ZEBRA is an open source incubation project for Zowe that started as an Open Mainframe Project Mentorship, but is now growing with users and part time contributors and volunteers. ZEBRA, which stands for Zowe Embedded Browser for RMF and APIs, is a data parsing framework that allows quick and easy access to z/OS performance metrics.
ZEBRA enables z/OS system users to monitor system health and current utilizations without heavy monitoring tools on z/OS. It exploits many open-source SW ecosystem and enables to connect with other system performance data to cross examine the larger application as well as system status.
The main goal of this project is to provide reusable and industry-compliant RMF data in JSON format. The benefit of using JSON is that it is a modern standard that is very attractive to developers. Because of this, there are many applications and use cases for third-party analysis and visualization tools to harvest ZEBRA’s metrics.
At Open Mainframe Summit, which took place on September 21-22, 2022 virtually and in-person in Philadelphia, PA, Alex Kim, Open Source Incubator Advocate at IBM and Fernando Zangari, Senior Consultant at Kyndryl, gave a presentation titled, “Real ZEBRA Use Cases in Large Production Systems.”
In this video, Alex presents a quick overview of ZEBRA and Fernando shares a live graphic dashboard for real customer use cases and how it is being uses in real production workloads. Specifically, the demo showcases use cases of ZEBRA running on Kyndryl’s production systems.
If you missed Open Mainframe Summit, you can find the presentation here.
To learn more about ZEBRA, click here. To join the ZEBRA community and speak with other contributors, connect with theOpen Mainframe Project Slack Channel #zowe-zebra. If this is your first time using the Open Mainframe Project Slack, register here.
