mainframe chatbots

IBM Z ChatOps, which provides an intelligent chatbot that can surface information from your IBM Z environment in an enterprise chat platform, now also supports Microsoft® Teams™ as target chat platform. With this enhanced support, IBM Z ChatOps can now be used within the following chat platforms:

  • Microsoft® Teams™
  • Slack®
  • Mattermost®

IBM Z ChatOps is included in the following offerings:

  • IBM Z Service Management Suite 
  • IBM Z Service Automation Suite
  • IBM Z Monitoring Suite
  • IBM Z System Automation

Why ChatOps?

ChatOps is a collaboration model that connects people, processes, tools, and automation in a seamless and transparent way through a chat platform and extensive use of specialized chatbots.

IBM Z ChatOps provides a chatbot that gives users access to information and tasks from Z systems management tools such as IBM Z System Automation, IBM Z NetView, and IBM OMEGAMON within popular collaboration platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Mattermost.

IBM Z ChatOps can be used to notify the operations team in the chat tool about IBM Z events, including recommendations powered by machine learning. This fosters collaboration during incident management and helps to isolate and resolve problems quickly.

IBM Z ChatOps integrates with IBM Service Management Unite for a broad access to IBM Z operations data and allows chat users to drill-down to web-based dashboards with more information to help resolve problems fast.

With this, IBM provides unique collaborative incident remediation capabilities with benefits such as the following:

  • Improved collaboration within and across teams
  • Faster incident identification and resolution
  • Faster onboarding of next generation of Z Operators
  • Easy sharing of Z data
  • Integration with other DevOps tooling
Z ChatOps in MS Teams

Figure: Z Chatbot named “bnz” is used to look at LPARs monitored by OMEGAMON for z/OS. All this from a team channel in Microsoft Teams. 

For a sample use case describing how Z ChatOps can be used to improve the collaborative resolution of issues in an IBM Z environment, I recommend to have a look at the following blog post: IBM Z ChatOps facilitates teamwork and enhances collaboration technology and process

How do I get Z ChatOps?

Refer to the following customer access portal support information for the latest news on IBM Z ChatOps and IBM Service Management Unite, which is the web-based systems management console which is leveraged by Z ChatOps: Customer Access Portal Tech Note

The latest IBM Z ChatOps software downloads are available on the following url: 
https://ibm.biz/zchatops-download

To access the download link you will need your IBM customer ID and password as well as the access key. You can identify your access key as follows:

View the PDF which is supplied with the product materials on a CD titled “Memo – Accessing IBM Z ChatOps on IWM” (form number LI13-5232-00) or send an email to smusup@de.ibm.com.

Please include your IBM customer and contact info when emailing IBM.

More information

Originally published on the IBM Z Community Blog

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