Business applications involve many components that go across computer systems and middleware. With these complex architectures, analyzing IT operation events in silo is no longer acceptable. To identify related events, IT operation monitoring tools need to automatically discover the middleware, and their relationship within the IT infrastructure.
The IBM Z Anomaly Analytics with Watson (zAA) product provides anomaly detection on key performance indicators (KPIs) and log messages. In the latest release, v5.1.0.7, it added the “topology service” feature that discovers the middleware running on z/OS and the topological relationship between the middleware and maps the anomaly events to the topology.
By mapping anomaly events to the topology, it’s expected that the user can visualize:
Through the topology service and the user interface, users can identify multiple middleware of interest. Then, the user can drill down into that middleware for correlation and comparison analysis.
In the topology example above:
Here is a step-by-step scenario on how the topology service can help you:
The topology view provides a holistic view to the IT Environment, and the linkage between different middleware. The topology view will assist the support professional to find the needle in the haystack, understand impact, and identify specific area to focus on.