With the growth of OpenTelemetry, clients are looking to exploit the capabilities around portable operational data to provide better observability of their hybrid applications that bridge public cloud, distributed environments and IBM Z. On platforms like z/OS, access to high quality operational data such as SMF has been available for many years, however the challenge has been to ensure that the right data is made available to the right consumer in a timely fashion.
Last year, we delivered the ability to deliver OpenTelemetry trace spans via Z APM Connect enabling mainframe integration with multiple observability solutions that claim support for the standard. Support was further enhanced earlier this year with new updates from z/OS and major subsystems like CICS, IMS, Db2 and MQ delivering native OpenTelemetry trace span support. Additionally solutions like OMEGAMON have also made updates to make their metrics consumable beyond the boundaries of the mainframe team.
It is an exciting time to start exploiting the availability of OpenTelemetry data from IBM Z, and simplicity of adoption is critical to ensure a successful integration that benefits both the mainframe team and additional stakeholders who will consume this data. How can this be achieved?
Introducing IBM Z Observability Connect for enabling and managing OpenTelemetry support across z/OS
By bringing together existing transaction trace capabilities together with additional enhancements to manage OpenTelemetry data, IBM is announcing a new release of IBM Z Observability Connect, formerly IBM Z APM Connect, to deliver a single solution to define and manage OpenTelemetry data under the control of the IBM Z operations team.
At the heart of the new Z Observability Connect is the Telemetry Controller, a distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector that provides capabilities to receive, process and export various telemetry spans - traces, metrics, and logs - to multiple consumers of this data that can ingest OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) data. The Telemetry Controller focuses on the needs of the team responsible for the management of this operational data ecosystem, including volume of data collected, and targeted consumers of the data like enterprise-wide observability platforms such as IBM Instana. By enabling managament of this data at scale, through a highly available cluster-based containerized deployment, delays in processing and exporting spans are avoided.
By using Z Observability Connect to integrate z/OS operational data into enterprise-wide solutions, the mainframe ceases to be perceived as a blind zone within an organization’s chosen observablity platform. Leveraging the Common Data Provider, metrics sourced from SMF and z/OS log information are now also available as OTLP spans giving more insight to SRE and teams responsible for critical enterprise-wide business applications. With better visibility of the mainframe, these teams can now make better informed decisions when detecting incidents, isolating and deciding what actions to take and engaging their mainframe subject matter experts.
Exploitation within enterprise-wide solutions, such as IBM Instana
Access to the data is important, and Z Observability Connect delivers this in a simple to manage approach. How you leverage and exploit this is also very important. There are many solutions available today that can consume OpenTelemetry span data however, the capabilities provided by these solutions can vary considerably. One possible observability backend for these trace space is IBM Instana Observability. With Instana, integration of the trace spans from z/OS together with metrics and logs can eliminate potential blind spots in critical business applications and enable Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and other operations teams detect, isolate and resolve incidents faster.
The benefits to the mainframe teams here should be obvious: few call-outs when an issue hits an application and IBM Z is demonstrably not the cause of the problem, better understanding of the platform by SREs, and more time to focus on productive work instead of fire-fighting.
Want to learn more?
If this is a topic that has interest for you, we'd love to discuss the topic further and what your goals are for integrating the mainframe into your enterprise-wide observability strategy. Please feel free to reach to me via email, or contact your IBM representative who will be able to set up a demonstration of these capabilities.
To see a demonstration of the OpenTelemetry capabilities on z/OS and how Z Observability Connect supports you on your journey to adopt OpenTelemetry across the mainframe, please watch this on-demand webinar.
The announcement letter for IBM Z Observability Connect V7.1 is available here.
You can learn how observability fits into the broader story of AIOps on IBM Z also learn more about Instana and OpenTelemetry on the IBM website.
The overall AIOps on IBM Z story is also available in this handbook.