Why IBM Performance Management

IBM Performance Management is the only application performance management (APM) solution to support the full IBM Middleware stack, monitoring the performance and availability of your applications, such as WebSphere Application Server, MQ, and Integration Bus, to ensure optimal performance and efficient use of resources. IBM APM is available both on Cloud and on premises. It also integrates with some other products, like traditional IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Netcool/OMNIbus, etc., which provides you more flexibility to deploy IBM Performance Management to your existing environment. 

How it works

IBM Performance Management agents collect data on the monitored hosts (some doing remote monitoring, such as WebSphere MQ agent). Agents pass the data to the Performance Management server, which collates it into the console.

• The agents establish HTTPS communication with the Performance Management server because they are preconfigured to communicate. Every minute, agents pushes all  information to the server that is required to populate the user interface.
• The Performance Management server receives and processes monitoring information from all agents in your infrastructure, using either the Performance Management server hosted in the IBM cloud, or your own server. The server stores all values  sent by the agents for 8 days. Summarized transaction data is stored for longer periods.
• The server also provides the Performance Management console, which is the user interface for Performance Management. Using a web browser to access the console and view the collated information in a single view across hybrid applications. Use the console to view the status of your applications and quickly assess and fix performance and availability issues.
• Depending on your IBM APM offering and capacity of your server environment, you can connect up to 4000 agents.

WAS agent functions

Put simply, the WAS agent gathers PMI metrics for resource monitoring through a JMX interface on the application server. If you configure the data collector within the application server, aggregated request performance metrics are also displayed in the dashboards. But wait, there’s more than just PMI metric collection.

Not only PMI data collector

Application Diagnostics is one type of IBM Performance offerings: code level visibility into your applications and health of your application servers. With Application Diagnostics, you can configure the data collector to track the performance of individual request and method calls. Then take dashboards provided with the agent to isolate specific problem areas of your application server, drilling down to determine whether problems lie with an underlying resource or relates to the application's code.

Where the WAS agent comes from

The predecessor of the WAS agent is the ITCAM Agent for WebSphere Applications, based on the IBM Tivoli Monitoring infrastructure. When the monitoring infrastructure moves onto Cloud, the brand new WAS agent is introduced and is much easier to deploy, configure, and use. However, the old ITCAM agent is not abandoned. One data collector can be shared by both the ITCAM agent and the WAS agent, so it is up to you how and where monitored data is displayed.

WAS Liberty profile in Docker

No worries! You can also install the WAS agent on the Docker host, and issue the docker run command with a few options to configure the data collector before you start WAS Liberty. Configure one data collector for one liberty profile to collect resource metrics, transaction metrics, and diagnostics data. Conversely, only one monitoring agent is needed to be installed on the Docker host. All data collectors configured on the same Docker host can share the same monitoring agent on the host.

Learn more

Ready to get started monitoring applications? Visit IBM Middleware learning site to explore Application Performance Management at http://ibm.co/2adAJx0, or IBM Marketplace at http://ibm.co/1SDvOV3.

Want to learn more about APM and WebSphere? Watch this demo at http://ibm.co/APMDemo.

This was written by Mu Han Sun. Please visit developerWorks for more information about APM.