Bridging Mainframe and Cloud with AIOps
Key Points
- Enterprises rely on mainframes for critical workloads due to their reliability, scalability, performance, and security, but must still actively integrate them with modern cloud and as-a-service solutions.
- Treating the mainframe as “set it and forget it” creates an “out‑of‑sight, out‑of‑mind” risk, making it essential to maintain visibility and proactive management.
- Separating infrastructure teams from application teams leads to blame‑shifting, conflict, and slower incident resolution, especially in hybrid environments.
- IBM’s investment in unified monitoring—covering transaction tracing, golden signals, metrics, logs, and events—enables a single, application‑centric view of both cloud and on‑prem mainframe health.
- AIOps platforms provide integrated, automated analysis and remediation across domains, giving all teams a common view that accelerates root‑cause detection and eliminates “innocence” disputes.
Sections
- Untitled Section
- Unified AIOps for Cross‑Team Collaboration - The speaker explains how fragmented communication between SRE, mainframe, and application teams can be solved by using AIOps‑driven integrated views—via Instana, Cloud Pak for AIOps, and Red Hat Ansible—to give all parties a shared, real‑time perspective of hybrid cloud and mainframe environments, enabling faster root‑cause analysis and coordinated action.
Full Transcript
# Bridging Mainframe and Cloud with AIOps **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CLT3JU55jE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CLT3JU55jE) **Duration:** 00:04:06 ## Summary - Enterprises rely on mainframes for critical workloads due to their reliability, scalability, performance, and security, but must still actively integrate them with modern cloud and as-a-service solutions. - Treating the mainframe as “set it and forget it” creates an “out‑of‑sight, out‑of‑mind” risk, making it essential to maintain visibility and proactive management. - Separating infrastructure teams from application teams leads to blame‑shifting, conflict, and slower incident resolution, especially in hybrid environments. - IBM’s investment in unified monitoring—covering transaction tracing, golden signals, metrics, logs, and events—enables a single, application‑centric view of both cloud and on‑prem mainframe health. - AIOps platforms provide integrated, automated analysis and remediation across domains, giving all teams a common view that accelerates root‑cause detection and eliminates “innocence” disputes. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CLT3JU55jE&t=0s) **Untitled Section** - - [00:03:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CLT3JU55jE&t=183s) **Unified AIOps for Cross‑Team Collaboration** - The speaker explains how fragmented communication between SRE, mainframe, and application teams can be solved by using AIOps‑driven integrated views—via Instana, Cloud Pak for AIOps, and Red Hat Ansible—to give all parties a shared, real‑time perspective of hybrid cloud and mainframe environments, enabling faster root‑cause analysis and coordinated action. ## Full Transcript
In many enterprise organizations, their business critical workloads reside on the mainframe
for its inherent platform benefits such as reliability, availability, scalability, performance and security.
And over the decades, working on the mainframe platforms, these enterprises rightfully
chose to adopt new technologies such as cloud and as-a-service solutions in order to accelerate their innovation and remain competitive.
That's a good thing, right?
Well, sure.
Unless they fall into the trap of pushing their mainframe off to the corner.
But why would they do that?
Because as long as the infrastructure that supports their hybrid applications,
if not tens or thousands of hybrid applications, is running efficiently, then it becomes an "out-of-sight, out-of mind" situation.
But even though the mainframe delivers, you can't treat it as a "set it and forget it" solution, because in the end, it's at the heart of the business.
That's why integration with your cloud platform is important.
So what barriers to this integration do you need to address for this to happen efficiently?
First and foremost, don't make this common mistake.
Separate your infrastructure team from your application teams.
For some, this task makes complete sense.
Like when you have platform-specific tooling that helps these different personas deliver different results.
But what happens when problems occur?
These two teams end up in a war room situation.
They point fingers at one another and they battle to claim that the current problem is not within their domain.
It's a rush to determine their mean-time-to-innocence.
This creates tension, conflict, and sometimes even makes stressful situations even more stressful.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
We can be one big happy family when we integrate across hybrid cloud and on-prem mainframe environments.
And so this is where IBM has been investing in integrating key performance insights here and here.
Let me name just a few: transaction tracing, infrastructure related golden signals, operational metrics, logs and events.
All of these can now be integrated with a hybrid application-centric tooling in order to bring visibility
of the underlying health of the mainframe infrastructure.
But how?
AIOps.
AIOps solutions help proactively identify emerging problems, automate correlation of disparate data sources,
ultimately accelerating root cause analysis, and providing an enterprise-wide automation stack that can
remediate operational issues across platforms and domains.
This eliminates the rush to claim innocence.
Instead, it helps drive towards resolution.
But how?
Well, a lot of challenges aren't solved because the various team members are speaking past each other.
They're not communicating because they don't have a common view.
That's what AIOps brings - an integrated view, so your whole team can really communicate, right?
That's here, your SRE team.
And here, your mainframe team.
That's the big picture.
But what about tools to make it real?
One of the ways we can achieve that is through the integration of Z data into hybrid application solutions like Instana for Observability,
Cloud Pak for AIOps for accelerated root cause analysis, and even Red Hat Ansible for enterprise wide automation.
This lets both the application and the infrastructure team see the same thing at the same time.
It's a lot easier to be a better together team when you integrate the mainframe with hybrid cloud.
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