Blending mainframe technology with Apple, Blackberry, and Android – makes you think!

I don’t know whether you’re going to be at the SHARE conference in Anaheim (California) from 27 February to 4 March, but one of the interesting things to see is the William Data Systems stand (booth 211).

They are showing how their ZEN z/OS network management suite of product integrates with popular smart phone technology – Apple, Blackberry, and Android. What you’ll see is ZEN monitoring z/OS networks and then reporting the results to a mobile device. The user can then evaluate what’s happening on the mainframe and take appropriate action immediately. As a consequence, z/OS support staff can get on with their lives and be out and about, but still be able to monitor their mainframes and react to alerts.

The company say that this mobile technology extends ZEN’s whistle-blower ability to monitor SyslogD, filter the results by many criteria, launch automation commands or REXX procedures, and transmit the important alerts to mobile devices, all in real-time. I think this sounds pretty impressive and I was lucky enough to have a demonstration of the technology a few ago.

Originally the technology was restricted to iPhone and iPad users, but now it’s extended to the other ‘smart’ technologies that organizations use.

Their press release mentions SyslogD. In fact, this is probably the most useful resource that many IT departments ignore or only refer to long after they should. Having this kind of information on your phone seems almost futuristic.

Anyway, if you are at Anaheim, take a look.

On a completely different topic… I was pleased to receive the following e-mail during the week:

“On behalf of IBM, it is with great pleasure to recognize you as a 2011 IBM Information Champion. We would like to thank you for your leadership and contributions to the Data Management community. You continue to be among a very small group to be chosen for this recognition. Congratulations.”

This makes three years in a row.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about the Information Champion programme here (www-01.ibm.com/software/data/champion/)

Who cares about SyslogD on a mainframe?

Unix System Services (USS) on a mainframe basically allows Unix applications to run and communicate. Running under USS is Syslog Daemon or SyslogD. This is an important system component because it’s part of z/OS’s Intrusion Detection and prevention Services (IDS). SyslogD receives detailed event messages, such as security violations, as well as messages from many other communications services such as FTP and AT-TLS, plus messages from routers, switches, and other network-based devices.

So, in the event of a hacker trying to log-on to your mainframe, how would you know? And when would you know? Surprisingly, many sites appear to ignore the information written to SyslogD completely! While other sites look at what has happened, perhaps a minute ago, perhaps an hour ago, perhaps yesterday!

What you probably need is some way to be alerted about what’s happening now. And, as this is 2010, you probably want the alert to come through to your mobile phone. And you then want to be able to jump on any browser, see where the trouble lies, and fix it. What are the chances of there being software that does that?

Well, let me confirm that it does exist and I’ve seen it.
WDS (www.willdata.com) has rather nice mainframe-based HTTP server software that front-ends their mainframe monitoring products. It’s called ZEN and it allows users of their products to access information through a browser – almost any browser. Their products are called ZEN EE Security, ZEN IP Monitor, or similar, but are perhaps better known by their old names of Ferret, Implex, etc. The products can monitor APPN, EE, FTP, IP, SNA, OSA, and USS. Each of these programs effectively has a DLL that allows them to plug in to the HTTP server. This can then respond to messages by ignoring them, sending a command, running a REXX EXEC, or sending an e-mail. It’s completely automated and configurable to what the users want. ZEN can also run utilities such as PING, TRACEROUTE, and NSLOOKUP commands. And, in addition to input from WDS’s programs and SyslogD, it also receives network messages and ECMS console contents.

For the end user, working from a browser, windows can be opened and closed, resized, refreshed, whatever. The windows can show number data and regularly-updated graphical displays. In fact, a variety of different graphs can be monitored in different windows at the same time, allowing end-users to monitor what’s going on in real-time. The drawing of the graphs is all handled in JavaScript (JSON, in fact), and AJAX is used so only the parts of the display that change are sent from the server to the browser, which speeds up communication considerably. It’s possible to drill-down through the alert information on screen, for example, to one particular type of alert, on a particular day, during a particular time range.

Now, the type of display I want on, say, a 17 inch laptop screen is not the same as on a 3 inch smart phone screen. You might think this would be a bit of a fly in the ointment. The truth is that WDS has a solution to even this problem.

Looking to the future, what else could we ask them to do with their excellent end-user interface? Might it not make sense to automate the monitoring of other things and use the browser-based interface to see what’s going on? Is there a way this could be done for, say, other Linux boxes? We’ll have to wait and see.

But whatever software monitor you choose, and however you choose to display it, it makes sense to ensure that SyslogD is not being ignored.