It's been two months now since APM 9.7 has been released. APM 9.7 is the most feature loaded release since I joined CA nearly 6 years ago and it is a first, but big step towards E.P.I.C. APM: Easy, Proactive, Intelligent and Collaborative APM.
Read CA APM Upgrade - How we successfully upgraded Huge APM Production Infrastructure for a more comprehensive story from a real customer upgrade.
Why should I upgrade to 9.7?
We published a few videos highlighting the new or enhanced features of APM 9.7 that might help also you in the decision to upgrade to APM 9.7:
You might also want to subscribe our YouTube channels Educate and CA Technologies for our latest videos.
APM 8.x and 9.0.x will be end-of-service with the next 12 months
Be aware that APM 8.x will only be supported until October 16, 2015 and APM 9.0.x until March 1, 2016.
So it is time to plan your upgrade to CA APM 9.7 now!
Make sure you have an internal project set up and approved and all the resources you need (internal or external from CA Partners or CA Services)! I have performed or witnessed enough upgrades to know that the upgrade of the EMs is relatively straight forward but the agent upgrade may take forever. Planning is the crucial first step to a successful upgrade. While older APM agents will usually connect even to the latest EM (check compatibility guide and release notes to make sure) you will only get the latest features (e.g. Smart Instrumentation) with the latest agent version.
Some customers have successfully used scripting and/or software delivery/release/automation tools to automate the installation and upgrade of agents and even EMs. Also APM Command Center is the first step towards supporting this functionality right inside the product. Join the CA APM Beta (Private) Community to test APM Command Center!
Upgrade Checklist
Here is a checklist (kudos to noosr03) for a large scale upgrade of 100+ EMs although most points apply to smaller environments as well:
- Identifying all the clusters and coming up with a priority sequence for those clusters
- Identifying the blackout periods (both company wide or service related)
- Prioritizing the cluster based on criticality and blackout dates. Upgrading a not-so-critical cluster first (as pilot) would be a good idea if you are not sure you have tested enough
- Coming up with a list of admins for those clusters and other stakeholders
- Developing a communication plan (when to raise the ticket, who to inform etc)
- Developing a backup strategy in case things where to go wrong
- Identifying all the services, dependencies (upstream and downstream services, ports etc) and components (believe me we had quite a few) running on each of the clusters
- Coming up with a complete test plan (this one was huge we identified quite a few issues )
- The most important was developing a complete upgrade script that with one push of a button would upgrade the entire cluster with 10 collectors (including backup, stopping agent traffic etc) without any manual intervention.
- As important as all the points are we couldn’t have done it without automation given the massive number + only allowed to upgrade few hours over the weekend.
- This is a good time to perform health checks on your APM clusters if you haven't regularly done so!
Couple of things I remember during our upgrade:
- Test (both functional and performance) if all the (sometimes not officially supported) features that you rely on are supported in the latest APM release. Check the Release Notes and test, test, test!
- Also perform performance tests as new APM features may require more resources.
- Provision for APM DB, especially if you are upgrading from APM 8.x!
- Had to stop the agent traffic at the network level (iptables) as agent would keep hitting mom and bog down the entire network, especially when you have upwards of 1000 agents.
- Backup strategy is quite important just in case
If you need help planning or performing your APM upgrade to 9.7 contact you APM account team or CA Services representative.
And finally - if you haven't seen it or want to watch again - a little fun: