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.
Prerequisites
Before you can start working with Grafana dashboards through z/OSMF, there are some prerequisites that you need to complete.
Defining the Grafana server
You must define the Grafana server as a target system in z/OSMF to access Grafana from the Resource Monitoring page of z/OSMF.
Accessing the Grafana dashboard
You can access the Grafana dashboard from the Resource Monitoring page of z/OSMF to investigate the RMF Monitor III metrics and reports.
PDF Guide
You can find the link to view or download IBM RMF for z/OS Grafana plugin user guide as a PDF file.