APM - How to prevent the messages "[WARN] [IntroscopeAgent.TransactionSamplingStrategy] Either Intelligent Instrumentation or Deep Tracing are disabled"

Products

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

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

-After switching to APM Java Agent 21.12.0 ("AgentNoRedefNoRetrans.jar") for IBM Java, you can get lots of warning messages like the one below.

3/07/22 03:10:38 PM MEZ [WARN] [IntroscopeAgent.TransactionSamplingStrategy] Either Intelligent Instrumentation or Deep Tracing are disabled, however, one of the selected sampling strategy requires them. Trace is discarded

Cause

Out of the box, Smart Instrumentation is enabled in the java agents including agent_noredef. TransactionSamplingStrategy will not work if both of the below two properties related to deep tracing are not enabled. Also if you decide to disable the smart instrumentation completely in the agent then you are likely to see the warnings above in the agent logs.

introscope.agent.deep.instrumentation.enabled
introscope.agent.deep.trace.enabled

If both or one of the properties above were disabled that could be the reason for this warning message.

For more information about Transaction Sampling and other options, refer to Configure Transaction Trace Options

Environment

APM Introscope 10.7.0 SP3
Component: DX APM Java Agents
Agent Release: 20.9, 21.12
Platform: AIX, Linux

Resolution

To eliminate these Warnings you may want to enable the 3 below properites in the IntroscopeAgent.profile file as below:

1) Open the <AGENT-HOME>/core/config/IntroscopeAgent.profile
2) Set the following:
introscope.agent.transactiontracer.sampling.enabled=true
introscope.agent.deep.instrumentation.enabled=true
introscope.agent.deep.trace.enabled=true

NOTE: You don't need to restart the JVM or app server. This is a hot property. Please check also the following article: Java Agent Properties

Additional Information

Despite the issue above the Java agent configuration is the same across all the JVM versions for both the regular agent.jar and agent-noredef.jar. You may want to check also the following resources below for Java Agent configuration.

Configure Application Server to Use the Java Agent: WebSphere Liberty

Configure Apache Tomcat to Use the Java Agent

Configure Application Server to Use the Java Agent: WebSphere Application Server