IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision vs. Percepio Tracealyzer

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.

This is a perfect tool to debug complex bugs in your system, especially in regards to inter-task communication. It is also a great tool for beginners, as the documentation is accessible and the support given by the company is excellent

• 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

• Great visualization
• Sometimes awkward views (vertical vs horizontal)

• 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.
• Monthly trending and cyclical pattern detection

• It's not always easy to include/integrate Tracealyzer in the OS build. It would be nice to have a simple install/plug n play method for our target.
• Sometimes, the .bin files from Tracealyzer don't always work and we don't know why

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.

Incentivized

Invited by TrustRadius (TR) on Vendor's Behalf

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info

Really highly skilled IntelliMagic team:

• Head of IntelliMagic (Gilbert Houtekamer, Els Das and Jean-Marc van der Kolk)
• Account manager DACH/Europe local support team ...

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

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info

While we started using uCOSIII for our simpler microcontroller products, we also use QNX on more complex targets (full microprocessors) and it is a much more complex platform offering event tracing, memory tracing, and performance measures that are extremely good and integrated. More importantly these tools are fully integrated without any code changes. Tracealyzer is not integrated as much into uCOSIII like QNX's tools, debugger, etc. But, going thru the manual work of adding Tracealyzer to the build, it did help us get to a shippable product.

• Based on data from Vision, we have not had to expand the hardware this year.
• Any expansion of hardware in the coming years can be well supported by figures from Vision.

• Positive: We were able to find some thread priority issues with Tracealyzer.
• Positive: we were able to see timing of events in the sw/hw that we couldn't otherwise see.