Written by Rudiger Schulze, Senior Technical Staff Member, Observability and OpenTelemetry for IBM Z and LinuxONE
The OpenTelemetry project and The Open Mainframe Project established the SIG “OpenTelemetry on Mainframe” at the beginning of 2024. Our focus is to enable OpenTelemetry on the Mainframe for an improved end-to-end observability and to support mainframe participation in hybrid cloud applications. Today, we launched a new survey that calls for your participation.
While there are many definitions of observability, we will refer here to the ability to receive actionable insight about the behavior of hybrid applications spanning across multiple landing zones such as public and private cloud and mainframe environments.
OpenTelemetry is a well-adopted open-source framework for observability that aims to make high quality telemetry data such as traces, metrics and logs available from any source to any target. OpenTelemetry remains the second most active project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The community of the OpenTelemetry project has made major efforts to provide specifications and implementations that unify the collection, processing and distribution of telemetry.
Given the breadth of the OpenTelemetry project and sophisticated capabilities of the mainframe, we as contributors to the SIG want to better understand the priorities for making the best use of OpenTelemetry on the mainframes. We seek feedback from a broad range of mainframe users and users of observability solutions, developers, site reliability engineers, application owners, architects, DevOps engineers and all other experts in the field.
The results of the survey will help us prioritize and implement targeted activities to accelerate the adoption of OpenTelemetry on the mainframe platform. Such activities could be the expedited porting of selected SDKs for code instrumentation to z/OS or the definition of Semantic Conventions for specific aspects of the platform. Once the survey is complete, we will publish the results and a prioritized list of activities on the websites of the OpenTelemetry project and The Open Mainframe Project.
The survey is structured in two sections. The first section gathers input about your role and background. The second section gathers the priorities of your organization for enabling OpenTelemetry on mainframes. Responding to the 20 questions will take approximately 15 minutes.
We appreciate your time spent on the survey and look forward to receiving your feedback!
Take the survey here! Learn more about Open Telemetry by joining the conversation on Slack here.
