Written by Krishi Jain (DJ Sanghvi College of Engineering), Open Mainframe Project 2024 Summer Mentee
Greetings viewers! I’m Krishi Jain, a CS undergrad and musician from Mumbai, India. I’ll do my best to keep this as interesting as I can! I’d love to start by saying that I’ve had a wonderful experience so far under the Open Mainframe Project’s mentorship with LFX.
The most wonderful thing about this mentorship is that I’ve had the invaluable opportunity to be actively working and interacting with mentors who have had over 35 years of experience under their belt. The coolest part is that all of my mentors are as hungry to learn about new technologies and practices as I am which makes the work I do with them as a team a 100 times more interesting and enjoyable.
Speaking of the project and my journey so far, I started my work early on, on the 28th of May; a week after I received my acceptance letter from the Open Mainframe Project thanks to my primary mentor Joe, who was kind enough to set up the entire project development environment for me to get started and made sure I got my hands on all the resources I needed to get comfortable with understanding my project which is “Open Mainframe Project – Zebra Plugin for Hitachi Mainframe Storage”. Being completely new to the mainframe world, Joe helped me get a huge head start with understanding the “whys” and “hows” of what we were to work on. He gave me exposure to production data and systems and how mainframe performance analytics was done at Hitachi Vantara as well as IBM. Project ZEBRA under ZOWE is the first of its kind in the open source world which is a parsing engine for raw RMF data that converts raw RMF XML data into JSON which can then easily be used by third-party softwares for mainframe performance analytics. ZEBRA offers performance analytics in a very useful way where it uses Prometheus/MongoDB as a time series database and then routes that data to Grafana to visualize performance metrics.
My project is to create a plugin for Hitachi Vantara’s HMAI data where ZEBRA can gather HMAI metric data and offer similar performance analysis for it as it does for RMF data on-prem. With the help of Joe and one of my secondary mentors, Fernando Zangari, I was able to create the prototype of this plugin within just 2 weeks of good work. Fernando has been super patient and amazing to work with and with that, I’m happy to mention that I will have the plugin ready for production use by the 1st of August which is almost a month before the cohort’s end. I’m using MySQL as the on-prem database for HMAI data where the data can be fed to Grafana directly through the user’s MySQL database. This also opens doors for adding an archiving feature for data in ZEBRA. While working on this plugin, I also figured out a way to store RMF data on-prem using PostgreSQL. With this system, users can now visualize as well as archive their RMF or HMAI data. The reason this is good is because the current MongoDB storage setup relies on a workaround third party plugin to feed data to Grafana because Grafana requires an enterprise license for MongoDB support. With PostgreSQL, the system is faster and 100% in-house with an added feature of archiving months worth of data on-prem with added automated customisations as to what data they want to keep and for how long. Bundling a few standard grafana analytics dashboards would make ZEBRA simply plug and play for users making it even more appealing.
Although my expected outcome was to simply create the HMAI plugin, I’m happy to be working on all the above features mentioned and make ZEBRA an even more amazing open-source product. I’d love to thank Salisu Ali, one of the creators of ZEBRA, to have initially helped me understand the project and guide me before I was accepted. My Secondary Mentors ,Vincent Terrone and Len Santalucia have been of great support throughout the project, always encouraging my work and positively reinforcing my efforts. Special mentions to Yarille Ortiz, Tom Slanda and Maemalynn Meanor for their encouragement and making sure mentees like myself are comfortable and have the smoothest experience as part of this wonderful mentorship cohort!
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