Today’s applications are complex, often involving processing in the cloud and on distributed servers and applications, as well as transactions on the mainframe. Customer expectations are high—these transactions are expected to always work and provide a fast response.
Making sure all these application components work together seamlessly, all the time, can be challenging, especially when the transactions rely on mainframe services into which distributed operations staff may not have visibility. It is critical for all of IT to have a clear understanding of the entire topology for each of their business services.
An enhanced integration between BMC AMI Ops and BMC Helix Discovery now makes it possible for mainframe objects to be fully included in automated application mapping. BMC Discovery for z/OS discovers mainframe objects, including machines, LPARs, and all the major sub-systems that run on them. It can leverage BMC AMI Ops monitors to discover detailed information about CICS transactions and programs, IMS and Db2 databases, MQ queues and channels, as well as other jobs and tasks. These objects and their corresponding network connectivity are pulled into BMC Helix Discovery. With network information from the mainframe side, BMC Helix Discovery can now observe communications between mainframe, distributed, and cloud environments. The integrated solution infers which objects are part of the same application without the need for manual work or ongoing maintenance, allowing users to view application objects and service dependencies across mainframe, distributed, and cloud platforms in a single view and see entire the topology of their business services.
BMC AMI Ops is used to monitor and alert on problems in the z/OS environment and will generate alerts that can trigger automated action. These alerts can also be sent to BMC Helix Discovery so all events can be viewed on a single pane of glass, whether from mainframe and distributed systems, multi-cloud, private cloud, physical and virtual resources, applications, containers, or services. This provides proactive notification of mainframe events that could impact distributed systems as well as distributed system events that could impact mainframe.
With all of the mainframe and distributed discovered objects and their events consolidated into dynamic service models, customers can now understand impact flow across mainframe and distributed systems.
This service-aware topology can help mainframe teams troubleshoot problems based on which objects are currently showing alerts and how those objects are connected to each other. Whether the mainframe is being impacted by a problem with a distributed application, or vice versa, the teams gain a direct line of sight to guide resolution. Distributed teams gain visibility into alerts on mainframe objects, helping them to troubleshoot current problems with distributed applications.
With a single pane of glass to diagnose bottlenecks and view dependencies, operations teams can see which services are impacted by a given problem and then prioritize problem resolution to fix the most impactful and urgent ones first.
By giving users a full topology, including cross-platform dependencies, this integration helps speed response times to potentially service-affecting issues and provide customers with the application quality and fast response that they expect.
