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IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision

Score9.8 out of 10

20 Reviews and Ratings

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What is IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision?

IBM Z® IntelliMagic Vision 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.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of where IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS evaluates CICS metrics against best practices to highlight availability risks. Results are shown in red, yellow, and green, with detailed views by group, region, or time charts.
Screenshot of an automated analysis of 80+ metrics for Db2 members and buffer pools, which detects availability and performance risks. The interactive report highlights warnings and exceptions, with drill-down capabilities for root cause analysis.
Screenshot of a time chart for metrics. These are used to explore potential relationships during analysis. For example, assess time-of-day correlations between metrics with exceptions (orange/red borders) and overall get-page activity.
Screenshot of where to filter network traffic by class or IP range to analyze protocol-specific data, including encryption algorithms, key lengths, and cryptographic attributes.
Screenshot of analysis of transaction rates alongside response times to identify issues or track workload trends. Viewers can break down response times into components like System of Record (SOR) time, with adjustable data granularity.
Screenshot of visual charts and dashboards, these showing CPU usage and transaction rates of WebSphere application workloads over time, enabling clearer communication and informed planning.

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Screenshot of where IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS evaluates CICS metrics against best practices to highlight availability risks. Results are shown in red, yellow, and green, with detailed views by group, region, or time charts.

Reviews

What users are saying about IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision.
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IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS Review

Fabio Pereira
Storage Specialist in Information Technology at BANCO DO BRASIL (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS on a daily basis job of looking at bottleneck and performance problems. Also, for a better design and understanding of our environment. They have been helping us a lot in the post-mortem analysis.

Pros

  • Storage Bottleneck
  • Drill downs
  • Correlations analysis
  • Tape performance

Cons

  • New IBM Boxes
  • Better reports about switches and directors, mainly about SAN
  • Better understanding of HDS hardware

Return on Investment

  • Faster resolution
  • Mitigate crisis and system downtimes
  • Better utilization of hardware
  • Knowhedgment about infrastructure

Usability

An invaluable tool!

Incentivized
Daniel Cannon
Sr IT Engineer in Information Technology at The Hartford (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Use IntelliMagic Vision to provide reports/graphs on utilization and identify top targets for tuning or realignment based on peak 4HRA.
The key business problem the product addresses is Mainframe cost containment/avoidance, either thru identifying Mainframe tuning inefficiencies or avoiding batch contention during peak utilization periods.

Pros

  • Identifies the top batch users during the peak 4HRA period
  • Provides health check snapshots for various Mainframe metrics
  • Provides quick insight for incident resolution

Cons

  • Lack of insight into IMS utilization at a transactional level
  • Lack of a detailed User Guide for navigation of VIsion

Return on Investment

  • Reduced z/OS infrastructure costs based on identifying high CPU usage batch jobs during peak 4HRA window
  • Faster generation of charts used during incident resolution, reducing MTTR

Usability

Other Software Used

IBM Z

An Independent Consultants Perspective on IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS

Frank Kyne
President in Information Technology at Watson & Walker (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We offer mainframe education and consulting services. For the education side of our business, IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is ideal because it helps us illustrate the concepts that we are presenting to the students in our classes. Its clean and powerful user interface allows us to focus on the meaning of the data that is being presented, rather than spending valuable time on how to use the tool. For the consulting side, if the client is an existing IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS customer, either on-premises or using the Cloud offering, we are able to work collaboratively with the clients' technicians to investigate questions they might have or anomalies that we might discover. In today's world, where everyone works remotely, the ability to quickly and easily pass reports back and forth nearly has the effect of working together on a shared PC. For clients that do not have IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS, IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS allows us to provide them with reports for all major system components with a common look and feel. Once again, they can concentrate on the information being provided, and we avoid the complexity of having to learn and use many different tools.

Pros

  • The provision of hundreds of sample reports, combined with the ability to drill down from each report, is both powerful and a real time-saver.
  • I love the ability to take an existing report, customize it to my needs, and quickly export it to a PDF or Powerpoint, or spreadsheet.
  • The Health Insight reports are great for helping me quickly hone in on aspects of system performance that require further investigation, without having to browse through hundreds of reports that simply report that everything is 'normal'.

Cons

  • I wish that the CPU reports would show CPU utilization for LPARs that are not included in the set of SMF records that were provided.
  • I wish the axis labels were a lot larger, so my old eyes could read them.
  • I would love the ability to easily import and export report definitions from one IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS instance to another.
  • I would love to be able to see which SMF fields were used for each of the values that IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS provides.
  • I would love to be able to create a report containing metrics from more than one IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS table.

Return on Investment

  • It has been great. It dramatically improves our efficiency, and our clients love the reports that it helps us deliver.

Very satisfied with Vision for z/OS

Paul van Velsen
Storage Administrator at Belastingdienst/DCS (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Monitoring and improving our storage environment (disk and tape). Identifying potential problems at an early stage. Identifying trends in the use of resources.

Pros

  • The information from Vision is input for our monthly reports.
  • It helps us decide on the purchase of new hardware.
  • Provide clear graphical overviews of disk and tape usage, performance and deviations.

Cons

  • Expand with functionalities for z/VM and Linux for Z.
  • Perhaps an app for mobile devices?

Most Important Features

  • It saves us a lot of work in collecting and editing metadata about our storage environment.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

IBM OMEGAMON

Other Software Used

Splunk Enterprise

IntelliMagic Beats The Rest Except For One Limitation

James SchlosserView profile
Z Systems Engineer in Engineering at Northwestern Mutual (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for capacity planning and general knowledge about our systems; how they're running, common issues, how we can improve performance, etc. So far IntelliMagic has [been] very helpful when it comes to see[ing] long term trends and new problems we are starting to see as a result of growth. The ability to dive deep into the graphs is something that is provided only by IntelliMagic, no other monitoring software, real-time or not, has that ability.

Pros

  • Deep Dive
  • Long Term Trends
  • Potential Issues and Current Issues with zOS

Cons

  • Real Time/Near Real Time Data Ingestion/Processing

Most Important Features

  • Long Term Trends
  • Deep Dive into the Data

Return on Investment

  • Positive but I can't provide any hard numbers

Alternatives Considered

Elasticsearch and Splunk Enterprise

Other Software Used

Elasticsearch, Splunk Enterprise, BMC MainView

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