Architecture overview

Data collection

Agents and data collectors monitor systems, subsystems, or applications and collect data. An agent or a data collector interacts with a single resource (for example, a system or application) and, in most cases, is on the same computer or virtual machine where the system or application is running. For example, the Linux® OS agent collects performance indicators for the operating system on the Linux host and the WebSphere® Applications agent monitors the performance indicators of WebSphere application servers. Also, some agents track transactions between different resources.

You can set up thresholds on key performance indicators (KPIs). If an indicator changes to go over or under the threshold, the agent or data collector generates an alert, which is the server processes. You can also configure forwarding of events to a target, such as the Netcool/OMNIbus Probe for Tivoli® EIF, Cloud Event Management, or an SMTP server.

Agents and data collectors are preconfigured to communicate with the Cloud APM server.

Communication between the server and agents or data collectors

The agents and data collectors on every monitored host establish HTTP communication with the Cloud APM server. The agent or data collector is the client side of the connection.

If you configured HTTPS communications and your firewall rules do not allow transparent outbound HTTPS connections to external hosts, you can configure agents and data collectors to send traffic to a forward proxy. For more information, see Network connectivity.

Cloud APM server

The Cloud APM server receives and processes monitoring information from all agents and data collectors in your infrastructure. The server also provides the Cloud APM console. You can use a web browser to access the console and view the collated information.

When you install the Cloud APM server, the installer also deploys a Db2® database and a MongoDB database. You can use an existing Db2 server or MongoDB server as long as they are not on the same server as the Cloud APM server and they are a supported version for 8.1.4.0.

The installer also preconfigures a copy of the agents and data collectors to communicate with this server. You can use the server to generate a preconfigured copy of the agents and data collectors later.

Data stored by the server

Agents and data collectors push data to the Cloud APM server at intervals ranging from 1 minute to 8 minutes, depending on the type of data. The server stores all values that are sent by the agents and data collectors for 8 days by default. Summarized transaction data is stored for longer periods.

Saved monitoring data is called historical data. The server uses historical data to display tables and graphs that you can use to analyze the trends in your environment. You can change the number of days that resource monitoring data samples are retained from the default 8 days to the best practices values (from 2 days to 32 days) that were established by the agent and data collector developers. For more information, see Managing historical retention values.

Historical reports are also available for certain agents. For more information, see Reports.

Scalability

You can monitor up to 10,000 managed systems from Cloud APM, Private. A managed system is a single operating system, subsystem, or application in your enterprise that an agent is monitoring.

The actual number of managed systems that your environment can support depends on the number and type of agents in your environment and the capacity of your Cloud APM server. A key consideration is the number of rows of agent data that is written to the databases per minute. Use the load projections spreadsheet to estimate the number of agent rows that are written per minute: IBM Cloud App Management Load Projections Spreadsheet . Compare the results with the range of values for the different environment sizes in Table 1 or Table 2 in Cloud APM server hardware requirements. For the Cloud APM, Advanced Private offering, an extra consideration is the number of monitored user transactions per second.

Integration

IBM Cloud Application Performance Management integrates with other products and components when they are configured for communication with the Cloud APM server.

Products that can be integrated include Netcool/OMNIbus, Tivoli Monitoring, OMEGAMON® for APM, Operations Analytics - Log Analysis, Operations Analytics - Predictive Insights, Tivoli Common Reporting, and IBM Cloud.

Agent Builder is a component that can be used to create custom agents.