Companies leverage their mainframes to run vital business applications, but these systems are not included in ServiceNow Event Management by default. Watch this on-demand webinar to learn how IT operations team can eliminate these blind spots and improve service availability by bringing their mainframe machine data into ServiceNow.
Automating Google Workspace (GWS) & more with Apps Script
Harness Mainframe Machine Data in ServiceNow Event Management
1. Ironstream®
The Full Stack
Harness Machine Data in ServiceNow
Event Management
Ian Hartley | Senior Director, Product Management
Andrew Farley | Solutions Engineer
2. Housekeeping
Webinar Audio
• Today’s webcast audio is streamed through your
computer speakers
• If you need technical assistance with the web interface
or audio, please reach out to us using the Q&A box
Questions Welcome
• Submit your questions at any time during the presentation
using the Q&A box. If we don't get to your question, we will
follow-up via email
Recording and slides
• This webinar is being recorded. You will receive an email
following the webinar with a link to the recording and slides
3. Themes
• Challenges around traditional
modernization approaches
• Impact to business
• Need for an accurate visibility
solution
• Demo of Ironstream for Event
Management
15. Mainframes host the most critical applications
71%
Fortune 500
$2.9 Billion
Mainframe market by 2025
$2.5 Billion
Transactions / day / per MF
Top World
Banks
92 of World’s
Top Insurers
10 of Top 25
US Retailers
23
15
16. Leading IT operations platforms lack native
IBM integration
Distributed and
Cloud environments
Mainframe Systems
Distributed and
Cloud environments
IBM Z
Platform
17. Impact of data silos on IT teams
No single view of
IT infrastructure
Increased
downtime and
critical outages
Health and
status of systems
is unknown
Lack of shared
information
across teams
Higher MTTR
Difficult to find root
cause of incidents
19. Intelligent operations for your business services
19
Visibility
For business services deployed on-premises or cloud…
Drive operational excellence through visibility across the entire operations
estate, higher service uptime, and optimized cost and service delivery
20. Intelligent operations for your business services
20
Visibility Health
For business services deployed on-premises or cloud…
Drive operational excellence through visibility across the entire operations
estate, higher service uptime, and optimized cost and service delivery
21. Intelligent operations for your business services
21
Optimization
Visibility Health
For business services deployed on-premises or cloud…
Drive operational excellence through visibility across the entire operations
estate, higher service uptime, and optimized cost and service delivery
22. Intelligent operations for your business services
22
Optimization
Visibility Health
For business services deployed on-premises or cloud…
Drive operational excellence through visibility across the entire operations
estate, higher service uptime, and optimized cost and service delivery
23. Drive down costs while swiftly resolving issues
23
Start with up
to date visibility
Empower users
to address issues
quickly
Everything looking
critical makes
nothing critical
Call out high
priority issues first
Eliminate outages
and reduce impact
of high priority
incidents
Services
Infrastructure
Cloud
Machine
learning
IT
operations
function
Big data
and
analytics
Services impacted
Users impacted
Applications impacted
Determine impact
25. Ironstream for
ServiceNow
Event
Management
IBM Mainframe
110+ Event Rules including:
• System Console/Syslog Events
• CICS Transient Data Queue Events
• IMS Master Terminal Operator Events
• Interval Monitoring
• SMS Group Threshold Monitoring
• MQ Manager, Channels, Queues
• Active Jobs
• RMF based Performance Monitoring
• Custom Message Interface
• Message Automation
• Reliable TCP Communication
• Heartbeat and positive message
acknowledgement
• Message Buffering
• Command Console
IBM i
170+ Rules for IBM i, including:
• AS/400 State
• ASP State
• Audit Journal Alerts
• Job Queue State
• Job/Subsystem State
• Memory Pool State
• Threshold Monitoring
• I/O per second
• TIMW Status
• Message Queue Alerts
• MQ Series States
• TCP Connection Status
• CMTW Status
• MTXW Status
• Output Queue State
• Services State
• Agent Connection
• Wait Status Monitoring
Companies are run based on departments. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Organizations have grown and realized there are specific functions they need to operate.
But if you really want to get work done, these departments need to work together. And when that’s the case, there are a lot of challenges when it comes to setting up departments to work well together.
The first challenge is they don’t have a common way to communicate or collaborate.
Instead, they are kind of loosely coupled together by emails, spreadsheets, phone calls, or tribal knowledge where someone knows someone who can help them get stuff done.
The second challenge is that each of these departments has their own technology stacks. They’ve each created a set of software that ties together to form a system of record based on the needs and what’s important to that department.
To make matters worse, you don’t just have this complexity to deal with, you have all the systems and technologies that exist around and between departments.
Things like what’s our mobile strategy or what are we going to do around our master data management or what’s our philosophy around AI?
So, the challenge is how do you actually link these systems, technologies, and departments together technically but also so work flows naturally across them as it wants to flow – without any care to how department, org charts, and technology dictate.
Imagine a new employee starting their first day of work. They need to be in contact with HR to get the materials they need, with Finance to get paid, and with IT to get all the hardware and tools necessary to do their job.
Or imagine if you’re a customer coming in just trying to ask a question about your product that ends up initiating a customer service request that has impact on sales, which may result in sales having to speak to marketing to get changes to their ad campaigns.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could kick off a workflow that ensures this is the case without relying on manual handoffs that waste time and lead to misunderstandings and confusion?
As we start to map more of these workflows across the enterprise, the enterprise becomes more and more connected. And eventually, you get to the point where everything is connected, where you’ve digitized your mission critical services, and you’ve built a service mesh or fabric that’s linking everything together.
For me, what’s interesting here is the system of action that actually creates this fabric. So, you have the system of engagement and below that the system of record, but what’s important is the connection between the two that links the level of engagement to the system of record.
And once you have that, there are a load of additional benefits.
Most importantly, employees get better experiences because there is less friction. And that means work happens faster. Organizations are more agile, and with workflows, they also get visibility into what’s happening at a given moment.
And that cuts down so much useless conversation. So, whenever I initiate a process or I need something, I can see where it’s going to go through and whereabout it is in the process. And then I start to get this feeling of being much more connected, with visibility into what’s happening.
Once we’ve connected the middle office and we understand how the layers of the company request work off each other, the next thing that becomes interesting for the Connected Enterprise is repeating the same process through the digitization of operations.
That could be through technology refreshes that are actually putting connected devices in or it could be the application to automation or AI to be able to allow you to repeat that same process again and again.
The key to all this, though, is ServiceNow as the platform of platforms. Our unique differentiation is providing you with one platform that shares one data model and one architecture,
The challenge is that in most modern enterprises, work is unstructured and happening within disparate systems of record. These departments have their own data and systems of record that are stored on various, in some cases legacy technologies, but work happens in silos – lowering productivity and giving a bad user experience, because individually they do not support how work flows across your enterprise. And replacing core systems is an expensive and lengthy process.
Our Now Platform excels at digitizing work that flows throughout your company and across several functions in a unified experience.
That’s why we call the Now Platform the “platform of platforms” for all business solutions and ALL workflows.
Our unique differentiation is providing you with one platform that shares one data model, one architecture, as well as many built-in powerful capabilities –
So you can easily build cross-enterprise workflows, you have a single CMDB to record all your asset information…
You deploy enterprise service management. There’s machine learning, AI and predictive analytics. We look at how we engage with the system by giving them native mobile functionality and conversational interfaces.
And then we provide a set of no code and low code development tools to allow anyone to build their own apps.
ServiceNow connects organizations, creating a seamless enterprise system of action that integrates silos & systems, gives people great employee and customer experiences, and most importantly, increases business agility and unlocks productivity.
On top of our platform, we offer best in class “out-of-the-box” workflows for IT, employees and customers that orchestrate work across the enterprise and are unique to each industry.
These solutions were all developed organically, 100% native to our platform. And we offer the same exact platform for you to build your own low-code and no-code apps with App Engine to deliver enterprise workflows and even develop new business solutions.
Our partners are also building apps on the Now Platform, providing an even greater selection of ready to use workflows for your business to download and deploy when you want to.
And lastly, all of your existing omni-channel experiences will have out-of-the box integration into the ServiceNow from mobile and web to conventional collaboration and through to productivity tools like Slack or Microsoft teams, so you can deliver great experiences to your employees, your customers and your partners through the interfaces they love.
Mainframes are still the backbone for the biggest organizations in the world
71% of the fortune 500 rely on the mainframe for their mission critical transactional systems and they are present in every vertical from FinServ to Insurance to Retail.
When talking to these organizations, it’s not unusual to hear that up to 80% of their corporate data originates on the mainframe and that business is growing. The mainframe market is expected to grow to $2.9 billion by 2025.
PURPOSE: The negative consequences of disconnection.
Let’s take a more detailed look at the first pillar of ITOM – Visibility. The charter of our Visibility toolset is to identify everything in your IT estate and catalog it in a central source-of-truth database. However, we don’t stop there. We then map business services – the very applications end-users and customers interact with – to understand their constituent components and how they interact. This map is overlaid onto the discovered operational estate so that you have a 360 degree view of any business service.
Let’s take a more detailed look at the first pillar of ITOM – Visibility. The charter of our Visibility toolset is to identify everything in your IT estate and catalog it in a central source-of-truth database. However, we don’t stop there. We then map business services – the very applications end-users and customers interact with – to understand their constituent components and how they interact. This map is overlaid onto the discovered operational estate so that you have a 360 degree view of any business service.
Let’s take a more detailed look at the first pillar of ITOM – Visibility. The charter of our Visibility toolset is to identify everything in your IT estate and catalog it in a central source-of-truth database. However, we don’t stop there. We then map business services – the very applications end-users and customers interact with – to understand their constituent components and how they interact. This map is overlaid onto the discovered operational estate so that you have a 360 degree view of any business service.
Let’s take a more detailed look at the first pillar of ITOM – Visibility. The charter of our Visibility toolset is to identify everything in your IT estate and catalog it in a central source-of-truth database. However, we don’t stop there. We then map business services – the very applications end-users and customers interact with – to understand their constituent components and how they interact. This map is overlaid onto the discovered operational estate so that you have a 360 degree view of any business service.
IT operations and security use cases can all be played across these tools and platforms. Even combinations of these many different use cases.
From simple visibility…to operational insights…finding issues and resolving them quickly before your customers are aware…to improving your security, compliance and audit posture.
These are all possible…at your own pace…and in-line with your common or even unique requirements.
Our coverage of events on these platforms is also comprehensive.
Out-of-the-box Ironstream comes pre-populated with many pre-built rules for the detection of a multitude of situations.
From real-time detection of console messages...to CICS activities…active jobs…even heartbeat and message acknowledgements
We provide a good working set of rules and scripts to start…but it is easy to add or modify rules for specific needs and requirements.
Let’s say something is unique to your organization…for example…specific data transfers that must take place between certain hours
…Ironstream plus ServiceNow Event Management and Workflow can provide the necessary observability and safety blanket to support such an operation.
This combination of technologies delivers very comprehensive and robust handling for any mainframe or IBMi event that can occur.
Using our 2-way communications….Event Management can proactively help keep things online and ensure you’re informed along the way.
Workflow gives you the power to control what takes place for a given scenario.
As an example, this rule detects a mainframe VTAM node has gone inactive and will orchestrate getting it back online.
This could be a vital service connection…and you need to get it back online FAST. Workflow automation can do that for you.
OK...I hear some say…yeah but that’s been available on mainframe for years. Yes it has…and that’s the point…ON the mainframe.
ServiceNow’s workflow is in the elevated context of the business.
This can include many other platforms and moving parts. Not just the mainframe or IBMi. And…ServiceNow’s workflow spans the business and not just specialized knowledge areas.
ServiceNow delivers better…wider control…across the complete IT landscape.