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 Monitoring IWS Servers on IBM i with Instana

  • IBM i
  • Java
  • Websphere
Felipe Nieves's profile image
Felipe Nieves posted Wed July 16, 2025 01:49 PM

Hi everyone.

I'm just reviewing the Instana documentation, and I came across with the list of sensors for IBM i:

And the WebSphere Liberty caught my eye, if I understand correctly, these servers are based on Liberty so my gues is that it would be possible to monitor these, right?

Right after that list it reads the following: 

To collect the metrics for WebSphere Liberty, you must enable the monitor-1.0 feature. To enable this feature, open the server.xml file, which is located in the <websphere-liberty_install_dir>/usr/servers/<specific_server>/ directory

So, my question is this, do you guys know if this setting its supported on IWS servers? if someone has tried, do you know what kind of information can we get from these sensors?

We have a scenario in which we're interested on review the response time for some APIs hosted with this technology in our systems, something that can help us determine if there are system resource issues or comms.

Also, if someone her knows of some key differentiatiors between Instana agent versus Dynatrace from the IBMi perspective I'll appreciate it.

I hope you can help me with this question. I'll post this question also on the IBM i group.

Have a nice day.

Neha Ghongade's profile image
Neha Ghongade posted Mon July 21, 2025 12:37 PM

Yes @Felipe Nieves,  Liberty Monitoring is supported on IBMi, pls find supported Liberty metrics monitored using Instana
  https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/1.0.300?topic=technologies-monitoring-websphere-liberty


  Could you pls help us to  IWS servers ? So that will help you to handle the usecase you are looking for... Is it Integrated Web Services ?...Pls confirm...Thanks

Bikram Debnath's profile image
Bikram Debnath posted Tue July 22, 2025 12:43 AM

Hi @Felipe Nieves

Yes, we do support IWS and as you mentioned it is based on Liberty. 

In general Instana is capable to do the monitoring and tracing of the websphere application and with that you can monitor each request like how many sub calls it has, time for each of those sub calls etc. For more info please check this - websphere-liberty-performance-metrics 

AFAIK, Dynatrace does not provide you the tracing in AS400 and the variety of metrics that we collect is much more verbose along with that we do support of a wide variety of events specific to jobs, message queue, disk, subsystem etc. 

Note: We do not support RPG tracing so, if the request is via some RPG program the trace would be broken.  

Felipe Nieves's profile image
Felipe Nieves posted Wed July 23, 2025 09:54 AM

Hi @Neha Ghongade, thanks for your response.

I'm just a little confused do you need help with IWS or just need me to confirm if this scenario I'm painting is with Integrated Web Services?

I its the latter, yes i confirm that my question was related to Integrated Web Services on IBM i, if you need some help with IWS I can give a try, just let me know.

Have a nice day.

Felipe Nieves's profile image
Felipe Nieves posted Wed July 23, 2025 10:21 AM

Hello @Bikram Debnath.

Thanks you very much for the response and help. Thanks for the confirmation on that IWS its supported on Instana just one quick observation, in the URL you've shared IBM i is not listed as a supported OS in the table, that is why felt the need to ask in the first place.

Additionally, I've been looking the Instana agents documentation and I can see that in IBM i the metrics are part of the collection services on the OS itself, I can see the value of Instana on the near real time monitoring in the platform but do you need if the IBM i Agent can help us identify db locking contention issues? or if we can display network usage by interface?

I'll continue reading the docs to see if there are more answers there.

Thanks again.

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