Compuware today announced the integration of its Compuware Abend-AID application fault discovery and analysis solution with Syncsort Ironstream, which captures and forwards mainframe operational data to analytic tools such as Splunk.
The integration of these two solutions enables IT to more quickly discover and act upon correlations between application faults and broader conditions in the mainframe environment—even as enterprises, out of necessity, shift operational responsibilities for the platform to staffs with limited experience on z/OS.
In complex enterprise environments, correlations between application behaviors and underlying infrastructure can be both subtle and critical. What appear to be platform issues may turn out to be software faults—and vice versa. By marrying these two important categories of data together in an organization’s analytic environment of choice, the Abend-AID/Ironstream integration helps IT staffs get richer, more complete insight into service delivery issues.
Analytic insight into abends can help mainframe dev/test/ops managers determine which personnel may require additional training and where DevOps processes may need improvement. In addition, integration of operational data and abend data can be useful for security forensics, compliance reporting and other core IT disciplines.
More mature enterprise IT organizations can further leverage the Abend-AID/Ironstream integration to feed rich platform- and application-related mainframe data into an analytic environment that also includes data from other enterprise platforms to better support, monitor and secure the multi-tier web and mobile services commonly found in today’s large enterprises.
Ironstream is the industry’s leading solution for access to and automatic forwarding of z/OS mainframe operational and security data to distributed/open systems environments. In addition to capturing SMF records and Syslog data, Ironstream also captures UNIX Systems Services (USS) files, which can contain critical system log information including Log4j, security data, IBM WebSphere and other web-based application log data providing deeper visibility into application availability and performance. Ironstream also provides useful platform metrics such as threshold monitoring for Open Systems Adapter (OSA) channels, ports, and interfaces—as well as data gathered from the monitoring of open-system channels, ports, interfaces, LPARs and TCP/IP.
Abend-AID is the industry’s leading solution for fault management and resolution of COBOL, PL/I and Assembler applications. It greatly reduces mean time-to-resolution for mainframe issues by providing comprehensive background information on the programs and data involved in a problem, often recommending possible resolutions.
“Mainframes generate a massive volume of useful but overwhelming data that enterprise IT organizations often fail to fully leverage,” said David Hodgson, General Manager, Mainframe, at Syncsort. “By comprehensively gathering that data and forwarding it to a sophisticated analytic engine, these IT organizations can do a better job of discovering anomalies and trends that can threaten the availability and performance of critical internal and customer-facing services that leverage the mainframe.”
“Central to the notion of DevOps is elimination of the silos that have historically separated application teams from ops teams,” said Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley. “By feeding Abend-AID data into Ironstream’s broader mix of operational data, we are eliminating another instance of that counter-productive siloing.”
