bnbtss.com

What It Is

BNBTSS (Total Systems Support) from Black and Blue Software is positioned as a proactive monitoring and support service for IBM i, iSeries, and AS/400. It is not a general-purpose cloud-native monitoring tool; instead, it focuses on hardware and system health monitoring for traditional enterprise core systems, with the goal of notifying the help desk or hardware engineers within minutes of detecting an issue.

Core Capabilities

Based on the available page information, BNBTSS centers on Monitor, Report, Repair, and Operations. On the monitoring side, it covers system health monitoring, hardware issue detection, disk failure prediction, and identification of inquiry messages that require a human response. For reporting, it can send fault information to engineers and operations teams via email or text message. On the operations side, it can push QSYSOPR messages directly to email or mobile phones and supports replying to messages remotely. Its low-level hardware detection capabilities can provide engineers with more detailed fault information, reducing the need for on-site troubleshooting. The page also mentions service-level data for SLA reporting and remote management tools.

Pricing and Deployment

The crawled content does not disclose the pricing model, plans, payment methods, or whether it is offered as SaaS, a managed service, or self-hosted deployment. There is also no clear information on whether it is open source, whether it provides an API/SDK, or whether it can integrate with modern tools such as ServiceNow, Jira, PagerDuty, or Zabbix. Before procurement, buyers should contact the vendor directly to confirm commercial terms, deployment options, security details, and integration capabilities.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are its very clear vertical focus and its design specifically for IBM i / iSeries / AS/400 operations scenarios. Alerts can be delivered by email or SMS, which fits traditional enterprise operations workflows, and remote handling of QSYSOPR messages has practical value for on-call teams. The drawbacks are that publicly available information is limited, with missing technical documentation, pricing, interface details, deployment models, and compliance statements. The website content also appears dated, making it difficult to judge the current pace of product iteration and ecosystem activity.

Who It’s For and Access from China

BNBTSS is suitable for manufacturing, finance, retail, or service-provider teams that still run IBM i, iSeries, or AS/400 systems, especially environments that need hardware failure alerts, remote message handling, and SLA reporting. Access from mainland China cannot be determined from the available content and should be marked as unknown; payment methods are also not disclosed. For alternatives, consider IBM Navigator for i, IBM i monitoring solutions based on Nagios/Icinga or Zabbix, or in-house enterprise alerting scripts.