Technology performance company Compuware Corporation has made enhancements to Abend-AID, its mainframe application failure resolution solution. The latest improvements make Abend-AID easier to use and includes analytics to help more rapidly resolve application failures.
The new release is targeted at IT staff members unfamiliar with mainframe applications or entry-level developers who are more familiar with distributed, Java applications, Stuart Feravich, director of mainframe product management at Compuware, told 5 Minute Briefing in an interview. Along with staff inexperience with mainframes, Feravich also is seeing less tolerance for any downtime, since many of these applications are now “very much part of the customer facing application or infrastructure in companies.”
In the past these applications ran in an operation environment and only a handful of users saw them, he says. Now, many mainframe applications support critical activities such as web and mobile banking and e-commerce, and even a short-term outage may have dire consequences mainframe. “Time is critical when an app goes down or a failure occurs,” Feravich says.
Citing a recent Compuware survey, Feravich says that a tech performance failure can cost an organization, on average, approximately $10 million in short-term costs business-wide, from operations and sales and marketing, to finance and distribution/supply chain. This figure is before longer-term consequences including loss of market share, erosion of brand equity and reputation damage, are accounted for. Abend-AID, Compuware contends, would be able to prevent a mainframe application outage by leading developers directly to the precise information they need to resolve application faults before they result in downtime.
Abend-AID’s tighter integration of fault identification with advanced Fault Analytics benefits multiple roles in the mainframe environment, Compuware states. Managers will see the value of Abend-AID’s increased visibility into faults, including trend analysis, enabling them to prioritize work assignments based on the frequency and severity of the issues. Developers can leverage Abend-AID’s new usability improvements that significantly shorten root cause analysis time, reducing application downtime and accelerating time to market for new functionality. The product has also added information to assist programmers to better understand the code in question, and customization capabilities to allow programmers to tailor the product to best suit their needs. Abend-AID also provides the ability to keep long-term historical information on abend (abnormal end) activity, allowing managers to determine at a glance if quality is degrading, and programmers to see if common problems are causing recurring abends.
In addition, the new release supports COBOL 5.1 which was released on June 21, says Feravich. “We had day one support for that.” The Fault Analytics is also zAAP-eligible to help keep the CPU footprint of Abend-AID to a minimum.
For more information, visit Compuware.