Many of us have experienced the phenomenon: New code reaches production and abends, then abends again and again. Multiple users could each be attempting the same abending transaction on their mobile phones over and over, or automated processes could be reattempting after each failure. These scenarios could create a runaway abend situation that negatively impacts performance and availability. A bug in one application could have effects that spread throughout your system, causing headaches for engineers and negative experiences for your customers. So, how can you shave minutes off of your response time and limit the impact?

BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID recently introduced a new option to help improve webhook notifications. Abend-AID will keep a running count of repeatedly occurring identical abends, allowing you to set thresholds—100, 1000, or maybe even just 10 times, and notifying you once this threshold has been reached so you can respond.

So, with runaway notifications solved, what can be done to resolve the underlying issue? This is where BMC AMI Ops Automation comes in. BMC AMI Ops Automation can be configured to react to abend notifications, triggering an event and driving an automation rule to take an in-context action based on the information provided in the notification.

Some examples of these automated actions include:

• Canceling the job
• Generating an alert
• Gathering additional diagnostic data
• Emailing developers so they can analyze the situation and provide a solution
• Opening an incident ticket
• Running an EXEC to perform custom automation

Applications running on the mainframe can be accessed by many concurrent users, and defects can spiral out of control unless you receive immediate notifications with automation ready to respond. BMC AMI DevX Abend-AID and BMC AMI Ops Automation deliver these capabilities to support you and your customers. For more information, visit our BMC Community post.

Today’s applications are complex, often involving processing in the cloud and on distributed servers and applications, as well as transactions on the mainframe. Customer expectations are high—these transactions are expected to always work and provide a fast response.

Making sure all these application components work together seamlessly, all the time, can be challenging, especially when the transactions rely on mainframe services into which distributed operations staff may not have visibility. It is critical for all of IT to have a clear understanding of the entire topology for each of their business services.

An enhanced integration between BMC AMI Ops and BMC Helix Discovery now makes it possible for mainframe objects to be fully included in automated application mapping. BMC Discovery for z/OS discovers mainframe objects, including machines, LPARs, and all the major sub-systems that run on them. It can leverage BMC AMI Ops monitors to discover detailed information about CICS transactions and programs, IMS and Db2 databases, MQ queues and channels, as well as other jobs and tasks. These objects and their corresponding network connectivity are pulled into BMC Helix Discovery. With network information from the mainframe side, BMC Helix Discovery can now observe communications between mainframe, distributed, and cloud environments. The integrated solution infers which objects are part of the same application without the need for manual work or ongoing maintenance, allowing users to view application objects and service dependencies across mainframe, distributed, and cloud platforms in a single view and see entire the topology of their business services.

BMC AMI Ops is used to monitor and alert on problems in the z/OS environment and will generate alerts that can trigger automated action. These alerts can also be sent to BMC Helix Discovery so all events can be viewed on a single pane of glass, whether from mainframe and distributed systems, multi-cloud, private cloud, physical and virtual resources, applications, containers, or services. This provides proactive notification of mainframe events that could impact distributed systems as well as distributed system events that could impact mainframe.

With all of the mainframe and distributed discovered objects and their events consolidated into dynamic service models, customers can now understand impact flow across mainframe and distributed systems.

This service-aware topology can help mainframe teams troubleshoot problems based on which objects are currently showing alerts and how those objects are connected to each other. Whether the mainframe is being impacted by a problem with a distributed application, or vice versa, the teams gain a direct line of sight to guide resolution. Distributed teams gain visibility into alerts on mainframe objects, helping them to troubleshoot current problems with distributed applications.

With a single pane of glass to diagnose bottlenecks and view dependencies, operations teams can see which services are impacted by a given problem and then prioritize problem resolution to fix the most impactful and urgent ones first.

By giving users a full topology, including cross-platform dependencies, this integration helps speed response times to potentially service-affecting issues and provide customers with the application quality and fast response that they expect.

IBM’s Tailored Fit Pricing (TFP) model provides contract options for mainframe organizations that more closely align with popular cloud subscription models. While mainframe organizations gain flexibility in cost management and more transparent, predictable costs, the burden of monitoring and making changes to control costs is still dependent on the mainframe operations team. If you ultimately use more than you committed to, or are not able to accurately forecast growth, you may be surprised by the costs. So, how can you make sure you stay within your commitments while forecasting and keeping things predictable?

Because every customer will have a different cost per million service units (MSU), even if they’re running the same products or capacity, each will need to determine the best model for their unique situation. Customers should also be able to perform analysis to ensure they can anticipate accurate growth and not grow higher than expected, which can drive unexpected costs.

BMC helps you get the most from your TFP subscription with reporting, forecasting, and management of TFP consumption. BMC AMI Cost Management allows customers to monitor their consumption and respond to abnormal consumption while also predicting usage and growth to contain cost. BMC AMI Ops Automation for Batch ThruPut allows customers to control batch workload in response to surging CPU demands and manage or reduce overall TFP MSU consumption.

Our latest updates to BMC AMI Cost Management include a number of new insights to support TFP by delivering both at-a-glance and detailed information. A new monthly summary report and month-to-month navigation across previous reports make it easier to compare usage and see emerging trends like TFP costs and MSU consumption. BMC AMI Cost Management also now includes historical MSU usage and your projected 12-month usage so you can forecast costs and ensure you are able to control consumption before an abnormality can occur.

TFP DevTest subscribers can leverage rolling 4-hour average (R4HA) details in order to drill down further into MSU consumption drivers like the top-consuming logical partitions (LPARs), workloads (service and report class), importance, subsystems, and suites. Another valuable report recently added shows your total consumption by LPAR, along with the peak intervals so you can focus on your most heavily used areas when demand is at its highest.

To help control rises in consumption, a new job/started task control (STC) consumption report is available for all workload types with consumption aggregated and metrics tallied for each job and STC executed. You can see at-a-glance information like your top 250 most-consuming jobs and STCs and then pivot to more details of an instance by clicking on a specific job/STC.

Lastly, BMC AMI Ops Automation for Batch ThruPut automated capacity management feature can help TFP management by constraining lower-importance workloads across multiple systems when CPU cycles are in danger of being overcommitted. Batch and online applications, as well as systems code, run more efficiently with lower cycles per instruction (CPI) values that translate into fewer MSUs consumed and overall lower consumption reported by the sub-capacity reporting tool (SCRT) to do the same workload. On systems with the Tailored Fit Pricing Hardware Consumption Solution (TFP-HW), automated capacity management can detect when CPU usage is about to use part of the TFP-HW capacity corridor and constrain batch workloads to avoid or reduce corridor use so it can be used by time-critical online work.

Don’t lose the benefits of Tailored Fit Pricing with poor visibility or management. BMC AMI Cost Management and BMC AMI Ops Automation for Batch ThruPut can help you take control of your cost drivers.

“To learn more about how BMC can help you control your software license costs, click here.”

BMC’s contribution to the Open Mainframe Project (OMP), the Workflow WiZard, has been accepted as part of the Zowe project. The Workflow WiZard helps developers and systems programmers simplify the generation and management of z/OSMF workflows.

The IBM z/OS Management Facility (z/OSMF) is used by systems programmers to manage z/OS. In addition to general management tasks, it handles installation, configuration, and maintenance of IBM and ISV z/OS software products.

Workflow WiZard makes it easier to create z/OSMF workflows, whether you are a systems programmer writing workflows for your own shop or an ISV software developer writing a workflow to configure your products.

It has been quite a journey to get to this point. If you would like to learn more about how the Workflow WiZard project came to fruition, please read on.

The Journey To Make Mainframe Software Installation Easier

Since 2015, I have been the product manager representing BMC as part of the Common Vendor Install Initiative, a collaboration of IBM and ISVs working to adopt a common and modernized way for customers to manage z/OS software using z/OSMF.

As we began to work on the simplification and modernization of our installation process, it became apparent we would need to develop a lot of z/OSMF workflows, some of them lengthy and complex. We needed an easier way to develop and manage all of these workflows.

The Inception of the Workflow WiZard

z/OSMF workflows are written in XML. Editing and managing them is challenging, with no easy way to maintain individual workflow steps and no ability to divide a workflow so multiple developers can work on it. We also found that testing of workflows was time-consuming, particularly when Velocity scripts were involved.

These challenges led us to develop a workflow builder that assembles a z/OSMF workflow from individual step templates and largely eliminates the need to code Velocity scripts. This enables multiple developers to work on a workflow and be responsible for their own steps. It also significantly simplifies testing and ongoing workflow management.

Sample Template for Input to the Workflow WiZard

The Plan To Make the Workflow WiZard Open Source

As we talked to other vendors and our customers, it became clear that they also needed an easier way to build and manage workflows. With the increased use of open source software on the mainframe, especially with Zowe, we decided to make the Workflow WiZard available under Zowe so everyone could benefit from the capability and, if they desired, contribute to its ongoing development. 

Conclusion

With Workflow WiZard now a part of the Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe project, we’re confident it will make the jobs of developers and systems programmers easier, and that with further iteration from the Zowe community, its capabilities will improve well into the future.

Receive Order: Start the New Year with Improved Maintenance Delivery Made Easy!

As part of our ongoing mission to make business easier for our customers by using industry standard best practices, BMC is happy to announce that it now offers a new maintenance delivery service: Receive Order. This new delivery method uses the IBM SMP/E RECEIVE ORDER process to acquire BMC Mainframe product maintenance over the internet by securely submitting an order for PTFs and HOLDDATA to a BMC Order server.

You can reduce hours of maintenance time down to just minutes, making your system programmers more productive and allowing them to focus on higher value tasks. After a successful pilot program, Receive Order is already being used by several large BMC customers.  They are saying that Receive Order is very easy to use and highly intuitive. Receive Order is standardizing maintenance retrieval and helping to make the mainframe platform viable for new mainframe professionals.

BMC Receive Order:

• Eliminates time-consuming fix searches and the need to select maintenance manually through the BMC Support Portal
• Automates delivery of BMC maintenance directly to your mainframe
• Fulfills orders based on the status of your SMP/E environments
• Enables scheduling of maintenance downloads
• Facilitates an easier installation of BMC Recommended and Preventive services
• Provides a secure transfer method to ensure the integrity of maintenance downloads
• Replaces the BMC ISR application with a more secure, industry standard method

With the BMC support for Receive Order, you can acquire maintenance on demand or can schedule a SMP/E job to run regularly. The BMC Order server supports the IBM-documented order types, which include: ALL, APARS, CRITICAL, HOLDDATA, PTFS, and RECOMMENDED.

BMC customers can immediately start to use Receive Order for BMC maintenance acquisition and take advantage of all the listed benefits.

Get a head start on the new year here and download the documentation!