Z Resource Discovery overview

IBM Z® Resource Discovery is a unified discovery and analysis solution that brings together a full corpus of understanding around applications and related artifacts in combination with subsystems and infrastructure. It aggregates and transforms data from various sources such as the Discovery Library Adapter, the Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence (ADDI), CMCI and HMC to be displayed in a unified topology, and supplements other IBM® offerings such as IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence for IBM Z via IBM Wazi Analyze, IBM Cloud Pak® for Watson AIOps, IBM Z Anomaly Analytics, IBM Z Monitoring Suite, IBM Z Service Automation Suite, IBM Z Service Management Suite and IBM zSystems Integration for Observability to enable impact analysis, root cause analysis and IT service/operation management use cases.

Architecture

As illustrated in the following diagram, IBM Z Resource Discovery consists of a set of services including the Data Service, Visualization Service, and IBM Discovery Library Adapter for z/OS®. The IBM Discovery Library Adapter for z/OS runs on premise (z/OS machine) and collects details of the z/OS resources and outputs the information into a set of files called the IdML books. The IdML books can be ingested into the Data Service by pipelines which runs on Linux® or zLinux, and the Data Service formats and provides the data via APIs for a more modern solution to retrieve z/OS data. The Visualization service is a React UI component that can be embedded into the UI of a product to visualize the API data. Apart from Discovery Library Adapter (DLA) IdML books, Application Discovery (AD) SQLDB and CMCI/HMC interfaces are also data sources that are supported by Data Service.

Use cases

IBM Z Resource Discovery has been adopted in IBM Wazi Analyze in the IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence for IBM Z, IBM Z Anomaly Analytics and IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps. For more information about how IBM Z Resource Discovery helps different personae, see Table 1.

Table 1. Use cases of IBM Z Resource Discovery
Role	Solution/Product/Component	Benefits
	IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence for IBM Z that includes IBM Wazi Analyze	Help to understand impact of making code changes.
	IBM Z Anomaly Analytics	Help to understand the impact of anomalies and get to root cause faster. For more information, see Context-driven anomaly detection driven by topology view.
	IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps	Help to identify impact of anomalies in hybrid applications.
	IBM Z Monitoring Suite IBM Z Service Management Suite IBM Z Service Automation Suite IBM zSystems Integration for Observability	Discover and forward IBM z/OS Configuration Items to a ServiceNow Change Management Database (CMDB)