Audit your IBM i application in minutes with Gianni!

Your IBM i application has been running your business for 30 years and (almost) never goes down. But could you actually say what’s inside it?

If you hesitate, you’re not alone. That’s the paradox of IBM i applications: extremely reliable, yet opaque over time. The good news: with Gianni, you can finally see clearly, in just a few minutes.

Your application was developed in the 1990s, extended in the 2000s, modified in the 2010s, and patched even more recently. Every generation of developers has left its mark: different conventions, fixed-format RPG sitting next to free-form RPG, sources that no longer exactly match the compiled objects, programs nobody remembers the purpose of.

On top of this comes a problem that has become critical within your team: your veteran RPG developers are retiring, and replacements are hard to find. The younger candidates you recruit gravitate toward web and cloud. The result: your few remaining experts are overloaded, and every departure takes away part of your system’s living memory.

Your documentation, when it exists, is partial, outdated, or lost in a shared folder that nobody opens anymore. The comments in your code sometimes describe decisions made twenty years ago, in a context you no longer understand.

And all the while, the questions keep piling up:

• How many programs do you actually have in production?
• Which ones are still in use? Which ones contain dead code?
• What are your most complex areas, the riskiest ones to touch?
• Are your sources synchronized with your compiled objects?
• Where do you start if you want to modernize, refactor, or migrate?

Without answers to these questions, every one of your decisions rests on hunches. And you know it: in business IT, hunches always end up costing dearly.

Not knowing your application portfolio has very concrete consequences on your daily work.

Your modernization projects are underestimated or oversized, because you can’t gauge the true complexity of the scope. Your refactoring efforts are poorly prioritized: your team tackles the program it already knows, rather than the one that’s truly problematic. Your production incidents regularly reveal synchronization conflicts between sources and objects, which you could have caught upstream.

More broadly, your inability to objectively assess the state of the code makes conversations with your executive management difficult. How do you justify a modernization budget without data? How do you prioritize initiatives without metrics? How do you reassure an external auditor without a map?

Your IBM i technical debt doesn’t appear on any balance sheet, but it influences all your decision-making.

Before modernizing, refactoring, migrating, or even just maintaining, you need to know what you have. That’s exactly why we designed Gianni.

Gianni is an audit tool designed for you: IBM i teams who want to take back control of your applications, without committing to a heavy audit project, without intrusive installation on your system, and without exposing your source code.

Here’s the idea: in a few minutes, from your Windows workstation, Gianni queries your IBM i, analyzes your libraries, and produces a self-contained HTML report that answers the key questions about your application’s state.

No installation on your target. No file left on your system. No source code excerpts in the report. Just reliable metrics, immediately actionable.

The report you get is organized around five views, each one matching a question you’re probably already asking yourself.

What does your application contain? The Object Types view gives you an immediate map of your portfolio: programs, files, modules, sources… You finally know what your application is made of, in numbers and proportions.

Where are your risk areas? The Source Explorer highlights the top 10 files according to four criteria: volume, cyclomatic complexity, comment ratio, and age. Enough to focus your refactoring efforts where they really matter, rather than on the ones your team already knows well.

How is your code evolving? The Modification History gives you a year-by-year timeline. You immediately identify periods of intense activity, dormant areas, and any anomalies in your maintenance rhythm.

Are your sources and objects consistent? The Synchronization & Conflicts view detects objects without sources, sources without objects, files out of sync, and naming conflicts between libraries. The kind of traps that turn a simple change into a production incident, as you well know.

How much of your code is still useful? The Dead Code view identifies objects never used, those inactive for several months (you choose the threshold, from 3 to 60 months), or those rarely called. A practical way to clean up, simplify, and reduce your maintenance footprint.

You know how it goes: for an audit tool to be truly usable in your company, it first has to clear a hurdle that’s often underestimated: validation by your security team.

We designed Gianni from the very start to sail through that review. The tool queries your IBM i via SQL and JT400, without dropping a single file on your target. The generated report contains no source code excerpts, only metrics. An end-to-end SSL/TLS encryption option is available, with certificate verification. And every release ships with a DELIVERY-NOTE.txt file containing the executable’s hash, which you can forward directly to your CISO.

In other words: a complete audit, with no footprint, no risk of leakage, and no battles with your security team.

Transforming your IBM i application doesn’t start with a big project. It begins with a clear view of your existing assets.

For years, getting that view meant either an expensive external audit, or an in-house build you kept putting off. With Gianni, it’s a matter of a few clicks: a complete, shareable, secure audit.

Whether you’re preparing a migration, a refactoring project, the handover of an application to a new team, or simply an update of your application map, your first step is the same: know where you stand.

Download Gianni for free and launch your first audit today. In less time than it takes you to read this article, you’ll finally know what your application contains!