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Status Not under consideration
Workspace Instana
Created by Guest
Created on Jun 20, 2023

Call tag values always treated as String

Our implementation of tracking flows into Db2 for z/OS via JDBC, the Db2 for z/OS and Z Common Data Provider are required. Once installed and configured, we provide metrics (such as cpu_time, smf_id, io_wait, subsystem_id, elapsed_time, lock_wait, plan_name) as custom call tags to Instana.

Instana treats all custom call tags as Strings, making it useless to filter and use in alerting as well as analytics, especially for metrics such as cpu_time, elapsed_time and so on.

This is a request to somehow be able to define the type of value a custom tag carries.

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Jun 27, 2023

    Thank you for creating this.

    It is true that during a POC for monitoring z/OS DB2, after seeing the mentioned metrics in Instana, and especially cpu_time, elapsed_time, lock_wait, we set out trying to define queries, events and alerts based on those metrics. For example, one interesting query might be, to search for DB2 spans where cpu_time or elapsed_time or lock_wait is larger than a given value. We could not do this, apparently because those are only available as Call Tags - Strings.

    As it stands, those collected metrics seem only partially useful. Even though the values are visible once a user selects a span, it is not possible to set a filter for them (unless one uses string equality or string inequality to filter, which is of limited practical value).