DX Application Performance Management

  • 1.  Creation of New Management Modules

    Posted Jan 25, 2015 02:26 AM

    Problem : I have more than 100 management modules in our environment. We are in a process of refining those modules (Removing unwanted alerts/modifying dashboards/Changing Regular Expressions). Instead of changing to current module, we are creating a new module with required alerts and dashboards (lot of boring work ). Most of the modules have similar dashboards and alerts. What are the best options available to us in this scenario ? Read about Field Pack called Auto Dash in a blog , How does it work and is it going to work in this case. Any other tool/trick which can make our task easier ?

    Thank You. Any help will be appreciated.



  • 2.  Re: Creation of New Management Modules

    Posted Feb 03, 2015 10:22 AM

    We have a similar problem space with more than 100 management modules.  We have tried to leverage the lens but found several draw backs the largest being that webview does not support lens. We have also tried to group like agents into a single management module with some success.  But with environments/applications/sub-systems having more than three or four agents, the graphs are very noisy.

     

    We have cleared some of the noise on the multi-agent management modules by creating averaging calculators but that has proven to be even more effort and support than just throwing another set of Management modules at the problem.

     

    We have attempted to build a template management module and then copy and change the agent expression.  We have had a little success with this.  The problem is some of the metrics we are using are from the collectors and the agent expression will not allow us to add any of the metric expression within it, so we have a handful of metric groupings that have to be (when we remember) modified to point to the right agent connection status.  Second, if we need to change the template we have to go through 25 to 75 management modules and review to see if they have been customized away from the template.  If they haven't, then unlinking the existing, copying a new template and switching out the links for the new management module is really a pain.

     

    I've been fielding the triage map as the go to representation with a focus on application instead of system or single agent monitoring.  We are also attempting to move any system monitoring expects, things that are on/off, good/bad over to our system monitoring tool (SiteScope) and try to narrow the focus of the APM to being application performance.

     

    We still have quite a few end users that are very resistant to leaving their custom dashboards for the triage map and are pretty voiceful when we move elements to SiteScope since then they have two consoles to view, oh the horror.

     

    Another problem we are facing is at one point we thought it was a good idea to create sub-domains in our domains.xml.  That has bit us yet again with the 9.6 upgrade since they fixed where a sub-domain can not see the elements within the super-domain, which required us to scrabble to relink and move some of our common elements (help dashboard, ADS, central navigation dashboards) so all of our dashboards can link to them.  So lesson, if you do not have a direct requirement for sub-domains and elements between domains might need to link, then don't add in sub-domains, make due with the super-domain.

     

    There are several ideas out there about management module templates, cascading management module, environment/global/module variables that we can add for titles and widget naming, but they have been out there for quite a while.

     

    Our efforts to moving people over to the webview has gave us some reprieve to the daily change my dashboard requests.  Showing the end users how to use the triage map to detect and find root cause has also helped ween our end users from the sea of custom dashboards, but there is so much more to do.

     

    Hope this helps,

     

    Billy