One of the areas where the inaccessibility of data stored in mainframes impacts organizations the most is security. With a sizable portion of the world’s transactional activity still being handled on big iron, it’s imperative to have a view of what’s happening inside, but the lack of interoperability leaves users struggling to take advantage of modern monitoring technologies.

That’s the problem Syncsort Inc. is tackling with the new iteration of its Ironstream data transfer software that is rolling out this morning, which makes it possible for customers to stream security logs from their IBM mainframes into Splunk Inc.’s popular operational analytics platform for processing. And more specifically, correlate them with data from other systems for a more complete understanding of their infrastructure.

The release incorporates the technology that the company gained through its purchase of William Data Systems Ltd. earlier this year to help administrators more easily pinpoints unauthorized access events and other threats from among the turret of logs coming off their mainframes at any given day.  It’s also useful for collecting key metrics about the more everyday aspects of mainframe operations.

That includes statistics such as the number of transactions processed per second – which can go up to 30,000 per second in IBM Corp.’s latest System z/13 – database latency and, of course, system errors. Syncsort says that the latter data can be analyzed in Splunk’s platform not only to find the cause of service disruptions but also prevent upcoming ones. That’s just as important as security given the key role of big iron in the organizations where they’re used.

Image via IBM