I think a lot of the stuff has to zero in and make it quicker. I think overall the SYSVIEW product right now has a lot of commands. There's a lot of panels. A lot of information. What we need to do is trim it down for the applications or the avid user. A lot of what they're doing right now, they're bringing in new hires out of college. We don't want to make it more difficult to use. We want to make it easier to use.

I think SYSVIEW has to sit down and look at the tool. That's what we're trying to do with them now, make it a little bit easier to utilize versus trying to remember all these individual commands. It would take something simple; develop a couple more panels, fast path panels.

I guess really just kind of expansion. We specifically use IMS as our database. I think really in the line of IMS and what it can provide needs to be expanded a little bit for some of our purposes.

I would like to see better web browser support that display views, reports, and graphs. Currently, we use the IBM 3270 interface.

It would be nice if we could access the data and display it in a more “modern” way. I think there is some web client offered via the Vantage product. It is unclear to me what possibilities this client offers, as I do not have Vantage installed.

I would like to have a web client which supports all SYSVIEW functions and graphical dashboards. Perhaps this would enable us to export the data directly into an Excel format. After all, graphical displays on an IBM 3270 are not that great.

We would like to see better graphics in the next version, so that even less experienced individuals can find problems without much effort. This can help one to see the bigger picture and easily figure out what's going on.

It can help to display the data better and you would not need lots of knowledge to see what is going on within the mainframe.

The things that I would think about would be in relation to JES3. However, I don't know if they'll be able to do much more with that because I don't know how much longer IBM is going to be supporting JES3. So I can understand not doing additional development. But if I were to suggest something it would be the JES3 initiators, the JES3 queues.

It confuses a lot of people because there are so many features, but when they see me bouncing around they say, "I didn't know it did that, I didn't know it did that." It takes a long time to find all the different features that are available. 

They are already working on improvements. One of them is the operational intelligence, which is a lot of stuff I am trying to learn and work on right now, which SYSVIEW reports to that all the system things which are going on. 

The documentation. I noticed with the last release that all of the manuals were bundled into one. It used to have a separate installation guide, user guide, etc.

I think some of the messaging from SYSVIEW could be improved. For example, how do you know if there’s a real issue that needs to be addressed? Is there something that identifies a problem in your configuration? Is there something for which you may need pro services?

While we do have consoles, what we attempt to do is to get those alerts integrated or reported into our monitors, and it wasn’t a very clean integration. We tried things like syslogging, but this required a lot of massaging and it's still not perfect.

As with every piece of software, there’s always room for improvement. But for our shop, the most important features of the product have been working perfectly for a very long time.

As for the JES2 component of the product, CA might improve the overall performance when accessing the JES2 spool. I do know that CA is using system interfaces from IBM to get the JES2 data, and I suspect that the actual room for improvement is in that interface. Maybe CA cannot do very much to improve performance, but it would be great to get better performance in this area.

There are some parity features, things you can do in a JES2 or JES3 shop, which you can't with CA SYSVIEW. For example, purge output from the spool. So better parity between JES would be useful.

The product itself seems very good. The documentation, like installation guides and stuff, put it all in one place.

Having spoken with the product owner, we discussed the interests of being able to identify the unit of work ID giving us the ability to correlate transactions that cross technologies. For example, if a unit of work ID is associated with a CICS, a DB2, and a MQ transaction, and having that capability correlate to those different technologies via one business application transaction which would be beneficial.

The creation of dashboards could be made much easier, such as the way it is done in BMCs MainView for example. Currently, you need to do some programming to create dashboards, which is time consuming and error prone. A dashboard you can create in seconds in MainView takes much, much, more time to create in SYSVIEW.

Perhaps the IMS monitoring part could be improved (at least according IMS specialists).

For one particular environment, the capturing, recording and presentation of IBM CPUMF data would be useful.

IBM Mainframes now produce data on processor cache performance. There is a mechanism for capturing that data within z/OS. It is useful for comparing machines and the impact of the number of partitions and logical to physical processors ratios.

We are using Datacom as the database system, so maybe a little bit more integration with that.

It can also be a little bit more better, but it is very good. I do not any products that can do all the things that it is doing.

From the demo I attended it looks like all the features I would want are coming.

Better historical reporting.

I think they could improve the frontend action stage and alert thresholds, for a better and more-usable job action or REXX launch.

Better management of the relationship between a threshold and the start of the response action, be it a job or a REXX, similar to the operation of OPS/MVS (in centers where there is not a SYSVIEW/OPS/MVS pair).

I would expect this product to be integrated with mainframe Linux system monitoring which is more popular in our mainframe solutions.

Perhaps the CPU usage: When SYSVIEW is accessed via VTAM, the CPU usage is higher than compared to when its accessed via TSO using exactly the same commands, e.g., Display active tasks.

I think we are going to 12.2 really soon. I'm looking forward to being able to use more than one job name to grab more information at one time.

The screen layout could be updated and be more modern looking.

The product has a 1980’s interface and it seems no investment whatsoever has been made in this respect.

It’s a green texted screen, the navigation is poor because you can’t use the cursor for selection.

Exiting the product does not allow for the standard ‘=x’ instruction. You have to Pf3 all the way out.

Great product...terrible looking interface

It's a complex solution, but we haven’t run into issues yet. I have heard of issues from others, but we haven’t seen them. Then again, we are not yet using cross-instance job dependencies in Workload Automation, so we're not sure whether there may be an issue there.

Any functionality that I thought it could improve on is in the most recent release. It is a complex system, though, as every view has a different setting panel. This can be overwhelming for someone coming in, but once you get a grasp of it, it gets easier.

It needs better documentation explaining the different possibilities of what you can do with the product.