z/OS Connect

Truly RESTful APIs to and from your IBM Z mainframe

View Only

Back to Blog List

z/OS Connect 3.0.96 now available

By Shruthi Krishnan posted 2 days ago

z/OS Connect 3.0.96 introduces several significant updates, enhancing its capabilities and addressing user needs. Key updates include the ability to configure OpenTelemetry tracing with z/OS Connect, updates to BAQT messages, and upgrades to the API provider and API requester Gradle plug-ins. Additionally, the IBM z/OS Connect Operator and the z/OS Connect CASE package bundle file have been updated, while the embedded Gradle version has been upgraded to 9.0.0.

For more information on these updates, refer to PH67345. If you’re new to IBM z/OS Connect, you can find more information about its features and benefits by visiting this page.

New

OpenTelemetry (OTel) tracing with OpenAPI 3.0

IBM z/OS Connect Server can be configured to participate in OpenTelemetry (OTel) tracing with OpenAPI 3.0 specification APIs to provide a comprehensive view of how applications interact in a hybrid cloud architecture. OTel provides a framework that enables you to instrument applications and systems to generate, collect, and export three types of data: traces, metrics, and logs. This data can be exported to observability backends like Jaeger or Prometheus, which present interactive timelines and graphs showing application request flows across distributed components, helping identify performance bottlenecks and error sources.

Enabling OTel allows z/OS Connect to emit OTel Trace data to an OpenTelemetry Collector where it’s combined with data from other systems. This enables quick identification of problem locations, speeding up resolution times. Additionally, capturing SMF 123 records is recommended when OpenTelemetry tracing is enabled.

z/OS Connect supports Otel tracing for both API provider and API requester scenarios as can be seen with the following example span output diagrams.

Figure 1: Example span output for an API provider request

Figure 2: Example span output for an API requester request

For more information about monitoring with OpenTelemetry and z/OS Connect, see Monitoring with OpenTelemetry.

For information on how to configure OpenTelemetry Trace with z/OS Connect, see Configuring OpenTelemetry for monitoring with z/OS Connect.

For more information about OpenTelemetry Trace with z/OS Connect and the other supported monitoring features, see What monitoring is available with z/OS Connect?

Enhancements

The BAQT* messages have been updated to include the api name.
The version of Gradle that is embedded in the z/OS Connect Designer and shipped as part of the z/OS Connect installation in <installation_path>/gradle.zip has been upgraded to 9.0.0.
Note: Java 17 is the minimum version required to run Gradle 9.0.0.
The version of the API provider Gradle plug-in is upgraded to 1.4.11.
The version of the API requester Gradle plug-in is upgraded to 1.2.6.
The IBM z/OS Connect Operator is updated to 1.0.12 and the z/OS Connect CASE package bundle file is updated to 1.0.13.

Fixes

PH64282 - z/OS Connect API providers do not map headers case-insensitively.
PH66905 - Message BAQT0007E “The length of the response message is invalid” could provide more diagnostic information.
PH67248 - A high elapsed time is reported for the first invocation of an API requester after a period of inactivity.

Keep in touch

If you have any feedback on this blog article, the enhancements in this release, or anything else that is related to IBM z/OS Connect content and information, please go to the z/OS Connect community and post your feedback on the discussion forum.