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Self-Hosted INSTANA on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE

By Megha R posted Tue December 19, 2023 09:35 AM

  

Authors: Srirama Sharma, Megha R, Srinath Kanukolanu, Sridhar Venkatesh

The mainframe remains a critical and strategic component of enterprise IT today. If you look at the application estate of many large businesses, you will find that most core business applications and workflows run on the mainframe or integrate with mainframe application and data. The inherent strengths of the Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE platform is centered on resiliency, scale, and industry-leading security. It becomes vital to provide Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE customers with the end- to-end observability of the applications performance through the Instana self-hosted running on this platform. IBM Z is known for its data gravity which is about bringing the processing to the data and If the processing in question is high-volume batch or transactional work. Observability of the workload applications running on IBM Z platform is of utmost priority for the IBM Z enterprise customers and hence hosting or running the Instana server on the IBM Z IFL’s becomes of very high value to observe the health of the applications.

IBM is excited to announce the availability of Instana self-hosted on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxOne platforms. All components of Instana self-hosted are now supported on the s390x architecture with data stores. This will enable clients to manage Instana backend components on the single platform for easier administration and efficient resource allocation.

This blog describes how to avail the Instana self-hosted and use it to install on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE.

Instana

Modern microservice-based cloud-native architecture is composed of numerous services and applications which are bound together with multiple protocols and utilities. Though this gives flexibility, it also introduces complexity in identifying bottlenecks and issue detection as the request flows through the mesh of services. Critical enterprise applications are also hybrid in nature, where these microservices interact with on-prem applications and data stores. Instana provides the automatic visibility into this entire application landscape with contextual information for faster issue detection and root cause analysis that reduces both MTTD (Mean Time To Detect) and MTTR (Mean Time To Repair).

Instana self-hosted is a fully automated real-time observability platform that puts performance data in context to deliver rapid issue detection and remediation. Instana has six core capabilities to uniquely address the challenges facing modern Dev+Ops teams.

The Instana backend server, which receives telemetry data from the monitoring agents and creates the observability experience, is available in both self-hosted (on-premise) and as SaaS flavours. To use Instana self-hosted, you need to install the Instana backend server on supported platforms. 

Installing Instana self-hosted on OCP on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE

Installing Instana self-hosted on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE is simple. You need a cluster with four compute nodes and the tools and binaries. The resource configuration for the compute nodes is shown in the following figure:

To install Instana backend server on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) cluster, refer to Using third-party Kubernetes Operators and search for Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE in the above documentation link. Following is the GA Release notes link for Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE.

Reach out to the following contacts for any assistance.

Contacts : 

Monitoring a sample application by using Instana Agent

To get started and learn about Instana, you can install the following sample Go application and understand the power of application tracing.

a. Deploying a sample application

b. Installing Instana Agent

You can monitor any cloud-native or standalone application by installing Instana Agent (on the environment where application is running) by following the simple commands in the “Install Agents” section of the Instana UI on your desired hosts/VMs/LPARs. These agents will automatically connect to the backend, which in this case will be running on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxOne in the OCP layer.

To Install the Instana agent on your environment, refer to Installing Instana agents and pick the method according to your environment.

c. Monitoring application

The three pillars of observability are metrics, logs, and distributed traces. By correlating the data from these three sources, the contextual information is derived that helps with faster issue detection and root cause analysis.  Instana helps to start your observability journey by automating the entire process:

  • Instana agent activates the applicable sensors through automated discovery of applications runtimes on every hosts/VMs. 
  • It also enables auto tracing for common programming languages like Java, Python, PHP and others. Using the trace data, it also automatically discovers the application profiles that informs you on how an application request flows through different services and applications, removing the need to manually describe your application topology.
  • Predictive analytics then automates issue detection and helps you with root cause analysis as Instana captures 100% of traces with a 1 second granularity for most applications.

Where can I find out more?
Learn more at Getting Started with Instana website to start your journey with Instana Observability.

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