Transforming complex data into actionable insights, enhancing real-time mainframe performance monitoring and capacity planning
Colruyt Group is a retail company with a diversified portfolio, from clothing stores to green energy, with supermarkets as their core business. At Colruyt Lowest Prices, Colruyt Group’s supermarket chain, the slogan is “The lowest price for every product at every moment.” For this slogan to be true, it’s necessary to continuously compare and adjust prices. Digital price labels allow Colruyt to adjust store prices at any time of the day. To optimize this process, Colruyt has expended a lot of effort in improving their IT processes that depend on efficient mainframe processing. Colruyt Group needed a tool that could provide daily insights into this, and for a variety of other processes and mainframe performance issues.
Colruyt Group has two data centers equipped with IBM Z® mainframes and IBM DS8950F disk storage systems. Their current flash storage capacity is 300 terabytes per data center. In addition, Colruyt Group has an IBM tape robot for backup storage in each data center, with a capacity of 600 terabytes per box. The tape and disk data are mirrored between both data centers.
After an extensive RFI (request for information) in which IBM Z® IntelliMagic Vision™ for z/OS® was screened for functionality, security and support, Colruyt Group chose the cloud version of the solution. They also opted for support for IBM z/OS Disk, virtual tape, systems, IBM® Db2®, IBM CICS®, MQ and TCP/IP.
Pieter Rogge, Mainframe Platform System Engineer at Colruyt, explains, “Colruyt Group needed out-of-the-box reporting with built-in knowledge in the field of performance and capacity. As system engineers, we are specialists in our domain, but we are not all performance specialists. Also, there is no specific team for capacity planning, but it is part of the job as a mainframe system engineer. We have extraordinarily little time ourselves to write programs and create reports. The out-of-the-box reports from IntelliMagic Vision were therefore an initial strong plus.”
In addition, the IBM team’s expert knowledge of their proprietary product was especially crucial in Colruyt Group’s choice of IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS. “The experts behind IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS know exactly what the metrics of the mainframe mean and have incorporated this into the product,” Rogge adds. “The reports are accompanied by an explanation. For example, in one report you see metric X with value Y; if the threshold is exceeded, it can have an impact. At other vendors, there are also people who have a lot of knowledge, but we haven’t seen many explanations in the tool itself.” This aspect, according to Rogge, is highly valuable for new colleagues in the team. “IntelliMagic Vision contains knowledge that sometimes is not initially thought of, but which can be particularly useful for the work of system engineers. A new colleague in the CICS (Customer Information Control System) domain, for example, can immediately learn a lot just by looking at the CICS reporting in IntelliMagic Vision,” he explains.
System engineers use IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS every day to look at the numbers and identify trends. Rogge elaborates: “In the old tool, this was very static: SAS programs that wrote HTML reports, with static graphics. If we wanted to change something, we had to change the program first, which was very impractical.”
Rogge praises the ease of use of IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS: "You can easily slice and dice, and reports are easy to change interactively. For example, by choosing another chart type, adding another metric, or displaying a metric in another unit. If necessary, one can also build a new report from scratch, which is then immediately available, including history. Exchanging information between colleagues is also amazingly easy because you can simply copy the URL of a report and send it to a colleague. They will see exactly the same—very convenient! Colleagues share charts with each other on a daily basis."
Rogge specializes in z/OS performance. "For me, the reports on consumption are particularly interesting. These are grouped within Workload Manager (WLM), so it includes report classes, jobs and started tasks. I can quickly see how much CPU and how much zIIP resource they consume. What makes it very useful is the drill down capability. For example, if I see high usage in the Db2 platform, I zoom in on the report classes there. Within the report class, you can see which software, started task or job is causing the spike." Another key feature is the top-down drill view to identify high CPU usage. System engineers begin at the workload level—using custom groupings of report classes—and drill down to report classes and then to specific address spaces. This structured method enables rapid root cause analysis and performance optimization.
For teams in other domains, other reports are important. CICS specialists find the response times and number of transactions within the CICS regions the most important. In the MQ domain, they are mainly concerned with monitoring queues, how many messages are on them, or how many gets and puts are being made. In the other domains, such as storage and Db2, many reports are consulted daily. Colruyt Group has deployed IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS in a majority of their mainframe domains, and it is being used daily for usage analysis and monitoring.
The team also uses dashboards for monthly WLM reviews—checking for unclassified work, analyzing importance distribution and identifying optimization opportunities. What used to be a manual and time-consuming task is now streamlined through IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS, saving valuable time. While the current use of IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS is focused on performance tuning and trend analysis, it plays a critical role in ensuring that the mainframe environment is continuously optimized in terms of CPU usage, WLM configuration and overall system efficiency.
More recently, Colruyt Group has been working on custom grouping within IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS to correlate CICS transactions with the corresponding application teams. By merging SMF metrics from IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS with metadata from their internal software management tool, they are now able to offer IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS as an application reporting tool for software engineers and application managers. This replaces their legacy SAS/MXG reports and enhances performance tracking across teams.
IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS plays a crucial role in monitoring trends in Distributed Data Facility (DDF) usage, particularly for Java processes that connect to Db2 on the mainframe. Each of these processes carries a unique correlation ID, allowing system engineers to trace performance issues back to the specific process and its owner, enhancing accountability and visibility. "It has become indispensable for this monitoring. If someone were to suggest that we stop using IntelliMagic Vision, I expect that many colleagues would say, ‘Then we have a problem, because we would be blind in several areas. Then we would have to write a whole bunch of extra reports,’" says Rogge.
Rogge was impressed by the number of reports in IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS. "Other vendors often say they can create any report. The point is, we didn't know in advance what we wanted to see. The pleasant thing is that many reports are already standard in IntelliMagic Vision and the history is built from day one. If we need a report, it is immediately available to us, including the history. This is often lacking with other vendors."
Moreover, Colruyt Group is very satisfied with the support available for IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS. They prefer not to need support, but if something does happen, they’re confident that they can quickly solve the problem with help from the IBM support team, who know the setup and data flow. And because IntelliMagic is in the cloud, the IBM experts can access it directly and also easily collaborate with the Colruyt team.
Rogge concludes, "With IntelliMagic Vision, we not only have a superior product, but also good people who can help when we have problems. It's an excellent match!"
Colruyt Group is a third-generation Belgian family business, with an extensive retail store network in Belgium, France and Luxembourg. The group is a majority shareholder in The Fashion Society and owns several subsidiaries, including in energy supply and document management. The group has offline operations in food and non-food distribution as well as an online presence. Founded almost a century ago and headquartered in Halle, the group has more than 33,000 employees.
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Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.