Modernizing ITOps for AS400 with AIOps

While it is still a debate whether AS400 (a.k.a. iSeries or IBM i) systems are relevant in today’s world, AS/400 systems are powering critical business functions within many organizations. Even Fortune 500 companies powered with AS/400. Managing legacy AS400 systems is also a challenge faced by many of these organizations. These systems also require specialized skills to maintain and be supported. But, with the ever-changing technology landscape and the increasing demand for faster and more efficient IT systems, it is becoming increasingly difficult for enterprises to find and retain this specialized skill and knowledge.

In this blog, we will look at why legacy systems are still important for an organization, the challenges faced in managing legacy systems, and how to address this by modernizing ITOps with AIOps.

Why AS400 systems are still important for an organization?

Legacy AS400 systems are still important for an organization despite the challenges they present. These systems are often integral to the functioning of the organization and cannot be replaced without significant cost and effort. Additionally, these systems often contain a lot of valuable data, business processes, and functionality embedded in the native applications which can be used to gain valuable insights.

Legacy systems are also important for an organization because they often provide stability. AS400 is one of the most stable and secured time-tested systems built by IBM and around 50,000+ companies are still running AS400 for their core business processes.

Challenges in managing legacy AS400 systems

Though AS400 has proven to be a highly reliable system, organizations using AS400 systems experience the following challenges:

Observability

The modern monitoring or observability systems are not designed for AS400. There are challenges in interpreting the status of the AS400 systems aligning with the enterprise-wide or enterprise-standard monitoring systems. As the DNA of these systems differ from the ones built around the modern IT infrastructure, it is difficult to monitor and analyze the data generated by them. This could lead to a lack of visibility in system performance as well as in business transactions.

Automation

AS400 has its own eco-system bundled with its own operating system (Called IBMi earlier OS/400), Application Programming platforms like RPG, ILE, COBOL etc., Database (DB/400) works well in tandem. This architecture of AS400 is quite proprietary for the outside open system (contemporary digital systems) and is often looked at as a black box. Hence, the native business processes & data embedded into its application platform makes it difficult to access/automate by external systems. Thus implementing and executing automation requires AS400 skills and so the automation capabilities are limited within the native team. In many cases, AS400 systems rely on manual processes to manage and maintain them. This is a tedious and time-consuming process and can lead to errors and delays.

SME/Skills dependency

Another important challenge faced in managing legacy AS400 systems is the lack of skilled resources available to work on them. As technology advances, the skills required for maintaining and supporting these systems become obsolete and it becomes harder to find and retain the required knowledge.

How to modernize AS400 IT Ops with AIOps?

To address these challenges, organizations can adopt AIOps for their AS400 systems. AIOps is a solution that uses AI and automation to enhance IT operations. AIOps can provide a comprehensive view of the AS400 systems by collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources. This data is then used to generate insights that can be used to identify potential issues and take corrective actions. AIOps also provide predictive and preventive capabilities which can help proactively identify and address potential issues before they become a problem.

Observability

AIOps can also provide observability into the AS400 systems not limited to infrastructure metrics but also for the application layer. AIOps can understand various patterns emitted by these metrics and their causality relationship. Thus the system can automatically detect anomalies and classify whether a given event is a threat or not. Following are some of the AS400-specific objects AIOps can monitor:

· Subsystems

· Jobs

· Database

· Auxiliary Storage

· Journals

· Application program performance

· User Profile Management

· Security & Access control

Automation

AIOps Automation solutions should provide capability around scheduling and executing tasks like jobs in AS400 systems. It should also provide wrappers or plugins to execute some of the primitive tasks using native CL commands. Thus when the Observability is configured to detect anomalies and threats the automation can be configured for remediation, thus AIOps Automation will provide Auto-healing capabilities. Automating some of the repeated ITOps activities outside the AS400 systems will enable the Help Desk and NOC teams to monitor and resolve issues without AS400 skills. Thus a well-knitted AIOps solution for AS400 should be able to build, manage and execute automation at enterprise scale and standard that also acts as a cross-platform automation solution.

SME Dependency

A well-run ITOps for AS400 relies not only on the skills but also the period of incumbency of the SMEs. The incumbency helps the SMEs to understand various domains within the ITOps to manage and enhance the systems. While incumbency plays a key role in any ITOps, it matters more for legacy AS400 as these systems were built a couple of decades ago and had constant changes. A typical SME should know the following domains in ITOps

· ITSM — Knowledge of Repeated Incidents, Service Requests, Problems, Changes, etc.

· Infrastructure — Knowledge of the AS400 servers, versions, configuration, etc.

· Application — Knowledge of the Libraries, Programs, Database, dependencies, etc.

· Business — Knowledge of various business functions, and processes associated with the programs and libraries

AIOps solution can discover the changes in each of these domains and can build a knowledge graph. A knowledge graph is a tool that captures and stores the knowledge and expertise of SMEs. This knowledge can then be used to understand the context, components, and code to manage and maintain the AS400 systems. This will not only reduces the reliance on SMEs, but retains the corporate memory of the IT systems even after the SMEs leave the organization/business unit.

Conclusion

Managing legacy AS400 systems is a challenge faced by many IT organizations. These systems are integral to the functioning of the organization and require specialized skills to maintain and support them. AIOps can help organizations improve visibility into these systems, reduce the reliance and efforts of SMEs, and retain knowledge. With the right AI tools and processes in place, you can ensure that your AS400 systems can continue to still be a vital part of the modern & smart IT eco-system delivering the desired high value & ROI for your business.