z/OS 3.2 is Generally Available
IBM z/OS was announced on July 22nd, 2025 and made generally available September 30th, 2025. z/OS 3.2 is the latest release of the flagship operating system for IBM Z, designed to fuel innovation through AI, improve operational efficiency, and strengthen cybersecurity in the hybrid cloud era. This latest release is a significant milestone in the evolution of the mainframe, empowering businesses to unlock new opportunities for integrating AI capabilities with core business applications, getting the full potential of their most critical data.
IBM is offering a new badge that recognizes users who have successfully installed z/OS 3.2 and validated the latest features of the platform. The IBM z/OS 3.2 Installation and Validation badge is a great way for clients to demonstrate their expertise and showcase their skills in harnessing the power of z/OS 3.2!
z/OS Data Gather OpenTelemetry Emitter
Observability is a critical consideration for every enterprise today. With the complexity of hybrid cloud architectures increasing to address new digital channels and customer experiences, the challenge of monitoring application health has become an imperative. These hybrid application architectures, including critical Z applications and data, span operating system, cloud and on premises and technology domains. The need is clear, therefore, for a consistent open standard approach to capturing and feeding telemetry data.
Born out of this necessity, OpenTelemetry is rapidly gaining traction as the open standard across organizations and teams spanning the entire IT landscape. The telemetry signals that it democratizes, feed observability tools and critical command center screens for teams of SRE’s charged with the health and uptime of critical hybrid applications which power the planet.
Today we complete the first phase of the journey to bring OpenTelemetry natively to z/OS and middleware in support of simpler end to end observability for critical hybrid applications. z/OS customers can now implement full end-to-end distributed tracing of applications using OpenTelemetry with fewer blind spots and with a much simpler instrumentation experience. The delivery of the z/OS OpenTelemetry Emitter as part of the z/OS Data Gather is the final building block which enables emission of OpenTelemetry distributed tracing from IBM CICS transaction Server for z/OS, IBM IMS, IBM Db2 and IBM MQ for z/OS. Using a suitable observability backend such as IBM Instana, users can now view application flows and topologies as they traverse systems on premises and the cloud to spot and alleviate problems before they escalate.
Please see the following for more details including prerequisite software levels for all of the middleware:
z/OS Data Gatherer
Install z/OS Data Gatherer PTF (z/OS 3.1: UJ98068, z/OS 3.2: UJ98067) for APAR OA66345: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/apar/OA66345
IBM z/OS middleware and database products supporting OpenTelemetry Tracing
CICS TS - 6.3
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cics-ts/6.x?topic=whats-new-in-cics-ts-63
MQ - 9.4.3
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ibm-mq/9.4.x?topic=network-opentelemetry-tracing
IMS IMS 15.6 and 15.5 with these APARs PH65117 (IMS Connect) and PH62728 (IMS TM)
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/announcements/information-management-system-156-ims-en[…]features-support-catalog-adoption-modern-ways-working?region=US
Db2 13 - Db2 13 at any function level starting at V13R1M100 through the following APARs:
- PH67971 – Db2 for z/OS OpenTelemetry Distributed Tracing Support
- PH68073 – Db2 for z/OS IMS Attach OpenTelemetry Distributed Tracing Support
z/OS Connect - 3.0.96
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-connect/3.0.0?topic=whats-new-in-zos-connect
CICS Transction Gateway - 10.3
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cics-tg-zos/10.1.0?topic=statistics-opentelemetry
Exploitation of OpenTelemetry
IBM has several offerings that can consume OpenTelemetry span data, including IBM Instana. To support the adoption of OpenTelemetry across IBM Z software, IBM intends to enhance the capabilities of several offerings. Please refer to this Statement of Direction for more information.
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