IBM Performance Management

Configuring the communications protocol for server agents

Either the HTTP or HTTPS protocol is used to communicate between the Performance Management server and the server agents. The Performance Management server allows connections from server agents that authenticate themselves with a valid certificate. If you change the communication protocol that is used by the server to communicate with monitoring agents, you must change the protocol used by the server agents.

About this task

Server agents are components of the Performance Management server. The server agents provide the following functions:

The Transactions Event agent provides services for transaction tracking.
The Synthetic Events agent provides services for synthetic transactions.
The Bluemix® Integration agent integrates the Performance Management server with your IBM® Cloud environment.

The Transactions Event and the Synthetic Events agents are installed and started automatically. You install and enable the Bluemix Integration agent if you plan to monitor IBM Cloud applications from the Performance Management console.

Default certificates are generated during the Performance Management server installation. The server agents might use the default certificates or they might use self-signed or custom certificates to connect to the Performance Management server.

Complete the following steps to configure the communication protocol between the server agents and the Performance Management server:

Procedure

To change the protocol when you use default certificates, complete these steps:
1. On the Performance Management server, open a command window and change to the install_dir/serveragents bin directory. For example:
```
cd /opt/ibm/apm/serveragents/bin
```
2. Enter the following command to reconfigure the communication protocol:
```
./agent2server.sh -p communication_protocol
```
  where communication_protocol is HTTP or HTTPS.
To change the protocol when you use custom or self-signed certificates, complete these steps:
1. Verify that the configuration packages for the agent images were created. The make_configuration_packages script is used to create configuration packages. The script creates a configuration package file, onprem_config.tar for Linux and AIX® or onprem_config.zip for Windows, in the default installation directory or where you specified, for example, /opt/ibm/ccm/newagentconfig. For more information, see Configuring the installation images.
2. Change to the install_dir/serveragents bin directory. For example:
```
cd /opt/ibm/apm/serveragents/bin
```
3. Enter the following command to update the key files that are used by the server agents to match the key files that are used by the Performance Management server:
```
./agent2server.sh -f path_to_configuration_packages
```
  where path_to_configuration_package is the location where you saved the configuration package files. For example:
```
./agent2server.sh -f /opt/ibm/apm/newagentconfig
```

Results

The communication protocol that is used to connect the server agents to the Performance Management server is changed.