Agents and data collectors
IBM® Cloud Application Performance Management agents and data collectors are available in both the offerings and the add-ons.
Many resources in your environment can be monitored by agents. Some resources on IBM Cloud and on premises can be monitored by data collectors. Corresponding agents exist for all data collectors, except the J2SE and Python data collectors. For a list of agents and data collectors and their descriptions, see Descriptions. To figure out the capabilities that the agent or data collector can provide in each offering, see Capabilities. To find out the change history of each agent and data collector, see Change history.
You can install these agents or data collectors, depending on your environment and requirements. Data collectors send data directly to the Cloud APM server. When an agent is configured, data collectors send data to the agent, which forwards it to the server. Data collectors operate within the application process space, whereas agents run as a separate process outside the application process space.
- You want a simpler installation process.
- You use containers.
- You want greater scalability.
- You want to limit sockets from end points to the server.
- When you add a threshold in the threshold editor, you want a clear list, which contains only the attributes for the environment you want to monitor. If you use a data collector, you must choose from the attributes of several data collectors.
- You want to turn on or off some of the data collection functions on the UI, such as diagnostics, transaction tracking, or method trace.
- You want to view on-demand diagnostics data, such as in-flight requests and heap dump at the current time.