Mainframe Blog

Advancing Mainframe Operations, Security, DevOps

3 minute read
April Hickel

As shown in the results of the BMC 2020 Mainframe Survey, today’s enterprises are more concerned than ever with being able to adapt, automate, and secure their mainframe environments. The new capabilities and enhancements to the BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) and Compuware portfolios are designed to help BMC mainframe customers achieve their goals in all three areas by optimizing systems management, enhancing automation capabilities, and expanding security measures.

BMC AMI Ops

BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) solutions enable you to leverage intelligent automation to achieve a self-managing mainframe. The newest addition to the BMC AMI portfolio marks the next step in the evolution of mainframe operations.

Operations teams of the future will use collected data to predict areas of risk and possible performance issues, using it to drive insight and automation that will improve operational resiliency. The new BMC AMI Ops brings mainframe operations into that future by building upon the best features of our MainView systems management solution. Adding a sophisticated new layer of artificial intelligence and machine learning, coupled with automation, BMC AMI Ops gives users the ability to go beyond monitoring, adding insight which allows them to “see around the corner” so they can find and fix problems before business services are affected.

This proactive management is aided by increased interoperability, enabling Operations to work seamlessly with tools across platforms to improve performance, increase uptime, and ensure availability. A new RESTful API is the first step in that effort, communicating securely with the mainframe and empowering Operations teams to invoke automated remediation.

BMC AMI Ops delivers this insight and management in an intuitive, customizable interface built with embedded expertise. This simplified systems management allows new and experienced mainframe users to view data collected from multiple sources in one easy-to-use interface.

Increased Mainframe Security Capabilities

Detection and mitigation of cybersecurity threats is more important than ever. BMC AMI Security has been improved with new security controls and out-of-the-box security checks designed to harden your mainframe against potential attacks. Increased threat detection and response is aided by updated indicators of compromise, compiled from BMC’s own penetration testing to give you enhanced protection against the latest real-world threats.

A new integration with Compuware Application Audit also helps prevent data breaches and the financial, legal, and reputation damages they cause by enabling users to quickly detect breaches and threats by capturing and analyzing user activity data.

DevOps Adoption Insights

New Compuware zAdviser Prescriptive Analytics dashboards encourage adoption of DevOps processes by allowing teams to view adoption and usage statistics at the organization, team, and user level to determine which Compuware products are being underutilized.

Meanwhile, new enhancements to Compuware Topaz for Total Test simplify automated test case creation and enable negative testing to expand test coverage, giving developers the ability to catch bugs earlier in the software delivery lifecycle and ensure greater overall quality.

Workflow Optimization

A new integration enables the use of ThruPut Manager to customize the prioritization of mainframe jobs based on data from Control-M, enabling cost-optimized batch processing by ensuring that jobs run at or before their expected times.

Optimized Data Management

BMC AMI Data for IMS has several new enhancements which help customers improve the availability of critical business services and support agile software development using fewer resources. BMC AMI Database Advisor for IMS’ new user interface provides information and status reports on critical databases while BMC AMI Log Analyzer for IMS offers improved memory utilization, enabling more efficient IMS log record processing. Additionally, BMC AMI Message Advisor for IMS provides accurate identification of problems while offering related insights into message queue sizes.

The new capabilities and enhancements offered in BMC’s January release address the central concerns voiced in the BMC 2020 Mainframe Survey, helping enterprises adapt, automate, and secure the mainframe. By advancing mainframe intelligence, security, and DevOps these offerings will help your organization run and reinvent the mainframe in the digital age.

Access the 2024 BMC Mainframe Report

The results of the 19th annual BMC Mainframe Survey are in, and the state of the mainframe remains strong. Overall perception of the mainframe is positive, as is the outlook for future growth on the platform, with workloads growing and investment in new technologies and processes increasing.


These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

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About the author

April Hickel

Vice President Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation