Data enablement checklist

Before you proceed to enable data collection, go through the following items one by one and consider carefully which data you really need.

• Archive accounting and statistics data
• Snapshot accounting and statistics data
• Resource statistics
• Message flow processing node details and topology
• Agent parameter considerations
• Historical data collection

Archive accounting and statistics data

Archive accounting and statistics data provides the information about message flow counts and rates of messages, elapsed and CPU timings, sizes of messages, and error counts. The data is available at four levels, message flow, node, terminal, and thread. Archive accounting and statistics data is generated by the broker at a configurable interval, and they are picked up automatically by the agent.

Archive accounting and statistics data is preferred for regular monitoring of message flows.

Think about the level of data collection for archive statistics necessary for your monitoring requirements.

For information about how to enable archive accounting and statistics data, see Archive accounting statistics.

Snapshot accounting and statistics data

Snapshot accounting and statistics data provides the same information as archive accounting and statistics data. The only difference is the data production interval. Snapshot accounting and statistics data is generated every 20 seconds with no choice on that interval. So enabling snapshot accounting and statistics data can produce a lot of data, which can impact the performance and agent memory requirements.

Snapshot accounting and statistics data is usually used for problem determination. You may enable it for a short time only when necessary for a particular message flow and then disable it after you are done. It is not recommended to be enabled more generally or for long periods of time.

For information about how to enable snapshot accounting and statistics data, see Snapshot accounting statistics.

Resource statistics

Resource statistics provide statistical data at the integration server level about various resources that are used by message flows. The resource statistics data is enabled for all types of resources or is disabled for all.

For information about how to enable resource statistics, see Resource statistics.

Message flow processing node details and topology

Message flow processing node details provide the detailed node level definitions. The data is not statitistics or status data. You can link to the workspaces that show this data from the Node Status navigator item in Tivoli Enterprise Portal. The collection of processing node definitional data is controlled by the defaultCollectNodeData parameter in the agent parameter file.

The advantage of collecting this data is that you can see the message flow topology in Tivoli Enterprise Portal, which is similar in appearance to what you see in the IBM Integration Bus toolkit for a message flow. By default, the IBM Integration Bus Monitoring Agent does not collect this data because the amount of the collected data can be very high, depending on the number of message flows, nodes, and attributes. Message flow processing node details and topology data is not available for IBM App Connect Enterprise on zCX.

For information about how to enable data collection, see Message flow processing node details and topology.

Agent parameter considerations

There are many parameters available for the monitoring agent. Most of the default settings are fine to use without change. You must provide information about the target IBM Integration Bus or IBM App Connect Enterprise objects to be monitored in agent parameters; please be sure to follow instructions in the applicable "Completing the configuration" section of the Planning and Configuration Guide about providing the required parameters.

Be sure to read through the Configuration best practices section next for other important considerations for agent parameters. For descriptions about all of the agent parameters, see Customizing the monitoring agent.

Historical data collection

Think carefully about whether you want to set up historical data collection to save and store the agent data. Historical data collection requires more disk space.

For instructions about how to enable historical data collection, see Collecting historical data.

For a list of recommended attribute groups for historical data collection, see Historical data collection.