In-Depth

IBM Introduces New Tivoli Mainframe Tools

Administrators can use Tivoli Management Portal to establish performance thresholds and drill down into the root cause and context of a system failure.

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 12/08/2003

Officials say administrators can use Tivoli Management Portal to perform a range of administrative actions, such as establishing performance thresholds and drilling down into details to determine the root cause and context of a system failure. The portal also supports customized views through dashboards that can provide insight into key metrics.

Big Blue also unveiled Tivoli Storage Optimizer, a new tool that delivers near-real-time monitoring of an organization's storage environment. Officials say organizations can exploit the Tivoli storage optimization tool to make more effective use of their storage resources and better identify potential problems. Administrators can create policies to automate actions in the Tivoli Storage Optimizer environment, and can script commands to automate routine tasks, such as moving storage volumes.

Another new product, Tivoli Performance Modeler, lets administrators develop performance models for IT resource capacity planning. Because Tivoli Performance Modeler is said to simulate the actual performance behavior of mainframe systems, officials say it can enable a variety of “what-if” simulation scenarios, such that enterprises can simulate system migrations and other potentially disruptive procedures.

Also last month, Big Blue enhanced its Tivoli System Automation for OS/390 tool, featuring a technology that IBM calls extendable Easy Message Management. The revamped tool consolidates automation message information from across the z/OS environment and reduces the time it takes operators and system programmers to create and propagate automation actions across single z/OS systems or nodes in a Sysplex.

NetView for z/OS has also been enhanced with improved TCP/IP availability management, enabling easier problem-diagnostic capabilities.

Editor's note: This story was originally published on November 4 in Enterprise Strategies.