IBM Z System Automation

Leverage 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 Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (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 the flow of their work. IBM Z ChatOps provides support for Z environments by including a chatbot that gives users access to information from Z systems management tools directly into Slack®, Microsoft® Teams™, or Mattermost®. Easily 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 to enable chat users to drill-down into web-based dashboards with additional information. With Z ChatOps, accelerate incident resolution and enable faster onboarding of next-gen IBM Z operators.

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

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, and 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 point of control. Use graphical views to easily understand the relationships of your automated applications. View z/OS system logs, exceptional messages, and messages streamed from 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 logon to a different screen.

Automate newly deployed resources, like IMS or CICS regions, leveraging user defined application templates and create new resources dynamically whenever needed in a quick and safe way. Apply your company defined rules and constraints for the automation of resources in the template definition, so the automated resources dynamically added will be compliant and audit ready.

Take advantage of Zowe conformant application programming interfaces (Restful API) that enable integration with hybrid cloud applications better than ever before. IBM Z System Automation provides a set of REST API to manage dynamic resources and an out-of-the-box integration with Red Hat® Ansible®. Through this integration, developers can provision new workloads that can be 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 plugin, 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 in 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. All these sample policies are guided along best practices and are designed for immediate high availability.