IBM Z System Automation

Use high availability and automated operations support for IBM Z systems and IBM Parallel Sysplex clusters through flexible, cluster-wide, policy-based self-healing. Use IBM Z System Automation to start, stop and recover applications, systems and sysplexes. You can also automate applications across multiple sysplexes from a single console.

Employ advanced application disaster recovery capabilities using IBM GDPS to manage remote copy configuration storage subsystems. You can also minimize outages with fast, reliable automatic recovery.

ChatOps is a model that integrates people, tools and processes into a collaboration platform so that teams can efficiently communicate and easily manage their workflow. IBM Z ChatOps supports Z environments by including a chatbot that gives users access to information from Z systems management tools directly into Slack®, Microsoft® Teams™ or Mattermost®. Quickly notify the IT operations team about alerts from IBM Z applications.

ChatOps also integrates with IBM Service Management Unite for broad access to IBM Z data, enabling chat users to drill down into web-based dashboards with additional information. With Z ChatOps, incident resolution can be accelerated, and next-gen IBM Z operators can be onboarded faster.

Optimize system health and performance by applying goal-driven automation to simplify operations, minimize costs and support business goals. Proactively managing availability through performance-driven automation can reduce automation implementation time and cost. Leveraging automated alert notification and escalation can also improve problem resolution.

Monitor and control enterprise-wide processor hardware operations, including powering multiple target processors on and off, resetting them and performing all relevant system management tasks. Respond to messages, monitor status, detect and resolve wait states and manage your overall IBM Z system capacity.

Manage and control automated applications running on multiple Parallel Sysplexes and related non-z/OS systems with the Service Management Unite Dashboard. Take advantage of modern, customizable dashboards to monitor and operate apps, giving you a single control point. Use graphical views to understand the relationships of your automated applications easily. View z/OS system logs, exceptional messages and messages streamed from the System Display Facility (SDF). Gain advanced built-in problem analysis and resolution capabilities. Trigger automation functions to start, stop, recycle or move components or issue system commands on any connected z/OS system without having to open and log on to a different screen.

Automate newly deployed resources, like IMS or CICS regions, leveraging user-defined application templates and creating new resources dynamically whenever needed quickly and safely. Apply your company-defined rules and constraints for the automation of resources in the template definition so the automated resources that are dynamically added will be compliant and audit-ready.

Take advantage of Zowe-conformant application programming interfaces (Restful API) that enable better integration with hybrid cloud applications.

IBM Z System Automation provides a set of REST APIs to manage dynamic resources and an out-of-the-box integration with Red Hat® Ansible®. This integration allows developers to provision new workloads seamlessly integrated into the existing automated operations. REST APIs also allow programmatical control of automated applications and management of automation configurations in the sysplex.

Through the Zowe CLI plug-in, users can control IBM Z System Automation from a command line running on Microsoft Windows, Linux or Apple Macintosh operating systems. Messages in the System Display Facility (SDF) can be streamed to Apache Kafka to visualize the data in Service Management Unite or any other Kafka consumer. The automation policy can be exported in JSON format.

IBM Z System Automation provides pluggable, out-of-the-box sample policies for the z/OS base system, middleware products such as IMS, Db2, CICS, SAP and many more system products and infrastructure components. These sample policies are guided by best practices and designed for immediate high availability.