Our initial support for Instana in IBM Z APM Connect is finally available. If you had told me that a few short months after the acquisition, Z APM's Instana integration would go live, I wouldn't have believed you. Given the Z APM team's delivery history, I should have known better. The day the acquisition was announced, our team dove in head first by checking out the
'Play with Instana' sandbox and
combing through the documentation. Not because we asked them to drop everything, but because they were genuinely excited about extending this new observability platform. Their hard work over the past few months is what made this possible, and I'm excited to share what that means for you.
Before I get into the details of this release, I have received many questions about what this all means for our existing AppDynamics integration, and I want to make it clear that our foundational product strategy has not changed. Z APM Connect was created to ensure that IBM Z could participate in modern observability practices, regardless of a customer's toolset. We have always planned for Z APM Connect to support the multiple APM vendors our customers are using and loving. AppDynamics, and Z APM Connect's existing integration, continues to be incredibly popular with IBM Z customers. We are fully committed to our AppDynamics partnership, and I look forward to expanding on the remarkable progress we have made together.
Now let's dive into what is included in the Z APM release that is available to download right now. Let's imagine you are an SRE at an international financial institution that is kicking the tires of Instana's enterprise observability platform. You are excited about Instana's AI-powered automation capabilities and wealth of contextualized data - metrics, traces, profiles, dependency maps and more - available for your application. One of the critical applications you are responsible for relies on IBM Z workloads to achieve the scale and performance necessary to serve your millions of users, but full visibility of these transactions ends once they hit the mainframe. You would have a view similar to what I've called out here in red - a mainframe black box.
Since you have Instana monitoring the rest of your application, you'll be alerted to problems before and as they happen, but if the issue is stemming from Z, you will be unable to pinpoint the source of the problem. For the banks, governments, insurers, airlines, retailers, and more that rely on Z to power their services, these mission critical workloads cannot be obscured.
Let's revisit the experience of our SRE, but now they are checking out Instana along with Z APM Connect. Instead of a mainframe black box, they have several layers of z/OS visibility into z/OS Connect, CICS, IMS, IMS DB, VSAM, Db2, and more all within the context of the specific business application they are responsible for. If a slowdown appears to be coming from a z/OS workload, the SRE with limited Z experience can identify where the problem is coming from and even provide transaction-specific details, like the transaction name, task number, or user ID. With this head start, the relevant Z SME can head directly to their deep-dive monitoring tool to address the problem in a matter of minutes. In our new scenario, no one was pulled into a war room, there was no erroneous finger pointing, and there was barely any disruption to customers, if at all.
I want to call out that this is our first step in what will be a lasting journey with Instana. In this release, we are offering support for several popular use cases, but we will be continuing to expand our supported flows to match what we currently offer with our existing integration. We timed this release in accordance with our agile principles of delivering early and continuously improving. For those of you who are making use of the technologies covered in this release, I would love to get your feedback after checking out this integration in your own environment. If you're outside our initial supported scope, do not worry. Our team is working hard to expand our supported Instana technologies to match what we currently offer, and these enhancements will be shipping through our regular continuous delivery cycle every few months.
We use these two graphics to provide an overview of the support we offer for our AppDynamics integration, and I have called out in green what we can monitor in Instana via our latest continuous delivery release. Z/OS Connect has been exploding in popularity with our customers as a way to provide API access to core business services on IBM Z, and with the growth of new teams accessing Z data comes the need for application-specific monitoring. Customers making HTTP calls to CICS can also start monitoring their applications with Instana + Z APM Connect. Our integration will work for both Instana SaaS and on-prem customers.
We know an overwhelming majority of enterprises have more than one APM solution in use currently. Whether you love the APM solution you're using now or if you're considering a change, Z APM Connect will ensure your data is accessible. When you license Z APM for your environment, you will have access to all our integrations through the single offering. If you have our Z components installed in your environment, there are no major changes required to start streaming Z data to a different supported APM.
We have a lot of exciting future enhancements currently being designed and developed by our team to deepen our integration. As I always do with these posts, I want to wrap up with my call for feedback. Our team puts a very high value on feedback from customers and partners so
please feel free to reach out with any comments or questions you have. Stay tuned for future announcements!
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Nicole Nemec
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