Mainframe Operational Intelligence

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General Availability Announcement for CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence 2.0.05

  • 1.  General Availability Announcement for CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence 2.0.05

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Dec 04, 2019 11:15 PM


    To:         CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence Customers

    From:    The CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence Product Group

    Date:     December 2019

    Subject: CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence Release 2.0 Service Update 05   


    Dear Valued Customer:

    CA Technologies, a Broadcom Company, is pleased to present you with a Service Update for CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence, an integral component of the family of solutions that we provide for z/OS.  This Service Update delivers additional capabilities including all maintenance updates through November 2019.  The Appliance Images are at the Release 2.0.05 level.


    Product Capabilities

    CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence provides predictive monitoring and alerting capabilities, leveraging a set of data collectors and machine learning algorithms, to determine when your systems or applications are behaving abnormally and alert you when they start trending toward a potential incident. The early alerting provides additional time for you to remediate, either manually or via automation, before the trend impacts performance or availability.

     

    New Features Included In This Update

    DB2 Accounting, CICS Transaction, and MQ SMF Support

    SMF continues to be an untapped source of insight in many mainframe shops, typically due to the lack of tools which can aggregate and analyze the volume and velocity of SMF records generated at a given time.  This release adds support for select DB2 (101.0/101.1), CICS (110.1), and MQ  (116.1/116.2) SMF record types allowing you to extend machine learning and historical analysis capabilities to performance monitoring of CICS transactions, DB2 plans and packages, and MQ channels and queues.

    SMF Records for these metrics are very voluminous so they are disabled for ingestion by default, giving you more control of when and which specific metric types or metric instances are streamed into MOI.   If you need these metrics, you enable (subscribe) and filter for what you need in the Appliance Controller user interface.

    Note: SMF metric support is available through licensing of the SMF Adapter Option. 


    New CA SYSVIEW Performance Management Option for DB2 Metrics

    Over 50 new metrics are added to the CA SYSVIEW Performance Management Option for DB2 (CA SYSVIEW DB2) integration based on customer demand, allowing even wider monitoring of your DB2 subsystem.  Metric descriptions also describe how the metrics are derived.


    Significantly Reduced Storage Requirement

    This release significantly reduces the storage needs for your MOI appliance.  Utilizing updated database technology which stores data in a more efficient way, you can now save 50% to 80% in disk space compared to previous releases.   When you upgrade from Release 2.0.04 to 2.0.05, MOI database services upgrade automatically to Cassandra version 3.11.4, and an optimization process occurs. You can only upgrade from Release 2.0.04.


    Option to Send Alert Notifications to SYSLOG as WTOs for Automation

    You can now define alert notification rules that write Write-To-Operator (WTO) messages to the z/OS SYSLOG.   You can then trap and automate Write-to-Operator (WTO) messages using available third party applications or tools.  This enhancement extends our automation capability to other vendor automation, console/event monitoring tools.

    Anomaly Detection Refinements

    This release continues to refine our anomaly detection capabilities. We have enhanced the system to not trigger an alarm for random fluctuations which are within business acceptable boundaries.  Additionally, several metric alarms have been turned off by default since they provide limited value for RCA or Issue (Alert Clustering) recognition.  Both of these changes increase the focus on actionable anomalies.  See the product documentation for more details.

    Issue Intelligence Update - Issue (Alert Clustering) Refinement

    This release also refines our machine learning algorithms which produce Issues (alert clustering).  These Issues are more meaningful since alerts are contextually correlated based on metric behavior and anomalies identified over time.  MOI is also enhanced to better recognize new Issues based on user feedback on the accuracy of the current Issues (Like/Unlike).


    Green Highway UI Updates

    The Green Highway now lets you toggle the Alert bubbles on and off as needed, providing more viewing area when you need to review and analyze metric values in detail.

    Additionally, MOI now fills in gaps in Green Highway charts to provide a better user experience.  Gaps in Green Highways might appear due to the sporadic nature of the data ingested (e.g. transactional data), or if the data provider is down or no longer configured to send data.

     

    Core Machine Learning Services Update

    Release 2.0.05 also provides updates to Machine Learning Services offered with the following products.

    - CA SYSVIEW Performance Management

    - CA NetMaster Network Management for TCP/IP

     

    Thank You

    We are dedicated to ensuring that your use of CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence is successful, and we thank you for your continued support of CA Technologies a Broadcom Company. If you have questions regarding this software solution, contact your local technical support group. Also, visit our support web site.