Modern enterprise applications rarely run in a single environment. A typical business transaction might begin in a mobile application, traverse cloud-native microservices, pass through APIs and messaging middleware, and ultimately execute critical business logic in IMS on IBM Z. While each layer can be monitored independently, obtaining a true end-to-end view of transaction execution has historically been a challenge.
OpenTelemetry is helping to change that story.
OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral observability framework that enables organizations to collect, process, and export telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. By providing a common standard across platforms, OpenTelemetry helps organizations gain visibility into how transactions flow across complex hybrid environments without being tied to a specific observability vendor.
IBM has embraced OpenTelemetry as a strategic observability initiative across the IBM Z platform, including technologies such as IMS, CICS, Db2, MQ, and z/OS Connect. The goal is to enable application-centric observability, allowing enterprises to view and analyse complete business transactions regardless of where they execute.
With IMS 15.6 and later releases, IMS and IMS Connect support OpenTelemetry-based distributed tracing and context propagation. This allows IMS workloads to participate in end-to-end transaction traces that span distributed applications and IBM Z, providing a unified view of application behavior across the enterprise.
The following architecture illustrates how OpenTelemetry integrates hybrid applications, IBM Z subsystems, telemetry pipelines, and observability platforms to deliver complete transaction visibility.
IMS OpenTelemetry architecture showing the hybrid application landscape, IBM Z and IMS environment, telemetry pipeline, observability backends and business benefits.
Understanding the Architecture
The architecture illustrates end-to-end observability for hybrid enterprise transactions spanning distributed systems and IBM Z.
- Hybrid Application Landscape: Trace context originates from diverse entry points: users and mobile apps, web and API gateways, microservices, MQ/Kafka messaging systems, and cloud services - all feeding into the IBM Z environment.
- IBM Z / IMS Environment: Requests flow through z/OS Connect to IMS Connect, and then to the IMS Transaction Manager (IMS TM), where transaction processing may access IMS databases or Db2 for z/OS, depending on the application architecture. Throughout the transaction lifecycle, Trace Context (Trace ID and Span ID), Baggage, and other correlation metadata are propagated across all participating components, enabling end-to-end observability, trace correlation, and transaction visibility.
- OpenTelemetry Pipeline: Telemetry data is collected by z/OS Data Gatherer, exported via the OpenTelemetry Emitter for z/OS, and forwarded through the OpenTelemetry Collector using the OTLP protocol to observability backends.
- Observability Backends: Telemetry is visualized in platforms including Grafana, Jaeger, Dynatrace, Splunk, IBM Instana, and other OTLP-compatible backends.
Now, let’s see how the transactional flow happens.
Sample End-to-End Distributed Trace Flow
A single Trace ID follows the business transaction across distributed and mainframe components, enabling complete end-to-end visibility and rapid root-cause analysis.
Key Benefits for IMS Customers
End-to-End Visibility, Faster Problem Resolution, Better Performance Insights, Vendor-Neutral Architecture, and Operational Efficiency.
Final Thoughts
OpenTelemetry marks a significant milestone in the modernization of IMS observability. IMS becomes a first-class citizen in the enterprise observability ecosystem.
References
For more information about IMS OpenTelemetry support and a demonstration of the capabilities discussed in this blog, refer to:
These resources provide additional details on IMS OpenTelemetry architecture, supported transaction flows, context propagation, configuration, and observability use cases.