Instana

Author: Neha Ghongade

Instana is the first and fully automated Application Performance Management (APM) solution designed specifically for the challenges of managing Microservices, cloud-native applications, infrastructures, mainframes, and other technologies. 

IBM Z HMC Instana sensor monitors the availability and performance of hardware systems and subsystem resources across an enterprise with multiple System Z mainframes.

Whereas Grafana is an open source interactive data-visualization platform, which allows users to see their data in charts and graphs that are unified into one dashboard (or multiple dashboards) for easier interpretation and understanding.

Integrating Instana with Grafana to get better visualisation of IBM Z HMC metrics is covered in this blog.

Architectural diagram

The zHMC plug-in sends data to Instana server. Grafana fetches data from Instana server by using Instana plug-in associated with Grafana server.

A. Agent configuration with zHMC plug-in

Configure Instana Agent with zHMC plug-in, refer to sensor configuration.

After the Instana agent is configured, the agent is listed in the Instana UI in the Platforms > IBM Z menu as shown in the following image.

B. Install Grafana Server and Integrate with Instana

Set up and integrate Grafana server to fetch zHMC metrics from Instana, complete the following steps:

     1. Install and set up Grafana. Refer to one of the following procedures depending on the operating system on your system:

1. 1. Mac OS

   2. Windows

   3. Ubuntu

   4. Kubernetes

   5. Docker

2. Sign into Grafana UI.
3. Check whether you can access Grafana server dashboard as shown in the following image.

     4.  Go to Administration → Plugin and then search for instana as shown in the following image.

5. Install Instana plug-in for Grafana.

     6.  Click create Instana data source. 

     7.  Follow the URL to Create personal API token for Instana, refer to Web REST API.

     8.  Provide Instana URL and the API token that you created in the Instana datasource configuration as shown in the following image.

9. Create dashboard, set Category as infrastructure-built-in metrics

• • and Query entity.type:zHMC.

    10. Select the metrics for which you want to create customised dashboard, as shown in the following image.

     11.  Select env power consumption metrics as shown in the following image,

In this way, you can build dashboards to customize your panels to create the visualisations you want by using advanced querying and transformation capabilities. 

For a detailed list of zHMC metrics which can be visualized using Grafana, refers to

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/current?topic=technologies-monitoring-z-hmc#metrics-collection