Fresche OpsIQ
A free, read-only AI assistant that answers plain-language questions about a running IBM i system, such as why a job ended abnormally or whether the overnight batch finished. It writes the SQL itself, runs it on your machine, and explains the answer in ordinary words. Fresche Solutions released it on October 26, 2026, it uses Anthropic's Claude in the cloud, and the product page lists it free for up to five logical partitions.
What OpsIQ does
An IBM i operator spends a lot of the day asking the machine small questions. Did the nightly jobs finish? Why did that one stop? Who is locking that file? Getting an answer usually means remembering the right CL command, or writing SQL against the IBM i Services, the set of built-in SQL views that report on the system. OpsIQ lets you ask the question in plain English instead.
Think of a new operator sitting next to someone who has run the system for twenty years. The new person asks "is anything stuck?" and the veteran already knows where to look. OpsIQ is meant to be the veteran. Fresche puts it on the product page as "Your IBM i Just Learned to Talk Back".
- Fresche's own example questions include "Did all critical batch jobs finish overnight?", "Why did this job end abnormally?" and "What's running in QBATCH, and is anything stuck?"
- QBATCH is the standard subsystem where IBM i runs background jobs. A subsystem is a named work area the system uses to group jobs.
- QSYSOPR is the system operator message queue, the mailbox the machine drops its own messages into. OpsIQ shows that feed and lets you click one message to investigate it.
- The product page also lists suggested follow-up questions, streaming answers, searchable chat history, audit logs and IBM i authentication, meaning you sign in with your own IBM i user profile.
How does it answer a question?
The four things IT Jungle says happen after you type a question
- You ask in plain wordsNo CL command, no SQL, no application programming interface. CL is Control Language, the command language IBM i operators normally type.
- It writes the SQLIT Jungle reports that "the software will generate the necessary SQL". SQL is the query language used to read data out of Db2 for i.
- It runs the query on your machineThe same report says it will "execute the query on IBM i". The system data stays where it already is.
- It explains the resultIt will "interpret the results, and then generate a plain-language answer to the question". You get a sentence, not a screen of columns.
Quoted from the IT Jungle article "Fresche Launches OpsIQ, a Free AI-Based Operation Assistant for IBM i", by Alex Woodie, dated October 26, 2026. Read October 27, 2026.
Minutes to answer one operator question, as Fresche demonstrated it
Yuval Oren, a Fresche product manager, during a demonstration: "So what would typically take 15-30 minutes, we can accomplish in seconds using OpsIQ." That is a vendor claim from a vendor demo, not a measured result on your system. The OpsIQ bar is drawn at one minute because seconds do not register at this scale.
A Fresche software developer, Dale Friesen, framed it the same way in that demonstration: "You can see it's basically doing the same things you do, just faster." That is the honest version of the pitch. It is not finding something a good operator could never find. It is skipping the lookup.
What does it cost?
Nothing, with one thing to watch. The Fresche product page says "The current version of OpsIQ is free to use, with no license fee and no time limit" and lists it as "Free for up to 5 LPARs, with a 45-day Anthropic API key and 45 days of complimentary support". An LPAR, or logical partition, is a slice of one Power server running its own copy of the operating system. IT Jungle put it more simply: "OpsIQ is free to download and use and will remain that way, Fresche said."
The software is free. The AI is a separate bill. Fresche includes an Anthropic API key for 45 days, and an API key is the credential a program uses to pay for and reach an outside service. Neither the Fresche page nor the IT Jungle report we read on October 27, 2026 says what the key costs after those 45 days, or whether the five partition limit is a hard stop. Ask Fresche before you plan around it.
Where does it run, and what does it need?
The two ways Fresche says you can set it up
| Setup | Where the software sits | What the IBM i side needs |
|---|---|---|
| All on IBM i | Everything runs on IBM i inside PASE, the AIX runtime environment built into the operating system | Node.js 22, PM2 and OpenSSL running on the IBM i server |
| Split | Core components on IBM i, the rest on an x86 machine beside it | The same three prerequisites on the IBM i server |
| The installer machine | The downloaded installer runs on Windows, Linux or Mac | Nothing. IT Jungle says those machines "are not required during production" |
Prerequisites and setup options from the IT Jungle report of October 26, 2026. Node.js is a runtime for JavaScript programs, PM2 keeps those programs running, and OpenSSL handles the encryption. No minimum IBM i release is named in the sources we read on October 27, 2026.
Can it fix what it finds?
No, and that is deliberate. The Fresche page answers the question directly: "Not today. OpsIQ is read-only: it surfaces insights and recommended next steps, but it doesn't execute commands or change anything." A person still types the fix. IT Jungle reports that could change in the future.
Read-only is worth more than it sounds on a production machine. The worst case for a tool like this is an AI that misreads a message queue and then acts on it. Here a wrong answer costs you a minute of reading, not a stopped subsystem.
IT Jungle says OpsIQ "isn't intended as a replacement for traditional monitoring tools, such as Fortra's Robot or Halcyon tools". It also says Fresche may later add Model Context Protocol support, the open standard an AI tool uses to reach a program or a database, and may connect to other large language models. Neither is shipping today.
What leaves your building?
Your questions and the system messages they are about. IT Jungle reports that "Fresche uses Anthropic's Claude AI model out-of-the-box and requires an open port to connect to Claude on the cloud". So the job log text or error message you are asking about travels to an outside AI service to be read. Fresche says of those questions and messages that "Nothing is sent to Fresche", and points to an OpsIQ Data Security FAQ for encryption, logging and retention.
Nothing being sent to Fresche is not the same as nothing leaving your network. Claude is Anthropic's model, not Fresche's, and the connection is an open port out to the internet. If your shop has a rule about production data going to an outside AI service, that rule applies here. Read the Data Security FAQ and the Anthropic terms before you point this at a live partition.
Related Terms
IBM i
IBM's operating system for Power servers running traditional AS/400-lineage business applications, with Db2 for i built directly into the OS.
AS/400
IBM's original 1988 midrange business computer platform; the term is still used informally to refer to IBM i systems and shops even though IBM has rebranded the hardware and OS multiple times since.
X-Modernize AI
X-Modernize AI turns legacy RPG, COBOL and Synon applications into Java. Fresche Solutions pulls the business rules out of the whole application first, then has AI agents write new Java from those rules instead of translating code line by line.
IBM i Services
IBM i Services are SQL views, table functions, procedures and functions that IBM ships inside the operating system, so you can read system information with a SELECT instead of coding to a system API. Most live in the QSYS2 schema, and they are how AI agents read an IBM i box: every tool in IBM's own IBM i MCP Server is a SQL statement against a service such as QSYS2.SYSTEM_STATUS or QSYS2.NETSTAT_INFO.
Db2 for i
The relational database management system built into every IBM i operating system, tightly integrated with IBM i rather than a separately installed database product.
IBM PASE for i
PASE for i is the AIX runtime built into IBM i, and it is where the open-source software behind most AI work on the platform actually runs. It ships as option 33 of 5770-SS1, has been a no-charge option since V5R2M0, and it hosts the yum-installed Node.js and Python builds under /QOpenSys/pkgs, including the Mapepire server that IBM's IBM i MCP Server connects through on port 8076.
Large Language Model (LLM)
A machine learning model trained on large volumes of text, used as the underlying technology behind generative AI tools including IBM Bob and general-purpose assistants like ChatGPT and Claude.
Model Context Protocol
An open standard, released by Anthropic on November 25, 2024, that defines a client-server architecture for connecting AI applications to external data sources, tools, and prompts over JSON-RPC 2.0. IBM's IBM i MCP Server is an implementation of it for Db2 for i and other IBM i resources.
Generative AI
AI systems that generate new content, such as code, text, or explanations, rather than only classifying or scoring existing data.