What is our primary use case?
BMC AMI Ops' most used cases are to monitor the health and performance of mainframe environments, primarily used for CPU, memory, and system utilizations, as well as for monitoring alerts if there are any higher values than the preferred performance values. We use
BMC AMI Ops for monitoring and resource utilization, and it helps in assisting with troubleshooting of any performance issues or it can be used for operations work.
What is most valuable?
BMC AMI Ops offers real-time monitoring of z/OS systems and related subsystems, providing immediate visibility of the health and performance. It helps for proactive monitoring or alerting of any irregularities or spikes in performance. The automation capabilities reduce the manual work in operational tasks, and root cause analysis helps us determine exactly where the problem started, assisting in resolution to prevent reoccurrence in the future. Real-time monitoring with intelligent alerting of the system and the automations are the standard features that we use day in and day out.
The automation capabilities have reduced the majority of the work that our team used to do manually, as manual processes consume a lot of time and are prone to human error. When it comes to automation, we see the performance has been raised, and clients are also satisfied with the performance. We do not have much downtime or any critical issues that are highlighted which impact the business. Automation has really changed and is a game changer for us.
BMC AMI Ops has had a major impact because we are using it for one of our major clients. The alerting system gives us precise alerts, and based on that we try to fix issues before they lead to a business impact. The client is happy when there is no business impact, which is a really positive thing. The improvements we have seen include a reduction in the FTEs or headcount needed for operations work because of automation, and that has really helped us for cost savings.
The monitoring and integrated monitoring and automation system have improved incident response by providing us with a unified view of the health system and data across the environment. It helps us with real-time monitoring and automated alerts, enabling early detection for the team to effortlessly fix issues before they escalate. Manual efforts have been reduced, allowing us to respond to incidents consistently.
What needs improvement?
The alerting system could be improved. Sometimes false alerts pop up, so if there is any automation that checks before putting up an alert on our consoles to determine whether it is a genuine alert or a false alert, that would be really helpful and would reduce the time we spend investigating false alerts.
Overall, I find it is well designed, but only two points less because, as I mentioned, a few false alerts still require our resources to investigate other issues, and the graphical representations, UIs, reports, and other aspects need some improvements, indicating a scope for improvement. Graphical representation helps us with better analysis for our business analysts, so that would be an improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using BMC AMI Ops for the past five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Security-wise, we do not think there is any breach. On the governance side, everything is going well, and we have not notified any issues reported anywhere while using this application.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The operation experience is solid due to the dependencies across z/OS,
CICS, DB,
IMS, and
MQ, which is helpful. A unified monitoring interface is helpful, and the quick time, centralized dashboards, and alerts across multiple components result in better visibility and operational efficiency.
What was our ROI?
Visibility into cost and capacity awareness has improved planning and provided insights for MSU usages in the workload, helping us optimize resource utilization. We have cut off four resources based on automation, which controls costs and prevents unexpected system performance issues.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I cannot disclose directly the numbers and figures because they are organization confidential values. However, I can say that previously we had ten FTEs or resources for monitoring and now we have six, so we have cut off four resources, which is the benefit.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Currently, we are not using the observability and AI Ops-driven early detection feature, but we have to implement this as it is not yet in our organization. Currently, we are not using the
OpenTelemetry operations, so I have no answers for this.
What other advice do I have?
You have to extend your knowledge and views to maximize the capabilities of BMC AMI Ops. My review rating for BMC AMI Ops is eight out of ten.