Team Center - required power packs

[Billy Cole]

Howdy Community,

 

I'm trying to plan out our v10 upgrade and with the new Team Center, what are the required power packs in order to have what is in the documentation screen shots be close to what we will be able to see in our environment?

 

This question stems from the WebView home page and about 1/3 of the page being for CEM, which we currently do not have running.  Before everyone starts asking about what they have seen, heard, read or been told about Team Center, I want to try to plan out possible answers to the question "I saw/read/shown team center, and why can't ours do <feature/display>?"

 

Thanks,

Billy

[Guenter DI Grossberger]

Hi Billy,

 

I would strongly recommend SPM. Other than that there are no special requirements for APM 10 and Team Center. Just use the same you have been using with APM 9.

 

One important thing is that cross-process correlation is working. Without it you will get a lot of disconnected components in ATC. http correlation for Apache and Spring is OOTB, SOAP with SPM.

 

Continue to use your existing Management Modules. If the alerts are on OOTB metrics (Servlets, EJB, Webservices, Frontends, Backends, Database, BT) the ATC map will be decorated automatically. If you have alarms on lots of custom classes you would need to add mappings for those alerts in teamcenter-status-mapping.properties if you want to show up in ATC (if not, why do you have an MM and alert?).

 

The "big thing" in ATC are (custom) properties and perspectives. You can assign properties to every vertex on the map, manually or using rules. And you can group by one or a combination of those properties. You can also filter by (currently a fixed number of OOTB) properties.

 

Your homework:

• which people are accessing APM?
• what are they interested in?
  • How would they like to have data organized? By location, by owner, by application, by tier (web, mw, esb, backend, db), by environment (prod, pre-prod, UAT, perftest, ...), application & tier, ....
  • What would they not like to see (filter out)? You can currently only filter by 7 predefined properties (application, business services, business transaction, type, location, tier, owner). Only the last 3 are custom. If you would liek to filter by something else you have to peruse one of those.
• Do you have a naming scheme for servers, agents, applications?
• Can you map from above names to properties (e.g. server names starting with p are Prod, servers having was in their name are WebSpheres)? What are the rules you would use?

 

ATC is valueable OOTB but really powerful if you put some thought into properties and perspectives!

 

Ciao,

Guenter

[Billy Cole]

Thank you Guenter.

 

As far as the end users that use APM, it has been a fight for the last five years to try to move the use from "Is it responding?" where the APM can be customized to be more of a infrastructure monitoring through the epagent to a performance management.

 

So my initial question was hopeful that I could try to get more eye candy with APM version 10 that I could attempt (again) the APM users view and use of APM.

 

Which people are accessing APM?

I've been looking around about the user profiles that were used to define the various new features within Team center to try to use them to help me categorize my end users.  Past that:

APM Admins: building alerts, dashboards, ADS, renaming and moving things around a bit

WebSphere Admins - Is the servers taking traffic, is that traffic balanced when there is a problem

Development Team - as another source of information

 

What are they Interested in?

There is the rub, the majority of our current alerts are infrastructure.  I actually go a "application average response time" alert within the alert structure but it's threasholds are so high and long, the only time it goes off is when the application is 100% unusable.  The other alerts (cpu/memory/file space/agent connection status/netstat sockets in use)  I should have been a dentist with the number of times I have tried to pull KPI from any of them.

 

We have two APM environment clusters, one for production and one for non-production.  Also have a test cluster for testing patches/upgrades before we impact our non-production users.

 

Filter Out?  Strange thing is, our end users want all the metrics possible so when something does go south they might have a chance to point at one or two different metrics and say that is the cause. 

 

Do you have a naming scheme for servers, agents applications?

Servers - we just shifting to yet another naming scheme so we have feet into the "tv show of the time" nouns to some cryptic protein chain.  The new naming scheme does have a p for production, t for test, d for development and s for stress, then there are like a handful more.  But in our production cluster only production servers are reporting to our production collectors.

Agents - We have like four agent names for epagents and then the WebSphere and WebLogic agents, but we haven't broke that down into the multiple application hosting clusters.

Applications - seem to have no naming structure since you have to really know what it is before the application name in the triage map makes any sense or understand how each application relates to all the other applications.  We currently have more than 250 applications.

The problem is there isn't enough constant known and stable naming within our server, agent, application but was hoping for something in APM 10 to help with that, knowing it will be another pushing a rock up hill effort.

 

Currently we have the java agents which gives us the front-end applications and backends (if they go through a known interface type (JDBC/EJB)).

We do not have CEM or SOA agent, or cross agent tracing enabled.  With the upgrade to APM 10 I might be able to get the SOA agent and cross agent tracing tested out (if everything else works and I have the bulk of the month per environment to upgrade).  From the sounds of it, that might make the team center better.

 

So, I'm going looking again for the end user profiles (Pete and gang) and see if I can align the various needs and skills to my end users.

 

Thanks again,

Billy