IBM System Automation

On a z/OS system, the difference between a five-minute outage and a five-hour one is usually whether someone had to notice the problem first. IBM Z System Automation removes that dependency. It takes the operational knowledge that normally lives in a runbook or in one experienced operator's head and encodes it as policy — so that starting a subsystem, restarting a failed address space, or bringing an application stack up in the right order happens the same way every time, on every shift, without waiting for a human to react.

This course takes you from no prior SA z/OS exposure to working competence across the product. You'll start with the architecture — how the Automation Manager, Automation Agents, Policy Database, and Status Display Facility divide the work between them — and then move into building automation policy yourself: defining applications and resources, setting their attributes, expressing the relationships and dependencies between them, and building and activating that policy on a running system. From there you'll cover resource automation in practice, including startup and shutdown, escalating recovery and restart, operator commands, status monitoring, event handling, and message automation.

The final week extends outward and then inward. Outward to integration — how SA z/OS sits on top of NetView and coordinates with JES2, CICS, Db2, MQ, and across systems in a sysplex. Inward to troubleshooting — diagnosing automation that didn't behave as expected, reading traces and automation logs, and recognising the common configuration errors before they reach production. The course closes with guided hands-on walkthroughs where you build a policy, automate a start/stop sequence, configure a dependency, and watch a simulated failure recover automatically.

Each day is self-contained: written articles covering the day's material, a short reflection section connecting the concepts to your own environment, and a quiz to confirm the material landed. The course finishes with a proctored graduation assessment covering all three weeks.

Who this is for: developers and technical staff working in IBM Z environments who have little or no prior exposure to System Automation. No SA z/OS background is assumed.