Grafana vs. IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS

Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation

Incentivized

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.

• Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
• Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
• Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
• Microservices monitoring
• Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere

Incentivized

• 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'.

• Documentation needs to be more clarified since it can be confusing for beginners
• Notification alert message templates need to be simplified

Incentivized

• 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.
• Monthly trending and cyclical pattern detection

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

Great usage in terms of monitoring of any application from backend to frontend and even any AWS resource via cloud watch and other connectors. Easy to use and configure personalised dash boarding and alerting features. Cost efficient and easy to setup and run, no mazor scaling challenges in terms of managing and maintaining the stack, easy to configure via Prometheus, influx and other connectors

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Really highly skilled IntelliMagic team:

• Head of IntelliMagic (Gilbert Houtekamer, Els Das and Jean-Marc van der Kolk)
• Account manager DACH/Europe local support team ...

Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't offer nearly as much flexibility. The other thing I like about Grafana is their storage usage is much lower compared to similar tools and competitors

Incentivized

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.

• It has kicked out some of our paid monitoring and visualization tools.
• Now Monitoring, Visualization and Alerting is being done in a single platform.
• It made monitoring and visualization very easy for us.

• Intellimagic allows support staff to gain a deeper understanding of the environment. This is applicable to both junior and senior staff.