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The 12 days of 8.0 - Day 6

By Anon Anon posted Dec 06, 2014 06:02 AM

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"On the 6th day of DevTest the CA team brought to me 6 more agents, protocols, categories intercepted

FIVE generated assets,

FOUR opaque data types processes,

THREE new execution modes,

TWO RR pairs added,

and a Server-Side Recorder in a DevTest tree!"

The new CA Continuous Application Insight is based on using our java agent technology to introspect your running business processes to find "live paths". The way this works is we put our java agent into the start up of your application, usually via the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS, and point the agent to our CA CAI Broker and start your application. When your application starts up you will see a message about the agent version, name, status, and remote broker connection. Quietly in the background we will start to instrument your application looking for interesting transactions. In general we look for:

Inbound http/s communications - web pages, web services, rest calls
Inbound socket communications - raw TCP/IP calls, java RMI or JNDI lookups, JMS messages, MQ Series
Outbound http/s communications - going out to another machine for data
Outbound socket communications - JDBC, TCP/IP, java RMI or JNDI lookups, JMS messages, MQ Series, plane old sockets with CTG or IMS connect
Inside the java virtual machine we see JDBC calls, EJB2, EJB3, IS flow services, Tibco activities

The agents start out a bit quiet and only track use counts which helps you identify what core components are being used, you can then dial up your transactions to see the counts and paths, or stitching of a business transaction into the live paths. Getting the paths takes a little more work (CPU) by the agent and broker but the visibility gained is great. The final thing you can do is turn on full payloads plus paths and you will get robust information about what is called and all of the data associated with it. Great thing is you get full visibility, just remember to make sure you have enough DB space to store all the transaction so you can generate virtual services and baseline tests.

When there are extra or noisy transactions you can include them or exclude them. For example, if your application has a heart beat between two servers, it is good to know it is there but can create tons of noise in the list of transactions in the CA Continuous Application Insight web user interface. We allow you to right click and stop persisting the heartbeat or you can add a exclude clause to not even pay attention to the calls. On the other hand if you have great custom frameworks written in your java that is just a bunch of POJO's you can explicitly include them into the paths to show more details so you can see your custom.

Now that we have a basis of what the agent will capture what platforms do I put the agents into? We test modern versions of J2EE and integration platforms running java 1.7, 1.6, and 1.5 (planned deprecation for 1.5 in next year).

webMethods IS	9.0, 9.5
Tibco BW	5.10
JBoss	4.2, 7.3
WebLogic	10.3, 12.1.1 with Sun and JRocket JRE
Jetty	8, 9.1
WebSphere	7, 8.5

As you can see, this new functionality is unmatched in the industry. We're even more excited to hear how you plan to use it - let us know in the comments below. And that's our 6th gift to you on these 12 days of DevTest!

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