A silos based status quo was present in many enterprises for many years. Different team, who take care of different subsystems, were working and focusing on their own subsystem or discipline only, with very limited interaction with other team in the enterprise. As time goes, the pressure to deliver faster to be "in the business", the importance to reduce outages and the time to solve any issue to have business application available 24x7, increased exponentially. The silos based approach is no longer suitable, mobile and internet penetration in the daily activities require business application to be always available, scalable and timely updated to react to business/users requests. All of this agility and reliability is achievable having in the back-end a team that work together on problem determination, beyond the specific subsystem point of view. The team need to have a complete end to end view of the applications components, access to the log data from the different subsystems part of the final application.
The fast and comprehensive access to the IT Operational Data is crucial to achieve the goal given from current business expectations. IBM Common Data Provider for z Systems is the answer, being able to collect all the z/OS IT Operational Data in near real time, including SMF record, as well as SYSLOG (IBM z/OS System Log and USS SyslogD), JOBLOGs and application logs (IBM CICS Transaction Server logs and IBM WebSphere Application Server logs).
All the these IT operational data are streamed by CDPz to the Analytic engine choose in the enterprise. CDPz is able to stream the data to IBM Operational Analytics for z/OS, that provides pre-canned dashboards and reports to improve problem determination time and analytic. Moreover CDPz is able to stream all of the data collected to Splunk as well as to an ELK stack or Hadoop. Moreover, if in the Enterprise there are different teams taking care of different applications/disciplines that span over different subsystems and/or systems, with CDPz is possible to filter what data are to be streamed to what analytic engine. So the data are read once and with one single tool, the data related to a specific discipline (like security for example) can be sent to Splunk for analysis and monitoring of security threat, in the meantime the log related to a specific application coming from CICS and WebSphere can be streamed to an Elastic Search Kibana stack for log monitoring, DB2 data are in the meantime sent to an IBM Operation Analytics for z/OS installation for database health monitoring and problem determination in case of issue.
Learn more about all the possible scenario you can implement with IBM Common Data Provider for z Systems (ibm.biz/CDPzProd) and IBM Operations Analytics for z Systems (ibm.biz/IOAzProd).
To get more information, please contact:
Domenico.DAlterio@it.ibm.com
Link to article in LinkedIn
