Transcript
The IBMI does a very good job at telling us when something needs attention. The challenge is making sure the right person sees the message, understands the priority, and responds consistently. That is where Robot Console fits in. Robot Console helps turn the messages into controlled, repeatable action and cuts out the noise. Before we go any farther, let me just do a quick introduction on myself. My name is Greg Schmidt. I'm a principal solution engineer here at Fortra. 27 plus years of experience within the IBMI and business process and operational background. I've spent my years working with IBMI customers in areas like business intelligence, document and workflow automation, cybersecurity, and also systems management and automation. A little housekeeping before I move any farther. Feel free to enter any questions into the chat as we go and I'll do my best to address them during the webinar or towards the end of the webinar if time allows. If I do not respond during the webinar or after, I will do it directly after the webinar is completed. Also, today's session is being recorded. You'll be able to share this with any others in your organizations afterward that might be interested or rewatch any part that you might have missed. When we talk about IBMI operations, it's easy to focus on uptime and application availability. But one of the most important parts of resilience is message management. The IBMI is very good at telling us when something needs attention. The risk is whether the message is noticed, understood, escalated, or handled in the right amount of time. For executives out there, this is not just a technical detail. It connects directly to continuity, audit readiness, and the ability to run the environment without relying on a few people carrying all the knowledge in their heads. In many shops, the problem isn't that the system is silent. The problem is totally the opposite. There can be a lot of message activity out there and not all messages have really the same urgency. Some are informational. Some require a routine response. Some need immediate escalation. It depends on who is watching the queue. You get inconsistent outcomes. One operator knows exactly what to do. Another escalates everything. Another may miss something because it looks routine. That is where operational risk starts to show up. Robot Counsel gives organizations a more structured way to manage IBMI messages. Instead of relying only on someone watching a message queue, you can define what matters, how it should be handled, and who should be notified. That might mean filtering out routine activities, highlighting critical messages, sending alerts to the right groups, and doing escalation, or automating a standard reply when the response is already known and approved. The goal is not to remove operational expertise. The goal is to capture the expertise and make it repeatable in the process. The business value of Robot Counsel comes from response consistency. Think about a batch process waiting on an inquiry message, a subsystem issue, or a security related event that should not sit unnoticed. In a manual process, the outcome depends heavily on who sees the message and how quickly they react. With Robot Counsel, critical messages can be escalated, known responses can be automated, and events can be handled consistently whether they happen during business hours or at 2am in the morning. For leadership, this is about lowering operational risk and improving consistency. The best place to start is not by trying to automate everything. Start with the messages that matter most. Which messages create business impact if they are missed? Which ones require after hours escalation? Which inquiry messages have standard replies? Which events depend on one or two experienced people knowing what to do? That gives you a practical roadmap. From there, Robot Counsel can help improve visibility, automate known responses, and make IBMI message management more consistent and less risky for the business. Alright, now let's get into a live demonstration. I'm going to do a quick overview of the Robot Counsel interface and sort of show you some of that. And if you feel after the webinar you want to be able to get into more detail around your business process and how you can use it internally, feel free to reach out to us at any time. Alright, on to the live demo. Today I'm going to be covering the Robot Counsel Explorer and sort of walk you through those different options inside of here at a high level. So today I'm logged into one of my systems already. You'll see that I'm logged into Vaughan, but you can have multiple systems set up inside of here. If you are monitoring multiple systems, we can actually set up multiple systems to have capability through our robot network option to be able to monitor through one location. So it's also a centralized access to those message queues, so you don't have to log into each of them. So there's some different configuration capabilities and solutions that we have to be able to streamline some of those different options inside of there. But what a message center is, message centers give you the capability to have messages put into those queues, right? So we'll get into the QsysOper one here in just a second. But from the standpoint, you might have something that's in QsysOper that needs to be escalated over a certain amount of time. So again, being able to set up the consistency on how things are processed. And hey, maybe something happens overnight and an email gets sent out, but then you want to be able to notify somebody or a group. And then if that group person or group does not answer within a certain amount of time, we can then push that up into a different location. And one of those, I'll say a lot of organizations do, they have like a network operation center that they might push those messages up to or a different group that they might want to push those to. So there's different things that we can do there. But each of these are configurable in the background that you can set up those user notifications or group notifications using our robot alert features. So that's an option that you get that you can actually set up with robot alert to be able to do that process. The network host option or the robot network option, you can see that that's an option inside of here too. Like I said, that's for if you are monitoring multiple systems, you want to be able to centralize those into one location. You can set up devices, you can set up time delays inside of there to say, hey, before sending that message out, wait X amount of time first before doing that process. So you can actually set those up in there. And this is the message redirect option. So think of this as an escalation point inside here. So we can actually escalate things after a certain amount of time and redirect them to a different message center that might have those notifications on. Now, from a message center standpoint, you can right click and display here if you want to display it, or you can go up to top here and you can actually select it. And this is the, so you can have this open all day long, right? From the standpoint and you can say, hey, messages from today, only messages from waiting response. You can set up your own filters in here too. So you can actually have your own filter on what you want to filter off of. You'll see here that that just came up with a little notification down there. So I have a message waiting inside of there for me that I was notified on via email. So, so you can see that it can be proactive at that point and then sort of get you that information to your screen. Now, inside of here from the standpoint, this is one that this requires a response. So you might have certain times and escalation set up on it so I can actually confirm that. And then you'll see that my other one popped up in here as well. So you can actually set those notifications up inside of there to be notified and clean out the queue. Now, from this standpoint, as we get those notifications are going to come up in the bottom there, there is also inside the system tray. There is a notifier inside of there. So that's my email popping up inside of there. But we do have a notifier in the system tray as well. That will notify you down below. So you don't have to have the screen open all the time, but you can have that notifier open on the bottom to be able to see that. Now, inside of here as well, we have all different kinds of things from a high level. We have obviously monitored objects, right? Message queue monitors. So we can monitor different message queues. A lot of times, I mean, all the times you're monitoring Qsys Opera, right? From that standpoint, but there might be other message queues that you want to be able to look at. A lot of times when people are using our power tech antivirus, they want to look at like the antivirus message queue to trap messages from there. We also have resource monitors. Think of resource monitors as up or down options. So a subsystem up subsystem down kind of a thing, right? So you can actually look at that information. Like I have my I have these active here to make sure that things are active, right? So like I want to make sure my FTP service is up, right? If the expected state is deactivated or not active, right? It's going to alert me. I can have different subsystems and stuff like that up or down, active or not active. What's the expected status? Print queues, things like that. Output queue depth gets, I might have say, hey, once it gets past, you know, 5000 spool files in a queue, I want to know, right? Or 100 or whatever that number is, right? You can set those up. Services go down. You can see that information there so that you can actually monitor some of those system resources as well. Up or down kind of things to be notified along with that process. Now, one of the things that I want to show here is message sets. Message sets are really cool because this gives us the capability. Message sets give us the capability to trap messages and then maybe set up some automation inside of those messages as we trap them or just notify someone if something happens. So a message set inside of here. So say that it's like a system failure or something happens, like we'll say a bad sign in attempt or something like that in this case, right? Or, you know, hardware failure or something like that. We can set up those different message sets inside of here and trap those messages during the process. Now, inside of here, you'll see that we can do like a serious storage condition, right? So this might be one that we want to trap and do that process on. Now, you can do different things inside of here, like suppress and, you know, do different, I'll call it functions inside of here, but I'll call it inside of here. It's called unconditional instructions, right? It's where I can actually say, hey, I want a response required for this one, or I want to suppress these messages or I want an automatic message because I know what the message is supposed to be and it's an approved message. So I'm going to set those up so you can set up those different options inside of here. And the nice thing is you can also test these messages. You don't have to wait for them to become a problem, but you can send test messages to see what they look like. So I can say, hey, I want to send a test message inside of here, and I'm going to send it to my QsysOper queue. So it actually goes into that QsysOper. And then I can go into my QsysOper queue and actually go in there and say, oh, yep, there's the storage one messages waiting for a response. And you can see that from that standpoint. So this is one that causes attention inside the system. Now, you'll see that I actually customize that message as well. So you can customize the messages inside of here and you can do things inside of here from what I'll call opal standpoint. It's our operator language. Think of it as an if structure kind of stuff, but opal language allows you to do different things inside of there to be able to set up some automation to basically say, hey, if this error does run into, if we do run into a message and trap this message and there's something going on, we might want to try some actions first before alerting someone. So we can run a program, we can start a subsystem, stop a subsystem and go through that process there as well. So this is a very powerful piece there for setting up some of those back end automations. We do have some setup and configuration in here, and we also do have reports. So you can see what messages and what responses you're getting on certain things. And then the beautiful thing inside of here that I want to the last thing I want to show is the capability around displaying the details of the message. So you can actually see the history of all this information, but also see what was responded to and how it was responded to the last time or in previous times as well. And how long it took to respond. So very, very powerful piece there. So you can actually start to set up some of those different automations and stuff like that and bring consistency to your message management process. That concludes the demo portion. There's a lot more to show inside of here. So if you have any questions or you want to see a more in depth demo, like I said earlier, feel free to reach out to us. We can set that up for you and walk you through those different options inside of the robot console interface. Thank you. All right. Thanks, everyone, for attending the webinar here today. For any questions that are out there, I will respond directly to them afterwards after the webinar here. But thank you for joining today. And like I said earlier, if you have any questions about robot console or any of the other robot solutions, feel free to reach out to us for a more in depth demonstration of the product around this. And we can answer your business requirements and needs. Feel free to reach out to your power solutions team here. I want to thank everyone again and have a great rest of your day and a great rest of your week. Thanks.
