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DPOD and Splunk

IBM DataPower Operations Dashboard Documentation

DPOD and Splunk

Owned by Shachar Greenberg
Last updated: May 27, 2024 by Amit Munwes
3 min read

Many customers use DPOD and Splunk as complementary products:

  • Splunk is often used to aggregate data from many products and technologies across the organization and correlate between them (including the DataPower data).

  • DPOD is used to debug, troubleshoot and fix DataPower transactional and configuration issues, to assist in API/service development/testing and adoption, to monitor the health of the DataPower gateways and to manage them.

Key Differences

The key differences between DPOD and Splunk are:

  1. DPOD is tailored for DataPower and is built on DataPower deep knowledge, making it IBM’s premier tool for monitoring and management of DataPower gateways.

  2. DPOD uses many methods and sources of information to collect information from DataPower.

  3. DPOD provides debug-level transactional data for debugging, troubleshooting and fixing DataPower transactional issues.

  4. DPOD monitors the health of the DataPower gateways (resource utilization, system events, etc.) and their configuration (e.g.: failed objects).

  5. DPOD includes DataPower configuration management features (backups, firmware upgrades, import services, etc.).

  6. DPOD accelerates the development/testing and adoption of APIs/services, by providing great value for DataPower experts and for users with zero DataPower expertise in prod and non-prod, based on roles and permissions.

  7. DPOD provides everything out-of-the-box (dashboards, error analysis, alerts, etc.) with almost zero maintenance and configuration efforts.

Detailed Comparison Table

 

DPOD

Splunk

 

DPOD

Splunk

Transactional Data

  • Transaction logs, including custom logs emitted by developers.

  • Invocation details (gateway, domain, API/service, URL, consumer, etc.).

Invocation details exist in the logs, but require DataPower expertise to understand them.

  • Error details and analysis, including early failing transactions (e.g.: TLS failures).

Error details exist in the logs, but require DataPower expertise to understand them.

  • Detailed view of each step in the transaction, including latency analysis.

  • Payloads (requests/responses) and headers including back-end invocations.

  • Debug-level data (variable values, inputs/outputs, matched conditions, etc.).

DataPower Health Monitoring

  • System events (e.g.: battery failure or disk failure).

  • Resources utilization (CPU, memory, load, file systems, etc.).

  • Physical gateway health (fan, temperature, voltage, etc.).

  • Service-level resources.

DataPower Configuration Monitoring

  • Certificate expiry messages (from DataPower Certificate Monitor).

  • Failed configuration objects (e.g.: GatewayPeering objects that are down).

  • Service configuration including changes over time.

  • Restart information (based on DataPower audit logs).

  • MQ connection pool utilization.

DataPower Device and Configuration Management

  • Scheduled DataPower backups.

  • DataPower Firmware upgrades.

  • Domain configuration synchronization.

  • DataPower Appliance migration.

  • Update WSDLs for DataPower Web Service Proxies.

  • Start and stop DataPower services.

  • Import DataPower services.

Reports and Alerts

  • Ready-to-use reports (errors, latency, resources, etc.).

No pre-defined reports.

  • Ready-to-use alerts (certificates expiry, latency, errors, failed objects, etc.).

No pre-defined alerts.

Coverage

  • Coverage of many products and technologies.

Tailored for DataPower/API gateways only.

  • Transaction correlation across many products.

Correlates across APIs/services/gateways only.

User Roles and Expertise

  • Pre-defined roles and permissions for different types of users.

No Pre-defined roles and permissions.

  • Designed for DataPower experts and for users with zero DataPower expertise.

Relies on the user's expertise to understand the DataPower logs.

  • Provides everything out-of-the-box (dashboards, error analysis, alerts, etc.).

Relies on the user's expertise to create custom dashboards.

Onboarding and Maintenance

  • Quick installation

Takes just a couple of hours.

Usually the infrastructure exists, adding the DataPower logs should be easy.

  • Almost zero maintenance and configuration efforts.

Significant effort is required to build dashboards and adjust to changes in the DataPower firmware over time.

  • High customization level (e.g.: create new visualizations).

Moderate customization level (e.g.: use existing visualizations only).

Sources of Information

  • DataPower log targets

  • DataPower XML management interface

  • DataPower REST management interface

  • DataPower Web Services Management Agent

  • API-Connect Analytics Offload

  • DataPower Probes

 

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