Features
The key features vary by offering. Some features are available in one or both offerings, in an add-on, or through integration with other products and components.
- Use resource monitoring agents to monitor languages and middleware. Coverage varies by offering. See Capabilities.
- Use resource monitoring agents to monitor Linux®, UNIX, and Windows operating systems. See Capabilities.
- The OS agents contain a feature to monitor application log files. This feature includes the
capability to configure log file monitoring based on regular expressions.For compatibility, the OS agent consumes the following information and formats:
- Configuration information and the format file that was used by the IBM Tivoli® Monitoring Log File Agent V6.x
- Configuration information and format strings that were used by the Tivoli Event Console Log File Adapter
- The Application Performance Dashboard gives you
a high-level status of the applications in your environment. View areas of interest either by
selecting from the navigator or by clicking in a summary box to drill down to the next level.
To learn about the features that are available at each dashboard level, see All My Applications - Application Performance Dashboard, Application - Application Performance Dashboard, and Group and Instance - Application Performance Dashboard.
- View KPIs from the Tivoli Monitoring and Cloud APM domains in the same dashboards
- In an environment that includes both IBM
Tivoli Monitoring
and IBM Cloud Application Performance Management products, you can install the IBM Cloud Application
Performance Management Hybrid Gateway to provide a consolidated view of managed
systems from both domains. To view your hybrid environment in the Cloud APM console, you must create a managed system group,
install the Hybrid Gateway in your Tivoli
Monitoring environment, and configure communications
with the Hybrid Gateway.
For more information, see Integrating with IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6.3.
- Historical metrics
- Get visualizations of up to 24 hours of historical data on the Application Performance Dashboard. When a time selector is displayed in a
dashboard's Status Overview tab, you can adjust the time range for the charts
and tables whose values are derived from historical data samples. For line charts, you can also
compare the current data, up to the past 24 hours, with up to 8 days of historical data to spot
abnormalities.
For more information, see Adjusting and comparing metrics over time.
- IBM Cloud Application Business Insights Universal View
-
You can use the Universal View to create customized pages for the applications you are monitoring. Choose from different chart and metric options to create widgets to monitor data according to your requirements. With Universal View, you can customize a dashboard to view consolidated data from multiple agents.
When you are viewing data on the dashboard, you can change the chart type dynamically. On the grid widget, you can filter data dynamically.
You can export the customized page data to a Raw Data file.
For more information, see Custom views.
- Cloud APM APIs are available for managing your environment such as to assign users roles and to create thresholds. For more information, see Exploring the APIs.
- In Cloud
APM,
a role is a group of permissions that control the actions you can take. Use the
Role Based Access Control feature to create customized roles, which are the basis of security.
The following four predefined roles are also available: Role Administrator, Monitoring
Administrator, System Administrator, and Monitoring User. You can assign users to both customized
roles or predefined roles, and users can be assigned to multiple roles. You can assign permissions
to customized roles, or you can assign more permissions to existing default roles. Permissions are
cumulative. A user is assigned all the permissions for all the roles they are assigned to.
You can assign the View permission and the Modify permission to individual applications, system resource groups, and custom resource groups. For example, if you are a member of a role that has View permission for an application, you can view all the supporting components within that application.
You can assign the View permission and Modify permission to system administration tasks. For example, if you are a member of a role that has View permission for Advanced Configuration, you can make and save changes in the Advanced Configuration window.
For more information, see Roles and permissions.
- Reports are available for data that is collected by the WebSphere® Applications agent, the Response Time Monitoring Agent, and the Synthetic Playback
agent. Transaction tracking is
required for Response Time Monitoring
agent reports (Not available with Cloud APM, Base Private)
For more information about installing reports, see Integrating with Tivoli Common Reporting. For report descriptions, see Reports.
If you have an IBM Tivoli Monitoring environment that is configured with the Tivoli Data Warehouse, you can send data from the Cloud APM agents to the data warehouse for use in Tivoli Common Reporting reports.
- Build custom agents to monitor any platform or technology. See https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSMKFH/com.ibm.apmaas.doc/install/agent_builder_guide.htm.
- Coverage varies by offering. See Capabilities for the names of the databases that can be monitored,
- Use resource monitoring agents to monitor hypervisors, storage, and networks. Coverage varies by offering. See Capabilities.
- Use resource monitoring agents to monitor business and collaboration applications. Coverage varies by offering. See Capabilities.
- See what your users experience from your infrastructure to their device. Use response time monitoring to monitor the performance and availability of websites and web applications from the browser through to the database, and to monitor mobile devices. After you install the Response Time Monitoring agent on any web servers that you want to monitor, data that is collected by these agents is displayed in the Application Performance Dashboard with little or no further configuration required. Data from the Response Time Monitoring agent is used for the End User Transactions dashboards. In you can measure response time from the Browser, and data from the Response Time Monitoring agent is also used in the Aggregate Transaction Topology. For more information, see Scenario: Monitoring the IBM Java application stack.
- This feature is available with Cloud APM, Advanced Private. The transaction
tracking feature enables topology views and instance level transaction monitoring. Transaction
tracking is installed as part of the Cloud
APM server. Transaction tracking is automatically enabled for some
agents but must be manually enabled for others. Table 1 provides more information about agents that support transaction tracking.
Data is shown in both the Aggregate Transaction Topology and Transaction Instance Topology views for all agents that support transaction tracking.
- Application topology
- See how all components are connected in your application environment. For more information, see Application - Application Performance Dashboard.
- Transaction instance topology
- Visualize the path followed through your environment for each instance of a transaction. For more information, see Transaction Instance Topology
- You can monitor the availability of your internal and external websites by using
the Synthetic Playback
agent.
For more information about using synthetic transactions, see Managing synthetic transactions and events.
- For specific agents, you can drill-down from summary dashboards to deep-dive
diagnostics dashboards and view information about individual requests. Drill down from summary
dashboards to view code-level, stack trace, and SQL query detail. Use the diagnostics dashboards to
identify which requests have a problem and to debug the problematic transaction. You can also
detect, diagnose, and kill hung or slow transactions that are still in progress (see the WebSphere Applications agent Reference). Table 2 provides more information about the
diagnostics agents.
Table 2. Diagnostics dashboards of agents and data collectors Agent or data collector Diagnostic data configured by default Available diagnostics dashboards How to access diagnostics dashboards How to configure the agent or data collector to collect diagnostic data J2SE data collector 
Detail, Web Modules, Request Instances, Request Summary, Request Traces Click Diagnose in the Overview dashboard or Web Modules dashboard. Configuring J2SE monitoring JBoss agent 
Diagnostic Dashboard, In-flight Requests Summary, In-flight Request Stack Trace Dashboard, JVM Garbage Collection, Heap dump, Heap Dump Comparison Click Diagnose, Inflight Requests, Details, or Heap Dump in the Overview dashboard. Setup the JBoss agent transaction tracking or diagnostics data collector Liberty data collector Detail, Heap dump, Heap Dump Comparison, Memory Analysis Click Diagnose, View Heap Dump, or View Memory Analysis in the Overview dashboard. Microsoft .NET agent Request Instances, Request Summary, Request Traces Click Diagnose in the Overview dashboard. Enabling the collection of diagnostics data by using the configdc command Node.js agent GC Details, Request Instances, Request Summary, Request Traces Click Diagnose in the Overview dashboard. Configuring the Node.js agent Node.js data collector GC Details, Slowest Requests Detail, Request Instances, Request Traces Click Diagnose or GC Details in the Overview dashboard. Python data collector Slowest Requests Details, Request Instances Detail, Request Traces Detail, Python Thread Details, Python Garbage Collection, Python Heap Details Click Diagnose, Threads Detail, or Memory Detail in the Overview dashboard. Ruby agent Request Summary Detail, Sampled Request Instances, Request Traces Click Diagnose in the Overview dashboard. Configuring Ruby monitoring Ruby data collector Request Instances, Request Summary, Request Traces Click Diagnose in the Overview dashboard. Configuring the Ruby data collector for IBM Cloud applications SAP NetWeaver Java Stack agent Request Instances, Request Summary, Request Traces Click Diagnose in the Overview dashboard. Enabling the collection of transaction tracking and diagnostics data Tomcat agent Request Instances, Request Summary, Request Traces Click Diagnose in the Overview dashboard. Enabling the collection of transaction tracking and diagnostics data WebLogic agent Diagnostic Dashboard, In-flight Requests Summary, In-flight Request Stack Trace Dashboard, JVM GC Detail, Heap Dump, Heap Dump Comparison Click Diagnose, View Requests, Details, or Heap Dump in the Overview dashboard. Configuring WebLogic monitoring WebSphere Applications agent Diagnostics, Request Instance, Request Sequence, In-flight Requests Summary, In-flight Request Stack Trace, Heap dump, Heap Dump Comparison, Memory Analysis Click Diagnose, View Requests, View Heap Dump, or View Memory Analysis in the Overview dashboard. The View Memory Analysis button works only after memory leak monitoring is enabled.
The Diagnose button is enabled only when deep-dive diagnostics is configured for your agent and you are a member of the Role Administrator role, Monitoring Administrator role, or some other custom role that has view permission for Diagnostics Dashboards.
- With thresholds, you can detect specific application behaviors and conditions based on actively
monitored definitions. Predefined thresholds are available for each agent and you can define new
thresholds for monitoring. For more information, see Threshold Manager.
When you have event forwarding configured, events are sent to the EIF receiver. You can use the default mapping between thresholds and events forwarded to the event server or customize how thresholds are mapped. For more information, see Customizing an event to forward to an EIF receiver.
In the Application Performance Dashboard, after you select an application, the Events tab is displayed. The Events tab shows the open events for the current application. You can drill down to detailed dashboards with performance metrics to help you determine the cause of the event. For more information, see Event Status.
- Managed systems in your monitored enterprise can be categorized by their purpose. Such managed systems often have the same threshold requirements. Use the Resource Group Manager to organize monitored systems into groups that you can assign eventing thresholds to. For more information, see Resource Group Manager.
- After you log in to the Cloud APM console, you are
presented with a Getting Started page. Click any of the User Tasks or
Administrator Tasks to link to a scenario-based tour or video demonstration.
Start now
links take you directly to the feature, such as the Threshold Manager. Community Resources links go to Frequently Asked Questions, the Cloud APM forum, and more.
Extra features are available through integration with other products and components. For more information, see Integration and more details in Integrating with other products and components.