I work as a Technology Architect for Precisely and was part of the core development team from the very begining of this product. I will try my best to provide some useful insights about Ironstream.

We started out on the mission to build ironstream to fill a void in the mainframe world – “Real time analytics” , before we came into existence there was never a product which could provide realtime information of critical security and operational machine data from IBM mainframe.

Ironstream for Z can send data to several targets like Splunk, Elastic and Kafka brokers.

Ironstream running with Splunk represents an easy, cost-saving way for an organization to get that invaluable 360-degree view of its entire IT infrastructure by integrating key performance indicators and events contained across the different logging facilities within the z/OS operating system. Organizations can address the decline of mainframe expertise due to staff aging and retirement because with Ironstream there is no need for special knowledge and expertise to correlate mainframe data with that coming from other platforms.

Ironstream provides support for all IBM mainframe z/OS data sources including:

SMF (System managed facilities) record.

SMF records provide wealth of information about the activity in your mainframe. Some of the examples are:

a) Which jobs are taking the most CPU during the peak time?

b) Are there any access violations reported on your critical datasets?

c) Monitor inbound and outbound FTP in your mainframe.

d) Did a business critical job fail ?

e) Security information from RACF, ACF2 and Top secret.

These are some of the examples, but there are thousands of events which can be reported with all the SMF records supported by ironstream.

SYSLOG

Syslog is the standard for message logging. It permits separation of the software that generates messages from the system that stores them and the software that reports and analyzes them. Because of this, syslog can be used to integrate log data from many different types of systems into a central repository.

SYSLOG messages are labeled with a facility code indicating the type of software that generated the messages and are assigned the severity.

Ironstream allows you to filter and capture specific messages of your interest. Customers using Ironstream can detect issues early and take preventive actions immediately.

Application Logs

Ironstream can also send your application logs using the Ironstream API feature.

Ironstream API enables COBOL, REXX, C and Assembler applications to directly forward application data to your analytics platform for enhanced visualization of application information.

Ironstream also supports sending Log4j data . Log4j is the most famous java based logging facility. Many Java applications running in z/OS use log4j to log some important error and warning messages. Ironstream automatically captures this data using a custom appender without any application level intrusion.

RMF (Resource measurement facility) data

RMF (Resource Measurement Facility) is an optional feature. It gathers data about z/OS resource usage and provides reports at any system in a sysplex.

The mainframe produces a set of metrics far superior to any other platform. But have you considered the learning potential that could be unleashed if you had easy access and visibility into the multitude of types of data across the broad scope of z/OS infrastructure?

Ironstream can capture all these metrics , you can also filter to capture specific metrics in your desired time interval.

DB2 data

Have you ever thought of capturing the real time DB2 data when an update/insert/delete happens on your business critical table?

Yes It is possible to capture it using the Ironstream “DB2 Trigger” data source.

This would enable organizations to exactly spot the root cause of the issues by finding the accurate date/time of the db2 update.

There are other important data sources like USS(unix system services) files , IMS data logs , SYSOUT, network peformance data , mainframe system state which can be captured and sent real time using Ironstream for Z.

If you are intrested in enabling your organization to get mainframe operational intelligence or application data sent in real time to targets like splunk, Elastic , Kafka or your generic platform, then talk to Precisely Inc. There is a team of expert sales engineers who will be able to guide you through every step of this process.

I will leave you with some interesting links about ironstream:

https://www.splunk.com/en_us/blog/it/total-enterprise-wide-visibility-including-the-ibm-z-os-mainframe.html

https://esj.com/articles/2016/03/17/syncsort-ironstream-upgrade.aspx

https://www.precisely.com/product/precisely-ironstream/ironstream-for-splunk

Thanks for reading my blog, I wish you the best!