An APM user sent me this question last week.
I'm the Product Owner for APM Command Center (ACC), so I guess you can deduce what my answer will be, right?
Now that we have established that my answer is biased, let's look at some arguments.
Using ACC has several benefits:
- It allows you to keep a track of configuration changes. You will know who changed which config on which date and be able to revert back to a previous version.
- This also allows you to make sure that the version you’re putting in production is exactly the one that you tested in QA.
- It also tells you which version of a configuration a particular Agent is using: No more logging onto servers to inspect the configuration files manually: huge time saver.
- Did I mention that it works across APM Clusters? No need to log in to Cluster 1 to check for Agent 1, and then Cluster 2 for Agent 2, all your agent are belong to us!
- Direct access to your log files in case there’s a problem and easy sharing. Do you remember the last time you were asked to collect the Agent profile, the pbds, the log files, the extensions, etc... When you had to create an archive with these files, and then transfer it to your laptop to finally be able to add them to a support ticket? How many minutes did that take?
- Editing an Agent's configuration itself should hopefully become a much more pleasant experience through a clean and simple UI, allowing you to easily add/remove additional functionalities, along with full documentation on each option.
- There’s also a pretty cool REST API that allows you to automate these tasks.
- ACC upgrades are guaranteed 100% EPIC Seriously, I just did it, not only the stuff just works, but I have set my Controllers to auto-upgrade (agentController.autoUpgrade=true in the Server config file) a long time ago and then forgot: I was blown away when I logged in and found that all my Controllers were magically all running the latest version!
- 98% of ACC users have expressed a significant improvement in their general happiness level ☺
There are additional goodies not mentioned here, so... let me return the question: What's your reason for not using it?
Florian.