How does APM Insight work?

APM Insight includes a remote monitoring agent to be deployed in your Application Server. This agent performs the tasks of data collection; acquisition and transmission.

To configure APM Insight you must first download the APM Insight agent and deploy it in your application server. Once the agent is deployed, the agent residing in the Application Server uses byte code instrumentation to collect application performance metrics and sends it to the central Applications Manager server at fixed intervals.

APM Insight gives you the following metrics for the applications that it is set to monitor:

  • APDEX Scores
  • Response Time
  • Throughput

Based on the metrics received from the agent, the APM Insight server measures the performance of the application and generates performance charts. This information is assembled and presented in detail in the APM Insight dashboard.

Setting up APM Insight

Browse through the following topics to set up APM Insight in Applications Manager:

When the Application Server starts up, APM Insight monitor will be added automatically in the Applications Manager console.

Upgrading the agent

Agent upgrade in APM Insight can be performed in two ways—Auto-upgrade and Manual upgrade.

Agent auto-upgrade

When the Agent Auto-upgrade feature is enabled, Applications Manager will automatically download the new agent zip/msi file for upgrade if a new agent version available. By default, auto-upgrade is disabled. You can enable auto-upgrade by clicking on the APM tab → Your application → Action → Edit → APM Insight Agent Configuration Profile → Edit icon and checking the Agent Auto-upgrade checkbox.

Note:
  • For Java agents, application restart is mandatory for the new agent to take effect. On the other hand, for .NET agents the update process can be scheduled by setting the "scheduledtime" property in apminsight.conf file.
  • Auto-upgrade feature is supported only for Java agent v5.4.1 & above as well as PHP agent v3.2.2 & above.

Manual Agent Upgrade

To manually upgrade the agent in APM Insight, follow the steps given below:

  1. The following message will be displayed at the top of the APM Insight details page "The deployed agent version at this instance is (1.9/2.0), Update now to the latest version (2.0/2.1)".
  2. On clicking the Update Now link, a confirmation dialog will appear to initiate agent update. For .Net agents the update process can be scheduled. In the pop-up Agent Update window, configure the schedule time for the update. IIS will be reset during that hour.
  3. Choose the Yes, continue button to start agent update. On doing so the alert message changes to "Agent update will happen shortly...".
  4. After few minutes, either on page refresh or on navigating to other tabs, the alert message will be modified.
  5. On successful download of the agent, the alert message changes to "Agent downloaded successfully. Please restart your application" for the Java Agent and or "Agent downloaded successfully. Update will happen at the scheduled hour" for the .Net Agent.
  6. If an error occurs during the agent update, then the message changes be "Problem encountered during agent update. View details". On clicking the View Details link, the error message will be displayed with options to retry or dismiss.

Note: The Retry option will clear the upgrade status in the cache and immediately try to perform agent update, so message gets modified to "Agent update will happen shortly..." again. The Dismiss option will just clear the upgrade status in cache and the message changes to "The deployed agent version at this instance is (1.9/2.0), Update Now to the latest version (2.0/2.1)".