Written by Rudiger Schulze, Senior Technical Staff Member, Observability and OpenTelemetry for IBM Z and LinuxONE
We are excited to annouce the recently established Special Interest Group (SIG) OpenTelemetry on Mainframe of the OpenTelemetry project. The SIG is focused on enabling OpenTelemetry on the Mainframe for an improved end-to-end observability. The Open Mainframe Project and the OpenTelemetry project have closely worked together to shape the focus of the new SIG, and we have plans to intensify the collaboration further to drive the outcomes of the SIG.
What is OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is a vendor-agnostic, open-source framework for observability, hosted as an incubating project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Observability is one of the strategic technologies that will allow organizations to operate more efficiently and reliably. Observability provides insight into today’s complex distributed applications and is not only central to the operations of applications in production environments but has become a best practice to be engineered into applications ealier in the development cycle.
The OpenTelemetry project gave itself the mission to enable an effective observability by making high-quality, portable telemetry flexibly available, so that organizations are enabled with an accelerated analysis and faster response to incidents. The OpenTelemetry project provides APIs, SDKs and the technology to extract signals (traces, metrics, logs, etc.) from any sources, to process and send them to any destinations of choice for processing.
Why is OpenTelemetry important?
OpenTelemetry is the second most active project of the CNCF after Kubernetes. A continuiously growing ecosystem of vendors is adopting OpenTelemetry. All major Observability and APM vendors as well as public cloud providers released OpenTelemetry integrations with their products. Various start-ups entered the market with a strong value proposition built on innovative approaches and OpenTelemetry for a simplified observability. Most of the vendors that adopt OpenTelemetry made contributions to the community as well to support the growing of the ecosystem.
With OpenTelemetry enabled, the mainframe will export telemetry in an open-standard format, making it easier to observe the mainframe and integrating it into end-to-end observability solutions.
How do we want to deliver?
In the SIG OpenTelemetry on Mainframe, our focus is on the implementation of three topics to simplify the export and consumption of telemetry generated on the mainframe:
- Semantic Conventions: In this track, we map the mainframe concepts on the OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions.
- Code Instrumentation: The focus of this track is on developing code instrumentation for mainframe-specific programming languages, such as COBOL and PL/1, and on porting existing code instrumentation to the mainframe.
- Collector Enhancements: This track is focused on porting the OpenTelemetry Collector to the mainframe, maintaining the port and extending it to capture mainframe-specific telemetry.
How to contribute?
There are many ways to contribute to the OpenTelemetry project, and many ways to contribute to the SIG OpenTelemetry on Mainframe:
- We welcome long-time mainframers, returnees and those who are new to the platform and want to learn about mainframe technology.
- We look for contributors that want to enable OpenTelemetry as an open-source technology on the mainframe.
- We look for participation from mainframe experts of all kinds: observability and monitoring experts, performance experts, virtualization experts, architects, and users of observability solutions for the mainframe. We also encourage those who want to extend, simplify, and improve their current observability solution to the mainframe to join.
- We welcome developers working with Assembler, COBOL, PL/1, and REXX, and engineers willing to contribute with the instrumentation for mainframe-specific programming languages.
- We invite everybody to join who is passionate about the mainframe.
If you plan to contribute to the SIG, please get the required approval from your organization to contribute OpenTelemetry as a CNCF project under the CNCF Contribution License Agreement (EasyCLA). Once you have it in place, please:
- Join the SIG meeting on Tuesdays, 10:00 am PT
- Join the Slack channel #otel-mainframes
SIG Meeting at Share Orlando 2024
If you’re at Share Orlando 2024, we will have an in-person meeting of the SIG contributors in Salon 23, from 2 to 3 pm on Tuesday, March 5th, 2024. Please watch the Slack channel #otel-mainframes for further announcements.
