BigPanda is designed to enable enterprise IT to intelligently automate and scale service operations to meet the complex demands of the modern datacenter. The vendor says their algorithmic service operations platform turns IT noise from fragmented clouds, teams, applications and monitoring tools into actionable insights to speed the resolution of IT incidents. Customers include Intel, Workday, News Corp, Macy’s and Cisco.
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IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS
Score 9.8 out of 10
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IBM Z® IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS® 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. Key Features: Proactive Monitoring: Early warning
system that identifies risks before they impact operations.
Enhanced Performance: Fine-tunes
configurations…
If the organization has a proper CMDB asset record then BigPanda features can be utilized to their true potential as it has alert correlation capability. The alert can be redirected to the proper support team using the auto-share feature. This wouldn't be the case where asset records are not updated and the Operations have to manually assign the alerts to support groups.
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.
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'.
The voluminous data is a challenge for all tools. As always, improved response time is always appreciated.
I really appreciate reading the descriptions and field descriptions that are provided with the screens. All additional elaborations will be appreciated.
In comparison to other products (even on IBM Z), IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is really RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability). The GUI is really stable; analyze/reduce jobs with detailed diagnostics; restart functions with Automator
with more than 12 years of experience in Mainframe performance tuning and analysis, it was much easier to translate and understand the tool. New college grads without Mainframe exposure struggled a bit to connect the dots, it might be good to have a recording from IM to go through mainframe basics before the staff start to use the tool covering mainframe concepts than tool itself.
TrueSight didn't provide many customization options. The features provided were primitive as compared to BigPanda. TrueSight was being used just for alert visibility and assignment to a proper support group from a single console. Although Moogsoft had similar features as compared to BigPanda, the user administration and ease of use were a bit complicated. BigPanda provides a much simpler user interface.
There are many different, and powerful, tools on the market. However, we could not find any other product that supported such a broad range of SMF records, provided IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS' collaboration capabilities, and allowed us to delve into the SMF information from many products with a common set of skills. Additionally, and very importantly, the IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS support is first class. The 'IntelliMagicians' are both experts in the use of their product AND experts in the data that is being reported on. They have many years of experience, excellent relationships with their customers, and a real enthusiasm for analyzing and understanding what is happening in the z/OS systems they are analyzing. We couldn't ask for better partners.
