Automation at the Heart of Mainframe Efficiency

At PopUp Mainframe, we are convinced about the profound benefits of automation across all environments we use – z/OS and beyond. As we have outlined previously, we have built a range of playbooks using Ansible, to automate various z/OS-related activities. The impact they have made on PopUp Mainframe’s customers, as well as our engineering team, is significant. We have seen our own productivity increase – tasks which used to take weeks now take minutes – and we are moving towards codification of knowledge which reduces subject matter expert dependencies, making us a more efficient, scalable organization.

All PopUp Mainframe customers have access to our evolving suite of Ansible playbooks through a shared GitHub repo. Any of the PopUp z/OS playbooks run in minutes with minimal commands, and with no setup required, as Ansible and all the PopUp Mainframe playbooks come pre-installed with the product.

Good for your Health

We are particularly excited about our latest and greatest playbook: a full health check for z/OS.

This playbook serves as a master orchestrator for z/OS health and readiness checks, ensuring PopUp Mainframe environments (or PopUps) remain healthy – because a correct, fully configured z/OS environment is the beating heart of the PopUp Mainframe promise.

Our full health check playbook is simple to run, and in one click executes our specialized playbooks for various aspects of platform health, such as system integrity, tool verification, readiness assessments, and DASD storage volumes monitoring, running them as a consolidated, comprehensive set of steps. All findings are part of a graphical report, available as PDF – via email and/or via a dashboard.

Note – while this new playbook checks the health of your PopUp, it can also check the health of your physical mainframe. In fact, our entire Ansible playbook is available to use as you see fit, on your PopUp environment, or your physical z/OS one, which can assist in standardization of mainframe environments, including the PopUps. See our guide for more information on how to run the health check playbook against your physical mainframe. 

A detailed assessment 

Let us look at what the health check examines in more detail. The playbook is comprised of three distinct sections and is extensible and fully customizable based on each user’s setup.

1. System Health & Tool Versions

This report looks at the integrity and validity of software running on the PopUp environment, and falls into two broad categories:

• System Integrity Checks – aims to assess the operational validity of required software, including validating APF list entries against actual datasets, flagging BPXPRMxx file systems that fail to mount during initialization, highlighting inconsistencies early to safeguard system integrity and prevent outages. The tool’s parameterized framework enables simple extensibility to include additional z/OS health checks.
• Tool Version Verification – aims to ensure compatibility and compliance by validating versions of critical USS tools running, such as Python, Git, ZOAU, curl, etc. It provides confidence in tool readiness before executing larger workflows.

• System Readiness

This checks the pulse of real-time operational activities, in two primary areas:

• Job Status Verification automates monitoring of critical job statuses, highlights active and inactive jobs, and provides clear visibility for operations teams.
• Volume Status Validation automates verification of volume status (online/offline), identifies missing or unavailable volumes, and helps operations teams quickly detect potential storage issues.

3.   Operational Monitoring: DASD Storage Utilization

• This is a powerful report which generates a snapshot of all storage usage across both SMS and non-SMS volumes, including highlighting areas exceeding customized thresholds. The facility enables proactive capacity management to avoid performance risks.

The playbook execution runs ad hoc or as scheduled, and the report is available via email, as a PDF document, or via a dynamic dashboard.

Why Regular Checkups Matter

We have invested in playbooks and our health checks to ensure there is the level of integrity and confidence in the PopUp Environment that our customers demand. The benefits fall into five broad categories.

1. Operational Assurance

Being confident that tools and systems are operating and configured correctly, offers noteworthy value. By validating system integrity and tool readiness, the playbook ensures that the PopUp environments remain stable and predictable, reducing the risk of unexpected downtime. A parameterized framework enables consistent validation across multiple environments, ensuring uniform operational standards across the team. Finally, automated checks assure that the environment is always in a “ready-to-run” state, enables faster onboarding of new workloads or trainees.

• Risk Mitigation

In the mainframe environment – risk management matters, and it is only right to replicate that ethos in the PopUp environment. Therefore, the playbook’s checks to identify potential failures in mounted file systems, APF list mismatches, or missing DASD volumes, enables users to rectify issues before they escalate into outages. Similarly, proactively highlighting DASD volumes nearing thresholds, prevents potential performance degradation and costly emergency interventions. Finally, compliance safeguards can align with enterprise standards, reducing risks of audit or compatibility issues.

• Automation ROI

It is important to quantify the value of new facilities. Manual effort reduction is a key focus, with the health check preconfigured and ready to run, eliminating repetitive, error-prone manual checks, freeing up skilled staff for other tasks. Similarly, users achieve consistency and repeatability through automated orchestration, ensuring checks run the same way every time, minimizing human error. Finally, the master playbook can extend to multiple z/OS environments (including physical mainframe LPARs) without additional overhead, streamlining management and ensuring consistency of multiple environments, even at scale.

• Visibility and Accountability

The playbook’s unified reporting consolidates diverse health metrics into a single, chart-rich PDF report, making it easy for stakeholders to check system status immediately, while transparent communication through email notifications immediately informs everyone involved, fostering accountability and collaborative problem-solving.

• Strategic Impact

Strategically, the use of automated playbooks supports the need for business continuity. By ensuring readiness and resilience, the playbook supports uninterrupted business operations, while the repeatability and visibility aspects support good governance, strengthening trust with auditors, regulators, and business leaders.

Learn More

Our z/OS Health Check is available alongside the rest of our Ansible playbooks, which are outlined in our product documentation. This provides step-by-step guides to running the playbooks (on the PopUp or the physical mainframe), and more details about the architecture of Ansible and PopUp Mainframe and best practices for getting the most out of your automation. Read more about why automation matters in Z systems.