Banking 2022

Observability and specialized support for IBM Z mainframe environment

Banking institution with IBM Z (z390) mainframe in production

Observability system designed and implemented for an IBM Z mainframe environment: operational visibility where before there was only reactivity

The challenge

The institution's IBM Z mainframe environment included a z/VM virtualization layer with multiple guest operating systems and critical applications running on it, including IBM ACE. The operations team lacked consolidated visibility into the environment's behavior: when a problem arose, diagnosis was reactive and slow. Furthermore, specialized support for these components — z/VM, the operating systems on top of it and IBM ACE — is a scarce capability in the market.

The solution

We assumed technical support for the z/VM virtualization layer, the operating systems running on z/VM and the IBM ACE platform in production. In parallel, we designed and implemented an observability system specific to the z390 environment: capture of performance metrics from the virtualization layer, states of the guest operating systems, IBM ACE behavior and correlation of events across layers. The result was an operational dashboard that gives the operations team real-time visibility into an environment that historically operated as a black box.

Results

z390 environment observability system designed and implemented from scratch
Active support for z/VM, guest operating systems and IBM ACE in production
Real-time operational visibility of the mainframe available to the institution's team
Reduced incident diagnosis time through the availability of correlated historical metrics

The IBM Z mainframe remains the processing core for some of Colombia’s largest financial institutions. It is a platform that processes millions of transactions with reliability that is hard to match, but it also represents one of the greatest knowledge challenges in the market: specialists with real experience in z/VM, the operating systems that run on top of it and tools like IBM ACE are scarce, and the companies that can provide them are even fewer.

This project is representative of a pattern that repeats itself in our relationship with banking sector clients: technical depth in technologies that few master is precisely the reason they seek us out.

Technologies

Services applied

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