Is anyone using CA APM with Tibco Silver Fabric?

[Anon Anon]

Hi Folks, we are getting ready to implement Silver Fabric in our environment.  We currently have Introscope and CEM running as our primary performance tool.  I was wondering if anyone else has run CA APM on top of Silver Fabric and if so - what was your experience?  Did it affect any alerting and how you were able to monitor?

 

thanks

stacey

[Guenter DI Grossberger]

Hi Stacey,

 

so you want to monitor Silver Fabric itself? I have not heard of anyone using APM for that but as long as it is Java it should work. Try in a test environment first, ....

 

Additional use cases would be to use Silver Fabric to deploy applications with APM monitoring included as well as deploy APM on top of currently unmonitored applications/components.

 

Ciao,

Guenter

[Anon Anon]

Hi Guenter!  Thanks so much for the fast reply. :-)  That is an unknown so far - so my assumption is YES we will probably want to monitor the fabric itself, as well as applications deployed onto the fabric. I want to make sure that any current alerting we have in place will be adjusted as needed and anything to watch out for for monitoring and performance analysis.  We should start testing in October, but I am wanting to get a head start so I can get some knowledge before hand.  I have no experience working with Silver Fabric, so its completely new to me.  I have not been able to really find any information on the combo so far... :-)

 

Thanks

stacey

[Guenter DI Grossberger]

Hi Stacey,

 

just to set expectations right: currently there is no support in CA APM for Tibco Silver Fabric. I.e. we have not tested it internally or have any extension for it like we do have for Tibco BW and EMS. So using CA APM with Silver Fabric is purely experimental and support will only be available via the community and not via CA Support. You can try this on you own or with help from CA Services but there are no guarantees. On the other hand we have succeeded in monitoring so many Java based applications either natively (e.g. BW) or by leveraging exposed APIs (e.g. EMS) that there is a very high probability of success. If you come up with a working configuration you are invited to share it with the community and on CA Technologies Application Performance Management · GitHub.

 

Let us know of your progress!

 

Ciao,

Guenter

[Anon Anon]

Thanks Guenter - so you are saying there is no support for monitoring the fabric itself (I kinda figured that - but its good to have confirmation if so) or are you saying that there is no support for running agents on JVMs living on the fabric?  Or both? If thats the case, I need to consider other options to CA APM.

 

thanks

stacey

[Guenter DI Grossberger]

Hi,

 

there is no support for monitoring the fabric - although it might just work. The JVMs are supported.

 

Ciao,

Guenter

[Anon Anon]

We've done so with varying degrees of success.

 

To summarize how we did it:

 

- Agent files to live on all SF hosts or bundled with your deployed application

- create a profile for all your SF deployed applications and also include with agent files

- you can take BW global variables as input to the JVM startup parameters.  Talk to your tibco admin, but what I have noted as a requirement is to update the bwengine.xml file in your deployment folder of your local BW Designer and re-build the ear files where it will need introscope added.  Here are the properties to add to the file:

<property>

           <name>Wily</name>

           <option>java.extended.properties</option>

           <default>-javaagent:/path/to/your/Agent.jar -Dcom.wily.introscope.agentProfile=/path/to/your/profile.profile</default>

           <description>Wily Configuration</description>

    </property>

 

 

 

 

- since a BW app will bounce around the SF environment, you can either deal with the fragmentation of metrics for application:host or as I did, statically set the hostname to avoid this: "-Dcom.wily.introscope.agent.hostName=StaticHostname" this will always set the hostname to something static so that all metrics stay bound to one host. This will however lose the ability to determine the hostname that the application is running on unless you look at the IP Address.

- Since you will be using a common profile, you'll also want to set the agent name at runtime using the following parameter: -Dcom.wily.introscope.agent.agentName=SOME_AGENT_NAME   

 

 

We did this a very long time ago, and is still used this way.  I am not a tibco person, but I hope this helps.