The basic mainframe monitoring is possible with simple reports of operational data. However, the use of monitoring software is more efficient. It provides features to manage performance, availability, and capacity.
Manual monitoring of mainframe systems requires time and effort. When issues are not detected early, it causes more problems on IT operation. The goal is to preempt the issue, do the troubleshooting and repair before it becomes apparent to the users.
The explosive growth of mobile gadgets generates a high volume of transactions. The expectation to meet the needs of digital business requirements has increased. Thus, there is a need to track the performance of mainframe components to prevent an outage. An efficient performance is only achievable with the use of more sophisticated monitoring tools.
Monitoring tools can benefit the business in terms of cost and performance. It can lower operational cost, reduce downtime and support workload capping, and workload balancing.
Lower Operational Cost
Mainframe monitoring solutions help reduce operational cost and improve service levels. The monitoring reports provide a better understanding of mainframe resource usage. This is a big factor in proper sizing and provisioning of mainframe systems.
Smart monitoring software can reduce time to detect, diagnose, and repair problems. It prevents frequent outages that can impact the users resulting in revenue loss. Moreover, there is no need to hire more IT staff to maintain the system.
Monitoring tools allow setting of the dynamic threshold to analyze the activity patterns. This self-learning approach reduces the alerts and alarms frequency. The automated monitoring does not require more staff; thus, you can save on compensation and benefits.
Reduce Downtime with Effective Troubleshooting
Installing a monitoring software is a proactive performance management. Monitoring can detect and prevent potential service delays and interruptions. It ensures availability to avoid major impact to the business.
With early issue detection, IT operations gain rapid insights on the issues. There are monitoring alerts for spikes in processor usage and performance slowdowns. The monitoring tool sends alerts and alarms with the set thresholds. Alerting reduces the time to diagnose and repair the problems as they occur.
Monitoring tools also allow automated monitoring schedule. Automation can increase speed in monitoring impending issues. Early detection gives IT team enough time for troubleshooting. The diagnostic results are useful for the rapid resolution of issues. Automated monitoring improves the mainframe maintenance process. An efficient troubleshooting would lead to faster problem resolution.
Intelligent Workload Capping and Balancing
Today’s mainframe system is not only limited to the traditional batch processing. There is an increasing number of transactions invoked from the Web. Queries from complex reports and data analytics add to the workload.
Access from mobile applications places major demands on mainframe-based workload. Workload increases with the real-time response requirements. The sporadic arrival of these type of requests is a challenge for mainframe systems. Thus, having a monitoring tool can preempt possible issues.
To meet the requirements of the high-volume transaction from digital applications requires automated monitoring. This is necessary to get enough resources for these workloads. The resource allocation must be enough to meet the spike in demands.
Mainframe monitoring tools have the ability for intelligent use of workload capping. If you set the priority of your workload, the system can do workload capping when needed. Setting some jobs to low priority doesn’t mean they are not important. It means that it’s less important than the other jobs. The best practice is to categorize your mainframe jobs. It’s best to set policies in categorizing the appropriate levels of importance.
The mainframe performance is efficient if it is consistent in servicing requests. The service availability is important to cater to systems, devices, and applications. When a transaction consumes excessive resources, you can set the automatic job canceling. You get notifications of the performance issues before the impact becomes severe.
The monitoring tools give the visibility of transactions across systems and subsystems. This gives them an idea of how to optimize resources across workload. Thus, workload balancing is more efficient.
Conclusion
The use of mainframe monitoring tool ensures early detection of performance issues. The notification alerts allow the IT Operation to act quickly on impending issues. The available monitoring metrics reduces the time for troubleshooting and repair. It reduces the number of IT staff, thereby lowering the cost of operation.
Monitoring software leads to a more efficient performance. With automation, monitoring can detect, and repair issues based on thresholds set. Workload capping is possible when the category of jobs is set. The system prioritizes job processing based on importance. It also does workload balancing to optimize the resources across subsystems and systems.
Real-time response is necessary for digital business accessing using mobile gadgets. It requires a rapid and consistent performance from a mainframe system. Impending issues need to early detection and resolution. This means lesser impact to the end users.