Stan's Corner

Event and Alerting features for IBM i by Instana 

Today, monitoring your system, service or infrastructure is critical to ensure the availability and reliability of that system. In fact, during the software development process, alerting and monitoring is essential in terms of DevOps perspective. 
 

What Is Monitoring and Event/Alerting? 

Monitoring is the process of collecting, aggregating, and analyzing the metrics that are provided by the components in your environment by using a monitoring solution. 

But we are moving towards an era where time is of the essence for identifying and resolving issues. We want to detect any issue within the system as early as possible so that actions can be taken. This is the part where ‘alerting’ works as a key feature. 

On high level, there are two outputs of an alert: 

• Notifications 
• Automated actions 

Based on monitoring, alerts notification actions can be taken by someone while in some cases ‘Automated Actions’ can be taken without any manual intervention. 

Levels of urgency 

Every alert can have a different severity – High Severity, Medium Severity or Low Severity – and Service-Level Agreement (SLA) can be met based on severities. For example, CPU and memory outage can be tagged as High Severity because these need immediate attention. 

Instana Event and Alerting capabilities for IBM i 

The following is the list of alerting features that Instana offers for IBM i: 

• Server Connection Availability  
• Subsystem Status 
• Running Job Status 
• Identical Jobs 
• Inactive Jobs 
• Inactive Jobs In JOBQ 
• Active Ports Listening Status 
• Message Queue Event 
• Message Text Event
  
  

Let’s examine some of these. 

• Server Connection Availability

Instana supports remote monitoring for IBM i server. It is not necessary to install the Instana agent on the same system to monitor. 

If the Instana backend is unreachable by the agent for some reasons, then an event will be triggered as follows: 

• Subsystem Status 

The primary responsibility of this event is to monitor the current status of the subsystems. If the subsystem is NOT ACTIVE at any time, then an alert will be triggered from the Instana side. 

You can specify a subsystem name or a list of subsystem names in the configuration file as follows: 

• • Values will be 'SUBSYSTEM_DESCRIPTION_LIBRARY/SUBSYSTEM_DESCRIPTION' in comma-separated way.  

• Infrastructure view 

In infrastructure view of system, the complete tower is visible in yellow color, which depicts the numbers of issues that it has. 

• IBM i OS detail page view 

            You can see all the alerts on the details page as follows:  

    You can see the detailed description of the alert with all necessary information as follows: 

•  Running Job Status 

The primary responsibility of this event is to monitor the jobs with specific Job Status for a Subsystem, so that an alert can be forwarded to the respective person who needs to take action against it. 

You need to define the value as JobStatus/Subsystem in a comma-separated way in the configuration file as follows. If any of the Jobs in that subsystem have the specified Job Status at any time, then an alert is triggered from the Instana side.  

 Note: Instana supports wild card for the subsystem. For a specific Job Status, if you want to include all the available subsystems, then you can use ‘*’ for the subsystem part. 

See the following event details: 

• Inactive Jobs

The primary responsibility of this event is to monitor whether the jobs that are up and running for all the time is not running due to some reasons. 

You need to define the Job Name(s) in comma-separated way in the configuration file as follows. If any of the Jobs is not present and running in the system at any time, an alert is triggered. 

 

           
            See the following event details: 

• Identical Jobs 

The primary responsibility of this event is to monitor the count of jobs with the same name, which needs to be up and running for all the time with a certain number. 

You need to define the Job Name & User combination in comma-separated way with the threshold value in the configuration file as follows. If any of the Jobs count is less than the defined threshold value at any time, then an alert is triggered for those Jobs. 

Note: Instana supports wild card for the User part. If you want to validate the minimum count for a specific Job irrespective of any user, you can use ‘*’ for the JOB_USER part. 

See the following events details:  

• Inactive Jobs In JOBQ 

The primary responsibility of this event is to monitor whether the job is not in a running state and waiting in the queue with RELEASED or SCHEDULED status. 

You need to enable enableInactiveJOBQStatus in the configuration file as follows. If any of the Jobs are in the JOB_QUEUE with the previously mentioned status at any time, then an alert is triggered. 

Note: Instana supports wild card for the Local Address part. Suppose that you want to monitor a specific port, irrespective of the Local Address, then you can use ‘*’ for the Local Address part. 

See the following events details: 

• Active Ports Listening Status 

The primary responsibility of this event is to monitor  whether a list of Ports are active or not, which can eventually help you to figure out whether the service is available or not. 

You need to enable Local Port and Local Address combination in the configuration file as follows. If any port and address combination is not in Listen or Null state at any time, then an alert is triggered. 

See the following events details: 

• Message Queue Event 

The primary responsibility of this event is to monitor whether a message with specific Message Id is coming to the defined Message Library & Message Queue in the specified time frame. 

You need to enable the Message Id, corresponding Library and Queue Name with the time frame in the configuration file as follows. If any message is coming to the defined Library and Queue combination in the specified time at any time, then an alert is triggered. 

See the following events details: 

• Message Text Event 

The primary responsibility of this event is to monitor whether a message with specific Message Text (fully or partially text) is coming to the defined Message Library & Message Queue with in the specified time frame. 

You need to enable the Message Text, corresponding Library and Queue Name with the time frame in the configuration file as follows.  If any message with same message text value is coming to the defined Library and Queue combination in the specified time at any time, then an alert is triggered. 

See the following events details: 

I hope this gives you a fair understanding of Instana alerting capabilities for IBM i system. 

To know more about Instana’s capabilities for IBM i, refer to this document.