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The Best Mainframe Performance and Capacity Tool on the Planet
October 18, 2021

The Best Mainframe Performance and Capacity Tool on the Planet

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS

IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is being used at our organization to better monitor and manage/tune our non-prod and production mainframe WLM, z/OS systems, DB2, CICS, MQ, Disk, Virtual Tape, and FICON Director resources. IntelliMagic is used by our systems programmers, capacity and performance engineers, DB2 systems programmers, CICS/MQ technicians, and Storage Management (disk and tape) engineers in our mainframe infrastructure teams. Using IntelliMagic helps our teams optimize our mainframe infrastructure solutions to support our mission-critical business applications. Our organization's mission is to do everything we can to service our members, healthcare providers, and business partners.
  • Provides comprehensive Health Check and Exception reporting of mainframe resources.
  • As a Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud solution, IntelliMagic Vision allows our infrastructure engineers to use the tool to manage our resources - rather than managing the installation/customization, and upgrade of the tool itself.
  • IntelliMagic allows our organization to build on the wealth of IBM's SMF statistical data, providing a 'force multiplier' effect that empowers our organization's technical staff to learn much more about the resources they're responsible for managing simply by using the tool's intuitive navigational interface.
  • IntelliMagic improves our mainframe infrastructure team's productivity and collaboration/cohesiveness through shared dashboard technology.
  • We've uncovered a few bugs in more-complex calculations in a few reports in IntelliMagic Vision that we've needed the vendor to address.
  • We've experienced minor issues with having to occasionally retransmit (FTP) our statistical data to IntelliMagic's cloud servers.
  • Periodically, we've experienced "lags" in the turnaround time from when our SMF statistical data is cut, to the time we're able to view the data in the IntelliMagic Vision tool.
  • The quality of the downloadable/exported reporting charts from IntelliMagic Vision needs to be improved to the point we'd feel comfortable with using those report images in executive leadership PowerPoint presentations. The image quality of IntelliMagic Vision graphs/charts needs to be comparable to those we can produce in MS Excel.
  • We acquired IntelliMagic Vision licensing to improve the maturity of monitoring for key domains in the mainframe environment: Visibility to health of key areas – CICS/MQ, DB2, Storage, z/OS and WLM
  • Mitigating major dependencies on vendors (IBM, Hitachi, Dell etc.) during key outages.
  • Improves our ability to produce executive dashboards & insights on the health of mainframe domains.
  • Improves our comprehensive performance and capacity predictive capabilities across all mainframe domains.
  • Provides a force multiplier effect for the performance and capacity team by technological compensation for the impact of mainframe skill gaps, accelerated learning for new team members, and enhanced collaboration and sharing, allowing more time to be spent on analysis and remediation.
  • The “force multiplier effect” is provided by building expert knowledge and statistical processing into IntelliMagic Vision, and presenting key metrics to users through an advanced, interactive interface that promotes a deep-dive analytical user experience
  • IntelliMagic Vison's strength is in historical performance monitoring with near real-time (NRT) reporting capabilities using intuitive health indicators (red, yellow, green), drill-down capabilities, and problem avoidance through predictive insights.
  • IntelliMagic Vision provides excellent on-board context-sensitive technical information - staff learns about cross-domain technologies while actively monitoring systems with the tool.
  • In addition to addressing our greatest mainframe management challenges, as the overall mainframe talent pool diminishes over time, the need for the semi-automated mainframe performance and capacity capabilities IntelliMagic Vision provides will only continue to increase.
  1. Better Ease of Use/Navigation/Intuitiveness.
  2. Better Customizable Reporting/Filtering.
  3. Better In-tool Context-Sensitive Help/Educational Capabilities.
  4. Better High-Level Health Check and Exception Reporting.
  5. Better Root Cause Analytics/Drill-down Capabilities.
  6. Better Predictive Analytics/Disruption Avoidance

Do you think IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS's feature set?

Yes

Did IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS again?

Yes

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.