Mainframe Blog

Greater System Visibility Improves Availability, Development Velocity, and Security

3 minute read
April Hickel

As organizations evolve to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise to keep up with the fast-paced digital economy, they’re extending the reach of their DevOps initiatives to include all of their compute platforms. To meet the demand for new services and applications that not only fulfill, but exceed customer expectations, many organizations are integrating the mainframe into their DevOps toolchains, combining the platform’s processing power and securability with distributed and cloud-based systems. This hybrid infrastructure enables them to quickly react to changing market conditions and continuously offer valuable solutions to their customers.

As integrations between platforms increase in number and complexity, it is imperative that application owners have clear visibility of how applications overlay the infrastructure that supports them, of the dependencies between them, and of system events that could affect performance and security. The enhancements to BMC AMI and BMC AMI DevX solutions announced as part of BMC’s January release provide this visibility by visualizing critical insights to help you ensure system availability, quickly and efficiently develop high-quality code, and manage privileged user access.

Automated Topology Mapping

The prevalence of multi-tier applications means that operations and development teams can no longer remain siloed by platform. When a service-impacting event occurs, time is of the essence. Operations and application teams must be able to immediately assess and troubleshoot issues. A holistic view of infrastructure dependencies is essential to quickly and accurately diagnosing and resolving issues which affect business services.

BMC AMI Ops now sends application network connection details to BMC Helix Discovery to create a service-aware topology, providing a clear visualization of service dependencies across your distributed and mainframe environments. By replacing manual correlation with automatic, color-coded impact mapping and real-time information, this enhancement empowers you to understand, prioritize, and troubleshoot problems to minimize their impact on your customers.

End-to-end service monitoring further enhances this visibility. A new integration between BMC AMI Ops and Splunk, paired with an existing integration with BMC AMI Security, provides a single location for mainframe operations and security data, giving you a better understanding of how your business applications and services behave. By eliminating manual reporting workflows and providing insights into real-time data, these integrations streamline SecOps and help decrease mean time to resolution (MTTR) of service-impacting issues.

Metrics That Drive DevOps Transformation

In today’s digital economy, every company is a technology company. Your products and services must outshine the competition’s, but so too must the speed and quality of your software delivery. Visibility into the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC) is essential to knowing not only how your DevOps transformation is progressing, but how your development and delivery rank amongst your peers. BMC AMI DevX Adviser collects data from processes throughout the SDLC and uses machine learning to produce valuable key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you make informed decisions that will improve the quality, velocity, and efficiency of your software delivery.

New zAdviser KPI dashboards provide development managers with actionable insights into developer productivity and efficiency, the adoption rate of modern development and automated testing tools, code quality, trends in IMS queue activity, and the performance and efficiency of automated processes.

Privileged Access Management

Privileged credentials in the wrong hands can result in disastrous outcomes. Having your security teams manage credentials through multiple External Security Managers (ESM) can be tedious and time-consuming, delaying critical access changes and increasing vulnerability to credential theft and insider threat activities.

BMC AMI Security now integrates with RACF, Top Secret, and ACF2, giving security teams real-time visibility into mainframe access from one security platform.

Preparing for the Future, Today

In today’s digital economy, change is the new norm. Clear visibility of integrations and dependencies throughout the enterprise IT ecosystem is required whether you are responding to service disruptions or delivering new services. By providing automated topology mapping and increased insight into software development and delivery, our January release will help you gain the visibility you need to keep providing value to your customers regardless of future disruptions.

Learn more about these enhancements and the other new BMC AMI and BMC AMI DevX features included in our January release on our What’s New in Mainframe Solutions page.

Access the 2023 Mainframe Report

The results of the 18th 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