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 Instana agent health monitoring table contains the following information:
- Agent entity link (links to the agent management dashboard)
- Agent boot version
- Mode (
Infrastructure onlyorFull APM) - Log level (
info,warning,errorordebug) - 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:
- The table presents all agents which reported within the current time window.
- 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 he 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, a user needs 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.
