OpenTelemetry tracing support

The IMS 15.5 APAR PH62728 provides support for using OpenTelemetry tracing in IMS and APAR PH65117 provides support for using OpenTelemetry tracing in IMS Connect.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that is designed to provide a unified set of APIs, SDKs, and tools for instrumenting, generating, and collecting telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces). It's a vendor-neutral standard for observability, enabling you to instrument your applications once and send the data to any backend, whether it's an open-source tool or a commercial observability platform.

OpenTelemetry tracing is a vendor-neutral specification and includes a set of tools for generating, collecting, and exporting traces. A trace represents the end-to-end journey of a request as it propagates through a distributed system. It's a key component of observability, providing insights into the performance and behavior of applications.

OpenTelemetry support within IMS and IMS Connect require a minimum release level of IMS 15.5. IMS Connect and IMS OTMA, if configured, propagate the OpenTelemetry context and emit tacking spans in the following transaction flows:

IBM® IMS Transaction Manager Resource Adapter (TMRA) 15.3.5 or later to IMS Connect 15.5 or later.
IMS Connect user-written clients.
z/OS® Connect OpenAPI 3 to IMS Connect 15.5 or later.
IMS Connect Java™ API.
Commit Mode 0 with SyncLevel Confirm transactions flows into IMS Connect 15.5 or later
Commit Mode 1 with SyncLevel None or Confirm.
IMS Full-Function transactions of the following types:
1. Program-Switch
2. Standalone
3. Shared Queues
4. Context propagation through ESAF
IMS Fast Path transactions of the following types:
1. Standalone.
2. Shared Queues where front-end and back-end systems are the same.
3. ESAF not supported in IFP regions.
IBM MQ to IMS OTMA.

The OpenTelemetry feature is supported in IMS 15.5 and later. To activate it, apply PTF UO05322 for APAR PH62728.

Changes to commands

For IMS Connect, the following commands are updated:

VIEWHWS - Added OTELTRACE status
QUERY IMSCON TYPE(CONFIG)
UPDATE IMSCON TYPE(CONFIG)

For IMS, the following commands are updated:

UPDATE IMS SET(LCLPARM())
QUERY IMS TYPE(LCLPARM)
QUERY TRACE TYPE(TABLE)
UPDATE TRACE TYPE(TABLE)

Documentation changes

The following table lists the publications that contain new or changed topics for the OpenTelemetry Tracing enhancement. Publications that are not impacted by this enhancement are not included in this table.

Table 1. Links to topics that have new or changed content for this enhancement
Publication	New or changed topics
Release planning	IMS system enhancements OpenTelemetry tracing support (new) (this topic)
System Administration	OpenTelemetry tracing in IMS HWS statement
System definition	DIAGNOSTICS_STATISTICS section of the DFSDFxxx member
IMS commands	UPDATE IMS SET(LCLPARM()). See UPDATE IMS command. QUERY IMS TYPE(LCLPARM). See QUERY IMS command. QUERY TRACE TYPE(TABLE). See QUERY TRACE command. UPDATE TRACE TYPE(TABLE). See UPDATE TRACE command.
IMS messages and codes	DFS messages DFS9144E HWS messages HWSS0791E OTMA codes 001D 0003 0038
Communications and Connections	Added OpenTelemetry context structure to output message from message exit to client section. See Format of the return OpenTelemetry context data. Updated fields in OTMA message-control fields that are used by IMS Connect section. See OTMA message-control fields used by IMS Connect. Updated fields in OTMA state data fields that are used by IMS Connect section. See OTMA state data fields used by IMS Connect. Updated fields in OTMA user data fields that are used by IMS Connect section. See OTMA user data fields used by IMS Connect.