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What’s new in APM 10.1

By Amy.Feldman posted Oct 15, 2015 03:20 PM

  

We are proud to announce the general availability of CA APM 10.1, released just three months after the release of CA APM 10.0.  Over the last year we’ve been talking about our amazing transformation which includes a new strategy and vision based on our  user centric design, a new start-up like culture and the adoption of agile development.  By moving to agile development we have been able to speed our release cycles now releasing our third version in less than nine months.  We continue to drive toward our E.P.I.C. vision with this new release introducing a new Node.js agent along with other minor enhancements.  Also the innovations introduced in APM 10 allow us to tackle tough problems faced by our customers with monitoring applications using a microservices architecture.

 

Microservices architecture compartmentalize the application by function allowing for greater application flexibility, portability and an increase in update/changes. This architecture introduces new layer of monitoring challenges to an already complex application environment.  The strides and enhancements we made in CA APM 10 with APM Team Center Perspectives, Timeline views and Differential Analysis has helped us to make strides in solving these challenges of monitoring microservices that include:

  • Reduce complexity – Since microservices introduces many new smaller applications components to an already complex application environment.  Often times it is difficult to understand the performance and health of each component and their impact to other services.  With the increase in components it becomes difficult to understand application environments and every components relationships using the traditional application service maps.  CA APM Team Center Perspectives helps to reduce this complexity with its patent pending innovation of pivoting on attributes, allowing users to view application relationships and health that are relevant to their role and task. 
  • Understand change – Microservices architecture offer developers a new level of flexibility allowing them deliver updates and changes more frequently. With the increasing rate of change it becomes difficult to understand if that change has had an impact on the performance of the application.  CA APM Team Center Timeline view allows users to view not only change but the impact that change has had on the application health. By scrolling back in time users can quickly and easily find the initial root cause of an issue which is key in triaging an application issue.
  • Know when and where to act – In new modern applications that utilize a microservices architecture, failure takes on a whole new meaning.  In many cases the application is designed for failure and is resilient, meaning the app should fail and restart in a new environment without impacting the end user.  In these environments, determining what application issue needs immediate attention is difficult.  CA APM Differential Analysis looks at performance trends to help you take the noise out of events and determine when and where to act allowing users to focus on the real issues before they impact the end user.
  • Elegance at scale– In these new modern environments, components come and go with greater frequency and scale resulting in an increase in monitoring data collected.  Not only does the monitoring tool need to scale with the scaling needs of the application but it needs to be easy to understand the complex and vast set of data.  CA APM provides smart instrumentation allowing you to collect what you need when you need it, monitoring at scale and a simple view into complex application environments.  These help the users to gain control of a sprawling application and information.

 

Since CA APM 10.0 and with this new release of CA APM 10.1 we have added the ability to monitor new technologies that support modern development and microservices architectures.

 

Node.js

In CA APM 10.1 we are introducing a new Node.js agent allowing enterprises running Node.js applications to identify and resolve performance issues.  CA APM for Node.js integrates performance metrics into CA APM for intelligent analytics, alerting and visibility on a single dashboard. CA APM for Node.js provides the following functionality:

  • Problem Detection: Monitors and detects performance problems in the critical components of Node.js applications. Also monitors the overall health and performance of the Node.js process helping to quickly identify performance problems.
  • Problem Triage and Diagnosis: Correlates performance of Node.js applications to the performance of the rest of the application tiers. Quickly triage and diagnose problems using intelligent analytics and alerting.
  • Problem Root Cause Analysis: Automatically collects deep dive diagnostic snapshots of transactions when performance problems occur allowing users to quickly determine the root cause of the performance issues.
  • Easy to Install and Deploy: Is easy to install and deploy and does not require any modifications to the Node.js application source code.

ATC1 Screenshot_NodeJS.gif

Docker Containers

  • CA APM provides the ability to monitor the performance of applications deployed in Docker containers using the CA APM Java agent. 
  • CA APM also monitors the health of the Docker Containers through a CA APM Field Pack Docker.  The Docker Platform provides some basic monitoring and metrics such as total number of containers, images, CPU usage, network traffic, running containers, memory usage, etc.  These Docker metrics are gathered using the CA APM EPAgent which connects to the Docker Remote API.

 

Cloud Foundry

  • CA APM provides the ability to monitor applications deployed to a Cloud Foundry PaaS using the CA APM Java agent (version 9.7 or higher)
  • Using the Cloud Foundry Java buildpack, customers are able to use CA APM to monitor their applications deployed to Pivotal or other Cloud Foundry environments.  The CA Introscope agents are included in the default java build pack for Cloud Foundry, so if you have CA APM monitoring running, the Cloud Foundry DEA (Droplet Execution Agent) will auto-detect the service and enable the agent in the buildpack.  This makes it easier to instrument and monitor applications deployed to a Cloud Foundry environment. 
  • Pivotal Cloud Foundry PaaS collects basic performance information such as CounterEvent, ContainerMetrics, (CPU, Memory and disk usage), heart beat events, HTTP requests passing through Cloud Foundry routers and ValueMetric (numCPUS, numGORoutines, memoryStats) for the platform.  These metrics are gathered using the CA APM EPAgent which connects to Pivotal Cloud Foundry Firehose Nozzle API and is available through CA APM Field Pack

 

Attribute API & other maintenance improvements:

Easily customize APM Team Center with this new Attribute API.  Submit new attributes to existing components, add new vertices, make a trace or add another component.  

 

Other maintenance improvements:

  • EM on Java 8
  • Domains.xml changes with no restart
  • Disable ABA tab in WebView
  • Threaddump truncation fix
  • .NET Socket monitoring DNS issue fix
  • Differential Analysis variance intensity expanded to MOM
  • “APM Simplification Phase I"

 

Attend our upcoming webcast with Jason Bloomberg to learn more about how CA APM monitors applications using a microservices architecture.  To learn more about CA APM 10.1 please refer to the CA APM 10.1 release notes.

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