AppliedModernization32 min
Mainframe observability
How to see what z/OS work is doing and why: metrics, logs and traces from SMF, RMF, OPERLOG and product monitors, feeding them into enterprise platforms, golden signals, alerts people trust, and tracing a transaction from a phone app into CICS and DB2.
What you will be able to do
- Explain the difference between monitoring and observability and name the z/OS sources of metrics, logs and traces
- Describe how SMF, RMF and log data reach platforms such as Splunk, Elastic or Grafana, and the trade-offs involved
- Apply golden signals and good alert design to a mainframe service
- Follow a transaction across distributed and mainframe tiers using correlation IDs and tracing
Lessons
- Monitoring, observability and z/OS telemetryMonitoring tells you when something you expected to break has broken. Observability is having enough data to work out why something unexpected is happening. On z/OS that data…
- Getting mainframe data into enterprise platformsMost organisations run one observability or log platform for everything, such as Splunk, Elastic or Grafana. Mainframe data can feed it through streaming collectors, so one…
- Golden signals, alerts and end-to-end tracingGood observability measures what users feel: latency, traffic, errors and saturation. Alerts should fire on symptoms that need a human, not on every threshold. Tracing and…
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Free account, 15 quiz questions for this subject.