Visionaries Share Innovations in Mainframe Efficiency and Observability
Mark Wilson, technical director at Vertali, highlights advances in AIOps and DevOps from SHARE's Tech Field Day
For a platform some people wrote off years ago, the mainframe is continuing to modernize, evolve and move forward, aided and abetted by some very smart people. This point was underlined on a recent trip to the US.
In August, I had the pleasure of attending SHARE Kansas City, where I was also invited to Tech Field Day Extra. While I knew the people behind the TFDx event, The Futurum Group, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. What I got was a fantastic day of insights into mainframe innovation. I took part in a panel discussion but, more importantly, met bona fide visionaries and heard about some exciting developments. Here are a few:
Broadcom’s WatchTower Platform
The WatchTower Platfom is Broadcom’s OpenTelemetry solution for observability and mainframe AIOps. While the mainframe is a transactional beast of burden, designed to cope with big demands, the reality is that we’re continuing to see exponential growth in data, transaction volumes and IT complexity. As a result, mainframe operations teams can struggle to keep up. WatchTower is a nifty tool that combines big data and machine learning with domain expertise to provide meaningful, actionable insights. It’s designed to help reduce manual effort and automate tasks, detect issues before they become major problems and speed up resolution times, thereby improving day-to-day operations.
I’ve written a few times that observability is now a big deal in the mainframe space, and this is the type of thing I mean. WatchTower is definitely one to watch.
10-Minute Mainframe Setup
Meanwhile, PopUp Mainframe presented its Mainframe on Demand concept, empowering mainframe houses to deliver changes faster and at lower cost through an on-demand environment. Yes, PopUp Mainframe does exactly what it says on the tin, as CEO Gary Thornhill explained: “We can pop up a full mainframe platform in roughly 10 minutes, in the cloud or on-premises.” Pre-installed, optimized and pre-configured. It’s quite something.
Gary said the company’s goal was nothing less than revolutionizing the developer experience, allowing the developer to test against a production-like environment even at the very earliest stages of testing: “Use cases on the pop-up are only limited to your imagination,” he said. Customers already include Legal & General, National Grid and TSB.
AI for Mainframe DevOps
BMC Software talked about leveraging generative AI for mainframe DevOps, addressing “the pervasive fear of change within mainframe environments.” To this end, BMC has created AMI DevX Code Insights, a tool to enables “comprehensive understanding and management of COBOL programs.” With features including structure charts, logic flow, data flow analysis and code extraction, it’s designed to break down monolithic programs into far more manageable chunks. BMC has also integrated AI capabilities into the tool to explain code sections in plain English, further helping developers to understand and maintain legacy systems.
Then it was back to observability, as BMC discussed the importance of measurements in mainframe transformation. On the basis that organizations often invest in new tools and processes but can struggle to quantify the value of those investments—and may innately fear revealing inefficiencies—its zAdviser tool leverages data from BMC and third-party tools, using machine learning to provide DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics. These offer what BMC say is a “comprehensive view of an organization’s efficiency and quality in software delivery,” contributing to better-informed decisions on improving DevOps processes.
Events such as SHARE, the GSE UK conference and, in this case, Tech Field Day, are vitally important for the health and wellbeing of our mainframe community. And while it’s not always possible for us to travel, it’s great when we can meet face-to-face to share ideas and inspiration with our peers.