Dynatrace Includes IBM i In Its Observability Bubble

February 14, 2024 Alex Woodie

If you’re looking for an observability tool that supports IBM i, you might want to consider Dynatrace. At first blush, you might suspect the application performance management (APM) experts at Dynatrace have better things to do than to support a proprietary midrange server used viewed as niche by the computing public. But in fact, Dynatrace appears to have devoted substantial resources to supporting the IBM i platform.

Dynatrace is best known for providing enterprise-level APM tools that track down performance issues in complex, multi-tiered applications that involve multiple operating systems, hypervisors, databases, application servers, and sundry other enterprise computing kit. The company traces its roots back to 2005, when three associates founded dynaTrace Software GmbH in Linz, Austria. After being acquired by Compuware in 2011 and then taken private by Thoma Bravo in 2014, the Compuware APM division was spun out into its own company, which finally went public in 2019.

Today the company pulls in about $1.2 billion, thanks to a solid reputation for handling the holy trinity of observability data – logs, metrics, and traces – for thousands of the largest enterprises in the world, including Porsche, SAP, and Air Canada. It regularly is among the leaders in APM, AIOps, and observability reviews by analyst groups like Gartner, Forrester, GigaOm, G2, and Constellation Research.

Dynatrace collects and displays observability data from IBM i among other platforms.

Dynatrace might not be the first vendor you think of when it comes to collecting and parsing logs, metrics, and event data coming off the IBM i, but that’s likely due to marketing and awareness issues, not APM capability in the Dynatrace product itself. In fact, the company has been collecting data from IBM i since 2019, when it originally announced support for the platform.

According to then-Dynatrace product manager Obinna Nwokolo (who has since moved on to Microsoft), the company developed an IBM i agent using its ActiveGate framework. ActiveGate enables extensions to be built to “any remote technology exposes an interface,” particularly platforms for which Dynatrace doesn’t support via its all-inclusive OneAgent agents.

“The IBM i extension remotely queries your hosts every minute and retrieves key performance metrics, properties, and events,” Nwokolo wrote in the 2019 blob. “These data points are continuously analyzed by Davis, the Dynatrace AI causation engine, in order to determine if your IBM i host is the root cause of an ongoing degradation within your technology stack.”

The ActiveGate extension pulls all the standard metric data off the IBM i, such as total and interactive CPU utilization, total and active jobs, and ASP disk used. It tracks memory page faults and fault rate, read and write operations, and monitors job and message queues. By default, it’s set to poll the IBM i every 15 minutes, and send the data back to Dynatrace, where it can be incorporated into graphs and reports for real time analysis, or stored for future analysis and troubleshooting.

When it debuted the ActiveGate extension for the midrange platform, it supported IBM i 7.2. Today, the minimum operating system level supported is IBM i 7.3. The company encourages customers to keep their IBM i operating system current, as “IBM has made significant performance improvements and introduced more accurate metrics in their latest Technology Refresh levels,” the company says in its IBM i documentation.

While there are undoubtedly less expensive IBM i observability tools, or observability tools that offer more platform-specific functionality for IBM i, it’s good to know that major observability tool vendors like Dynatrace are devoting resources to supporting this platform. It might not be the right tool for IBM i shops that don’t have complex IT systems that require advanced analytics to troubleshoot performance issues. But if you work at an IBM i shop that do have those requirements, Dynatrace is a name you might want to keep on your list.

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