Following a five-hour delay at the start of my friend’s family holiday due to an IT problem, he received €2,000 in compensation from the airline for five people. Even if the plane was 80 percent full and only 50 percent of the people applied for a reimbursement like he did, that’s tens of thousands of Euros in losses for the airline – nothing to turn your nose up at.

We all know how complex today’s IT systems are and we all know what happens if something breaks. What most of us don’t know is how expensive this can be and how many customers as in this case will decide to never fly with that airline again.

An alternative ending

So let’s assume they could have solved the problem in two hours. Yes, the passengers would not be happy, but at least, they might have avoided paying the money. And if the airline had it solved in one hour, people would have accepted it as a simple delay and nothing would have happened.

Every complex system will fail – it’s only a matter of time. While we all know this, we often find ourselves in situations where we don’t have a complete view of all the components that make a process work (or not work).

Many systems, many tools

To gain insight into systems, we have many different tools, monitoring many different components. The reasons are simple; when asked to select a tool or utility, the subject matter expert will select the best solution that will help him/her to get the job done.

Whether that is managing a database, a network component, a (virtualized) server, a service running in the cloud or an ERP application, you can be sure they have selected the best possible solution. But unfortunately, vendors who sell these solutions don’t always care about the other vendors and components that you rely on to run your business. None of this is new, and all of us have been struggling with this for as long as we have had to rely on IT.

Can the silos be removed?

What is also not new is the problems this is causing us every day. People working in silos, difficulties finding the root cause of problems and lengthy calls and meetings with lots of people blaming each other, ultimately leading to unhappy end-users and customers. As an industry, this is the No.1 issue that needs solving and many have tried.

Ultimately, the only solution that will really do the job is one that can bring everything together. However, many Fortune 5000 companies are still using an IBM mainframe – also known as “the black hole” because most of the tools available stop at the mainframe where transactions “disappear” and start monitoring again when the transaction magically appears again (or not).

Combining mainframe experience with UIM

CA UIM for z Systems has now solved this problem for everybody once and for all. Our 30-plus years of mainframe experience combined with the teams that have developed CA UIM for z Systems as the ultimate monitoring solution have not just resulted in a bunch of windows simply populating the same screen.

We have used our expertise in writing probes for every possible IT component you’d ever want to monitor and used the same technology to write probes that sit on the mainframe and report straight back into the UIM management console: real integration, not just on the glass.

Finally, the mainframe can be viewed as just another IT component. No more finger pointing, no more delays for our customers, no transactions that disappear in the dark and leave customers in the dark as well. Simple IT management as it was always intended.

For more on CA UIM for z Systems and the announcement made at this year’s CA World last month, please see this page.

We’d love to hear your comments about monitoring solutions and how your IT department is more agile thanks to them.

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