Seeing the core clearly: Dynatrace mainframe monitoring meets IBM z17

Enterprise computing just got a major upgrade. With the launch of IBM z17™, organizations running mission-critical workloads now have access to a platform purpose-built for AI at scale, end-to-end automation, and advanced security capabilities. For the enterprises that run the world’s most important transactions in banking, insurance, retail, and government, this is a significant step forward.

A more powerful platform also means more complexity to manage. More AI workloads in production, more transactions per second, and more pressure on the teams responsible for keeping it all running.

That’s where Dynatrace comes in. As a trusted IBM partner, Dynatrace brings AI-powered, full-stack observability to the mainframe, giving teams the visibility and intelligence they need to operate IBM z17 environments with confidence.

IBM z17™: A new era for enterprise AI and automation

IBM z17 is designed for the next era of enterprise computing, bringing AI, automation, and security closer to the mission-critical transactions that run the business.

With the IBM Telum II™ processor and IBM Spyre™ Accelerator, organizations can run AI inferencing directly within transaction flows, helping support real-time decisions without moving data off-platform.

But as AI-powered workloads become more embedded in core systems, teams need more than infrastructure performance. They need real-time visibility into how those workloads behave across the full hybrid environment.

The observability challenge on the mainframe

As organizations accelerate AI adoption and automation on IBM z17, how do teams know it’s all working?

Mission-critical mainframe workloads have always been difficult to observe. Legacy monitoring tools were built for a different era, designed for periodic sampling rather than real-time intelligence. They tell you something went wrong after the fact, not why, and not how to fix it.

Bringing AI inference into live transaction flows raises the stakes. Unexpected model behavior, workload spikes, or latency issues can affect critical services, so teams need to understand what is happening and respond in seconds, not hours.

Dynatrace mainframe monitoring is built specifically to close that gap.

Dynatrace mainframe monitoring: Full-stack visibility for the core

Dynatrace mainframe monitoring gives enterprises deep, real-time visibility into their IBM Z environments, unified with the rest of their technology stack in a single platform, helping to reduce silos, minimize manual correlation, and support more informed decision making.

Here is what that means in practice:

• Real-time performance monitoring. Dynatrace continuously monitors CPU utilization, response times, transaction throughput, and resource consumption on IBM Z, surfacing anomalies when they occur rather than after a batch job completes.
• AI-powered root cause analysis. Dynatrace Intelligence, an agentic operations system, can analyze billions of dependencies across mainframe, cloud, and hybrid environments. When something goes wrong, Dynatrace Intelligence pinpoints the root cause, reducing mean time to resolution and freeing teams from manual investigation.
• End-to-end transaction tracing. Dynatrace traces transactions across the full hybrid stack, from the web front end through microservices, APIs, and into the mainframe core. Teams get a complete picture of how workloads behave across every tier.
• Unified observability across hybrid cloud. Whether workloads run on IBM z17, in a public cloud, or in containers on OpenShift, Dynatrace brings it all into a single view. No more switching between tools or reconciling data from disconnected systems.
• Security and compliance insights. Dynatrace can surface runtime vulnerabilities, detect unusual behavior, and generate compliance-relevant telemetry to extend the security capabilities built into IBM z17.

IBM z17 and Dynatrace: From infrastructure power to operational intelligence

IBM z17 delivers the infrastructure power: AI at the core, intelligent automation, and ironclad security. Dynatrace delivers the operational intelligence: real-time visibility, automated answers, and end-to-end context. Together, they give teams what they need to harness that power with confidence.

In practice, that means organizations can:

• Accelerate AI adoption on IBM z17 with the observability to validate model performance and catch issues before they impact customers.
• Automate IT operations from the mainframe to the cloud with AI-driven insights that eliminate manual toil.
• Better maintain the reliability, security, and compliance that mission-critical environments demand, with enhanced transparency across every workload.

IBM z17 raises the ceiling for what enterprise infrastructure can do. Dynatrace enables organizations to see everything happening across it and act on operational intelligence in real time.

See what’s possible

If your organization runs workloads on IBM Z, now is the moment to ensure you have the observability to match the platform’s capabilities. IBM z17 is built for the future of enterprise computing. Dynatrace is built to help you operate it.