DX Application Performance Management

Hi there,

With CA APM Team Center (version 10.x), there are "Basic Attributes" (reported by the Introscope Agents) and "Custom Attributes" that can be created manually or through Rules.

Can you explain how values are assigned to Custom Attributes ?

For example, one can create a custom attribute named "Location". The question is how values (for example London, Paris and New York) are assigned to that "Location" for the matching components ?

Can Introscope Agents assign (while instrumenting application components) values to Custom Attributes ?

Thanks.

I have this question also and even more around creating perspectives and attribute rules. I did notice in the bottom right of team center, when you select an item, there is an area titled "Custom Attributes" that you can edit. This seems like it could be labor intensive and possibly an admin nightmare to maintain. Also I have found no use for creating perspectives or attribute rules as they don't do any kind of filtering. Actually I have not found any useful views for team center since you cant filter by host name or agent name.

Generally most attributes are created using the rules engine by the administrator.   Manually setting attributes is typically an exception use case.   The rules engine let's you process "gathered" attributes that the agent "knows" about a resource (i.e. Hostname, AgentName, WebService Name, ...) The rules engine has various rules that can be used to generate new attributes like location.  For example if I knew that all hosts that begin with NYC were located in New York City, it can create a location attribute with a value of New York City.  If all agent names had a 5 letter application name embedded after the first three characters, you could extract that dynamically using a single rule.  The idea of the rules engine is that naming conventions tend to have method to their perceived madness.

Additionally in future releases of APM we will be making the filters and perspectives more flexible in which attributes can be used.

However your comment about the "Agent" not being a property you can use a perspective with right now is a bug that has been identified and will be available in the next release.  Here is a workaround you can use with the rules engine to allow it.  You only need to create this one rule and it will be applied to everything.  You can then use IntroscopeAgent in your perspective as part of a nested level to organize or group data.

• Create a custom attribute with a Custom Attribute Name of "IntroscopeAgent"
• Set the Newly Assigned Value to $1
• Set the Existing Attribute Name to agent
• Next set Condition/Matching Operator to Contains Regex
• Finally set the Condition Value to (.*)  

Thanks for the info. That was helpful to some extent.

Let me get back to the case of "Location".

Let's say that I have 3 servers in NYC and 3 others in London (NYC_AppSrv1, NYC_AppSrv2, NYC_AppSrv3, London_AppSrv1, London_AppSrv2, London_AppSrv3)

Can you please advise (a screenshot if possible) how can we create a custom rule named "location" for that purpose ?

That will help a lot.

Thanks

Haithem

You can be more specific using a cleaner and more exact rule, but here is a pretty open wild card rule.   I can post a better one if you want when I can get to a test system to confirm my syntax. 

• Create a custom attribute with a Custom Attribute Name of "Location"
• Set the Newly Assigned Value to $1
• Set the Existing Attribute Name to host
• Next set Condition/Matching Operator to Contains Regex
• Finally set the Condition Value to (.*)_(.*)  
  

This wild card rule will match hosts which contain an underscore (from the right) and split the host into two strings.  The first string will be used for the location.

Thanks a lot. That was helpful.

To close this topic, I would add the following recommendations (enhancements):

1) On the "Attribute Rules" Tab, make the "Existing Attribute Name" column as a Combobox so that one can easily find an existing attribute. Currently, one need to type and search

2) In the documentation, provide additional examples to illustrate concrete use cases of Custom attributes (using RegEx as well as the other Condition/Matching Operator)

3) Share some videos (and/or Webinars) that illustrate concrete examples and real world use cases of Custom attributes. 

Kind regards

Haithem

Hi:

  I am sure someone will be soon answer your questions. I will be submitting a doc bug on this

Thanks

Hal German

Hi,

I think i missed that too. This is a good example for the documentation about using regex with $1

Also while at it, can the doc have a link simple example (maybe in the dev community) on how one could feed these rules upon installation (and later updates) with the REST api

Thanks,

Fred

Hi,

With regards to Locations and how values are assigned to them, it is done through the use of Regular Expressions. 

Can you provide some details on how to do that using Regular Expressions (an example, or a link in the documentation, or somewhere else).

I was not able to find (in the documentation nor in the community) a concrete example on that.

Thanks

Looks like it was answered by Corey!

Hi,

Using RegEx in creating Attribute Rules, including examples, is documented here: Configure Team Center - CA Application Performance Management - 10.0 - CA Technologies Documentation

Fred.K, I'll investigate your question about using API.

If you have any ideas for improvements or additions to the documentation, do please use the comments section on the bottom of each page. The doc team check new comments daily.

Cheers,

Hugo.