Now available z/IRIS release 1.7.0

Okt 28, 2021 | All, APM, Mainframe, Products, z/IRIS

Release 1.7.0 is now available

New technology partner and integration support

If you attended the Dash 2021 conference, you probably already heard that mainstorconcept is a Datadog Technology Partners. z/IRIS is now available directly in the Datadog Marketplace, providing users with access to z/IRIS information and a 14-day trial without ever leaving the Datadog UI.

Datadog supports multiple open-source tracing frameworks, including OpenTelemetry, which lets you benefit from single-source APM telemetry in multiple monitoring and observability tools.

All z/IRIS mainframe-inclusive observability features are supported with Datadog, including traces and metrics. Datadog users also get pre-defined dashboards which are automatically populated into their environments as soon as a z/IRIS trial is activated.

Features

Datadog integration demo video

If you missed Dash 2021, you want to take a look at our Datadog integration demo video below.

Datadog trace ID support for OpenTelemetry

IronTap can be configured to convert OpenTelemetry trace IDs to the 64 bit Datadog trace ID format. This ensures that trace IDs we provide in tags to Datadog users can be searched for in the Datadog UI.

In some use cases, like Db2 Deadlocks, z/IRIS highlights a temporary relationship between two otherwise independent and unrelated services. We do this by cross-referencing the trace IDs using tags. Staying with the Db2 deadlock example, z/IRIS enriches one of the deadlocked call traces with a Deadlock Participant span, which contains the trace ID of the other request that was impacted by the same deadlock. The other call trace will also get an additional Db2 Deadlock span, which contains information about the deadlock, the relevant database resource and more information about affected requests.

Find out more

Improvements

Revamped z/OS Connect metrics

Basic and advanced metrics from z/OS Connect were overhauled to provide more querying flexibility as well as ensure compatibility with telemetry processing pipeline tools, like OpenTelemetry’s Collector Contrib.The metrics were composed of complex measurements and tags. These measurements were difficult to integrate with external telemetry processors and resulted in inaccurate query results and missing metrics.
The new schema produces multiple simple measurements that are easily integrated into telemetry pipeline and processor tools.Our measurement names and traces tags now follow the same dot separated naming convention as our traces. Users can also set a custom prefix for measurements in cases to cater for any vendor or operations specific requirements.

The earlier z/OS Connect metrics have been deprecated and are no longer supported.

z/OS Connect metrics

New Grafana dashboards

New importable z/OS Connect dashboard are available for Grafana. The dashboard utilizes the revamped z/OS Connect metrics and contains an inline description and links to documentation to simplify start-up and usage.

Grafana support

Instana traces revamped

Distinct deadlock holder and waiter child spans

Instana Deadlock spans have been updated similarly to OpenTelemetry deadlock traces. A Db2 Deadlock span describes the deadlock event that occurred on an IBM Db2 for z/OS system. A Db2 resource child span, describes the database resource on which 2 application requests deadlocked. Information about the respective holder and waiter requests that were impacted by the deadlock are now available in the holder and waiter child span. This has 2 benefits: