Using the IBM App Connect Enterprise Agent

Overview

The App Connect Enterprise Agent offers the following capabilities:

• Provides realtime visibility into App Connect container topologies, licensing, and usage.
• Inspects deployed message flows to determine how flows are triggered and what they expose, and to identify resource dependencies and deprecated components.
• Provides actionable guidance about deployment changes across App Connect runtimes, resources, flows, credentials, and policies.
• Offers an efficient way to query pre-trained versions of the following content in the IBM knowledge base:
  • The IBM App Connect in containers 13.0.0 or later (Long Term Support Cycle-3) documentation
  • The App Connect TechXchange community website
  • IBM App Connect Enterprise support cases
• Provides relevant up-to-date guidance to accelerate troubleshooting.

You can enable the Agent within an App Connect Dashboard instance that hosts integration runtimes in a containerized environment on Red Hat® OpenShift® or Kubernetes. The resulting Agent deployment embeds a chat button within the Dashboard UI. This chat button opens a chat window where you can ask questions and receive generated responses about your container deployments in natural language. You can also use the chat window to query the IBM knowledge base about technical or conceptual information about App Connect.

When you enable the Agent in your cluster, a connection is configured to large language models (LLMs), which are hosted in a designated tenant-specific instance of IBM watsonx.ai on IBM Cloud. The Agent deployment sends your questions or prompts in the chat window to these LLMs, which are then used to formulate and send back responses to the chat window.

Use cases

As a typical use case, you can use the chat window to run queries against your deployed integration runtimes for the following types of information:

• A listing of the integration runtimes that are managed by the Dashboard
• The versions of these runtimes
• The status of the integration runtimes
• The amount of CPU that is allocated for running the integration runtimes
• Details of which integration runtimes are optimized
• A listing of all applications that are deployed on the servers
• Details of whether a specific integration runtime is running

You can also ask questions about product information that is documented in the knowledge base; for example:

• The differences between App Connect Enterprise deployed on virtual machines and App Connect Enterprise in containers
• The minimum CPU that an integration runtime can be configured with

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