Session Evaluation

Mainframes remain critical for powering essential business applications. However, understanding how transactions flow and components communicate can be challenging. This session provides an overview of typical mainframe architectures, walking through common transaction flows within z/OS. We’ll examine the interactions between subsystems like CICS, IMS, and associated components, explaining how they work together to ensure speed, reliability, and scalability. You'll gain insights into the movement of data through message queues, network pathways, and attachment facilities. Whether you’re an architect, developer, or operations professional, this session will solidify your foundational understanding of mainframe connectivity and transaction processing, providing a practical basis for improved system management.

Session Evaluation

Many modern organizations are implementing enterprise-wide observability solutions to gain end-to-end visibility across all their systems, and IBM Z plays a crucial role in many of those environments. OpenTelemetry offers a vendor-neutral, open-source framework to simplify the collection and management of telemetry data (traces, metrics, and logs) from diverse environments. This session will show you how OpenTelemetry bridges the gap, providing visibility into transaction flows spanning critical z/OS components such as MQ, CICS, IMS, and Db2. We’ll demonstrate how instrumenting these applications generates standardized OpenTelemetry data, allowing seamless integration with your existing enterprise observability platform. You’ll learn practical steps to enable OpenTelemetry on z/OS and discover how to leverage this data to improve incident detection and accelerate troubleshooting.