Several updates have been delivered over the past few months to IBM Z Decision Support and IBM Z Decision Support for Capacity Planning to add additional capabilities supporting clients that are making use of Splunk as an enterprise wide analytics platform together with underlying performance improvements.

Firstly, a reminder of a couple of important updates delivered back in June that formally added support for Cognos Analytics as a reporting platform and several new reports that delivered management and forecasting capabilities that supports users adopting IBM’s new Tailored Fit Pricing initiative. Now you can track MSU consumption accurately and forecast future consumption to understand cost impacts quickly and easily through pre-defined reports.

A key focus of the updates over the past few months have been on adding new pre-defined dashboards on Splunk that brings Key Performance Metrics for CICS and IMS alongside existing dashboards for z/OS plus updated capacity planning reports for z/OS resources. Using these dashboards, users can get immediate reporting details on for example, CICS transactions and IMS ATF performance. The value of Key Performance Metric reports are that they provide a curated analysis of the most important metrics for giving initial insight into performance. These reports have been based on the input and feedback of subject matter experts allowing easy access to vital system health information while reducing the amount of data that needs to be collected and processed.

Splunk has been widely adopted by organizations to manage and analyze data for business and operational needs and there is an increasing demand to also integrate data from IBM Z. This enables multiple users stakeholders to take advantage including cross-platform operations, line of business owners and capacity planners. New capacity planning dashboards enable the ability to focus on future needs across CPU and storage with just a few click. As most Splunk users are aware, the volume of data sent to the platform affects costs, and with the wealth of data available from IBM Z you need to think carefully about the data your stream. With IBM Z Decision Support the curation of the information has already occurred prior to forwarding to Splunk giving you greater control over data transfer and cost.

Other updates improve the underlying performance of IBM Z Decision Support. You can keep up to date with the latest APAR and PTF deliveries via these technotes for IBM Z Decision Support V1.9 and IBM Z Decision Support for Capacity Planning V2.1.

Finally, you may have seen our announcement this month for IBM Z Operations Insight. This is a new suite of capabilities to maximize the value of taking your Z operational data to support multiple user stakeholders from operations and domain experts to capacity planners and IT management. IBM Z Decision Support for Capacity Planning is an integral part of this suite and you can combine this with operational root-cause analysis and anomaly detection leveraging machine learning technologies.