Instana for cloud-native platforms and Instana on IBM z/OS enables application delivery modernization across any entire hybrid cloud environment.
Why is this important? Because to keep up with the unrelenting demand for better application performance and reliability, hybrid applications need to be updated with the latest technologies to achieve those goals.
The prevailing modern technologies are cloud infrastructure, container technologies, microservices, and web technologies. The development of these technologies as an evolution from previous generation technologies wasn’t just to create new ways to implement applications, but to enable ways to make applications, and particularly online applications, faster and more reliable with an ability to fix problems rapidly as soon as they’re found.
To facilitate these changes, Application Performance Monitoring (APM 2.0) evolved from being purpose driven to monitor medium to large code stacks deployed in SOA architectures to Observability specifically for the much smaller microservices code stacks, containers, and endpoints to facilitate service access via APIs.
Both SOA and microservices architectures use interconnection between services using a network. The difference tends to be scale. SOA broke down monolithic services into smaller service groupings on multiple servers. Microservices has taken that even farther by implementing many small services over many servers.
The benefit of this modernization is to enable rapid changes in services implementation and deployment. The smaller the code base for microservices, the less time required for debugging code. Instead, the focus is on the efficacy of the information exchange between services and applying context across those exchanges.
More succinctly, monitoring shifted from a heavier focus on code profiling to observing metrics and traces between many distributed service connections.
Instana on IBM z/OS supports hybrid cloud application modernization by effectively blending observability for both microservices and SOA services. This is important because both SOA and microservices are frequently implemented in hybrid cloud environments with IBM z/OS mainframe services. With the new IBM z16 mainframe, which brings unprecedented levels of transaction performance, AI, and security to mission critical workloads and is creating a bright future for hybrid cloud implementations.
Instana on IBM z/OS sends metrics collected from IBM z/OS to Instana through the IBM z/OS Connect or CICS Transaction Server where they’re displayed on Instana dashboards and mapped out in the dynamic graph and dependency maps along with cloud-native, web, and mobile metrics.
With these features, operators can view the mainframe processes and infrastructure where it resides within the entire hybrid cloud ecosystem. The IBM technologies now receive the same holistic view of everything occurring from mobile and the web into the mainframe and back. They can then more precisely determine where within a mainframe an issue caused by cloud-native services is occurring or which mainframe service may have an issue that’s adversely impacting the cloud native services.
Each sector of a hybrid cloud as now a co-equal participant in operational visibility, enabling the teams that have to remediate issues to quickly determine what needs to be done. For IBM z SMEs, it may be using their trusted profiling tools, such as OMEGAMON, to implement application adjustments. What they won’t have to do is spend and waste time searching where the problem is. Instana on IBM z/OS serves as an IBM z SME GPS for finding where a problem is.
This capability enables application modernization to more easily occur wherever it’s desired. Cloud-native application front end services can take advantage of new capabilities to enable better and more responsive services for users.
Mainframe teams can enhance mainframe services with new mainframe technologies without having to be concerned that they won’t be able to determine the impact of those changes on the cloud-native services that prepend the mainframe services.
Instana and Instana on IBM z/OS enables application modernization without limitations. One of the keys to application modernization is to ensure that application changes are continuously observed while they’re being implemented. Both in pre-production and production. Instana makes that possible by providing precise one second metric visibility from mobile to mainframe. No gaps. No samples. No limitations.
To learn more, please view the on-demand Instana on z/OS webinar @ https://z.instana.com
