OMEGAMON Tech Summit – live in Milan, Rome and Madrid
Before I get into the product update details, there are a collection of live events coming up to talk about OMEGAMON futures. These events are targeting Italian and Spanish customers with simultaneous translation being provided. See here for locations and registration information.
The new Storage and Network dashboards are here!
There are eight OMEGAMON agents running natively on z/OS. With the latest addition of starter dashboards for Networks and Storage, all agents have starter dashboards. Have you given OMEGAMON Data Provider a try yet? We are very interested in how you are using it and would love to see some of your own dashboards. The primary reason the dashboards are available on GitHub is to facilitate sharing among customers. But it doesn’t mean that just IBM and Rocket software share their dashboards. This is meant to be a community of dashboard sharing. If you are interested in sharing, feel free to contact me at jporell@rocketsoftware.com
Some examples from the storage and networks dashboards
Instana continues to evolve with OMEGAMON
Instana is a hybrid cloud application performance monitor (APM). When run alongside OMEGAMON, there are enhancements available within Instana to better understand z/OS infrastructure. These additions to Instana make true end to end APM possible, from desktops and mobile through back-end transaction processing.
To date, CICS, Db2, z/OS, MQ and JVM infrastructure have been made available through Instana. To leverage the latest OMEGAMON capabilities, the following service needs to be applied:
- OMEGAMON for MQ: APAR OA63963, PTF UJ09793
- OMEGAMON for JVM: APAR OA63898, PTF UJ09673
- OMEGAMON Data Provider: OA64177, PTF UJ92106
- OMEGAMON Monitor for z/OS: APAR OA63776, PTF UJ92041
Hybrid operations – how does your organization handle that?
One interesting note about OMEGAMON Data Provider (ODP). It might not be right for the traditional subject matter experts that can quickly navigate through the Classic, E3270UI and Portal user interfaces. But look outside that mainframe community. Does your business have people working with Instana, Splunk, Elastic, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Dynatrace or other analytic platforms? If so, ODP may fill a gap toward getting true end to end performance metrics within your environment. Collaboration across systems is critical for highly available business applications. And in turn, you may find potential problems more rapidly and avoid a costly outage. Observability can be greatly improved and at the same time, leverage that capability for improved availability.
Machine Learning – looking for sponsor users and data
As mentioned above, ODP can provide a connection to many analytic platforms. We’re also working to build some machine learning algorithms into OMEGAMON itself. To be successful, we are looking to capture some SMF 70 and 72 records from customers’ production environments. There is no personally identifiable information in those records. We’ve been able to build some models already. Some customers have sent us several instances of data and we’ve identified issues through their data repeatedly. The true value will come when this machine learning is available in real time within OMEGAMON. The instructions are simple. Send me an email if you are interested in joining us on this evolution.
More information available
As always, the master blog continues to be updated with the latest news about ODP. Look there for additional hints and tips. If you are new to ODP and would like some assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out to me.
Originally published on the IBM Z and LinuxONE Community Blog.
James Porell is a Rocket Principal Software Architect, focusing on new functions for System, Storage and Security products from IBM. His primary focus is the architecture of the OMEGAMON family of monitoring agents. Prior to joining Rocket, he was an independent consultant and retired IBM Distinguished Engineer. He held various roles as Chief Architect of IBM's mainframe software and led zSystems Business Development, as well as marketing of Security and Application Development for the mainframe. His last IBM role was Chief Business Architect for Federal Sales. James held a TS/SCI clearance for the US Government, was a member of the US Secret Service Electronic Crimes Taskforce in Chicago and co-authored several security books. He has done cybersecurity forensic work at a number of Retail, Financial and Government agencies and created a methodology for interviewing customers to avoid security breaches for large enterprises. James has over 43 years working with Information Technology.