CA Wily Tuesday Tip by Hallett German, Sr. Support Engineer for 1/8/2013
Any actuarial worth their salt can predict the probability of life events happening in the population. And a good support engineer should be able to tell you what probably will be the most typical APM CE misconfiguration for that week.
Common misconfigurations are the following:
TIM
- Placing TIM in the wrong place which impacts Client IP, User Id, and other information appearing in defects and statistics.
- Having web server filters exclude desired traffic.
- Configuring span/tap/VACL to accidentally exclude/include traffic.
- Using incorrect logical port and hardware filters on a MTP TIM.
Not Seeing traffic in TIM log
See the list under TIM.
Common causes are the following:
- TIM Trace options for HTTP components or parameters are not checked.
- The TIM Inspection settings are filtering out traffic.
- Issues with private keys/certificates? (See last month's Tuesday Tip)
Not able to record
See the above list. Other causes could be:
- Wrong client IP address, language(s), content-type specified.
- Hosts table/DNS are incorrect.
- The account is incorrect or has wrong privileges.
- Using the wrong application URL.
- Browser/Browser Settings
- Transaction discovery template/settings are incorrect.
- Wrong script recorder arguments or being sent to wrong EM.
- Time is not synchronized between EMs, database, and TIMs.
- Issue with TIM Collector (EM in Unknown state due to MOM properties file misconfiguration.)
Not Seeing Users/User Groups.
Some common misconfigurations contributing to this issue include the following:
- If using User Group by IP Subnet, check if the subnet is incorrect (Typically is 255.255.0.0 or 0.0.0.0 to allow widest range of
traffic ).
- Check if session timeout is too low.
- See if the Business Service is assigned to correct business application.
- See if using the wrong/unavailable user/session identifier or identifier logic incorrect (Too many ANDs).
Not able to See Defects/Statistics.
In addition to the above list, check the following
- The "Two enables" not set for a business transaction to provide statistics and defects.
- The Definition not matched (Incorrect, fields are not there, matching on too many fields).
- The defect thresholds are too high
- The defect retention period too low.
- Not waiting long enough (Thinking reports are realtime)
The Response Time is shorter than expected.
There are many factors that may impact this but here are some reasons.
- Using the wrong Session Identifier. If the session identifier is not the correct one. the TIM will only match a transaction on a component base - hence ignore all " included" components in the timing calculation. )
- Not all components are included in the recording
- Comparing it against something that is configured incorrectly
And there are many more that can be mentioned but this will get you started. Use the Show History/Audit capability to determine the author of the last change
These are the discussion questions for this article:
1. Are there other misconfiguration issues that you have experienced? What were they and what is the impact.
2. Are there features that can be added to APM CE to reduce misconfigurations?