mainstorconcept’s z/IRIS software provides performance monitoring solutions for IBM mainframe z/OS systems, so you can assess your mainframes’ health and their impact on mission-critical services. With support for OpenTelemetry, z/IRIS creates integrable observability data from your mainframe systems.
mainstorconcept’s z/IRIS offering is now available in the Datadog Marketplace, allowing you to seamlessly integrate z/IRIS traces and metrics with the rest of your application data in Datadog. With access to key infrastructure metrics, detailed error messages, and alerts, you can troubleshoot faster, reduce your mean time to recovery, and improve the reliability of your system. Additionally, the offering comes with two out-of-the-box dashboards that give you deep visibility into REST API and Java database connectivity (JDBC) data.
In this post, we’ll explore how you can use this integration to:
- Resolve Db2 deadlocks quickly with automated alerts
- Monitor the performance of mainframe services
- Visualize mainframe CPU health
Resolve Db2 deadlocks quickly with automated alerts
The mainstorconcept offering tracks JDBC calls processed by Db2 for z/OS instances, and enables you to visualize request throughput, latency, and mainframe resource utilization metrics on a single dashboard. The dashboard also allows you to evaluate your databases’ efficiency against the state of your entire system. For example, you can view the effect of expensive database queries on your resource consumption by analyzing Db2 programs’ CPU usage against all z/OS CPU usage.
You can also create Db2 deadlock alerts to be notified of deadlocks right when they occur. Traces are enriched with tag-based metadata, including information about the lock request (zos.db2.lock.request), lock duration (zos.db2.lock.duration), and any resources associated with the deadlock (zos.db2.deadlock.resources), so you can get to the root cause faster. To determine whether an issue is part of a larger trend, you can also view traces of other requests that deadlocked on the same resource.
Monitor the performance of mainframe services
Once you enable the mainstorconcept offering, it immediately starts populating Datadog APM with data from z/OS. As Datadog traces requests to applications, flame graphs display information about mainframe service tiers and performance. By tracking z/OS Connect traces, you can gauge how well your mainframes handle REST API requests. The Live Request Flow Map also provides real-time insight into request workflows and helps you identify potential bottlenecks in any applications that rely on mainframe services. And when you need to analyze performance over time, you can pivot to the z/OS Connect dashboard.
To visualize the work being executed on your mainframes, you can also view z/OS Work traces in Datadog. Filtering batch job data by address-space subsystem (zos.subsystem.name) can help you better understand which processes are using the most system resources. You can also filter your work metrics by TSO user sessions, allowing you to monitor access to environments that contain sensitive data and ensure the security of your system.
You can set up alerts on key service level indicators—such as latency—to automatically detect issues that could affect your user experience. If you need to investigate a performance issue, traces include error details from z/OS servers to assist you in quickly finding the root cause.
Visualize mainframe CPU health
mainstorconcept’s offering provides mainframe CPU utilization metrics to help you assess the overall health of your infrastructure. You can use these metrics to decide if you need to take steps—such as upgrading hardware or optimizing code—to prevent future problems.
Observing CPU contention can help you ensure that your mainframes are equipped to process tasks. If you do notice CPU contention running high, you can measure any impact to your system’s throughput with workload distribution metrics. Additionally, sysplex and load-per-system data enables you to see whether all your z/OS instances are available and able to spread the workload evenly.
Make mainframe data a key part of your APM
mainstorconcept’s z/IRIS offering is now available in the Datadog Marketplace, allowing you to gain full visibility into the health and performance of your mainframes. To learn more, see our documentation. If you’re not yet using Datadog, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial today.
The ability to promote branded monitoring tools in the Datadog Marketplace is one of the benefits of membership in the Datadog Partner Network. If you’re interested in developing an integration or application for the Datadog Marketplace, contact us at marketplace@datadog.com.
