Sometimes pictures on their own can be underwhelming. They might lack something. But then you put that picture in the right frame, and it suddenly seems to be transformed. It needs to be presented with a frame in order to really show off the best aspect of the picture.
The integration running in your business can be like a painting hanging in a gallery but it’s in a dark room, surrounded by other paintings and just pinned up on the wall. It’s there but anything in the picture is lost.
But take that picture and put it in the right frame and hang it in a well-lit room and suddenly you realise what the picture is, and it becomes the star of the gallery. Integration is key to your business moving and using the data behind every transaction, every query from customers and partners, every update to business records and a thousand other activities. But do you really know what’s happening with your integration products? Are they running? What are they doing? Do you know what their key status indicators are showing?
Sure, you can dive into the tooling that comes with each product, but wouldn’t it be good if you could see it all on a single screen, and dive into any aspect easily? Would that not be showing you what’s happening in the best way and ensuring you see what you want to see? This is now what’s available with the latest release of Cloud Pak for Integration which was announced on November 22nd 2022. For customers buying new entitlements to Cloud Pak for Integration, there is 6 months of entitlement to Instana Observability (self-hosted). This comes with a specific set of Instana sensors to enable monitoring and tracing for the integration products and some additional components or functions. This will allow customers to get a clear understanding of what is happening with their integrations and in their business.
What else is new in latest release of Cloud Pak for Integration? It’s now easier and quicker to build, deploy and manage integrations. When defining integration capabilities as part of a solution, customers using the latest release can now deploy and manage these as a single unit. So, when building integrations that might comprise multiple separate MQ instances and Event Streams deployments, these can be handled as a single unit of integration.
Additionally, if you use Aspera to move data rapidly over long-distance or lossy networks, the new inclusion of the Aspera Proxy Gateway enables its use in a wider range of deployment configurations beyond the enterprise.
The IBM Integration portfolio includes so many capabilities – what else is new?
One of the core products – IBM App Connect is now available as a managed service: IBM App Connect Enterprise as a Service on AWS. This leading enterprise integration product is now available as an iPaaS. Whether looking to connect to cloud apps, or multiple enterprise applications and systems, IBM App Connect Enterprise offers a fast track to integrating your business needs. Pre-built templates of integrations, no-code integration design, and AI powered mapping and transformation assists accelerate your integration solution from none to done. As a fully managed integration offering on Amazon Web Services (AWS) IBM App Connect Enterprise SaaS is provisioned, patched and upgraded for you without service downtime. Find out if it meets your needs with a free trial.
In addition to these important new capabilities there are also enhancements for IBM MQ which has announced MQ V9.3.1. This is the newest Continuous Delivery release with enhancements to the MQ Web Console, and also improvements to allow message expiry to be set on a streaming queue which creates new ways to leverage this feature.
And customers using z/OS solutions benefit from enhancements to both IBM MQ on z/OS V9.3.1 and IBM Integration Bus for z/OS V10.1. For MQ customers there are SMF enhancements delivering improved queue analytics. Client channel buffers now use 64-bit storage increasing concurrent client numbers, and there is also streaming queues support for shared queues. Integration Bus customers get access to VSAM and QSAM datasets directly from integration flows. Additionally there are z/OS Explorer plugins providing access to z/OS assets from the Integration Bus Toolkit.
With so much new content delivered you have to see it to believe. And so it’s a good job Instana is there to help with Observability.