OREANDA-NEWS. Compuware and ConicIT are partnering to help a new generation of IT ops staff proactively resolve emerging mainframe issues before they impact application service levels.

By integrating ConicIT’s predictive mainframe analytics and Compuware Strobe’s visually intuitive troubleshooting intelligence, the two companies are empowering even IT staff with relatively little hands-on mainframe experience to quickly identify and resolve a full range of application performance problems.

This guided, predicted mainframe problem resolution is critical for large enterprises because:

  1. Mainframes continue to play a central role in large enterprises as high-performance back-end application and data servers for business-critical customer-facing mobile and web apps.
     
  2. Enterprise IT organizations are losing their experienced mainframe experts to retirement—which means they have to transition mainframe ops to skilled staff with much less platform-specific experience.

ConicIT utilizes state-of-the-art machine learning to automatically baseline normal mainframe behavior across thousands of metrics. It then applies advanced algorithms to recognize in real time when those metrics deviate from the baseline. By doing so, ConicIT gives IT staff early warning about potential application issues—without requiring them to manually set and continually adjust threshold levels for individual performance parameters.

Compuware Strobe empowers even mainframe-inexperienced systems staff to act on those alerts by guiding them through an exploration of the problem using a combination of built-in platform intelligence and intuitive visualization.

The integration between the two solutions allows predictive alerts from ConicIT to automatically launch Strobe with its guided graphical troubleshooting pre-populated to address the appropriate corresponding mainframe conditions.

“Integrating Strobe with a product like ConicIT will drive the next generation of infrastructure monitoring where capturing deep application analytics is automated,” said the Performance and Capacity Manager at a Fortune 100 company. “ConicIT and Strobe are the tools that help us improve the customer experience as well as decrease our cost of providing IT services.”

Mainframe metrics analyzed by ConicIT and addressed by Strobe’s built-in platform intelligence include those associated with CICS, DB2, IMS, WebSphere MQ, CA IDMS, ADABAS, and z/OS UNIX. The combined solution can also help systems staff and developers understand issues relating to programs written in COBOL, C/C++, PL/I, Assembler and CA Gen.

In addition to alerting systems staff when mainframe performance parameters exceed baselines on the high side, ConicIT also alerts them when they are anomalously lower—as this can also be an indicator of something amiss either within the mainframe environment itself or in the interaction between the mainframe and other application components. Systems staff can then automatically launch Compuware Strobe to better understand and remediate these issues as well.

“Given the complexity and criticality of today’s enterprise mainframe environments, ops staffs need both insightful platform analytics and a practical means of acting on those analytics regardless of their level of expertise,” said Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley. “By partnering with ConicIT, Compuware is giving ops staffs precisely this combination of rich mainframe insight and practical mainframe remediation tools.”

“Enterprise mainframe environments continue to become more complex as they support a broader range of mobile and web applications and accumulate more diverse datasets,” said ConicIT CEO Eli Hizkiyev. “This relentlessly growing complexity makes ConicIT’s predictive analytics and Compuware’s Strobe technology increasingly valuable individually—and even more compelling together.” 

Compuware Corporation
Compuware empowers the world’s largest companies to excel in the digital economy by fully leveraging their high-value mainframe investments. We do this by delivering highly innovative solutions that uniquely enable IT professionals with mainstream skills to manage mainframe applications, data, and platform operations.