Case Study: McKesson Outlines Five Steps for Managing CA Application Performance Management for Speed and Focus on Customer Experience

Steve Stewart

DevOps: Agile Ops

McKesson

Program Architect for Operations Engineering Group

DO5X195S

Do You Have Time To…

• …Install each CA APM Agent individually?

• …Configure each Application Server individually to set parameters for starting Agents?

• …Create metric groupings, alerts, calculators, actions and dashboards individually for each Agent?

• …Update metric groupings, alerts, calculators actions and dashboards individually every time a new metric display is required?

Your time is better spent!

Five Steps For Managing CA APMDesigning a truly Effective, Maintainable and User-Friendly APM

1

2

5

3

4

Easy, Quick, Consistent

“Automate” install of APM Agents

“Automate” App Configuration to start APM Agents

Create a Main Dashboard as a Central Point

Design Dashboards that are maintainable and intuitive

“Clone” Dashboards

Step 1: “Automate” Install Of APM Agents

Create a Template APM Agent installation that can be

customized based on just a few parameters

• Install one “Master” APM Introscope Agent.

• Package “Master Agent” into a single compressed file.

• Create a script to deploy new agents passing in the few

parameters that change from installation to installation.

Install One “Master” APM Agent

• Must include all .PBD and .PBL files required for the application

• Ensure that the IntroscopeAgent.profile file has all parameters that

will be the same for all installations set correctly

• Identify all parameters in the IntroscopeAgent.profile file that will be

different from one installation to another. You can either omit setting

these parameters or set them to place holder values

• This will be your “Master” APM Agent

Package “Master Agent” Into Single Compressed File

• Compress the entire agent installation including the

<AGENT_HOME_> directory and everything under that directory

into a single .zip, .tar or similar compressed file

• This is you “Master” Agent file.

Create A Script To Deploy New Agents

Using any scripting language write a script that will…

1. Take command line parameters or parameters from a

configuration file (agent name, number of agents to install,

environment type, etc.)

2. Extract files from the “Master” Agent file to create a new agent

installation

3. Change all installation specific items (agent name, custom

process name, <AGENT_HOME> name, etc)

4. Write a data file that contains all parameters needed to configure

the application start-up script or application server start

parameters

The script has created a file containing parameters for starting the agent when the application is started

Step 2: Automate Configuration To Start APM Agents

• Write a “Start-up Configuration” script

• Then write the parameters to the proper

location in your application start-up

script (Apache Tomcat or Pure Java

applications)

• If using WebLogic or WebSphere, you

need to use the specific

Weblogic/WebSphere “Start-up

Configuration” tools

Tip: daisy-chain the “APM Agent Installation” script and the “Start-up Config” script or combine into one

Step 3: Create a Main Dashboard

• “Be more like a Cloud Provider” – customer based views

• One button for each customer/environment with summary alert

• Clicking on a single button then takes the user to the dashboard set

for the environment of concern

• Launching point to the metric display of interest

Main Dashboard Example

Main Dashboard

Each button is comprised of just 3 widgits with 2 properties to set

TIP: Develop A Naming Convention

• Uniquely identifies the APM Agent

• Use this unique identifier as a prefix to ALL metric groupings,

alerts, calculators, actions and dashboards in the management

module

• Use a place-holder in your Template for all titles or headings

unique to the agent to be displayed on dashboards

Eases ‘search and replace’ operations

Step 4: Create Dashboards The Smart Way

• Make all dashboards the same size

• Put Identical “heading section” with a button to return to the Main

Dashboard

• Create a pseudo “tabbed set” across each page

• Each tab takes the user to a different dashboard and displays the

summary status of all alerts on that dashboard page

• The body of each page contains the metric displays and alert

indictors

Custom Dashboard

Example Before adding metric widgets

What Is A “Summary Alert”?

• Shows the worst case status of all simple alerts (or other summary alerts) that are assigned to its “Included Alerts” property

• Any alert that turns yellow (warning) or red (danger) will turn the summary alert that same color.

Custom Dashboard

Example after adding metric widgets

Step 5: Clone Dashboards

• Create Template - one dashboard set (MM_Template.jar)

• Create a script - to copy and update your “Template Management Module Jar” file by performing a search and replace on the ManagementModule.xml file in the jar.

• Rejar the file – place in <EM_HOME>/deploy/ directory

Create new dashboards in minutes instead of hours

TIPS: Update All Management Modules In One Shot!

• Use as a template for other environments

• Feed in customer parameters to create new template from master

• Make any changes needed to all Management Modules in your Template Management Module

• All Management Modules are identical except for the customer specifics which are customized automatically!

Your dashboards and metrics are consistent across all customer

environments!

Benefits

• Saves weeks per year over the previous way

• Takes minutes instead of days for changes to be made to all management modules

• We act like a cloud provider - main dashboard allows customers to view status

Easy, Quick, Consistent

Customer Experience

• User Centric - Users love the new dashboard design and intuitive navigation.

• Proactive - When an incident occurs, our support team often has found the cause before the customer knows that there was a problem.

• Improved availability - 100% up-time for all customers for more than 5 months in a row!

Experiences Moving To CA APM 10

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Q & A

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