AppDynamics partners with IBM to provide mainframe visibility with IBM z APM Connect

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Users building and supporting enterprise applications require end-to-end visibility, but most apps are composed of different services hosted in different environments and managed by different teams, which leads to a tendency for teams to be siloed with their own views and tools.

Today's enterprise companies continue to innovate on top of existing systems and require improvement and visibility into legacy systems such as the mainframe.

Resources are often under pressure, transactions volumes are increasing, new applications significantly increase mainframe workloads, and many mainframe applications are absolutely vital to business.

If there is a problem, how do IT Ops teams identify where the problem is located, and who to call? Teams need to manage complexity and quickly get a clear picture of all of the components on which their business applications run.

IBM and AppDynamics have already created a strong partnership across a number of different areas. Now, AppDynamics has partnered with IBM to provide transaction visibility into the mainframe subsystems using the IBM z APM Connect product offering. 

The integration extends the visibility of AppDynamics Map iQ and Diagnostic iQ into mainframe subsystems, such as MQ, CICS, IMS DB, and DB2, allowing for faster problem identification. Data sharing facilitates collaboration between siloed groups and enables operations, developers, and DevOps teams to understand Mainframe dependencies and performance. 

Note: The Mainframe Agent will consume 1-5 C++ SDK instances in the Controller. As this requires a purchase of AppDynamics licenses, this will already be covered.

The Mainframe licensing requires the use of 1 AppDynamics Pro license for every 16 Value Units of Mainframe capacity in addition to the IBM license requirements for the IBM z APM Connect product.

Mainframe Technology Support

1. CICS via HTTP calls
2. CICS
3. CICS to CICS transactions
4. MQ
   • AppDynamics can detect backend calls made from any language agent to IBM MQ running on z/OS for either JMS or Native MQ applications (Native MQ may need additional configuration).
   • JMS rules or Custom Correlation for non-JMS MQ messages are required for correlation.
   • NOTE: The addition of a correlation token in the message, while done to MQ specification, may cause issues for applications not expecting additional information to be contained in the MQ message.
5. CICS to IMS DB
6. CICS to DB2

As shown in this diagram:

Getting Started

Requirements include a z/OS Mainframe, AppDynamics and a gateway box.

 

Customers interested in the new feature can contact AppDynamics (email: techpartners @ appdynamics.com).

Learn More

• IBM z APM Connect Main Page 
• IBM discussion forum - IBM z APM Connect
• IBM z APM Connect Product Documentation

[Thomas.Taylor]

Hi, can you point me to where I might find the hardware requirements for the Transaction Gateway server?

Also can this component reside on the Controller server? 

Thank you,

Tom

[Jonah.Kowall]

Hello, Tom. You can find the full documentation here: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSYHZ9_5.5.0/com.ibm.omegamon_apm.doc/overview/zapm_o... to answer your question we don't really have any requirements for that system since it's not a system doing a lot of work. It can be installed on any Intel Linux system really. We had some preliminary hardware requirements, but during load testing, we found it needed far fewer resources. I will check with the product team just to verify this. 

[Jonah.Kowall]

We now support additional subsystems with this including IMS, VSAM, and outgoing WebSphere.