Network Overhead for CA APM Agent

[mradouane]

Hi,

We are planing de deploy CA APM Agent in a Datacenter.

• Do we have to care about Network Overhead of CA APM Agent when desining de solution ?
• Can i have some metrics about network consumption of CA APM agents ?

 

Thank's.

[Hallett German]

The documentation talks about factors that contribute to agent overhead :

 

Deployment Guidelines - CA Application Performance Management - 10.1 - CA Technologies Documentation

 

There is also this KB:

http://www.ca.com/us/support/ca-support-online/product-content/knowledgebase-articles/tec595025.aspx

 

Which is on the non-networking aspects of agent overhead which may help with any planning that you may do

 

Thanks

Hal German

[mradouane]

Thank you for your answer HELLET,

 

I understand that i can do stress tests in order to dertermine the overhead. But, in my context, i cannot do thoses stress tests. I'm finding some benchmarks or best practices to mitigate network consomption.

 

Thanks

[Guenter DI Grossberger]

Hi,

 

network overhead is dependent on the data you are gathering. Normal metric data does only consume in the order of 100 bytes or less per metric per interval (15s) - if I remember correctly. The more metrics you gather the more data you send. You should keep the number of metrics to 1000-3000 per agent as a best practice.

 

What consumes more network bandwidth are transaction traces, error and stall events. If you are actively tracing all the time or generating lots of errors that will produce more data. But there are clamps in place (e.g. max 5000 components per trace, max 10 errors per interval) to also step on the breaks if things go south.

 

We have been running APM in production with 10,000 of agents for years and I have not heard one customer complaining about the network traffic we generate!

 

Keep your agents healthy and you won't even notice the data they send in the network.

 

Ciao,

Guenter