A few weeks have passed since IBM announced its definitive agreement to acquire* the application performance monitoring (APM) and observability company, Instana. This deal has exciting implications for all of IBM, but I wanted to devote some time to discussing what this means for our IBM Z APM Connect offering.
As our clients accelerate digital transformation, it is increasingly challenging for them to manage their business critical applications and data across a variety of hybrid cloud environments, from public and private clouds to on-premises. This acquisition is just one of the many ways IBM is setting out to help businesses better manage the complexity of these modern applications and infuse AI in all areas of IT management.
Instana’s APM was designed specifically to natively monitor microservice architectures including Kubernetes and container-based applications. It brings a host of leading capabilities, such as a comprehensive collection of application tracing and dependencies, relating of logs, automated and instant instrumentation, and it is designed for AI-based root cause analysis.
Enterprises of all sizes, across all industries have come to rely on their APM solutions to understand and troubleshoot the many variables that can impact performance. For this reason, it became very apparent that to support our many IBM Z customers and the platform itself, we needed to ensure the platform's data could be consumed by the market-leading APM solutions are customers are using and loving. This core belief motivated the creation of IBM Z APM Connect that entered the market in 2017 with support for AppDynamics' APM.
Despite the acquisition announcement, Z APM Connect's mission remains unchanged. Our ultimate goal is to enable Z APM Connect to integrate IBM Z data into all leading APM tools. We are excited to continue our work with AppDynamics and expand the partnership we have built over the last few years.
At the same time, we couldn't wait to kick off our integration work with Instana. Our team is already hard at work building the foundation for our next supported vendor, and I have some sneak previews I'm excited to share with you.
Put yourself in the shoes of an application owner or site reliability engineer responsible for an application powering one of your organization's critical business processes. You receive a notification that something is amiss with the application and customers are feeling the pain so you log in to Instana to check things out.
After logging in and selecting the problematic application, you can quickly see the overall health of the application via key metrics such as call count, error count, and latency. You can also see the health of the many services that make up that application - including those that run on z/OS. Perhaps you're not very familiar with the workloads involved in your application that run on Z. You can navigate to the topological view that shows the relationship between all those services.
At this point, you probably have a rough understanding of where the problem impacting customers is located. You'll likely want to drill down into a specific call in the monitored timeframe. From there, you are presented with detailed information on that call including a timeline displaying time spent in each of the services. You can also see call details on each of the services that supported that call. Seen here are CICS and z/OS Connect details surfaced by Z APM Connect including the related CICS task number and user ID as well as the z/OS Connect request ID and service name.
This enables you to engage the right Z folks inside your organization by sharing your initial problem triage findings so they can quickly resolve the issue and restore service for your customers.
I can't wait to share more about this integration over the coming months. Initial support for Instana in Z APM Connect will roll out via our continuous delivery release stream in the first half of 2021. We will continue to work very closely with our customers to build an experience that directly meets their needs. If you're interested in helping shape the future of the Z APM Connect and Instana integration, please reach out to me directly (nicole.nemec@ibm.com) so I can get you involved.
Finally, as I wrap up this post and we say goodbye to 2020, I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge all of the contributors that got us to this point. Even when your plates have been overflowing, our customers have continued to help us improve Z APM Connect by providing constant and productive feedback. Throughout the acquisition process, all of the folks at Instana have been willing to go above and beyond in helping us learn about their product. And of course a huge thank you to the Z APM Connect team that has made all of this progress possible despite the challenging circumstances of this year. I want to wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday season, and I'm looking forward to sharing more about this topic in 2021!
* The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021.