Overview: Operations dashboard

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration® Operations Dashboard Add-on provides integration tracing across instances to allow troubleshooting and investigating errors and latency issues across integration capabilities to ensure applications meet service level agreements.

Attention: Effective with IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration 2022.4.1, the integration tracing capability (IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Operations Dashboard) is deprecated. This capability will be removed in a future release. No further updates will be provided. No new uses of the Operations Dashboard should be implemented. Users who want to implement tracing should use Instana observability. For more information, see Enabling IBM Instana monitoring.

Main features

  • Visually follow the journey of distributed transactions – from the entry as an API, to invocation of an integration flow, placement into a Kafka topic or an MQ queue and beyond, including complex, asynchronous and long-running use cases.

  • Quickly understand latencies and errors across integration capabilities.

  • Identify and focus on issues using builtin dashboards and advanced filtering based on capability-specific terminology.

  • Execute and schedule reports and define proactive alerts to quickly respond to issues.

  • Non-intrusive implementation that does not require changes to existing integration code for sending tracing data.

License and limitations

  • Trace data cannot be collected from integration products deployed outside of the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration platform.

  • You must purchase an additional license to remove the usage limitations of this add-on capability. Without this license, the following limitations are valid:

    • Trace data for Operations Dashboard generated from any of the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration capabilities cannot be exported or used outside of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Operations Dashboard.

    • Spans are available for a limited duration based on the following conditions (if any of these conditions are reached, new spans will replace existing spans that have met the established limit):

      • Maximum duration of two hours

      • When the total number of spans within IBM Cloud Pak for Integration platform reaches one million.

  • See Product activation to remove these limits.

Supported capabilities

Currently Operations Dashboard supports tracing across the following IBM Cloud Pak for Integration capabilities:

  • App Connect (ACE)

    • Only HTTP, SOAP, MQ and Kafka nodes are supported.

    • Tracing MQ messages is only supported for MQ messages that are copied into the default output location. If "Output data location" or "Result data location" (e.g. in the MQGet node) is set to a different location, those messages will not be traced by Operations Dashboard.

  • API Connect

    • APIs using API Gateway are supported.

    • APIs using v5 Compatible Gateway are not supported.

  • MQ

    • Only MQ messages that include an MQRFH2 header or message properties are supported.

    • MQ client connection is supported, binding mode is not supported.

  • External applications

    • Applications deployed inside the Cloud Pak for Integration cluster can push trace data into the Operations Dashboard runtime (requires code changes to the application).

Terminology

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Operations Dashboard has adopted OpenTracing API specification for collecting tracing data. OpenTracing is comprised of an API specification for distributed tracing, frameworks and libraries that have implemented the specification and documentation.

  • Trace: The description of a transaction as it moves through IBM Cloud Pak for Integration platform.

  • Span: A named, timed operation representing a piece of the workflow (e.g. calling an API, invoking a message flow or placing a message in a queue or a topic).

  • Span context: Trace information that accompanies the distributed transaction, including when it passes the service to service over the network or through a message bus.