Syncsort has added new capabilities in its Ironstream software that allow organizations to access and integrate mainframe log data in real-time to Splunk IT Service Intelligence (Splunk ITSI).
The integration of Ironstream with Splunk ITSI provides users with greater visibility into the health and performance indicators of mainframe and mainframe-to-distributed IT services.
"What we bring to the table is, what from the mainframe do you need to know about? What are the key performance indicators you would need and how do you fit them together with other parts of the business service?" said David Hodgson, GM of Mainframe at Syncsort. "It's incredibly powerful."
Splunk ITSI is a machine learning-powered monitoring solution that enables organizations to monitor and visualize their business services and processes with dashboards and interactive visualizations. The new Syncsort Ironstream Module for Splunk ITSI delivers information about large-scale mainframe business processes and services that play a core role in many organization’s key customer transactions.
The new Syncsort Ironstream Module for Splunk ITSI allows customers to send mainframe machine data in real time to Splunk solutions, without needing administrators to manually navigate back and forth between systems to troubleshoot problems and derive actionable intelligence, said Rick Fitz, senior vice president of IT markets, Splunk.
Leveraging the data Ironstream delivers, Splunk ITSI gives customers a view to monitor key activities that affect availability and response times for application services from across the enterprise, including IBM z Systems.
Many of the world’s leading telco, retail, insurance, healthcare and financial organizations rely on mainframes for critical application, observed David Hodgson, general manager of Syncsort’s Mainframe business, noting that an example of a key use case for the new integration is identification of slow-downs by banks when customers are trying to login to their accounts from mobile phones. The data that Ironstream feeds to Splunk ITSI for analytics can give administrators the information they need to see the entire transaction path and help them better understand and resolve those kinds of critical performance issues, he noted.
Syncsort says its roadmap for Ironstream includes delivery of enhancements, modules, and Splunkbase apps to handle emerging use cases, continuing to work to make the right data from evolving data sources available in real time to Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Enterprise Security, and now Splunk ITSI.
"This is an interesting journey and we're only at the start of it for sure," Hodgson said.
Prior to the new capabilities announced today, Syncsort delivered the ability to filter SMF data generated on z/OS systems (to control how much of the large quantities of SMF data generated on z/OS systems are sent to Splunk for analysis), developed ways to push additional mainframe data sources to Splunk solutions, and added IBM z/OS network and security data and alerts to the stream to provide deeper insights into security issues.