What was mentioned at a recent CA conference was NetMaster's getting tied in with the whole new infrastructure with the analytics. That would be great to get that over to z/Linux, to see if there are tools that could do the understanding of how the network is working, and if it could be shifted off. For instance, I'd like to be able to see week-in, week-out what's happening with SFTP traffic. There are a few metrics that could be followed, and you could actually see in real time, with some threshold monitoring, with the new product feature that they had, with the metrics that were being put into the analytical phase. A few months ago a java app making web services calls to the mainframe didn't "work". App developer blamed the majnframe. I traced the connection (port & source ip) in netmaster. Saw a SYN, SYN, ACK then nothing else. I told him he needed a network person to fix the problem. He wouldn't believe it. After telling him there was nothing more I could do, he got the network guru. Long story short - the skinny protocol (for voice) was turned on several routers. It used the same port as the listener on z for web services. The router let through the startup of the connection but skinny then dropped the data packets. This would have been hard to troubleshoot without being able to see the trace and proving beyond doubt it was not a problem on z. Seeing the handshake during ssl connections was also used to verify proper use of algorithms with remote vendor clients.
