Mainframe Blog

Make Change Your Advantage with Mainframe DevOps Metrics and Enhanced Security

3 minute read
April Hickel

As the saying goes, “the only constant in life is change.” In just the past few years, the way we live our day-to-day lives has changed drastically, with an incredible increase in the use of digital services for everything from shopping and banking to socializing and working. This has, of course, meant that the businesses and organizations that provide these services have had to adjust, not only to increased transactional and data volumes, but also to customer demand for newer, faster applications and services. In the current digital economy, every company faces disruption. Your success, however, may depend on how you deal with it.

The ability to react quickly will set you apart from competitors whose processes, tools, and mindset keep them flat-footed in the face of changing market forces and customer expectations. By making change your competitive advantage, you can be ready to react and adapt to the next major disruption, prepared to offer your customers services that help them thrive in their new “normal” while operating securely with minimal interruption.

With the help of BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) and BMC AMI DevX solutions, your organization can quickly and efficiently develop and release new applications and services, more quickly react to security threats, and find and remediate service-impacting issues faster than ever before. Our July quarterly release enhances these abilities by driving continuous software development and delivery, improving security management, and more.

Increased insight into DevOps initiatives

To continue to satisfy customers and stay on the cutting edge, mainframe organizations are increasingly utilizing DevOps to make their software development and delivery quicker, more agile, and most importantly, more responsive to the changing digital landscape. But how do these organizations gauge their success? To truly know whether mainframe teams are adopting the tools and practices they need, organizations must measure their development, deployment, and issue resolution and compare the results to key performance indicators (KPIs). Luckily, modern tooling can help.

BMC AMI zAdviser, a free service to customers on current maintenance, collects customer-supplied data and leverages machine learning to help organizations measure software development and deployment and identify trends that may improve or hinder the speed and agility of the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). A new KPI dashboard in zAdviser gives organizations valuable insight into how their mainframe software delivery measures against DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics.

Already well-established in the world of distributed DevOps, DORA’s four key metrics were developed after years of research and analysis of data from organizations worldwide. The BMC AMI zAdviser KPI Dashboard for DORA Metrics brings these metrics to the mainframe, standardizing KPIs across environments and providing clearer visibility into hybrid applications and environments.

Deployment Frequency

With the ability to track deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR) and change failure rate, organizations can make data-driven decisions to help continuously improve the mainframe application development process by delivering high-quality software faster and resolving application failures more quickly.

Speaking of MTTR, a new enhancement seamlessly integrates BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID with leading ticketing and messaging software, providing real-time notification of application failures. By enabling automated creation of trouble tickets and instant production of diagnostic information, this integration allows development teams to begin working on resolution immediately, leading to quicker recovery.

Secure certificate management for the mainframe

Certificate management is integral to system security, but manually moving, configuring, and updating certificates can be cumbersome, time-consuming, and prone to error. BMC has partnered with industry-leading certificate management provider Venafi to provide one of the first integrated solutions for automated, controllable mainframe certificate management.

The new BMC AMI Enterprise Connector for Venafi helps prevent malicious use of connections in and out of the mainframe. The solution protects application uptime and increases your enterprise-wide Zero Trust security stance with automated certificate management and built-in validation that your certificates are installed and working correctly to protect mainframe-to-enterprise connections and communications.

Embracing change

The way customers interact with your business, and the market space it inhabits, is changing rapidly. Embrace change and use it to your advantage. With the enhancements included in our July quarterly release, BMC continues its pledge to partner with your organization to make change your advantage, optimizing and transforming the mainframe to continue to power the digital economy.

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