Agent Health Monitoring

The only constant in modern infrastructure environments is change. Hosts come and go as they are needed, and applications appear and vanish frequently. So too should a monitoring tool be able to tell its operators which agents are running at a particular point in time, and if not, historical information about when it went offline.

Enter agent health monitoring!

On upfront, a chart of reporting agents indicates where agents went down or came up. So users get instant feedback of where deployments happened or something went down unexpectedly.

The administration section allows for quick access to the following features:

• Update All Agents: updates all reporting agents to the latest version.
• Reset All Agents: resets all reporting agents.
• Instana Agent Installation: Agent installation instructions for all supported platforms.

The Instana agent health monitoring table contains the following information:

• Agent entity link (links to the agent management dashboard)
• Agent version
• Agent boot version
• Origin of installation
• Update Mode
• Mode (Infrastructure only or Full APM)
• Log level (info, warning, error or debug)
• JVM name and version
• Reporting status: if the agents is running at the end of the selected time window

Usage

As with most features in Instana, the agent health monitoring view strongly depends on the current time configuration.

There are two important things to understand:

1. The table presents all agents which reported within the current time window.
2. The status (reporting / not reporting) is based on the selected time.

An example

The following conceptual image will show how the reporting indicator behaves.

In this example image, the time window was set, so that three agents are listed. The end of the selected time window was set somewhere around 6:20am. The agent table would now indicate Agent 1 as not reporting because it stopped reporting at 6:00am, so before 6:20am. The other two agent have reported at this time.

Configuration

In order to have access to this feature, users need to have a role that has the canConfigureAgent permission enabled. To learn more about users, roles and permissions, head over to our managing users docs.