Observability tools are becoming increasingly popular among enterprises because they enable organizations to quickly detect and resolve issues before they impact their customers. With the rise of microservices architectures and the increasing complexity of IT environments, it’s becoming more difficult to understand the dependencies and interactions between different components. Unfortunately, industry-leading tools do not support mainframe applications. However, with z/IRIS these tools gain unprecedented access to application performance on mainframe and provide users with enterprise wide observability. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at z/IRIS and how it can help enterprises improve their monitoring practices by including mainframe application performance into a single pane of glass.
What is z/IRIS?
z/IRIS streams application performance data from mainframe to observability tools, allowing them to track and analyze transactions in real-time, accelerating the identification and troubleshooting of digital services.
It enables companies to see the mainframe applications as services and seamlessly integrates it into the overall observability, making it easier to understand dependencies and interactions between different parts of the IT environment.
z/IRIS Integrations
In addition to its built-in features, z/IRIS can also be integrated with different monitoring tools, such as Datadog, AppDynamics or New Relic. This allows you to combine mainframe performance data, giving you a more complete view of your mainframe environment.
For example, by integrating z/IRIS with Datadog, you can create custom dashboards that display data from mainframe, cloud and server applications in a single location. Datadog’s Watchdog will automatically alert users to mainframe application anomalies that impact overall user-experience, allowing you to quickly react to any issues as they arise.
Integrating z/IRIS with other observability tools, such as AppDynamics, New Relic or Datadog, is a great way to get a more complete view of your enterprise IT environment. But what if you want to use open-source tools? Fortunately, z/IRIS integrates with open-source tooling as well.
Use open-source tools like Prometheus and Grafana to monitor z/IRIS performance data. This allows you to create custom dashboards that display real-time performance insights / analytics for your mainframe environment.
By integrating z/IRIS with open-source tooling, you can create a monitoring and alerting solution that caters for your specific needs. Whether you prefer commercial tools, open-source tools or a combination of both, z/IRIS has you covered.
Conclusion
z/IRIS is a powerful enabler for observability tools that enables you to monitor and optimize your entire digital services environment (i.e. mainframe, cloud and server applications). DevOps, Enterprise Monitoring and Site Reliability engineers are able to identify true bottlenecks and improve your customer experience faster. If you’re looking for a powerful and flexible way to incorporate mainframe data in your enterprise tooling, z/IRIS is definitely the way to go.