Overview of APM Admin Philosophy

Products

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

Issue/Introduction

Description:

This is an expansion of a Tuesday Tip sent to the Community Site

Solution:

Operating System Administration and APM Administration use similar approaches. For APM Administration, it comes down to making a choice:

Will I do the MINIMUM needed and then "pay as you go" when things go wrong?

Will I have a REACTIVE or PROACTIVE APM environment?

This is summarized in the following table:

Philosophy	Admin Activities	System Stability	Use of Tool	Time-Consuming
Minimum/ Do Nothing	Only if absolutely necessary.	System runs until it breaks. Not optimized.	Generate metrics	Only if fixing an APM system.
Reactive	Fix broken components. Add agents, dashboards etc. without being concerned about implications	Visible issues fixed but deeper ones may not be addressed.	Generate metrics Minimum reporting	Only if fixing an APM system or resolving upgrade issues. In "Reactive Hell" state because not applying lessons learned during outages.
Proactive	Frequent, to have optimized and current systems.	Good because visible and deeper issues addressed, architecture and configuration is optimized	Generate metrics Full use of reporting Event correlation Application optimization Capacity planning Takes full advantage of the solution.	Time spent on proactive tasks is offset by reduced outage time.

References

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/4/html/Introduction_To_System_Administration/ch-philosophy.html -- Red Hat Document on System Administration Philosophy

http://kagan.mactane.org/essays/sysadmin.php -- Another Overview on OS System Administration

Environment

Release:
Component: APMAGT