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  • 1.  Instana Essentials 1 – The Agent Webinar

    Posted Tue September 19, 2023 03:19 PM
    Edited by Julia Leyton García Tue January 30, 2024 11:43 AM

    Summary

    A free-of-charge technical enablement series to help you get started with Instana.

    Join us for an 8-week enablement series to help you understand the fundamentals of Instana.

    We will deliver one 1-hour session each week dedicated to a key learning area of the product. The sessions are designed so you can drop in at any point into the curriculum. You can ask questions and get familiar with Instana features and capabilities to start your observability journey.

    During this session, you will learn everything you need to know about the Instana Agent. How does it work, architecture, design, installation, and configuration options.

    Please share any questions by clicking on the Reply button. If you have not done so already, register to watch here.



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    Viktor Manweiler
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  • 2.  RE: Instana Essentials 1 – The Agent Webinar

    Posted Wed October 18, 2023 01:57 PM
    Edited by Julia Leyton García Tue January 30, 2024 11:44 AM

    Hi everyone,

    Thanks for joining!

    Stay tuned for upcoming Instana Events.


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    Viktor Manweiler
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  • 3.  RE: Instana Essentials 1 – The Agent Webinar

    Posted Fri December 08, 2023 10:51 AM

    Hi everyone:

    Is there any information about the resource consumption of each sensor?

    Regards,

    Christian



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    Christian Kam
    Software Specialist Advanced
    GBM
    Panama
    +507 300-4800
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  • 4.  RE: Instana Essentials 1 – The Agent Webinar

    IBM TechXchange Speaker
    Posted Mon December 11, 2023 08:40 AM

    Christian,

    My understanding is that sensor resource consumption does vary based on the workload, so its not a "one size fits all" kind of answer.  However with that said, Instana has done a lot of work to both made the resource consumptions of the sensors running under the Agent very low by design and to make the resource consumption visible to the users.  You can check out the documentation to see how to manage the host resources.  https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/current?topic=agents-managing-host. 



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    Mike Mallo 
    Instana Technical Head of Product
    IBM Corporation
    mmallo@us.ibm.com
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  • 5.  RE: Instana Essentials 1 – The Agent Webinar

    Posted Mon December 11, 2023 11:28 AM
    Hi Mike,
     
    Thanks for your reply. 
     
    Some sensors can perform remote monitoring, for example: IBM MQ, IBM ACE, IBM i instances, and others. 
    - ibm i sensor: start and use the QZDASONIT job on IBM i server
    - ibm mq sensor: generates temporary queues and opens channels in the remote queue manager to retrieve metrics
     
    In these cases, the resource consumption on the agent's side is visible, but it does not correspond to the consumption generated in the remote side.
    We usually do tests in QA env to evaluate resource consumption and prevent system degradations, but we do not have a value to compare...
    Regards,
    Christian


    ------------------------------
    Christian Kam
    Software Specialist Advanced
    GBM
    Panama
    +507 300-4800
    ------------------------------



  • 6.  RE: Instana Essentials 1 – The Agent Webinar

    Posted Tue December 12, 2023 10:52 AM

    Hi Christian

    you choose the right and only approach: measuring in the right context aka your environment.

    In general, we must differentiate between trace sensors and metric sensors. Trace sensor add overhead with growing load (each span must be processed) while metric sensors have always the same overhead, no matter the load (it does not matter if the value of a metric is 0 or a gazzilion...the numbers of metrics collected is constant).

    Also, when we talk about overhead, there are 4 different overheads: cpu, mem, io (network) and storage (likely of little concern). Which one is our concern?

    Lastly, your observation with remote agents is interesting. Per design of Instana the typical setup is one agent on one host. But this changes with remote agents and theoretically you could monitor 1million entities with one agent, and obviously that does not work. Hence, my appreciation of you measuring the actual overhead.

    I hope that helps

    Tom



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    Tom Tammann
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  • 7.  RE: Instana Essentials 1 – The Agent Webinar

    Posted Tue December 12, 2023 05:00 PM

    HI Tom,

    What is our concern?
     
    This may vary depending on the sensor, but we are measuring the overhead to minimize these concerns.
     
    About tracing >>>
    MQ Tracing and ACE Tracing are features that we are using with caution because they can cause overloading, slowness, timeouts and high I/O.   This requires a lot of testing as documented.
    Thanks for your reply.



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    Christian Kam
    Software Specialist Advanced
    GBM
    Panama
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  • 8.  RE: Instana Essentials 1 – The Agent Webinar

    Posted Wed December 13, 2023 01:56 AM

    Hi Christian ,

    We discovered high CPU overhead when trying to monitor heavy working IBM MQ Server on AIX hosts.  Actually we planning to work with MQ tracing, but we cannot continue.

    Case open.

    In addition, with tracing IBM HTTP server on AIX host we have problems.

    I have number of reasons to say, that AIX is "unloved" by Instana.



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    Shimon Zaidman
    MATAF
    TEL-AVIV
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  • 9.  RE: Instana Essentials 1 – The Agent Webinar

    Posted Wed December 13, 2023 10:52 AM

    Hello Shimon

    I am sorry to hear about your experience. A couple of ideas,

    a) it might help to bump the heap of the agent a bit to reduce garbage collection for heavily taxed agents

    b) httpd: did you try the latest tracer lib and mod 1.0.14 or even 1.0.15?

    Best regards
    Tom



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    Tom Tammann
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