The 12 days of 8.0 - Day 7

By Anon Anon posted Dec 07, 2014 04:08 AM

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"On the 7th day of DevTest the CA team gave to me 7 well calibrated agents"

SIX agents, protocols, categories intercepted,

FIVE generated assets,

FOUR opaque data types processes,

THREE new execution modes,

TWO RR pairs added,

and a Server-Side Recorder in a DevTest tree!"

Welcome to the 7^th day of DevTest 8.0! Today we are looking at the new CA Continuous Application Insight – specifically how to calibrate DevTest Java agents to capture the raw data that is turned into insights.

By default, agents do not capture transaction paths or transaction data. We call this zero-weight mode. In this mode, adding an agent to your application adds very little performance overhead – it also doesn’t capture transactions that can be used to generate virtual services or tests.

Unlike light-weight APM agents which only capture performance data – the DevTest agent captures transaction request/response payloads. A single transaction frame may be as large as 1 MB. Serializing each frame does add a run-time overhead. To minimize the performance overhead on your application, it is essential to properly calibrate each agent to only capture the data that is needed for visibility and for the generation of virtual services, baselines and documentation.

A well calibrated agent will produce fewer transactions, with less data. This means that you will require less storage to warehouse the data and won’t have to sift through a lot of captured noise when looking for transactions during CAI artifact generation.

Each agent is calibrated separately. This gives you maximum flexibility over what data you wish to capture. Each protocol supports three levels of data capture:

Counts – Capture only the number of invocations for this protocol type.
Counts and Paths – Include this protocol in the transaction path
Full Data – Include this protocol in the transaction path with full data request/response payloads

For advanced users who are interested in POJO serialization. The Settings tab gives you full access to the agent’s transaction serialization settings.