Enhancing z/OS observability with z/OS OpenTelemetry Emitter

The z/OS® OpenTelemetry Emitter provides a native z/OS interface that generates and forwards OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) compliant distributed tracing data to OpenTelemetry collectors and observability backends. This enables CICS®, Db2®, IMS, MQ, and compatible vendor applications to fully participate in the observability ecosystem.

As shown in Figure 1, the z/OS OpenTelemetry Emitter is a standalone Java™ application that runs in its own address space. It reads SMF records containing encoded OTLP span information from SMF in-memory resources, transforms the data into an OTLP-compliant format, and sends the data out using OTLP/http or OTLP/gRPC to an endpoint.

For more information, see Setting up z/OS OpenTelemetry Emitter and z/OS OpenTelemetry Emitter in z/OS Data Gatherer Programmer's Guide.