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Historical data
In Grafana, you can view historical data using absolute and relative time ranges.

Overview
Grafana is a platform for monitoring and visualizing data. It enables users to create, explore, and share dashboards that are interactive and customizable. The IBM® RMF for z/OS Grafana plugin provides effortless analysis and visualization of Resource Measurement Facility for z/OS (RMF for z/OS) Monitor III metrics and reports within the Grafana platform. Thereby, you can monitor and analyze the health and performance of applications.
Release notes
This article covers the new features, system requirements, and known issues of the IBM® RMF for z/OS Grafana plugin.
Installing the plugin
You must install the IBM® RMF for z/OS Grafana plugin to analyze and visualize RMF Monitor III metrics and reports.
Upgrading the plugin
You must ensure that the IBM RMF for z/OS Grafana plugin is up to date to leverage its enhanced functionalities. You can do so by either installing or upgrading to the latest version of the plugin.
Creating RMF data sources
To access RMF Monitor III metrics in Grafana, you need to connect to the Distributed Data Servers by adding an RMF data source.
RMF master dashboard
IBM® RMF for z/OS Grafana is a plugin provides custom panels for the RMF data source and master dashboard that consists of RMF Charts, RMF Reporting, and RMF Time Series dashboards.
Applying visualization to RMF data
By adding panels to dashboards, you can effectively present your RMF data in a visual format. Each panel must require at least one query to display a significant visualization.
IBM RMF query languages
In Grafana, queries are essential for fetching and transforming data from RMF data sources.
RMF Variable Query syntax
Variables are a powerful tool to create more interactive and dynamic dashboards. They offer a way to replace hard-coded values in metric queries and panel titles with placeholders for values.
Alerts
Grafana Alerting feature provides a reliable solution to detect and respond to system issues in real time.
Historical data
In Grafana, you can view historical data using absolute and relative time ranges.
Error types
Whenever you encounter issues while using the IBM RMF for z/OS Grafana plugin, you can view detailed error messages that contain sufficient information to help you identify and troubleshoot the problem.
Troubleshooting issues
This section guides how to analyze and address typical issues that may arise when using the IBM® RMF for z/OS Grafana plugin.
Grafana through z/OSMF
When you use IBM® z/OS Management Facility to monitor the performance of the z/OS sysplexes in your environment, you can also access Grafana dashboards from z/OSMF.
PDF Guide
You can find the link to view or download IBM RMF for z/OS Grafana plugin user guide as a PDF file.

Historical data collection

In Grafana, you can view historical data using absolute and relative time ranges.

Viewing historical data is a common practice across organizations for various purposes. The importance and use of historical data are significant in decision-making, research, analysis, and planning. Analyzing historical data provides valuable insights into the status, usage, performance, and health of various resources.

You can also access cached metric data for queries, data sources, and timestamp combinations that have already viewed by other user on Grafana. This means that if any user requests metrics data for the same query, datasource, and timestamp, the cached data can be displayed faster than a service call from DDS. If data for a particular timestamp is not found in the cache, it will be fetched by a service call from DDS. This feature can save you time and provide a faster experience accessing metric data.

CAUTION: When you view data over extended time ranges, the system may require considerable CPU resources on the host.

The following example shows the percentage of time during the report interval that the system job or enclave was waiting for a processor by specifying absolute time:

Similarly, you can collect the data for the percentage of time delay for a processor by specifying the relative time range: