Configuring digital experience monitoring (DEM) for Liberty applications

After you configure the Liberty data collector, you can enable DEM to collect data about how actual users interact with and experience web applications.

Before you begin

Prerequisites:

DEM supports monitoring kube services that are exposed by Ingress only. Make sure that the following settings are enabled in your Kubernetes environment.
- If you are using ingress rewriting rules, ensure X-Original-URI header is supported to pass original URI. By default it is enabled.
Make sure the Kubernetes data collector is installed and enabled. Otherwise, the DEM service cannot be found in IBM Cloud App Management portal. For more information, see Kubernetes data collector.
Make sure the Liberty data collector that you deploy is up-to-date. For more information, see Monitoring Liberty applications in Kubernetes environment.
OpenTracing monitoring must be enabled. By default it is enabled in Liberty monitoring.

About this task

To enable DEM after you configure the Liberty data collector, do the following steps:

Procedure

Open your application deployment yaml file, and add the following environment variables.
```
   containers:
      - env:
        - name: IBM_APM_RUM_ENABLED
          value: "true"
```
Note: If you want to disable DEM, set the value to false.
Apply your application deployment yaml file.
Optional: If you have configured OpenTracing sampling settings of the Liberty data collector, DEM reads the sampler type and param. If you want to change the sampling settings, open the application deployment yaml file and modify the lines in the env: section, for example,
```
- name: JAEGER_SAMPLER_TYPE
  value: "ratelimiting"
- name: JAEGER_SAMPLER_PARAM
  value: "10"
```
For more information, see Customizing the Liberty data collector.

What to do next

Launch a web request, and then do the following steps to verify whether DEM is successfully enabled:

In the Cloud App Management console, click the Resources tab.
Find Kubernetes Service from the All resource types list and click to open it.
Browse the Resource list, click the resource name that you have enabled DEM, and open the resource dashboard.
Use one of the following methods to verify:
- Check whether browser is displayed in Service dependencies section.
- Check whether Browser is listed in the Related resources widget.
Click to drill down browser to check whether you can get detailed browser data.