BMC AMI Ops Reviews

I have used BMC AMI Ops, which is a mainframe operation management tool, to work on the mainframe's application. I have used this for a monitoring solution that provides real-time visibility into the system performance, handles workload activity, resource utilization, and operational health. It helps the operations team proactively detect issues, improve availability, and optimize performance across operating systems.

In my project, I have used the OpenTelemetry integration for streaming operational data, mainly for observability purposes within our mainframe environment. This integration allows us to incorporate operational metrics with our broader monitoring ecosystem, enhancing cross-team collaboration and simplifying troubleshooting efforts. I used OpenTelemetry for streamlining operational data and incorporating mainframe metrics into our observability platforms, yielding significant business impact.

BMC AMI Ops has helped my organization positively by reducing the manual monitoring process. Before this tool was implemented, the operators had to constantly watch the dashboard and logs, and issues could be missed if nobody noticed them. With BMC AMI Ops, alerts automatically notify the operations team, allowing users to focus on tasks instead of constantly monitoring these things, reducing the need for manual monitoring and enabling focus on other priority tasks.

BMC AMI Ops provides strong monitoring and operational visibility capabilities; however, enhancements in dashboard customization could further improve the overall user experience. Additional automation capabilities will provide greater operational efficiency.

The best features that BMC AMI Ops offers, in my experience, are real-time monitoring, intelligent alerts, performance management, automation capabilities, and centralized visibility. The real-time feature stood out the best for me, as it provides system health information, detects issues, and impresses me.

The intelligent alerts in BMC AMI Ops are automated notifications in my company, generating notifications for alerts when the system detects abnormal conditions or goes down. For example, when the CPU usage is too high, storage usage crosses the threshold, batch jobs are delayed, transaction response time degrades, or a critical application fails, these intelligent alerts create notifications.

BMC AMI Ops provides strong monitoring and operational visibility capabilities; however, enhancements in dashboard customization could further improve the overall user experience. Additional automation capabilities will provide greater operational efficiency.

More intelligent correlation is needed in BMC AMI Ops. Currently, large environments may generate many alerts, so implementing intelligent correlation and noise reduction capabilities would help operators focus better. Regarding automation, capabilities can be further enhanced.

Additional granular access controls and AI-driven anomaly detection could further strengthen BMC AMI Ops.

I have been using BMC AMI Ops for 4.8 years.

BMC AMI Ops is very stable in my experience.

BMC AMI Ops's scalability was evidenced by our handling of large volumes and increased system complexity. The platform continued to provide reliable operational visibility without any performance degradation, and its architecture supports our growing business needs.

The customer support for BMC AMI Ops has been quite good. My experience was generally positive; the support team has been knowledgeable and responsive in resolving technical issues. Their expertise in the mainframe environment has been particularly valuable during complex troubleshooting efforts.

I have not used a different solution before BMC AMI Ops.

I have seen a return on investment with BMC AMI Ops, saving a significant amount of time because mean time resolution was the main factor.

I did not evaluate any other options before choosing BMC AMI Ops, as this was the first time I worked with it.

My team leverages the observability and intelligent monitoring capabilities of BMC AMI Ops to gain early visibility into potential performance and operational issues. The proactive monitoring and analytics features have helped us identify anomalies sooner, reduce troubleshooting time, and improve overall system availability.

Regarding the governance and security of BMC AMI Ops, these are important strengths of the platform. Through centralized monitoring, role-based access controls, the platform allows the operations team to support complex deployments, and its ability to proactively address issues contributes to the stability and security of critical workloads, making governance and security quite good in BMC AMI Ops.

BMC AMI Ops has been deployed in the public cloud, specifically on Microsoft Azure.

In assessing the unified operations experience provided by BMC AMI Ops in terms of system health visibility across mainframe systems and subsystems, I can deliver centralized visibility into these systems and their subsystems. Instead of relying on separate tools and manual monitoring, I can view performance metrics, resource utilization, and alerts through a centralized platform, improving my ability to quickly identify bottlenecks, threats, or potential incidents, allowing me to address issues proactively. The consolidated operation view has helped.

Regarding integrated monitoring, automation, and open telemetry features in BMC AMI Ops, I have automated everything with the dashboards and leveraged automation capabilities along with open telemetry integration. These improvements have enhanced incident response consistency by providing centralized visibility to the system, enabling faster identification of performance issues, and automating incident management, leading to improved collaboration between the operations, infrastructure, and application teams, which facilitates quicker root cause analysis and enhances service level.

BMC AMI Ops has been helpful in improving mean time to detection, allowing me to resolve issues caused. I achieve mean time to detection through real-time monitoring and intelligent alerting capabilities.

My experience with pricing correlates events effectively. I would rate this product a 10 out of 10 overall.

We use TM-AE for batch job management. Not only does it help enforce some of our standards, but allows us to control where certain jobs run based on licensed software. The service level and automated capacity manager functions allow us to control priorities, support SLA's and manage our 4HRA and reduce MLC for some software bills.

Software access control (SAC) limits systems where some of our products are not licensed. Again, the automated capacity manager helps manage our workload and reduce priorities of discretionary work so the critical path batch jobs are completed within the policy defined at our site.

Job binding services (JBS) is used by SAC, but also helps with our datas sharing environments. Any job can have multiple affinities (like SCHENV on steroids) associated to allow the job to run in a JESMAS and find all of the resources on a particular LPAR to satisfy requirements.

Our scheduler managed batch has standard checking prior to promotion. Enforcement of JCL standards for end user desktop submitted jobs has been very positive. We change processes (especially SYSOUT classes) based on standards to manage output.

There currently is a WUI that allows an operator a single pane of glass to see how TM is performing to meet service policies within a JESMAS environment. This is a new feature and multiple individuals have expressed desire to not only see real time monitoring, but the ability to historically go back at least several hours or possibly an entire day to review history.

There have been little or no issues with the software as delivered.  We maintain the ability to run directly under WLM without TM if needed, but manage ALL batch via TM to make sure we receive maximum value from the tool.

TM can run on a single member or multiple member JESMAS configuration.

All cases are responded to in a timely manner.  The always provide valuable feedback or immediate solutions to an issue.

No, prior to data sharing and other initiatives we exploited a single affinity SCHENV and only scheduled batch processing was managed for standards.

Installed product in couple of hours.  The time has been spent creating and modifying policies along with the job action language coded to exploit functions. 

The vendor team met with us weekly to make sure we had the resources and answers to make our install successful.

Batch smoothing our 4HRA and implementation of group capacity profiles has allowed us to run sub-capacity and lower our MLC.  

The TM team was very helpful getting us started.  They provided a detailed project plan as a guide to successful implementation.  Installing the software is very easy, but the time is spent building you policies for service levels, capacity management and action code language used to tie all of the components together.

No

MainView is used as a central point of view to control and monitor systems on the mainframe like z/OS, CICS, MQSeries IMS, or DB2. 

MainView has enabled me, in the past, to solve production problems faster, or even avoid them preemptively with warnings.

The integration of IMS commands is very useful, because you do not have to switch to another tool to problem solve solutions.

More visualisation and support for mobile devices would be good. An expansion for distributed systems would be great, but probably not workable.

We did use IBM OMEGAMON, but switched to BMC MainView, because it is easier to use, more flexible, and it also came in a software package.

If you already use other products from BMC, you might be able to get a package deal from BMC's sales department.

Yes, we had IBM OMEGAMON, but decided against continuing to use it, because BMC MainView was more valuable.