IBM Z® IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS® is a performance analysis solution that helps organizations
monitor and optimize their mainframe environments. It enhances RMF and SMF data
with built-in expertise to prevent disruptions, improve performance, and
safeguard service availability. Key Features: Proactive Monitoring: Early warning
system that identifies risks before they impact operations.
Enhanced Performance: Fine-tunes
configurations…
IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is perfect for just about any after-the-fact analysis that I have tried to use it for. Sometimes it doesn't provide support for the latest SMF fields, but that is the nature of SMF data analysis - it is impossible to keep up with the rate at which new SMF fields are added. Combine that with the fact that the description of new fields is often poor, and it is amazing that IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is as up-to-date as it is. I think that less experienced users might benefit from material that more clearly differentiates products like IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS, which feed off SMF data, and products like Omegamon, which report in real-time contents of various system control blocks.
BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.
IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is easy to use for beginners and experts.
Search and drill down helps to find overview and deep dive.
IntelliMagic has implemented expert knowledge into Vision and the rating of the report is really helpful.
Predefined reports can be modified very easily and individually adapted reports (replacement of old SAS programs) are also possible without any problems
It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow.
Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors.
If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites.
Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day.
The voluminous data is a challenge for all tools. As always, improved response time is always appreciated.
I really appreciate reading the descriptions and field descriptions that are provided with the screens. All additional elaborations will be appreciated.
In comparison to other products (even on IBM Z), IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is really RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability). The GUI is really stable; analyze/reduce jobs with detailed diagnostics; restart functions with Automator
with more than 12 years of experience in Mainframe performance tuning and analysis, it was much easier to translate and understand the tool. New college grads without Mainframe exposure struggled a bit to connect the dots, it might be good to have a recording from IM to go through mainframe basics before the staff start to use the tool covering mainframe concepts than tool itself.
BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.
These are the legacy products that have been used for capacity/performance/billing and report generation over many years. Some are better suited for solutions using programmatic interfaces ( internal billing ), and processing IMS transactional data in particular. For most tasks, however, Vision can generate charts, provide levels of drill-down, allow a focus on analysis rather than report generation, much faster with greater reliability and less required training than the above products
BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are Microsoft SQL Server. Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.
A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware.
A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business.
A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts.
