As with all other mission-critical infrastructure, mainframe computers require organizations to monitor continuously for issues that might hinder their ability to function. But the task is made difficult by the fact that there isn’t an effective native mechanism for streaming operational logs from big iron deployments to external monitoring tools. Syncsort Inc. is working to bridge that gap.

The company today launched a new iteration of its Ironstream data transfer engine that provides the ability to pipe mainframe performance information to Splunk IT Service Intelligence in real-time. The latter application is a paid extension for Splunk Inc.’s popular log processing platform that uses machine learning algorithms to find problem indicators. Administrators can customize it to look for specific issues, configure alerts to notify them when a positive hit is found and perform troubleshooting using the built-in analytics functionality.

According to Splunk, the latter capability makes it possible to identify the source of an outage or performance hiccup much more quickly than the traditional approach of manually digging through logs. That means the amount of time it takes to resolve technical issues is reduced and the end-users who rely on a mainframe can resume their work faster. Since companies typically use big iron to run their most sensitive workloads, particularly financial management software, this speed-up has the potential to make a significant impact on operations.

The new integration with ITSI expands upon Syncsort’s already extensive support for Splunk. Last month, for instance, the company enhanced the data migration capabilities of its DMX-H ETL software to let customers export their mainframe records in the widely used .csv format. The addition is designed to make it easier for administrators to feed the information into Splunk and other third-party analytics platforms for processing.

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