Authors: Srirama Sharma, Megha R, Srinath Kanukolanu, Sridhar Venkatesh
The mainframe remains a critical and strategic component of enterprise IT today. If you look at the application estate of many large businesses, you will find that most core business applications and workflows run on the mainframe or integrate with mainframe application and data. The inherent strengths of the Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE platform is centered on resiliency, scale, and industry-leading security. It becomes vital to provide Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE customers with the end-to-end observability of the applications performance through the Instana self-hosted running on this platform.
IBM is excited to announce the availability of Instana self-hosted on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxOne platforms as a beta version. All components of Instana self-hosted are now supported on the s390x architecture with data stores. This will enable clients to manage Instana backend components on the single platform for easier administration and efficient resource allocation. This version is available until December 2023 for evaluation.
This blog describes how to avail the Instana self-hosted beta version and use it to install on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE.
Instana
Modern microservice-based cloud-native architecture is composed of numerous services and applications which are bound together with multiple protocols and utilities. Though this gives flexibility, it also introduces complexity in identifying bottlenecks and issue detection as the request flows through the mesh of services. Critical enterprise applications are also hybrid in nature, where these microservices interact with on-prem applications and data stores. Instana provides the automatic visibility into this entire application landscape with contextual information for faster issue detection and root cause analysis that reduces both MTTD (Mean Time To Detect) and MTTR (Mean Time To Repair).
Instana self-hosted is a fully automated real-time observability platform that puts performance data in context to deliver rapid issue detection and remediation. Instana has six core capabilities to uniquely address the challenges facing modern Dev+Ops teams:
The Instana backend server, which receives telemetry data from the monitoring agents and creates the observability experience, is available in both self-hosted (on-premise) and as SaaS flavours. To use Instana self-hosted, you need to install the Instana backend server on supported platforms.
Availing closed beta build
Reach out to the following contacts to avail the closed beta offering. A beta license agreement is required, and IBM will provide you installation assistance and guidance to start your evaluation . The beta period is for 90 days, and it cannot be used in a production environment. This product is expected to be GA in 4Q 2023.
Contacts :
After the Instana self-hosted on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE is installed, you can Install the Instana monitoring agents on both distributed and IBM Z platforms to start monitoring the installed applications.
Installing Instana self-hosted on OCP on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE
Installing Instana self-hosted on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE is simple. You need a cluster with four compute nodes and the tools and binaries. The resource configuration for the compute nodes is shown in the following figure.
Monitoring a sample application by using Instana Agent
To get started and learn about Instana, you can install the following sample Go application and understand the power of application tracing.
a. Deploying a sample application
b. Installing Instana Agent
You can monitor any cloud-native or standalone application by installing Instana Agent (on the environment where application is running) by following the simple commands in the “Install Agents” section of the Instana UI on your desired hosts/VMs/LPARs. These agents will automatically connect to the backend, which in this case will be running on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxOne in the OCP layer.
To Install the Instana agent on your environment, refer to Installing Instana agents and pick the method according to your environment.
c. Monitoring application
The three pillars of observability are metrics, logs, and distributed traces. By correlating the data from these three sources, the contextual information is derived that helps with faster issue detection and root cause analysis. Instana helps to start your observability journey by automating the entire process:
- Instana agent activates the applicable sensors through automated discovery of applications runtimes on every hosts/VMs.
- It also enables auto tracing for common programming languages like Java, Python, PHP and others. Using the trace data, it also automatically discovers the application profiles that informs you on how an application request flows through different services and applications, removing the need to manually describe your application topology.
- Predictive analytics then automates issue detection and helps you with root cause analysis as Instana captures 100% of traces with a 1 second granularity for most applications.
Where can I find out more?
Learn more at Getting Started with Instana website to start your journey with Instana Observability.