Company Overview

Banco do Brasil, with over 87,000 employees, 5,000 branches, and 81 million customers, is one of the largest banks in the world, processing over 15 billion transactions per day. Headquartered in Brasilia, Brazil, Banco do Brasil provides commercial and government services as well as a large variety of consumer services, including bill payment services, ATM loans, and checking, savings, and investment accounts.  

> 87,000 employees

> 5,000 branches

> 81 millions of customers

> 15 billion transaction per day

The Challenge 

As the second largest financial services company in Latin America, Banco do Brasil has one of the largest and most complex IT infrastructure environments in the world. As a publicly owned bank with billions of daily transactions and millions of customers, there is no margin for system downtime or application disruptions. 

Previous solutions to manage performance and conduct capacity planning were cumbersome, slow, required manual coding, and were not interactive or easy to train new hires on. They needed a solution that would allow them to keep up with modern demands, rising transactions, and expanding data volumes. 

The Solution 

For more than a decade, Banco do Brasil has used IntelliMagic Vision to monitor and manage the performance and availability of their entire end-to-end z/OS and SAN infrastructure environments. 

“We use IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS on a daily basis to investigate bottlenecks and analyze performance problems. We also use IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS to improve our system and storage designs and better understand our environment. IntelliMagic Vision has been extremely helpful in post-mortem analysis.”  

– Fabio Pereira, Banco do Brasil, Storage Manager 

Banco do Brasil uses IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS Systems, CICS, Db2, Disk & Replication, Virtual Tape, as well as SAN Storage, Fabric, and VMware.  

IntelliMagic Vision also met the organization’s core requirements with its: 

• Built-in health insights to proactively avoid disruptions 
• Extensive drill down capabilities 
• Code free report builder 
• Capacity Planning 
• Intuitive graphical user interface 

Business Results 

IntelliMagic Vision enabled Banco do Brasil to streamline its performance management and capacity planning and enhance its overall business operations.  

With IntelliMagic Vision, Banco do Brasil was able to: 

• Proactively highlight and prevent potential availability issues 
• Eliminate redundant tooling and use a single interface across infrastructure areas 
• Reduce mean-time-to-resolution for problems 
• Enhance communication and cooperation amongst different teams 

To learn more about how Banco do Brasil uses IntelliMagic Vision, view the full review on TrustRadius. 

Get Notified of Upcoming Webinars

In a world where applications are at the forefront, it can be difficult to know which applications are critical to your business and how to protect them. The z/OS system manages a large number of applications, some of which are vital to the success of your business.

Performance analysts need to understand both the business and operational aspects of all applications to ensure z/OS manages them optimally. A key to a performance analyst’s effectiveness is to be able to translate what the business requires of the z/OS system and what the performance data is telling those in charge of the business.

In this webinar, we explore practical steps for identifying and prioritizing your business-critical applications, and how to optimize and report on their performance. We cover key considerations, such as CPU and Disk performance, defining service classes, and spotting relevant changes in the midst of overwhelming data.

You learn:

• How to identify and prioritize your “most loved” business-critical applications
• How to examine all aspects affecting the applications, including CICS, Db2, and Systems components
• Techniques for ensuring service classes are defined correctly
• Ways to spot and identify relevant changes through data analysis
• Strategies for protecting and reporting on performance
• Reporting the health of applications to those not close to the operation of z/OS

Watch this informative and engaging webinar to learn how to cut through the noise and ensure your mission-critical applications are functioning optimally on z/OS.

When troubleshooting remote cluster issues or trying to determine if your remote clusters are receiving replication, a few key reports will provide most of the insights necessary. These reports include:

• Replication Backlog
• Logical Volumes for Copy
• Average Deferred Queue Age
• Average Immediate Queue Age
• Inbound Total Copy Data Rate
• Average CPU / Disk Utilization
• VTS Cache Utilization
• Compressed Data on Logical or Physical Volumes
• Data Flows in and out of Cache

In this video, we walk through these reports and provide some insight into what to look for when trying to determine if your remote clusters are receiving replication.

Video Transcript

When trying to determine if your remote clusters are receiving replication, there are really just a handful of key reports you should check.

You likely aren’t going to need to check these reports all that often, but it is still important to make sure you’re keeping an eye on them to ensure remote VTS(s) are operating properly and receiving replication data in a timely manner. Deferred copy throttle will delay replication to remote clusters but should only be active during periods of high host activity.

For this video I used IntelliMagic Vision to create a custom dashboard that has these key reports.

The first key report is actually a group of minicharts covering Replication data for Receiving Clusters. I can drill into any of these reports to explore them further, but having them all in this view makes it easy to assess the replication health at a glance.

If deferred copy throttle is not the cause, then if there is Replication Backlog and the data rate is zero or lower than normal, then network links may need to be reviewed. If data rate is 0, the cluster may be unable to receive data, either because of a full cache utilization situation or a possible hardware issue.

IntelliMagic Vision makes it easy to spot warnings or exceptions with it’s built-in ratings that you can see by the colors around the charts.

Another indication of a replication problem is when either Average CPU or Disk Utilization is near 0 and stays there while Replication Backlog is increasing. It is normal for CPU and Disk activity to be low during a period of no tape activity or if deferred copy throttle is slowing replication, but if the cluster utilization stays near 0 when data is awaiting replication to this cluster, then it should be investigated.

VTS Cache Utilization can be an indication as to why the cluster in a remote location is unable to receive data. Obviously if the utilization reaches 100%, there is no space for data. If the cluster has back-end tape, the library, drives, and media should be investigated to ensure they are operational. If there is no back-end tape, then the investigation moves on to why too much data has been retained in the cluster.

This report is a complete view of data movement within a cluster. If a tape attached cluster is not writing to the tape pool, then the back-end tape system can be investigated.
For host attached clusters, Virtual Device Write Throughput shows data actively being written to the cluster. Outbound copy data rate shows data being replicated to other clusters in the grid. Inbound copy data rate shows data being replicated to this cluster. Write Rate to Pool shows data that is being pre-migrated. Various configuration parameters can influence data movement within the grid, but for a healthy grid, data should be flowing as your configuration allows.

The dashboard helps keep all of these reports in a single location, and any user can share the dashboard with their coworkers. If there were any issues, we could simply click on any of the reports and drill down into the root cause.

And there you go. Keep an eye on these reports to determine if your remote clusters are receiving replication or not. I hope this video helped.

Check us out at intellimagic.com to learn more about z/OS performance and IntelliMagic Vision.

Company Overview 

Watson & Walker is a vendor-independent mainframe consultancy firm that provides practical mainframe performance and measurement advice. Founded by Cheryl Watson and Tom Walker in 1991, the Watson & Walker team is one of the best-known and respected z/OS performance and measurement advisory groups in the world. Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter, named after the co-founder and mainframe legend, is the most comprehensive body of practical and impartial z/OS tuning and measurement advice ever published. 

The Challenge 

As the very nature of their business, Watson & Walker provides consulting services for clients spanning the globe, but their existing method of SMF performance analysis required manual coding, wasn’t dynamic or interactive, and couldn’t keep up with the pace of the demands from their work.  

Watson & Walker needed a way to quickly navigate and analyze the mainframe environment in order find performance optimization and cost reducing opportunities for their clients. 

Watson & Walker embarked on a research project to find the perfect SMF performance analysis tool available on the market. To meet Watson & Walker’s strict criteria, their chosen solution needed to: 

• Be powerful, robust, and interactive 
• Save time conducting analysis 
• Offer great customer support 
• Be up to date on the latest mainframe technology and metrics 

The Solution 

After analyzing the solutions on the market and consulting with customers from each of the solutions, Watson & Walker decided upon IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS. Since 2016, Watson & Walker has used IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS with their consulting efforts when helping customers and generating reports. 

“At the conclusion of our research, we found that IntelliMagic Vision, without a doubt, is heads and shoulders above anything else. We wouldn’t go anywhere without IntelliMagic Vision; it is powerful, easy to use, and is now a vital part of our toolkit when creating presentations, classes, Tuning Letters, or customer reports.” 

– Cheryl Watson, CEO and Founder, Watson & Walker 

Business Results 

The partnership between Watson & Walker and IntelliMagic allows mainframe customers to benefit from IntelliMagic Vision’s built-in intelligence and Watson & Walker’s unrivaled services. 

Using IntelliMagic Vision, Watson and Walker was able to: 

• save significant time by applying their experience to the analysis, not in trying to extract and organize the information out of SMF 
• more quickly and accurately spot tuning opportunities for cost reduction and performance optimization 
• take advantage of the built-in health insights to identify warnings and issues prior to their deep-dive analysis 

“What I liked most about IntelliMagic Vision was its automatic identifying of the key performance indicators, the KPIs, and the ability to drill down. The whole idea of looking at this boundless information from SMF, is that you don’t want to spend time looking at all that information. All you want to know is, is everything okay or is something wrong? So the ability to drill down, look at only one of the items instead of multiple is pretty powerful and takes no programming.”