Did you say mainframe? - OMEGAMON Monitoring for JVM

Speaker: Chris Walker

Host: Nick Garrod

Nick Hi, this is Nick Garrod welcoming you to another podcast in the "Did you say MainFrame"

podcast series. This is where we talk to experts from the hardware and the software side of

the mainframe business to speak about topics relating to the mainframe. Today we are lucky

enough to be joined by Chris Walker who is the offering manager for the Omegamon

products, so Chris thank you for joining us today

Chris Hi Nick, thanks for having me on...I'd like to talk about OMEGAMON Monitoring for

JVM today. This is a brand new OMEGAMON offering, we released for the first time this

year focused on resource level monitoring of JVMs on z/OS, including CICS JVM servers.

Nick So as a listener to this podcast, what is this JVM monitor and why should I care - what is

the benefit to me?

Chris It's probably a good time to recognise how much Java is running on a typical z System

these days, Java technology can be found in WAS, IMS, DB2, CICS of course, Operational

Decision Manager (ODM), standalone batch JZOS application, new technologies like

Apache Spark and any application running with Liberty profile at it's core, like z/OS

Connect or zOSMF. In fact, one of the nice features of OMEG/JVM is the auto-discovery

of all the Java you have out there. Just deploy the agent onto an LPAR and it should find the

name and ASID of the address space hosting a JVM plus the level of Java and the type of

the subsystem. That's excellent visibility for very little effort for all the Java you have out

there.

Nick So, I know what Java I have out there and I've configured it for monitoring, what can I see?

Chris In this initial release we focused on the key metrics which several clients told us would help

them understand the health and performance of the JVM. An example of this is the Garbage

Collection (GC) details. Clients want to know if delays are being caused by regular freeing

of memory through GCs either because of a poorly written application or insufficient heap

allocation. That slows up the entire process of running the JVM, so from a single

workspace you can understand if you might have a memory leak in your application by

viewing the changes in heap utilisation - the amount of used space on the heap after a GC,

rather than being surprised by it when the JVM's memory is exhausted, you get an out of

memory error and it abends.

Another example is thread and lock data. Clients want to know what threads are doing

within the JVM - are they blocked, if so by whom and what was it running, rather than

running blind. The Thread Details view provides this so you can be alerted to these event

and observe the stack trace of the problematic thread which could point you to the code that

may be the root cause. Same goes for locks where you may have a synchronized block of

code that may be held for long periods causing other threads to wait and spin, obviously

causing a bottleneck in the system.

Nick This sounds really helpful Chris, is there anything else OMEGAMON for JVM provides

that our listeners should be aware of?

Chris Earlier in the podcast I mentioned zIIP offloading. Clients want reduce costs, reduce MIPS

and ensure they make full use of zIIP processors for Java-based workloads. OMEG/JVM

will show the CPU utilization of the address space, how much was run on a zIIP processor

if available, and importantly, how much of zIIP-eligible work actually ran on a general

processor contributing to your MIPS costs. This is a quick and easy way to see if you have

insufficient capacity for zIIP offloading rather than just assuming you do.

Nick So really, that then is a great opportunity for people who assume just because they have

everything switched on that it's all going through but this will actually monitor and tell you.

So this will acually tell you that you might have it on but you might not have enough

resources there to use it so what you assume is getting offloaded and been charged at a

cheaper rate actually isn't happening, is that correct?

Chris Absolutely, that is exactly the scenario. It's a real help for customers.

Nick And as it's an OMEGAMON product, it must l have a similar look and feel to other

OMEGAMON products, so a similar experience for the user?

Chris Right, workspaces are provided for the Tivoli Enterprise Portal GUI and the enhanced

3270UI so there is close integration with all other OMEGs. As with other OMEGs. They

are out-of-the-box situations or alerts that can inform you of problem conditions, so if you

want to check the zIIP offload CPU, you can have a situation against that and trigger that.

And you can also customise these situations to your own environments. Plus data can be set

to collect over time so you can view historical snapshots of data which assists in

determining root cause problems.

Nick I'm sure people are getting excited and interested in finding out more, so when is it

available and how can I get it?

Chris It's available today. If you have one of the three monitoring or management suites that IBM

provide - Service Management Suite, OMEGAMON Performance Management Suite, or

OMEGAMON z/OS Management Suite, you are entitled to this agent already. If you don't

have an OMEGAMON suite, this initial release is available as a priced feature of the

OMEG/zOS product

Nick Chris, where could someone find out more about this if they are interested?

Chris So, the easiest way to find out more about it, is to visit the product home page, we have a

URL that is easy to remember: ibm.com/omegamon. We also have a section on

developerWorks called Service Management Connect which is focused on IT service

management. If you do a search on that and find the SMC area, you'll find blog posts for

z/OS systems and you'll see a list of posts on how to use the new JVM monitor. Also short

videos on the introduction and the function available. We're always updating that and

adding new blog posts regularly.

Nick Okay, thanks Chris. That's a great taster and summary for the new product. I know there is

huge adoption for running Java on the Mainframe, so having something that will monitor

and that will enable us to tune is an obvious choice. So thank you for joining us today.

Chris No problem Nick, thank you for having me.

Nick So that about raps it up for this podcast, for more details please go to ibm.biz/ibmdysm.

Join us again for another interesting topic relating to the Mainframe, for now this is Nick

Garrod saying thank you for listening.

Useful URLs related to this podcast

ibm.com/omegamon