How APM Insight AutoProfiler Works
This article describes how APM Insight AutoProfiler operates on Windows and Linux systems after the Full-Stack Observability (FSO) Agent is installed with APM Insight enabled.
How APM Insight AutoProfiler works in Windows
After the installation finishes, the APM Insight AutoProfiler will verify the system's architecture and libraries. Once these checks are completed, the details are shared with Applications Manager, which then returns the license key to authorize the agent installation. The APM agents are downloaded and authorized. The logs are stored in the C:\ProgramData\Applications Manager APM Auto Profiler\logs folder.
The AutoProfiler will detect your applications running on the host and report them to the Applications Manager server. Those applications will be added in the Applications Manager console. Restart your application process to initiate communication between the agent and the Applications Manager client. After that, you can perform transactions to view the APM monitoring data in the Applications Manager console.
How APM Insight AutoProfiler works in Linux
When the Applications Manager Full-Stack Agent is installed with APM Insight enabled, the APM Insight AutoProfiler is installed and runs as a service, provided the host machine architecture and libc implementation are compatible with the APM Insight agents it supports.
The apmautoprofiler.service registers the AutoProfiler instance. The service will download the APM Insight agents and install them in the APM Insight root directory, making them ready to be attached to application processes. Application Discovery will identify the web application process running on your host machine. Whenever a new application process is identified, the preloader checks whether the particular process is supported by Applications Manager APM Insight and evaluates it against the configured APM Process Monitoring Rules.
When a matching rule is found, the AutoProfiler attaches the appropriate Traditional APM monitoring agent, which hooks into the application process to collect detailed performance metrics, including transactions, traces, and method-level insights.
Note: In Linux, logs are stored in the /opt/applicationsmanager/apminsight folder.
Key points to note
- You can use APM Process Monitoring Rules to monitor applications using default rules for common apps or by creating custom rules as needed.
- The AutoProfiler automatically attaches APM agents to processes that start after the AutoProfiler is installed. Any application processes that are already running must be restarted for the rules to take effect and for the appropriate APM agents to be added.
- For Windows systems, you can apply or update monitoring rules for Java applications without restarting the application process. For .NET and .NET Core applications, you should either recycle the application pool or perform an
iisreset command as administrator. For Node.js applications, restart the application by starting it again from a fresh terminal session. - It is strongly recommended that you uninstall and remove all existing agent installations before installing the FSO Agent with APM Insight enabled.
- Agents added through AutoProfiler will create new APM monitors if the same processes are already being monitored using individual agents.
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