IBM today announced new releases of the following suite offerings:
- IBM Z Service Management Suite 1.7,
- IBM Z Service Automation Suite 1.3, and
- IBM Z Monitoring Suite 1.2
Click here to view the full announcement letter.
One key addition that is introduced with these releases is a new free of charge component that enables ChatOps capabilities for your IBM Z environment. The new component is named IBM Z ChatOps and provides an intelligent chatbot that gives users access to information from Z systems management tools, such as IBM Z System Automation, IBM Z NetView, and IBM OMEGAMON, directly into Slack or Mattermost.
Why ChatOps?
Do you face challenges with siloed teams and efficient collaboration that increase the time to resolve problems in your IT environment? Is your environment getting more and more complex and hybrid? Does your organization face skills issues as you go through a generational shift and at the same time you have the need to reduce the cost and maintain operational integrity under increasing transactional volume? Do you wonder how to adopt DevOps practices and agile methods and how to apply them to your mainframe environment?
Applying ChatOps can help to address some of these pain points by providing
- Improved collaboration
- Faster Incident Identification & Resolution
- Integrated notification and history by building on a collaboration platform
- Faster onboarding of next gen operators
What is ChatOps?
ChatOps stands for chat-based operations and describes a collaboration model that connects people, processes, tools, and automation in a seamless and transparent way through a chat platform and extensive use of specialized chatbots. ChatOps is designed to help improve service reliability, service recovery time, and collaboration efficiency.
For example, during the troubleshooting of an incident, instead of each person working independently and coordinating by phone, email, problem ticket, or collocated physically in an office, team members can collaborate by using a chat and collaboration platform, such as Slack or Mattermost, that is designed for human-to-human and human-to-machine interactions. Such a collaboration platform maintains a timeline of team communication that provides a record and enables team members to stay current without becoming overwhelmed by information.
With ChatOps, all technical team members can work together in the same virtual location and see and share the same information by using a chat platform with which they are familiar or currently using with other projects. The team's necessary tools are readily available, with access to those tools from within a chat window that uses bots or other integrations instead of requiring users to open dedicated application windows or consoles.
IBM Z ChatOps elevates collaboration techniques and processes
IBM Z ChatOps provides ChatOps capabilities for your IBM Z environment. It includes a chatbot that gives users access to information from Z systems management tools such as IBM Z System Automation, IBM Z NetView, and IBM OMEGAMON within popular collaboration platforms like Slack.
IBM Z ChatOps can be used to notify the operations team in the chat tool about IBM Z events, including recommendations that are powered by machine learning, to help isolate and resolve problems quickly.
IBM Z ChatOps leverages and integrates with IBM Service Management Unite for a broad access to IBM Z operations data. This also enables chat users to drill-down from chatbot output to web-based dashboards with more information to help resolve problems fast.
Improve collaboration with IBM Z ChatOps
IBM Z ChatOps is included in the following offerings:
- IBM Z Service Management Suite 1.7, or higher
- IBM Z Service Automation Suite 1.3, or higher
- IBM Z Monitoring Suite 1.2, or higher
- IBM Z System Automation 4.2
How do I get Z ChatOps?
Refer to the following customer access portal support information for the latest news on IBM Z ChatOps and IBM Service Management Unite, which is the web-based systems management console which is leveraged by Z ChatOps: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/710583
The latest IBM Z ChatOps software downloads are available on the following url:
https://ibm.biz/zchatops-download
To access the download link you will need your IBM customer ID and password as well as the access key. You can identify your access key as follows:
View the PDF which is supplied with the product materials on a CD titled "Memo - Accessing IBM Z ChatOps on IWM" (form number LI13-5232-00) or send an email to smusup@de.ibm.com.
Please include your IBM customer and contact info when emailing IBM.
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