IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS

Intellimagic is great for organizations [onboarding] junior staff OR for organizations with skilled experts simply trying to do more with less labor.

I give them a 10 our of 10. IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is a unique software doing what it does so well; there is no other on the market.

More appropriate to keep an eye on the system. It might not be LIVE but it is a great tool to look at specific data points and points in time where an issue maybe reported. For example, our team used IntelliMagic to look at DASD port intensity and was able to see there was a faulty port within the DASD.

More time spent on performance tuning and analysis than creating PDB's. In house requires an additional windows support team to help the product,

Well suited for when a quick chart needs to be generated, or a chart showing a metric over an extended period of time.

Might be less appropriate where trying to categorize based on Line of Business ( for internal chargeback, for example ). While it can be done, more difficult than a programmatic mapping solution.

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.

using IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS helps me to choose areas for optimization and also aids me in understanding how to configure for the future.

We run Vision on the mainframe instead of a Windows server. The SMF records are processed in the batch at night. So there is always a delay in reporting. The way it has been implemented in our company is not suitable for online monitoring. We are going to investigate whether migration to a Windows server is possible.

Works great for discovering infrastructure tuning opportunities. Useful to identify specific jobs whose CPU utilization is high or outside of a trend or normal range.

The only reason I give it a 9 vs a 10 is because of the near-real time data processing. Other than that, IntelliMagic is very critical to our success as a team. If we don't have those graphs showing us systems trends and problems, we can['t] plan ahead for the future.

[IntelliMagic] Vision [for z/OS] is a great product to report on many aspects of disk performance. We use Hitachi and Hitachi provides a tool (MAR) to provide RMF records to report on [their] internals. [IntelliMagic] Vision [for z/OS] uses that data to produce reports. I find them very helpful and [they] provide further info other than data provided by RMF. It does provide insights for CPU and z/OS as well [even] though we don't have the license to do so. I can't think of a better product for disk performance reporting and analysis.

IntelliMagic [Vision for z/OS] does a great job of collecting and reporting on z/OS performance. We could not do without it when bringing in new hardware and needing to look at current performance to determine future needs.

During an instance when our entire system was down due to a massive power failure, they were instrumental in our recovery.

IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is an excellent comprehensive mainframe reporting tool that can ingest raw SMF/RMF statistical data, tape management configuration (TMC) data, DCOLLECT data, and proprietary ISV SMF data (Hitachi Mainframe Analytics Reporter SMF records, Oracle VSM SMF data) unlike any other product on the market. The reporting capabilities of IntelliMagic Vision is also best-in-class across all mainframe domains. No other historical mainframe reporting tool in the market can compete with IntelliMagic vision in terms of health/exception reporting, the "Change Detection" reporting - i.e., the ability to compare performance data across data points in statistical terms, and in terms of easy-to-use out-of-the-box (OTB) reports, as well as user-customizable reporting capabilities.

IntelliMagic Vision is not a 'real-time' reporter such as Omegamon in that IntelliMagic consumes IBM SMF/RMF data that is DUMPd of SMF log streams, compressed, and FTPd to IntelliMagic's cloud server environment. However, IntelliMagic Vision can be considered as a 'near real-time' reporting facility - as long as the client installation can build the necessary automated infrastructure to "feed" their statistical data to IntelliMagic over several shorter (e.g., 1/2-hour or one-hour) intervals. Our typical turnaround time is about 1.5 hours from the time we create/cut statistical data to the time we can see the statistical reports based on that data in the tool - sometime that lag is even less than 1.5 hours.

[IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is] well suited for:
Monitoring disk performance and replication metrics
Same for VTS
System Logger (SMF88)
CPU hardware utilization, hyperdispatch, etc