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Experimental Open Telemetry metrics added to OMEGAMON Data Provider

  

The latest functional update for OMEGAMON Data Provider was delivered on 3rd November 2024 as APAR OA66911/PTF UJ96180. This update includes enhancements to protocol security and a new output type for Open Telemetry.

Open Telemetry (Experimental)

One new function is support of the OTLP protocol over gRPC for sharing metrics with Open Telemetry focused analytic servers. Initial testing was done with IBM Instana server and several open source implementations to prove interoperability. This new capability is described in the ODP Guide

This function is considered experimental as the Special Interest Group for Mainframe Open Telemetry standards has yet to finalize the Semantic Conventions that deal with the naming of metrics that are unique to the mainframe. As an accommodation for this, ODP has introduced an as variable that allows you to rename an existing OMEGAMON metric to a convention of your choice. This provides great flexibility in leveraging custom dashboard capabilities within existing analytic platforms to leverage your z/OS metrics from OMEGAMON.

Some usage guidelines may be helpful. When testing with IBM Instana, we found the “service name” to be generated automatically by Instana if not specified within the JSON payload. This was very difficult to understand what was being sent until that particular instance was opened on the user interface. As a result, the auto-resource-attributes variable was created. When that is true, ODP automatically generates the service name attributes. You can also specify that directly within the connect.yaml parameters for Open Telemetry.

Customer Use case

One large Instana customer was looking to extend their usage of z/OS attributes from OMEGAMON beyond the curated list that exists today. (put link in to previous blogs)  They can use any available OMEGAMON attribute and send it to Instana via Open Telemetry and use the Custom Dashboard capabilities of Instana to extend their z/OS infrastructure monitoring there.

Enhanced Network Security

This update includes support for TLS 1.3 encrypted handshakes between  OMEGAMON Data Broker and OMEGAMON Data Connect. This support had previously been available between OMEGAMON Data Connect and target analytic platforms. This capability is described in the ODP guide.

Use of TLS 1.3 on z/OS is dependent on either the z/OS System SSL Security Level 3 FMID or the CPACF Feature 3863 being installed.

Summary

Thank you to all our ODP customers. We’ve had a tremendous number of customers exploiting this capability to a wide range of analytics platforms. Should you seek additional functionality or have questions about a particular problem you are trying to solve, don’t hesitate to reach out for assistance. We’ve been really pleased with the customer interactions that we’ve had and look forward to many more. Learn more about OMEGAMON and OMEGAMON AI Insights via our Master Blog. 

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