Here are some features of the new APM v8.1.4.0.

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The new APM 8.1.4 was released on July 31st, 2017.    With this new release, there are some new features and enhancements, summarized below for easy reference:

OS Support:
·    Linux for System z - Added support for Linux OS, WebSphere® Application, DB2®, WebSphere MQ, IBM Integration Bus, Tomcat, and Response Time Monitoring agents.
·    Linux for Power Systems™ (Little Endian) - Added Linux for Power Systems (Little Endian) support for the following monitoring agents: Linux OS, WepSphere Application, and DB2.
·    Linux for System x- Added Linux on System x to support the Liberty data collector.
·    Windows 2016 operating systems - Added support for Windows 2016 operating systems.

IBM iOS agent support- Data for the IBM i OS agent can now be displayed in the Cloud APM console.

IBM API Connect™ monitoring- Cloud APM agents and data collectors now support the monitoring of the IBM API Connect environment.

New agents available:

The following new monitoring agents are now available:
·    Monitoring Agent for Amazon EC2 to monitor the health, availability, and performance of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Instance resources.
·    Monitoring Agent for Cassandra to monitor the health and performance of the Cassandra cluster resources, such as the nodes, keyspaces, and column families.
·    Monitoring Agent for Microsoft Office 365 to monitor the health and performance of the Office 365 resources.
·    Monitoring Agent for NetApp Storage to monitor the health, availability, and performance of the NetApp storage systems.
·    Monitoring Agent for OpenStack to monitor the health and performance of your OpenStack applications
·    Monitoring Agent for RabbitMQ to monitor the health and performance of the RabbitMQ cluster resources.
·    Monitoring Agent for SAP NetWeaver Java Stack to monitor the health, availability, and performance of your SAP NetWeaver Java Stack Cluster and Instance resources.
·    Monitoring Agent for Siebel to monitor the health and performance of Siebel resources.
 

New and enhanced data collectors now available:
You can use the data collectors to monitor the health and performance of the following applications on Bluemix®, on premises, or both:
·    J2SE data collector to monitor the health and performance of Java™ applications and view diagnostics data
·    Liberty data collector to monitors both the Liberty profile in Bluemix environment and the local Liberty profile on Linux for System x.
·    Node.js data collector to monitor both Bluemix and on-premises applications. You can view both resource and diagnostics monitoring data.
·    Python data collector to monitor Bluemix applications.
·    Ruby data collector to monitor only Bluemix applications.

Agent enhancements:
·    Monitoring Agent for Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure - Added the ability to retrieve Windows Event Log Events for Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) and Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC) machines.
·    Monitoring Agent for DB2 - Support for Linux for Power Systems (Little Endian), Ubuntu ZLinux and System z was added.DB2 user can now view data for all the attributes of the DB2 agent for a monitored instance.
·    Monitoring Agent for Hadoop - Added support for Windows 2016 and AIX® 7.2 systems. Support for monitoring the following Hadoop offerings was added: Hortonworks HDP 2.5 and 2.6, Cloudera CDH 5.8 and 5.9, and IBM BigInsights® 4.2. Agent configuration was improved and simplified. Also added support for monitoring the status of Hadoop services, such as are ZooKeeper, Sqoop, Hive, HDFS, YARN, Ambari Metrics, and Oozie.Support was added for monitoring a Hadoop cluster that is secured with the Kerberos SPNEGO-based authentication, which uses only MIT Kerberos V5 Key Distribution Center (KDC).
·    Monitoring Agent for IBM Integration Bus - Support was added for Linux for System z
·    Monitoring Agent for JBoss - Added transaction tracking and deep dive monitoring in the Advanced Agents offering. Added a dashboard page to monitor datasource metrics
            Added support for monitoring the following JBoss offerings: WildFly 8.x/9.x/10.x, JBoss EAP 7.x, JBoss AS 7.x. Added support for running the agent on the Windows operating system.
·    Monitoring Agent for Linux KVM - Multiple dashboard updates were made-Summary, host Detail, Hosts, Clusters, Storage, Virtual Machine Details dashboards.
·    Monitoring Agent for Linux OS - Support for Linux for Power Systems (Little Endian) was added. Docker V1.8.0 or later is supported. New attribute groups and widgets were added to enable the Linux OS agent to deliver docker monitoring capabilities.
·    Monitoring Agent for Microsoft Active Directory
            Group widgets and pages to display the details of Group Policy Object, Netlogon, Local Security Authority, and LDAP details were added. Multiple data sets were added-Services Data Set, Replication, File Replication Service, Moved or Deleted Org. Unit, LDAP Attributes, Security Accounts Manager, DFS, Address Book, Event Log, Password Setting Objects. Data sets, group widgets and pages to display details for ADFS, ADFS Proxy, and Asynchronous Thread Queue were also added. Added agent install on Windows Server 2016 systems was added.
·    Monitoring Agent for Microsoft Exchange Server - Pages and group widgets to display reachability attributes and details were added. Support agent install on Exchange Server 2016 and Windows Server 2016 systems were added.
·    Monitoring Agent for Microsoft Internet Information Services- Support for installing and configuring on a Microsoft Windows Server 2016 system was added. Front-end registration status and the quality of poor calls details can now be obtained. A dashboard to display the details of the Microsoft Lync Server usage was added.
·    Monitoring Agent for Microsoft .NET - Ability to display the response times of database calls, status of .NET processes with high thread count, and Just in Time (JIT) compilation failures was added. Data sets, pages, and group widgets were added to show JIT compilation details, database call details, GC handles and pinned objects collection for a selected .NET process, thread contention rate, and thread queue length.
            Eventing thresholds were added for JIT failures, .NET request failures, slow commands, garbage collection, and the active threads in .NET processes.
·    Monitoring Agent for Microsoft SQL Server - Detailed view of the top 10 cached query plans according to the performance statistics of the Microsoft SQL Server now available. Support for agent install on and monitoring the Microsoft SQL Server 2016 system was added.
·    Monitoring Agent for MongoDB - Enhancements made to display the number of MongoDB instances and their status, MMAPv1 and the WiredTiger storage engines were added. Ability to display cursor details and historical data for the queued operations, active connections, data flow, and the data access of the selected host was also added. Pages were added to display details of the locks of version 2.x and version 3.x, or later. The Replication Details page was added to display details of the replication member, oplog, and historical data of the replication lag and the oplog. Support was added for monitoring the MongoDB cluster or replication setup when the primary node fails.
·    Monitoring Agent for MySQL - Data sets and a configuration parameter were added to remotely monitor MySQL resources.
·    Monitoring Agent for Node.js - Enhancements were added to the Node.js agent to leverage Node Application Metrics (Appmetrics). New dashboard and group widgets to view garbage collection details, event loop details were added.
·    Monitoring Agent for Oracle Database - The Oracle Database agent dashboard was updated to display information about the lock contention on the selected instance, Oracle Real Application Clusters GCS and GES, Automatic Storage Management (ASM) disk groups that are attached to the selected instance, per table space, historical details of the foreground and background processes that are attached to the selected instance. Also added a table that displays the Top 5 Worst SQL queries (by run time) on the selected instance.
·    Monitoring Agent for PostgreSQL - Support for installing and configuring the agent on Windows systems. Support for monitoring PostgreSQL V9.6 was added along with Overview page updates.
·    Monitoring Agent for SAP HANA Database - The License Expiry Days attribute and the HANA_License_Expiry_Crit_SYS and HANA_License_Expiry_Warn_SYS thresholds were added to monitor the number of days that are remaining before license expiration.
·    Monitoring Agent for Synthetic Playback - The Synthetic Playback agent includes a new filtering feature for synthetic transactions, ability to configure blocklists and allowlists for your synthetic transactions that exclude or include requests to specified URLs and domains.
·    Monitoring Agent for Tomcat - Support was added for Linux for System z. Support for installing and configuring the Tomcat agent on Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 systems was added. Data sets, dashboards, and group widgets for transaction tracking and deep-dive diagnostics were added.
·    Monitoring Agent for VMware VI - Several updates made to Server Summary dashboard was updated to show the SSH status
·    Monitoring Agent for WebLogic - Transaction tracking and deep-dive diagnostics were added to the agent in the Advanced Agents offering.
·    Monitoring Agent for WebSphere Applications Support for Linux for Power Systems (Little Endian) and Linux for System z was added. (Transaction tracking is not supported.) Support for IBM WebSphere Application Server traditional V9 was added. The Memory Analysis dashboard was added to help you diagnose possible memory leaks. Support was added to use the Application Health Status data set to create event thresholds for application status monitoring.
·    Monitoring Agent for WebSphere MQ - Support for Linux for System z was added. Channel and queue long-term history data is supported.
·    Response Time Monitoring Agent
            Support for configuring user and session tracking for applications on the Agent Configuration page was added with ability to locations that are applied to specific IP addresses or address ranges in the End User Transaction dashboards.
·    IBM OMEGAMON® for Application Performance Management support-OMEGAMON for APM enables support for your IBM OMEGAMON agents in your Cloud APM offering via the Hybrid Gateway.
·    Enhanced data retention - Ability to retain data for up to 32 days before the oldest samples are removed to make room for the new data samples.
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Cloud APM server enhancements:
·    Enhanced visualization - Custom Views- IBM Cloud Application Business Insights Universal View supports ability to create customized pages for the applications that you are monitoring. In the Custom Views tab, you can use an existing template or create customized templates for your page. You can choose from different chart and metric options to create widgets to monitor data according to your requirement. By using the Universal View, you can create dashboards to monitor data from various agents.  You can also export the customized page data to a Raw Data file.
·    Application Performance Dashboard Status Overview - The Application Performance Dashboard page for the selected application is streamlined for improved viewing.

 
Agent Builder enhancements:
Support is improved for building Cloud APM summary dashboards for Agent Builder agents.

Enhanced integration:
·    Alert Notification - Ability to configure and to send events to Alert Notification.
·    Customizable EIF Slots for events - Ability to customize the base EIF slot message and create custom EIF slots for events sent to a receiver such as Netcool/OMNIbus.
·    Multiple Hybrid Gateways - Ability to install a Hybrid Gateway on multiple Tivoli Monitoring domains.
·    Enhanced scalability - An increase in the maximum number of agents that you can connect to a Cloud APM server from 4,000 agents to 10,000 agents.
·    API - You can use APIs to create scripts for automating the onboarding of your Performance Management environment.

Notes:
You will be able to upgrade from APM v8.1.3 to v8.1.4 in the near term future as soon as Dev completes the upgrade patch or you can install v8.1.4 directly.

Your v8.1.3 agents will be able to communicate with your new APM v8.1.4 server.    You can choose to upgrade the v8.1.3 agents to v8.1.4 later if you wish.

Good luck.

Noel Lewis

ITCAM / APM L2 Support team

(PS: Above info was also contributed by my illustrious colleague Gary.  If you find this info useful, send him a quick thanks at gkalatuc@us.ibm.com).

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