BMC AMI DevX is an integrated software platform that provides mainframe development teams with modern Application Development and DevOps capabilities. The solution connects traditional mainframe environments with contemporary development practices through components for source code management, testing, debugging, and analytics.
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Splunk Enterprise
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Splunk is software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface. It captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations.
I love these tools! However, my company has not yet transitioned from SCLM to a modern repository, and this is causing most of our developers to remain within TSO for all their development. It's been a slow adoption up to this point, but we are moving toward more modernization this year and next, so with any luck, we'll see usage pick up. Success depends on the speed at which your management is willing to move.
It's well suited for what I do, which is network security operations. And that's for anything from troubleshooting incidents, troubleshooting performance, troubleshooting for the purpose of a compliance and auditing. It's not best suited for users who are new in terms of they're new to the product and they have expectations that probably Splunk cannot meet.
The tool I use is fairly intuitive. It doesn't take long to be using it full time.
Changing the layout/view is fairly easy. This allows it to fit individual preferences.
It is helpful to be able to view specific windows in full screen. Usually, I have it set up to view multiple windows, but sometimes, I just want to view one window in full-screen mode.
the debug utility is very useful. Place stopping points is easy and one can set parameters as to when you stop at a line of code. Changing the data on the fly is easy and usefull. The interface is easy to use and make sense.
We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.
You can literally throw in a single word into Splunk and it will pull back all instances of that word across all of your logs for the time span you select (provided you have permission to see that data). We have several users who have taken a few of the free courses from Splunk that are able to pull data out of it everyday with little help at all.
Support has been amazing compared to Optim. Further, new features are very regular with File-AID - I can't remember the last time Optim had a significant update. File-AID support is very receptive to feature requests and reported bugs, including sending out hotfixes quickly.
Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.
The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.
The installation teams for these products have never complained about any difficulties during the integration of this range of tools into our IT system.
The names may have changed over the years, but anyone who has been around for a while will recognize them. For Software Configuration Management, I have used TSO/ISPF/SCLM, Panvalet, ChangeMan, Librarian, Endevor, and now Code Pipeline. All of them met the basic requirements. All of them had their advantages and disadvantages. Code Pipeline, however, stands head and shoulders above the rest in simplicity, completeness, effectiveness, efficiency, and elegance.
I didn't get to fully evaluate Logstash as our corporation was already using Logstash, but both seemed like viable solutions to the problem that we were having. I wanted to evaluate Logstash some more, both did seem like they would work for the business needs that we had, we went with splunk as many teams were already using it.
Possitive impact. It is main product suite to enable devops in the mainframe applications team. All developers use these on day-to-day work.
Negative impact: Recent usability issues caused disappointment in the application teams. It became hard motivate the development community to increase usage.
I don't have any numbers to share but Splunk has positively served as a 24/7 monitoring tool that has saved hours of work by self-detecting, saving statistics and alerting problems in the system or from external interfaces as soon as they happen.
Splunk dashboards does a solid job in collecting, analyzing data and creating reports that contain an entire day's activity and then automatically sent out to the business.
Splunk is very easy to learn and very useful to any program or business application.
