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12 Days of CA APM - Day 2: APM Command Center (ACC)

By Guenter DI Grossberger posted Dec 09, 2014 12:50 PM

  

"On the second day of APM 9.7, the CA Team gave to me… APM Command Center (ACC)"

 

Hi, I’m Kyle! Part of my job is to administer our APM environments. We are a big company with hundreds of Java, .NET and EP agents monitoring our business critical applications and reporting to about a dozen of production and QA/Dev APM clusters.

 

Our application teams always come to me when they have questions about or problems with CA APM. And to answer that questions nearly always I have to log in to the application server via ssh or Remote Desktop (or get someone from the application team that has the right level of access to do it). Then I have a look at the log files, have a look at the configuration, maybe change the log level to DEBUG – it’s always the same manual process!

 

With APM 9.7 CA Technologies is introducing the APM Command Center. Exactly what I need!

 

Now I can get a list of all the agents installed across all clusters in one single, simple and neat UI. I can search by just typing in the host name or the agent name in the search bar. That makes my life so much easier!

 

ACC1-search.png

 

For every agent in every cluster I get a quick overview of the agent:

  • Agent name
  • Log level
  • Number of metrics
  • JVM vendor and version
  • App server type and version
  • OS type and version
  • Connection status

 

ACC2-agent.png

 

If I need more information I can run a report that gives me a configuration snapshot of the agent including:

  • IntroscopeAgent.profile
  • (Agent) log files
  • pbd and pbl files
  • Java system properties
  • JVM startup parameters
  • Installed extensions (contents of ext directory)

 

ACC3-report.png


I can directly open the files because they have been downloaded from the application server by ACC. I can even download the full report and send it to a colleague or attach it to a support ticket. No more remote logins required!


I can even get information from an agent that is down because ACC does not use the EM-agent communication. Once I install a configuration agent on a server it gathers the information from all agents running (or not running) on that physical or virtual server. And we usually have several app server instances running on every machine! The ACC agent is idle all the time but for the few seconds it takes when I request a report. So it needs nearly no resources.

 

CA has great plans for ACC: it will become my administrative cockpit for APM! In future releases I will be able to remotely configure all my agents, upgrade agents, create and enforce configuration policies and be notified of problematic configurations. I’m looking forward to that because it will make my life as APM admin so much easier, relieve me of many repetitive manual tasks and I’ll have more time to do the fun stuff and provide real business value with CA APM!

 

I do really see the CA APM E.P.I.C. strategy coming alive with ACC and CA APM 9.7!

 

Happy holidays,

Kyle

 

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TThe 12 Days of APM Blog SeriesT


Twelve (12/19)

Eleven (12/18)

Ten (12/17)

Nine Node.js Monitoring (12/16)

Eight PHP Monitoring (12/15)

Seven CA UIM Integration (12/14)

Six MongoDB Monitoring (12/13)

FIVE Rich Email Notifications with Contextual Data (12/12)

Four Smart Instrumentation (12/11)

Three Mobile App Analytics (12/10)

Two APM Command Center (12/9)

and an E.P.I.C APM Strategy  (12/8)

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