Crontab clarification for installing Infrastructure Agent and PHP agent in Cloud

Products

• CA Application Performance Management Agent (APM / Wily / Introscope)
• INTROSCOPE

Issue/Introduction

We are trying to install the Infrastructure agent and the PHP agent in the Cloud and we are concerned about the Crontab.

 

Can anyone clarify what is the Crontab used for?
Also, is it safe to install it without the Crontab?

Environment

Release:
Component: APMISP

Resolution

- Can anyone clarify what is the Crontab used for?
Crontab is used to start apmia-ca-installer.sh on reboot.

- Also, is it safe to install it without the Crontab?
This can be achieved using force_start option (see TEC DOC KB000095294). Indeed it is safe in terms of functionality. Our Openshfit/Kubernetes/DockerMonitor – all of them run with this option only, we do not use Crontab inside the container.

By the way, below is our official image for APM IA. We would suggest customers to use this as base image in case they want to run APM IA.
Customers should be able to configure any extension from this image
 
https://hub.docker.com/r/caapm/apmia/
 

Additional Information

Infrastructure Agent install fails without permissions to Crontab
https://comm.support.ca.com/kb/_infrastructure-agent-install-fails-without-permissions-to-crontab/KB000095294