Mainframe Blog

Notify, Then Inform with Automated Trouble Ticket Creation

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2 minute read
Mark Schettenhelm

Agile development is all about constantly looking at your processes to continuously improve them and make them more efficient. Take trouble ticketing, for example.

In the world of trouble ticketing, it’s one thing to be notified that there is an issue, but another to actually help with it. When developers are faced with trouble tickets, they are informed of a serious issue but are not given the context and information needed to immediately start toward a resolution. They must take the bare information and guess about the next steps as they head toward other tools. In today’s fast-paced agile, world minutes—even seconds—can count.

Let’s see how this plays out today:

  1. A developer is assigned a trouble ticket informing them that an application has abended.
  2. They then go over to BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID and search for the abend, using the time it occurred and the program name (if they have it).
  3. Once they have located the proper Abend-AID report, they can begin to understand the root cause and work towards a solution.

Working with our customers, BMC understood the issue with the handoff that occurs between Steps 1 and 3 and we sought a way to collapse that time and provide the information right at the beginning—in the trouble ticket. To that end, we have developed a new BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID webhook for notifications, which provides developers with the means to create automated issue notifications in products like BMC Helix ITSM and ServiceNow.

The notification contains detailed information, such as program name, abend code, user ID, and more, and includes the Abend-AID report number and a link to the report in web viewer so the developer can immediately start root cause analysis. Now your developers can arm themselves with the information they need to resolve issues and get your applications running again.

Setting this up is actually quite easy; you can find more information in our BMC Abend-AID Community. Your existing tool for issue notification will probably have a clear interface to create a URL to use in the webhook or have an API where you can post the webhook information. Review the user guide for your product to learn how to create an issue using a webhook.

The BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID enhancement pays off with less developer time spent on manual tasks and more time spent on new applications that benefit your users, while demonstrating DevOps in action by accelerating the hand-off of an issue from operations to a developer. The enhancement is available with the July 2022 maintenance for Abend-AID and BMC AMI DevX Enterprise Services (CES).

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These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

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About the author

Mark Schettenhelm

Mark is a DevOps Evangelist and Lead Product Manager at BMC who has experience working with developers around the world in Source Control Management, Testing, DevOps and Application Portfolio Analysis. He is a frequent conference speaker, webinar presenter, blogger, and columnist, often explaining the benefits of bringing Agile and DevOps to mainframe development and encouraging development teams to adopt new methodologies and continuously improve.

His writing has appeared in Enterprise Executive and Enterprise Tech Journal and he is a frequent contributor to DZone.com and SHARE Tech Watch. Mark is currently the Lead Product Manager for BMC products in Source Control Management, Deploy, Code and Fault Analysis.