Big Blue Boosts IBM i Support In Instana, Adds Tracing
October 6, 2025 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that need more insight into how their hardware and software is running may want to consider IBM’s Instana software. IBM has been investing in the observability tool, which was recently updated to support traces on IBM i systems. That’s one of several upgrades IBM has made to Instana to help its IBM i customers.
IBM acquired Instana back in November 2020 to bolster its presence in the nascent observability arena, particularly as it related to monitoring cloud-native environments (i.e., those using Kubernetes and microservices). Big Blue had just spent $34 billion to buy Red Hat and its OpenShift product line and customer base (which was tiny) the previous year, and since the Kubernetes abstraction layer has a tendency to break traditional monitoring, it needed a modern tool to cut through the clutter and tell customers what they needed to know.
Since the acquisition, IBM has sculpted the Instana product into a full-blown observability solution that not only monitors a range of applications, not just those running in cloud-native environments. That includes apps those running on its big iron platforms, such as IBM i.
We wrote about what Instana brought to IBM i environments back in 2022. Three years ago, Instana was able to collect and display a hundred or so events and metrics from the IBM i environment, including things like CPU usage, active jobs, ASP usage, message queues, spool usage, etc. It could also check display metrics from the Db2 for i database, like the number of active queries, database reads, database writes, and SQL plan cache info.
But there have been some changes to the IBM i support in Instana over the past few years. The biggest change is the delivery of a native IBM i agent.
Up until recently, Instana supported IBM i via remote monitoring, which meant the Instana software ran on a separate Linux or Windows instance that then pulled data from IBM i. That has changed, and today Instana features a native agent that runs directly on IBM i.
Having a native agent brings some advantages, one of them being the development of automated tracing capabilities on IBM i. Tracing is the toughest of the three types of observability data to do and do well (the other types being logs and metrics), since it’s interactive and investigative by nature. That, ostensibly, is why IBM needed a native agent running directly on the IBM i system to pull it off.
In a recent IBM i Guided Tour, software engineer Brock Shamblin explained the significance of having IBM i tracing in the Instana product.
“With this, IBM i will no longer be a black box in your application stack,” the Rochester Lab employee said. “So if you’re monitoring an application and it goes into IBM i, a lot of times that kind of ends it right there. We’re not able to see what happens beyond downstream of the IBM i system and what happens on the IBM i system. But now with Instana we’re able to trace these transactions through IBM i and downstream through the IBM i to complete the full transaction.”
There are some caveats to Instana’s tracing support on IBM i. For starters, it’s just supporting the JDBC protocol and Java products for now. That means it’s able to trace problems occurring in WebSphere, Liberty, and IWS. It also supports Node.js environments, Shamblin said. However, he indicated that tracing support will be expanding. It will be interesting to see if IBM adds support for ILE languages or will stick with newer languages that use the PASE runtime, like PHP and Python.
Another IBM i feature that IBM has added to Instana is support for the audit journal. Events like authority changes and authority failures will now generate an alert within Instana, which could kick off a range of responses. Look for IBM to bolster the IBM i security capabilities of Instana in the near future.
“We’re also adding support for password events, so incorrect passwords or incorrect users, as well as other audit journal entries are coming soon,” Shamblin said in the IBM i Guided Tour. “This is one of the places that we’ve gotten a lot of requests for.”
Instana can take automated actions in response to observability events, potentially preventing the need to notify a human. Users are able to define responses to automated events, which could be scripts or Ansible playbooks, through Instana’s “action catalog,” Shamblin said.
IBM has also built watsonX AI into Instana, where it monitors what’s going on and suggests responses. “It will . . . automatically recognize your actions based on the event and the event text,” Shamblin said. “ It will go through your automation policies and your action catalog and see which ones it thinks are most relevant.” In most cases, the AI will be generating documentation for the SRE team, he said. But it can also be used to generate automated scripts.
“These actions can happen automatically,” he added. “You can set these to run automatically. So when a given event shows up, automatically run this script and it should resolve the event without any intervention from you or your team.”
Automation is a big part of the Instana value proposition. Configuration is also done automatically. When you load the IBM i agent, it will automatically configure itself and detect all of the supported sources for logs, metrics, and traces. However, Instana does support a way to develop custom metrics, utilizing Prometheus. This capability involves configuring a JSON file that defines what SQL queries you would like to collect, and Instana will put the data into the dashboard, as well as the automated response system.
Instana also supports custom events, as well as more complex event types on IBM i. For example, one can configure Instana to send an alert when CPU levels exceed a certain threshold. An example of a more complex event is when a job that is supposed to be running is not running, or if it’s running in the wrong status. In these cases, Instana can be configured to generate an alert. Similar events can be set up to alert for unexpected conditions in IBM i jobs, subsystems, and other components, Shamblin said.
Other IBM i-specific monitoring capabilities of Instana include network activity and license management. IBM gave customers the capability to see what licenses customers have, when they’re going to expire, and PTF and Group PTF information directly in Instana.
You can watch the full IBM i Guided Tour on Instana’s latest IBM i capabilities here. For more info on Instana IBM i sensors, click here.
