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Bolstering mainframe infrastructure and management to achieve integration, agility and security
Banco de Brasília S.A. accelerates its digital transformation with IBM, aiming to automate activities, integrate different platforms and monitor data and statistics across its entire fleet of services.
Enhancing mainframe monitoring: BRB's journey towards automation and integration
Banco de Brasília S.A. (BRB) needed to improve its mainframe monitoring infrastructure with the aim of automating activities, integrating different platforms and monitoring data and statistics across its entire fleet of servers and services. The institution finalized the migration of its high-platform systems to IBM® z15® mainframe in mid-2018, offering its more than 7 million customers a hyper secure, agile and hybrid multi-cloud-ready infrastructure. The monitoring of this new environment was still very incipient, being restricted to a few indicators.
Since then, the institution’s daily challenge has been to improve the processes and tools that help it monitor its environment, to make it available to all interested parties, and to share information on how the high-platform environment works, particularly, the statistics related to performance and availability. As the high- and low-platform monitoring processes and tools were not integrated, only the low platform benefited from the great improvements brought with the adoption of Grafana (link resides outside of ibm.com). This made it even more noticeable how much the institution needed to evolve in terms of monitoring the high-platform environment.
Digital transformation in banking: automated processes, integration, and efficient management to improve customer experience
Given this scenario, it became clear that the challenge was to integrate mainframe monitoring into the same process already designed for the low-end platform. This would enable the institution to have more efficient processes, enhance the performance of its infrastructure and strengthen security.
To address this need, the IBM monitoring team along with the institution’s mainframe infrastructure team put into practice some actions such as the use of the IBM Tivoli® Enterprise Portal. This resulted in the creation of dashboards that allowed BRB to monitor the mainframe more proactively.
As part of the project, the IBM team provided the necessary knowledge and support to install and configure the IBM OMEGAMON® Data Provider, included in the IBM Z® Service Management Suite. The services were carried out with a focus on real-time monitoring; configuration of data collection from monitoring agents under IBM z/OS®; sending information regarding z/OS, IBM CICS® Transaction Server, IBM Db2®, IBM MQ as well as the storage, network and Java components to the Elasticsearch/Grafana platform; creation and availability of information in the form of dashboards; and collection of historical data.
BRB has in the past faced an issue with lack of storage pool space to store Db2 archive logs, which led to the mainframe batch and online services being unavailable. Therefore, it was imperative that the ITOPs and Db2 administrators were made aware when the storage pools were growing above normal expectations. The monitoring team enabled alerting to monitor Db2 archive storage pools using the OMEGAMON for Db2 Performance Expert on z/OS agent features. A few weeks later, a similar Db2 storage event occurred; only this time, the support teams were promptly alerted early on, giving them additional time to take actions and avoid a Db2 on z/OS outage. Today, BRB has created advanced, integrated observability dashboards providing a holistic view of their entire mainframe and distributed environment through the Elasticsearch/Prometheus/Grafana tools.
The OMEGAMON Data Provider proved to be a central point in the success of the project. From the OMEGAMON Data Provider, it was possible to professionalize the visualization of mainframe operating indicators and statistics using the same resources and processes used for low-end servers. OpenSearch, Zabbix and Grafana could, from that moment on, concentrate all monitoring information and automatic actions in anomalous cases, regardless of the origin—mainframe or low platform.
BRB’s initiative to enhance its mainframe monitoring infrastructure through collaboration with IBM has yielded significant benefits. By integrating mainframe monitoring with low-end platform processes, the bank has achieved greater operational efficiency, improved infrastructure performance and strengthened security measures. Advanced monitoring tools such as the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Portal and OMEGAMON Data Provider have provided real-time insights into the bank's entire technological landscape, enabling proactive monitoring and swift resolution of potential issues. This technological upgrade not only ensures a seamless banking experience for its 7 million+ customers but also underscores BRB's commitment to delivering secure and efficient financial services in today's digital era.
The BRB (link resides outside of IBM.com) created on December 10, 1964, is a mixed-capital company, whose majority shareholder is the government of the Federal District. In 1991, it became a multiple-service bank with the following portfolios: commercial, foreign exchange, development, and real estate. The BRB has a staff of 3,280 employees in addition to 450 interns, 120 apprentices and 705 outsourced workers, thus generating more than 4,500 jobs. BRB operates with a focus on excellence in customer service, and currently has 1,082 service points. It operates in 9 Brazilian states, in addition to the Federal District, in which the country’s capital is located.
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