Hi,
In general sudo or root privileges are not needed for installing CA APM. There is one notable exception: installing the PostgreSQL CA APM database. If you are using Oracle as APM DB this does not apply as we do not provide an installer for Oracle database itself.
In https://wiki.ca.com/display/APMDEVOPS97/How+to+Install+and+Configure+the+APM+Database#HowtoInstallandConfiguretheAPMData… there is mention of a user account postgres for the APM database.
If you want to use PostgreSQL as your APM database there must not be an account named postgres on the server where you are installing Postgres or you must enter the password for this account when prompted for the password. In the first case the user postgres will be created on the server. Therefore you need to run the APM installer with an account being able to create a new user.
We recommend to run the installer first with the option to install only the PostgreSQL DB and if that is successful to run again and install the Enterprise Manager, even if both reside on the same server (which we do not recommend for production systems).
All other components can be installed with a "normal" user that only has access to the part of the filesystem where APM is installed: create the directory where you want to install CA APM, create the user, chown the directory and run the installer with that user.
For agents run the agent installer with the user that is used to run the application server (e.g. Tomcat, WAS, WLS, JBoss, ...) and install into the main directory of the app server (e.g. /opt/tomcat). The installer will create a subdirectory 'wily' for the agent. The app server user needs write access to that subdirectory tree for logs and temporary files.
Ciao,
Guenter