IBM Z® performance monitoring through Instana sensor
Authors: Priyanka Oruganti, Shivangi Mehra, Bipin Chandra Srivastava
Mainframe computers play a central role in the daily operations of most of the world’s largest corporations. In banking, finance, health care, insurance, public utilities, government, and a multitude of other public and private enterprises, mainframe computers continue to form the foundation of modern business.
IBM Observability by Instana provides a comprehensive observability platform for an enterprise to track requests spanning from mobile to mainframe, and from bare metal machines to hybrid multi-cloud deployments.
Let’s explore how this works with IBM System Z.
System Z mainframes
IBM System Z mainframes are high-performance computers with large amounts of memory and processors that process billions of simple calculations and transactions in real time.
IBM Z® Instana sensor monitors the availability and performance of hardware systems and subsystem resources across an enterprise having multiple System Z mainframes.
The Hardware Management Console (zHMC) is an IBM System Z feature that provides the end-user interface to control and monitor the status of the system.
IBM Z® Instana sensor can connect to one or many zHMCs at the same time, and collect the required metrics. If any deviation occurs from normal behaviour, alerts and events can be created based on these metrics, and the abnormal behaviour can be analysed and diagnosed by using relevant data.
zHMC controls and monitors the system
zHMC provides the Web Services API, which can be used to query, configure, control and monitor Central Processing Complexes (CPCs) and its various components. By default, the Web Services API is disabled on the zHMC, and can be enabled.
Once a user is permitted to establish API sessions, the actions within those sessions are subject to the zHMC’s access control model.
zHMC Instana Sensor Architecture
IBM Z® Instana sensor collects performance metrics, and transforms the information into actionable key performance metrics and reports quickly and efficiently. It monitors the availability and performance indicators of hardware systems and subsystem resources across the enterprise, and provides a single tool for one or many zHMCs. For example, it can connect to one or many zHMCs at the same time, and collects the performance metrics for all of them.
IBM Z® Instana sensor, you can:
- Visualise performance metrics with built-in dashboards.
- Get business-critical application monitoring data that is available in near real-time.
- Support one or many zHMCs by using only one Instana instance.
- Create events and alerts based on any of the performance metrics for the supported alert channels.
Supported Metric Groups
It provides metrics for the system resources, such as power consumption, environmental data, processor usage, etc. The utilisation and environment data that is displayed on the user interface is also provided through the Metrics Service API in the following metric groups. Details of the latest available metrics can be found here.
Alerts and Events Configuration
Based on performance metrics, we can create alerts and events. For mor information on how to create these, click on the following links.
This is an example of a custom event based on Server’s Temperature.
If the system’s temperature is more than the specified value for 60 seconds, then this event is triggered:
An alert can be created by using these events, and can be routed through any available alert channels.
We hope you found this article informative. If you would like to find out more about the benefits of using Instana sensor with IBM Z systems, please read this blog or refer to the Instana documentation.
