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Watch z/IRIS streams mainframe OpenTelemetry signals to Datadog.

OOTB WatchTower Dashboards to visualize the health of z/OS systems.

OOTB WatchTower CPU Monitor to increase mainframe system reliability.

Embedded error and exception documentation for faster MTTR.

Overview

Broadcom’s WatchTower platform provides a comprehensive picture of mainframe health and performance. With its integrated real-time information streaming (z/IRIS), teams can anticipate failures based on past patterns, prevent small issues from becoming outages, and proactively manage z/OS operations.

This WatchTower z/IRIS integration collects metrics, logs, and traces via OpenTelemetry, and includes out-of-the-box content for seamless observability in Datadog:

• Monitor z/OS systems and applications using WatchTower’s curated and customizable dashboards.
• Enable alerts on resource contention and application anomalies with WatchTower’s recommended mainframe monitors.
• Enrich mainframe logs using the included log pipeline for easier analysis and correlation.

Setup

Prerequisite

Verify that WatchTower z/IRIS is installed and running. Refer to the WatchTower z/IRIS Installation documentation on the TechDocs Portal for more information about installing z/IRIS in your environment.

Installation

1. Configure the OpenTelemetry Collector

   • Configure the OTLP receiver

   WatchTower z/IRIS can export telemetry over HTTP or gRPC. Refer to the z/IRIS IronTap configuration to verify the appropriate receiver is configured.

   • Enable OTLP logs ingestion
   • Add a Transform Processor to set the source of OTLP logs from z/IRIS

     transform/datadog: 
      log_statements:
        - context: log
          statements:
            # set resource attribute if the instrumentation_scope name matches
            - set(resource.attributes["datadog.log.source"], "ziris") where scope.name == "com.broadcom.ziris.irontap"
   

   Add a transformation to prefix all metrics streamed from z/IRIS with ziris.:

       metric_statements:
        - context: metric
          statements:
            # Concat "ziris" and the current metric name with a "." separator
            - set(name, Concat(["ziris", name], ".")) where scope.name == "com.broadcom.ziris.irontap"
   

2. Configure the Datadog Exporter and Connector

   Follow Datadog’s documentation to add the Datadog exporter to your collector configuration and provide your API key. Add the processors transform/datadog to the z/IRIS pipelines exporting signals to your Datadog tenant.

3. Launch the collector and verify in Datadog that the renamed metrics (ziris.*) are appearing in the Metrics Explorer and verify that mainframe traces and spans are streaming.

4. In Datadog, open the WatchTower z/IRIS integration tile and click Install.

   Dashboards will be cloned into your organization, and the monitors will be available on the Monitor Templates page.

5. In Datadog, open Log explorer and verify that the z/IRIS custom group facets is available for filtering.

Data Collected

Metrics

Uninstallation

1. Stop the OpenTelemetry Collector or disable the Datadog Exporter.
2. In Datadog, open the WatchTower z/IRIS integration tile and click Uninstall.

Support

Need help? Contact Broadcom by visiting support.broadcom.com and creating a support case for WatchTower z/IRIS.