How do I use AppDynamics and IBM Z APM Connect to see what's going on inside the mainframe?

Claudia.Landivar · ‎12-22-2021

IBM Z APM Connect enables AppDynamics to track detailed transactions between individual z/OS subsystems

This article provides an overview of how AppDynamics works with IBM zAPM Connect to provide mainframe visibility

Overview

As today's enterprise companies continue to innovate on top of existing technology stacks, they require improvement and visibility into legacy systems such as the mainframe. Absolutely vital to business, mainframe application workloads see significant increases from rising transaction volumes and new applications. Their resources are often under pressure.

Professionals 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. Those teams need to manage this complexity—including operational silos and related communication and procedural pitfalls.

When facing a problem, how can IT Ops teams manage the process and reduce MTTR?

AppDynamics has partnered with IBM to provide transaction visibility into the mainframe subsystems using IBM’s z APM Connect.

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. Z APM Connect needs to be licensed, but so does AppDynamics. Each CICS/IMS/ z/OS instance requires an APM Any license in AppDynamics.

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

z/OS subsystems to monitor
Monitor CICs subsystems	Track IBM MQ to CICS transactions NOTE \| Non-MSQ JMS messages might require additional configurations on the Distributed app and/or MQ queues
	Track CICS TG to CICS transactions
	Track z/OS Connect EE to CICS transactions
Monitor IMS region and IMS Connect	Track transactions entering IMS Connect through a user-written IMS Connect client
	Track transactions entering IMS Connect through an IMS Connect TM resource adapter
	Track z/OS Connect EE to IMS transactions
	Track IBM MQ to IMS transactions

The following diagram shows all supported flows:

Getting Started

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

IBM Z Connect Architecture - v2 (2).png

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

Learn More

Thomas.Taylor · ‎10-04-2018

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 · ‎10-06-2018

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 · ‎10-06-2018

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

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