If you've been following recent news from 21CS, you already know we released OPTIMAn, our premier performance, capacity, and cost tool. What you haven't seen yet is the new user interface. Here's your first look.
We built this reporting interface specifically for OPTIMAn, shaped by feedback on how performance and capacity teams operate and where legacy reporting tools that require years of experience slowed them down.
It runs on z/OS, or under zLinux/zCX, which keeps it close to the data it's reporting on. That also means the whole thing stays inside the mainframe. Your team can install it, run it, and manage it without pulling in groups from outside the z/OS team.
And it's fast to get running. No multi-week implementation project, no professional services engagement required. Most customers can have the interface installed, configured, and look at their own data in under 30 minutes.
Built into the interface is an AI assistant designed to answer the questions performance and capacity teams actually ask, in plain language.
It doesn't stop at pointing you to the right report. It's built to help with root cause analysis, get new team members answers without years of tribal knowledge, and get you fast answers when a specific outage hits and there's no standing report built for it.
Try something like:
"Which LPAR has the highest CPU consumption in the last 7 days?"
"Which jobs on that LPAR are driving the spike?"
"Are there jobs I can offload to zIIP to save on MIPS and MSU?"
Found something worth keeping an eye on? Ask the chat bot to build the query, save it, and run it again whenever you need it, all without leaving the interface for a separate Db2 query tool.
Have something you want to report on but aren't sure how to build or visualize? Describe it to the chat bot and let it put the report together.
The point isn't that you can talk to a chat bot. It's what that gives back: less time hunting for the right report, more time on the work that actually needs your judgment.
Most tools require you to already know which report or which area to focus on before you even open them. Our model works differently: metrics that belong together are combined into the same dashboard, so drilling down into the detail only happens once you've actually identified something worth chasing.
The reports themselves have been modernized too. Cleaner visualizations, simpler navigation, and less time spent figuring out where to look before you can get to anything useful.
The underlying data hasn't changed. It's the same data OPTIMAn has always tracked. The reports built on top of it have been reimagined and optimized to get you to an answer faster.
This is a first look. There's more here than fits in a blog post, and the best way to see it is against your own environment, not a demo script.
Reach out to joshua.stiles@21cs.com or visit 21cs.com. Let's set up time to show you what this looks like running on your own systems.
Josh Stiles is Product Lead at 21CS, where he leads OPTIMAn - performance and capacity management built natively for IBM Z.