IBM Unveils Manzan, A New Open Source Event Monitor For IBM i
May 5, 2025 Alex Woodie
IBM developers have created a new open source event monitor for IBM i. Dubbed Manzan, the project, which was spearheaded by IBM i open source guru Jesse Gorzinski, promises to provide a versatile way to ingest and redistribute a variety of IBM i event data types to downstream tools, thereby consolidating event monitoring for a wide range of use cases behind a single pane of glass.
There are no shortages of ways that users can monitor what is going on in their IBM i server. There are job logs to look at, message queues to inspect, and even stream files to interrogate. Each of these locations can house event data that’s critical to ensuring that the system is running as expected, that reliability is not being compromised, and that proper security is being maintained.
There’s also no shortage of tools and techniques for getting to this event data. Users can work with the various CL commands, APIs, and SQL-based services that IBM provides with the operating system. Or they can also use Navigator to get to this data. They can also use a variety of open source frameworks and third-party products to access, manage, and analyze this data for specific performance, reliability, and security use cases.
In fact, there are so many places where IBM i event data might be hiding and so many ways to work with it and analyze it that it can become a bit of a problem for those trying to use it, according to Gorzinski, whose official title is now business architect for AI solutions for IBM i.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if a single tool provided visibility into all these events?” write Gorzinski and IBM software developer Sanjula Ganepola in an April TechChannel story that apparently serves as IBM’s official announcement. “That’s where Manzan comes in.”
At its core, Manzan serves as a gateway for publishing IBM i events to a variety of endpoints, including user applications, external resources, and other open source technologies, according to the description of Manzan on Gorzinki’s personal GitHub site.
Manzan is a new open source event monitoring tool for IBM i. (Image source: Manzan project)
As a gateway, Manzan’s architecture recognizes two core components: inputs and outputs. Inputs could be an entry a stream file, a message on a message queue, or a log entry. The outputs represent the places, or destinations, where users would like to route this data.
Manzan supports a handful of popular destinations out of the box, including HTTP/HTTPS endpoints via REST; email via SMTP/SMTPS; AWS Simple Email Service (SES); AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS); SMS via Twilio; Slack; FluentD; Sentry; Grafana Loki; Apache Kafka; Google Pub/Sub; ActiveMQ; Splunk; PagerDuty, Mezmo; and Elasticsearch.
“Manzan is the gateway that bridges your inputs and destinations,” Gorzinski and Ganepola write. “It itself consists of two core components: Handler and Distributor.”
The handler component of Manzan is what receives and handles inputs, the two write. It looks for events on system exit points or alternatively uses IBM’s system watch facility, which the authors say is “a powerful yet underutilized tool built into the IBM i.” By using the STRWCH command, the handler, which is defined using the “data.ini” file, calls a specified program when a certain event occurs. In addition to the system exit point, the handler looks for two types of log entries via the system watch facility: Licensed Internal Code (LIC) log entries and Product Activity Log (PAL) log entries.
The distributor component of Manzan looks for events that has been received by the Manzan handler component, which makes the event available on a table or a data queue, and then sends the data to any of the supported destinations. It also receives stream files directly; these events apparently can bypass the handler. The distributor component, which defined using a configuration file (dests.ini), is powered by Apache Camel, which Gorzinski called “the Swiss Army Knife of integration tools” during a 2020 IT Jungle interview.
Jesse Gorzinski is the IBM business architect for AI solutions for IBM i.
Manzan can be used to power a range of event monitoring actions. For instance, users can configure it to send an email when a certain event occurs, such as an unauthorized attempt to log-on to the IBM i, or sending a message to a Slack channel when an application writes a warning to its log file. Manzan allows users to “consolidate a multitude of event types behind a ‘single pane of glass,’” Gorzinski and Ganepola write.
There are also more advanced use cases for Manzan, such as pushing IBM i security data to a dashboard running on Grafana Loki or Sentry. “With this tool, any of these tasks could be configured in mere minutes!” the two write.
IBM released Manzan as a technology preview in March. It is unclear if there will be an official release to general availability for this tool. However, development work continues on this tool. According to Gorzinski and Ganepola, the Manzan team is looking to add more event destinations and more security features, such as audit journal and network exit point support (although that may have already happened, as audit journal types appear to be already supported according to the Manzan documentation). The group is also looking to support Prometheus, the open source logging and time-series database, as well as support for Google Drive and Microsoft Teams.
So where did the name Manzan come from? According to the official Manzan GitHub page, the tool “owes its name to a tranquil haven that brings solace to its creator, Jesse Gorzinski.”
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Alex, did AI write this article for you?
I’ve read the lede paragraph 5 or 6 times. I still don’t know what that (buzz)word salad means. “[A] wide range of use cases behind a single pane of glass”? Huh?
And why is the name of a configuration file (dests.ini) relevant to an overview article such as this one?
Not to mention gems such as “Manzan’s architecture recognizes two core components: inputs and outputs.” Um, yeah, a lot of things recognize inputs and outputs…