A connector that provides transaction tracing information from z/OS subsystems to enterprise-wide Observability solutions by using OpenTelemetry

IBM Z® Application Performance Management Connect (IBM Z APM Connect) generates trace telemetry signals from transactions as they flow through various z/OS® subsystems.

IBM Z APM Connect helps customers achieve complete end-to-end application observability and faster problem isolation that can impact critical customer transactions by providing trace telemetry signals from z/OS subsystems to enterprise-wide Observability platforms via the use of OpenTelemetry.

Features

• **Extend visibility of Observability platforms to include assets running on z/OS: **Observability solutions provide visibility, control and automation of your hybrid cloud applications to help ensure optimal performance and efficient use of resources. IBM Z APM Connect delivers z/OS trace telemetry data into these tools and extends application visibility to the mainframe while optimizing for lightweight performance.
• **Use OpenTelemetry for seamless integration: **OpenTelemetry has quickly gained popularity through its mission to deliver vendor-agnostic observability framework that assists in generating, processing and distributing telemetry data. IBM Z APM Connect can generate and export trace spans compliant with the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) for ingestion into any OpenTelemetry collector.
• **Fully trace critical customer transactions across hybrid applications: **With the rapid development of complex hybrid applications spanning mobile devices, public cloud and on-premises environments, it has become more critical than ever to have an application-centric view that can quickly isolate application issues that impact customers and prevent the need for inefficient “war rooms” to triage issues.
• **Bridge the between multiple stakeholders including IBM Z operations: **For many organizations, application complexity has gone so far that it has overwhelmed the capabilities of talented engineering and IT teams. With multiple stakeholders involved, getting the right experts involved quickly is critical to maintain the qualities of service. When you have a single pane of glass showing application performance from end-to-end everyone has access to detailed information to diagnose and correct critical issues in minutes, not hours or days.
• **Obtain context from your critical z/OS subsystems and environments: **What was previously a mainframe black box has transformed to multiple layers of visibility as transactions hop between z/OS subsystems. With context provided around the performance at a transaction level, subject matter experts can be engaged with sufficient information to take prompt action. Better communication means faster time to recover or avoid issues.

Benefits

• **Achieve cloud to mainframe visibility: **By tracing the flow of hybrid application spanning public cloud to mainframe, you can eliminate IBM Z blind zones in your enterprise-wide observability strategy.
• **Integration capabilities across multiple Observability platforms: **By using OpenTelemetry, telemetry signals from z/OS can be delivered to multiple Observability platforms.
• **Reduce hybrid application problem resolution time: **With end-to-end visibility, reduce the frequency and time spent in inefficient “war room” investigations by more rapidly identifying and resolving application issues.