Mainframe Blog

You Don’t Need the Force to Keep Your Mainframe Going

2 minute read
Glenn Everitt

You don’t have to be a Star Wars fan to know about “The Force.” In the movies, it’s a special ability that gives you many skills, including the ability to sense things—but it is limited to a few. You can be born with it, but it also requires years of training with a Jedi master.

Keeping your mainframe applications running can seem like a similar endeavor. Only a few have the sense and skill to monitor and react. BMC AMI Ops gives this ability to everyone. It isn’t special hidden knowledge and there isn’t an apprenticeship. You can use BMC AMI Ops Insight to sense problems within “The Force” of your mainframe environments.

Here’s how BMC AMI Ops Insight does it.

  • Intelligent, proactive automation for rapid problem detection and resolution using anomaly detection is like a faithful droid watching hundreds of metrics simultaneously. It’s ready to detect and identify problems, and once it does, it accesses the many pathways that could have caused the problem and backtracks through the causal pathway to help you identify the root cause.
  • Operational resiliency from actionable intelligence, embedded expertise built on the industry’s best experience and knowledge, and simplified management help identify a problem’s root cause. Like decoy space probes, false positive alerts can distract you from your mission of solving the true problem. BMC AMI Ops Insight uses multiple techniques to take you from knowing you have a problem to knowing what is causing a problem. This prevents the subterfuge of misguided alerts and alert storms by grouping related abnormalities together as a single event to help you focus on your mission.
  • Minimal system and management overhead across all solutions, optimized to take advantage of technologies like IBM® Z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP), lowers your total cost of ownership. Just like a droid without power, an advanced monitoring system is useless if you cannot afford to run it on all systems that need monitoring. We have chosen efficient metrics, fast, yet low-overhead machine learning algorithms, and composite metrics that reduce overhead but quickly identify problems. It’s like a super-efficient star drive that can take you anywhere you need to monitor.

The ability to sense a disturbance on the mainframe is no longer limited to a few heroes. Check out BMC AMI Ops and BMC AMI Ops Insight to learn how to empower anyone on your IT operations staff with the mainframe skills of a Jedi master.

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

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About the author

Glenn Everitt

Glenn Everitt joined BMC as part of the Compuware acquisition and is now working with AI/ML Operations Monitoring Products as a Principal Product Manager. Prior to Compuware he was the Chief Architect of a startup company’s core application acquired by Compuware. Glenn has architected products that run on Mobile, Windows, Linux and Mainframe platforms. He is actively involved in technical due diligence and patent review for BMC.