IBM Z Common Data Provider (CDP) was built to make IBM Z operational data available in near real time to where our customers want to perform analytics. As product manager of the solution, I've had the opportunity and pleasure to see this solution grow and mature over the past several years. It never ceases to amaze me the types of use cases our customers have come up with and how critical this solution has become for them to gain insight into the operational health of IBM Z.
At a high level, the two primary capabilities of CDP are the supported data types and consumers of that data. This delivery contains exciting new enhancements in both of those areas. For data consumers, Common Data Provider now supports streaming data directly to Humio and Kafka. These new advancements will open a whole new set of opportunities for working with IBM Z data.
Not long ago, IBM announced Humio Log Management for Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management. With this delivery Common Data Provider can now deliver IBM Z operational data into that ecosystem. Working in partnership with the team from Humio, IBM has delivered a solution that can take advantage of Humio capabilities.
The other data consumer that is now supported is Kafka. This implementation has been something that I've had requests from several of our customers over the years. As we are starting to emerge from the pandemic, I know a large number of folks have taken advantage of streaming services during this past year. In terms of scale, its well known that at least one of the most popular television streaming services has their infrastructure based on Kafka. I'm extremely excited to see the new opportunities this integration will bring.
Common Data Provider still supports the broadest set of IBM Z Operational data in the industry. This list has just grown and now includes support for additional data as requested by some of our customers. Here are a few of the key highlights now supported in this delivery:
- RMF III Reports: CFACT, CHANNEL, CFOVER, CFSYSS, Enclave Enqueue, DEVR
- IMS Log Data: x01, x03, x5901, x5903, xFA, xF9
- SMF Data: SMF 84 subtype 21 (JES2), SMF 115, 116 Currency (IBM MQ)
- Log Data: WebSphere Liberty Log data
Collecting and streaming data seams like its quite an easy job, but there is so much more to it when the data source is IBM Z. IBM Z is quite a flexible platform and its amazing how our Common Data Provider customers are unique in their environments. As such, we now have additional support for collecting data where dynamic virtual IP addresses (DVIPA) is enabled, collecting data for a single LPAR across a shared log stream, enabling the output of data collection statistics and many more.
This latest delivery contains quite a large number of enhancements and I've only been able to highlight a few in this blog. The full list can be found in the what's new section in the solution documentation. Before I close, I have to give a lot of credit to our great development team as they continue to drive to enable our customers to be successful with the solution.
Lastly, if you happen to be new to IBM Z Common Data Provider, you can find more details here.