Installing agents

You can install any combination of monitoring agents on a managed system. For example, if you install the WebSphere® MQ) agent to monitor queue managers in your enterprise environment, you might want to also install the Windows OS agent. With the Windows OS agent, you can monitor other aspects of the system, such as the overall CPU, memory, and disk.

For a list of the agents that run on a Windows system, see Preinstallation on Windows systems.

Before you begin

• Review the information in System requirements to make sure that you have the requirements for the agents you plan to install.
• Download the agents. See Downloading agents and data collectors from Passport Advantage.
• Review the agent prerequisite tasks before you install the agents. For details, see Preinstallation on Windows systems.
• Configure the agent images with the connection details for the Monitoring server. See Configuring the downloaded images.

About this task

Ensure that you have adequate permission to run the agent installation script and agent commands. You must be logged in using one of the following user account types:

• Default Windows administrator user account
• Administrator user account
• User account, which is a member of the administrators group
• User account, which is registered as an administrator in Active Directory services

Procedure

Complete these steps to install monitoring agents on VMs and systems where the Windows operating system is installed:

1. On your system, navigate to the directory where your configured agent images are located.
2. Extract the agent installation files to the location where you want to install the monitoring agent software.

3. Open a command prompt as administrator.

   1. From the Start menu, type command in the search box.
   2. Right-click Command Prompt from the list that displays and select Run as administrator.

4. From the command prompt, run the installation script with Administrator privileges from the directory that is named for the extracted installation file and version, for example, C:\images\APP_MGMT_WIN_Agent_Install_2019.4.0.

   cd extracted_image_directory 
   installAPMAgents.bat
   

   To install the agents in silent mode, see Installing agents silently.

   The installation program checks that the agent images were configured with parameters for connecting to the Monitoring server. If the agents images were not configured, the installation is stopped. You must configure the agent images and start the agent installation procedure from Step 1. See Configuring the downloaded images.

   Restriction: For the WebSphere Applications agent, the Administrator privileges must be the same privileges that were used to install the WebSphere Application Server.

5. If you are installing the agents, specify a different agent installation home directory or use the applicable default directory, C:\IBM\APM.

   If you are upgrading the agent, this step is skipped, and the agent installs into the previous installation directory.

   Remember:

   • The name of the installation directory cannot exceed 80 characters or contain non-ASCII, special, or double-byte characters. Directory names in the path can contain only the following characters: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ _\:0123456789()~-./.
   • When short file name creation (8dot3Name) is disabled, if directory names in the path contain spaces, installation is not supported.
   • If you want to install the WebLogic agent and JBoss agent on the same Windows machine, you need to use different installation directories for the WebLogic agent and JBoss agent.

6. When you are asked if you accept the license agreement, enter 1 to accept the agreement and continue, or enter 2 to decline. After you enter 1 (accept), a prerequisite scan of your environment starts and takes a few moments to complete. If any requirements are missing, a message directs you to a log file with the reason for the failure. A prerequisite, such as a missing library or insufficient disk space, stops the installation. You must address the failure, and start the installation script again.

   Troubleshooting:

   If the installation exits with the following message, check whether the Server service is started (Start > Administrative Tools > Services). If not, start the Server service and run installAPMAgents.bat again. This script installAPMAgents.bat must be run as Administrator.

7. After installation is complete and the command line is available, you can repeat the steps in this procedure to install more monitoring agents on the managed system.

Results

When installation completes, the selected agents are installed. The installation log file is install_dir\logs\APPMGMT_Agents_install_date-time.log.

What to do next

Configure your agents as required. If your monitoring agent requires configuration as described in Postinstallation tasks for the agents or if you want to review the default settings, see Configuring montioring agents.

Before installing new agents, Windows installation program temporarily stops all agents currently running in the installed product location. After installation completes, the installation program restarts any stopped agents. You must manually restart any monitoring agent that is not automatically started by the installation program.

Use one of the following methods to start the agent:

• Click Start > All Programs > IBM Monitoring agents > IBM Performance Management. Right-click on an agent and click Start.

• Run the following command:

  name-agent.bat start
  

For information about the monitoring agent commands, including the name to use, see Using agent commands.

After you configure and start the agent, view the data that the agent is collecting from the the console.