Enhance your IBM Z observability by integrating Instana with OMEGAMON

Author: Chinmay Samant, Co-authors: Ajith Aravindan, Nithin Thomas

Abstract: By using IBM Observability by Instana APM for z/OS (Instana on z/OS, for short), you can quickly understand how specific z/OS resources support your critical hybrid applications. It provides a summary view of application health and request flow across all involved hybrid components, including Z resources. This observability experience can be enhanced by integrating Instana with OMEGAMON, which provides key resource metrics information with the ‘launch in context’ feature.

In this blog, we talk about the capabilities of Instana and OMEGAMON Integration and how to configure it from the Instana side.

Instana — OMEGAMON Integration design and configurations

The Integration of IBM OMEGAMON with Instana is accomplished by configuring IBM Z OMEGAMON Data Provider, IBM OMEGAMON Instana Integration Proxy, and Instana sensor. Instana ingests attributes from OMEGAMON Data Provider, and the Instana sensor from the host agent sends the payloads to the Instana server where the payloads are processed. Then, entities are created in the Instana server, and the metrics are saved for display on Instana UI.

Note: Make sure that all the required licenses for Instana and OMEGAMON Integration are in place. For more information, see the following:

• License activation and renewal
• IBM Observability by Instana APM on z/OS

Activating OMEGAMON support
Metric ingestion by using the proxy sensor in the host agent is deactivated by default. To activate, you need to do the following :

1. Download the deployment package for the IBM OMEGAMON Instana Integration Proxy from https://github.com/instana/ibm-monitoring-integration, and follow the instructions in the readme file to deploy the service.
   Note: The deployment package provides the ability to deploy the IBM OMEGAMON Instana Integration Proxy on a system that does not have a connection to the internet, which is also known as air-gapped. The deployment supports High Availability (HA) mode for new deployments. When HA mode is enabled, three pod instances are created for statefulset components (zookeeper and kafka). For stateless components, the number of replicas can be specified. The minimum number of replicas is 2.
2. Note: The deployment package provides the ability to deploy the IBM OMEGAMON Instana Integration Proxy on a system that does not have a connection to the internet, which is also known as air-gapped. The deployment supports High Availability (HA) mode for new deployments. When HA mode is enabled, three pod instances are created for statefulset components (zookeeper and kafka). For stateless components, the number of replicas can be specified. The minimum number of replicas is 2.
3. Follow the steps in Configure the sensor in your Instana host agent to receive IBM OMEGAMON data.
   Instana collects data from monitored systems by using a single agent on each host. The agent runs on your hosts to collect and aggregate data from various sensors before it sends the data to the Instana backend. For more information, see Instana Host Agent documentation.

OMEGAMON® Data Provider
IBM Z OMEGAMON® Data Provider makes OMEGAMON attributes available to applications and analytics platforms outside of OMEGAMON. By integrating with IBM Z OMEGAMON Data Provider, Instana can ingest attributes from OMEGAMON Data Provider(ODP), and then get key infrastructure monitoring metrics for z/OS, CICS, and Db2 on z/OS.

To integrate Instana with IBM Z OMEGAMON Data Provider(ODP), you need to do the following:

• Configure the OMEGAMON Data Connect component of OMEGAMON Data Provider to send attributes as JSON lines over TCP. You can also configure OMEGAMON Data Provider to send only the attributes that Instana specifically supports. For more information, see IBM Z OMEGAMON Data Provider Documentation.
• Deploy and configure IBM OMEGAMON Instana Integration Proxy to activate OMEGAMON support in Instana. For more information, see Integrating with IBM OMEGAMON.
  Note: You must have an OMEGAMON products entitlement if you want to use IBM OMEGAMON Instana Integration Proxy.

Instana sensor configuration
To configure the Instana sensor, locate the ibmapmproxy section of the agent configuration file, and uncomment the lines for the sensor. Provide the host, protocol, and port information for your IBM OMEGAMON Instana Integration Proxy in the corresponding fields of <agent_install_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yaml as follows:

com.instana.plugin.ibmapmproxy:
  enabled: true
  # host: Provide the hostname or IP address of the system where the IBM OMEGAMON Instana Integration Proxy server is running.  No quotation marks are needed.
  host: '<INSERT_HOST_HERE>'
  # port: provide the port defined for contacting the server. No quotation marks are needed.
  port: 443
  datainterval: 1 # Default
  heartbeatinterval: 15 # Default  
  # protocol: indicate whether to connect with the IBM OMEGAMON Instana Integration Proxy server using the secure (SSL) port or the insecure port.  Values are either "http" or "https".  Default is "https".  No quotation marks are needed. Ensure the value provided for the "port" variable is the appropriate port for your server.
  protocol: https # Default

Once all the needed configurations related to Instana, OMEGAMON, and ODP are in place, IBM Z data would be visualized as below in Instana

In the Infrastructure view of Instana UI, you would see the z/OS which are monitored by the above integration as follows:

Associated middleware that runs on the selected z/OS is as follows:

z/OS dashboard with KPIs and other Performance metrics is as follows:

Db2 for z/OS dashboard with KPIs and other Performance metrics is as follows:

CICS for z/OS dashboard with KPIs and other Performance metrics is as follows:

IBM MQ for z/OS dashboard with KPIs and other Performance metrics is as follows:

JVM dashboard with KPIs and other Performance metrics is as follows:

Launch in context
The Launch in context (infrastructure correlation) feature allows you to co-relate the request spans that come from zAPM trace data to the resource metrics data that comes from OMEGAMON Integration. These insights can help you identify and isolate potential problems and reduce the time to resolve and minimize the impact on application performance and availability.
For now, the Launch in context feature is available for Db2, MQ, and CICS for select connections like HTTP and RPC.
Doc Link: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/current?topic=applications-infrastructure-correlation

Launch in context for CICS is as follows:

For a detailed metrics list and configurations, check the following documentation:

• https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/om-im/5.6.0?topic=platforms-instana
• https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/obiapmoz?topic=configuration-integrating-omegamon