AIOps on IBM Z - Group home

On September 3, 2019 IBM announced a brand new offering - IBM Z Operations Insight Suite V1.1.0 - that provides a complete end-to-end solution for leveraging z/OS operational data to deliver insight, analysis and forecasting for multiple stakeholders from operations and subject matter experts to performance analysts, capacity planners and IT management.

Elevate Your Digital Enterprise with AIOps
In a world of hybrid multicloud environments, the complexity of many business-critical applications have increased to the point it becomes difficult to manage workloads, predict future requirements or anticipate operational challenges. With IBM Z at the backbone of today’s digital enterprise, it is critical these systems remain resilient and are able to support business need, both now and in the future.

As a result, it is clear there are three key needs that all enterprises must address to achieve success:

• The need to manage across hybrid multicloud environments with IBM Z as first-class participant

• The need to drive resiliency to maintain qualities of service

• The need to simplify and integrate z/OS data into a overall tooling strategy to support the requirements of today's enterprise

The IBM Z platform delivers high-quality, detailed data about performance through SMF, RMF, and other structured data sources such as logs. Analyzing these to create valid actionable outcomes can be challenging, time consuming and heavily dependent on domain expertise. Today's enterprises often make use of a variety of tools acquired over many years - some of which may be homegrown and usually incompatible with each other - to address a variety of requirements for different user stakeholders. The result is inefficiency, high operational cost, redundancy of effort and potentially missed insights.



How IBM Z Operations Insight Suite addresses these needs
IBM Z Operations Insight Suite unites the capabilities of existing leading offerings (IBM Z Operations Analytics V4.1 and IBM Z Decision Support for Capacity Planning V2.1) in a single solution that:

• Enables key data to be collected and curated in near real-time removing the need to wait for analysis and lower the overall cost of processing data
  
  
• Delivers deep insight into operational data leveraging advanced analytics with machine learning for workload analysis and anomaly detection that reduces the dependency on niche tooling or limited domain expertise

• Supports performance analysis and capacity planning activities, including the ability to forecast future cost and resource needs, to optimize utilization aligned to business goals

• Provides a modern user experience based around market-leading analytics solutions, such as Splunk and Elastic Stack, that integrates with many customers’ enterprise-wide strategy for operations and systems management.

• Forms the basis of an operations ecosystem to deliver differentiated insights across multiple domains and user stakeholders

The latest updates enable the ability to leverage technologies like Watson Machine Learning for z/OS to identify potential problems and support enterprises who are looking to grow workloads on z/OS though initiatives like enterprise consumption container pricing (also known as Tailored Fit Pricing). All of this underpinned by lowering the overall cost of collecting and curating data by offloading more components to zIIP engines.

The value of a singe solution that enables efficient root-cause analysis, performance evaluation to forecasting of future problems and capacity needs becomes essential in reducing overall costs. Making optimal use of your IBM Z resources enables the platform to remain a first-class participant of your overall enterprise IT strategy.


Next Steps
Hopefully this has given you a high-level view of how you can make best use of the detailed data IBM Z provides to increase efficiency and lower costs through tool consolidation. If this has generated questions or you want to learn more about IBM Z Operations Insight Suite, we would be pleased to talk with you. Contact your IBM representative to set up a technical discussion meeting.

In the coming weeks, look out for for some deep-dive webinars that will focus on key features of IBM Z Operations Insight Suite. Please also take time to review the Announcement Letter and Knowledge Center for more details.