Created:  | Updated: 

IronTap application.conf

The following module configurations can be customized, otherwise the default values will apply.

Property prefix: irontap.apm.instana.

Property

Description

Default Value

tracing.db2.trace-delimiter

A single ASCII character (except "0-9" and "a-f", "A-F") used to separate the trace information.

|

ASCII code 124 (vertical-bar, pipe)

Metrics overview

click on the image to enlarge

Screenshot of IronTap Metrics in Instana

z/IRIS IronTap metrics are visible in the Instana UI. Open the z/IRIS IronTap JVM Dashboard and scroll down towards the Micrometer Custom Metrics.

Metric

Description

irontap.apm.instana.events.sent

Events that were successfully sent to the Instana Agent.


irontap.apm.instana.spans.sent

Spans that were successfully sent to the Instana Agent.

irontap.apm.instana.spans.enqued

Spans ready to be sent to the Instana Agent.

irontap.apm.instana.spans.dropped

Dropped Instana Spans. Spans might drop when the Instana Agent is not available and the internal queue is full.

irontap.apm.instana.record.invalid-type

Records that aren't supported by your current setup.


irontap.smf.xxx

Number of records processed for each enabled SMF record type.

Debugging

Activating debug features may impact the performance of z/IRIS and the delivery of spans into the Instana backend.

Span Dumps

Enabled Span Dumps by setting a non-empty path string for the irontap.apm.instana.instanaSpanDumpDirectoryPath property. IronTap will write all spans into the specified directory. Multiple spans may join into a JSON array in one file.

JSON file name example

2019-05-07T14.40.29.955+02.00-204.json

Each file name consists of a timestamp (when IronTap sent this span to the agent) followed by a dash ('-') and the agent HTTP response code or the string "connection-error" for an unsuccessful agent connection.

Instana designated z/OS in-memory resources

z/IRIS z/OS clients will automatically discover and connect to IBM z/OS in-memory resources, where names match the following pattern:

  • **.INSTANA.**

Instana designated resources do not need to be specified in the ziris.comm.config file and will be automatically connected.

Example of an Insana designated In-memory resource
IFASMF.IFA.INSTANA.INMEM.DB2
TEXT

Considerations 

  • z/IRIS IronTap must have access to an Instana agent to send spans to the Instana APM backend.

  • Mainframe-inclusive tracing requires the client application on distributed infrastructure to be fully instrumented by Instana agents. This ensures that Instana trace-ids are populated within the meta-data of client application calls, ensuring mainframe related spans, processed by z/IRIS, are appended to the correct application traces within the Instana backend.