BMC Application Diagnostics overview

BMC Application Diagnostics proactively detects and isolates application performance issues from the end-user perspective before they negatively impact business reputation and revenue. It reduces the time, effort, and operational cost involved with monitoring dynamic applications by providing both IT and the business with real-time insight into application performance and its impact on user behavior.

The following topics provide a brief introduction to the product's features and functions:

• • BMC Application Diagnostics components
  • BMC Application Diagnostics and BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring
  • BMC Application Diagnostics and event integration
  • BMC Application Diagnostics operational flow

BMC Application Diagnostics components

BMC Application Diagnostics comprises the following components:

BMC Application Diagnostics Server

The BMC Application Diagnostics Server comprises of the BMC Application Diagnostics Portal and the BMC Application Diagnostics Collector:

• BMC Application Diagnostics Portal. The BMC Application Diagnostics Portal is the main component for managing both BMC Application Diagnostics Collectors and BMC Application Diagnostics Agents. Each BMC Application Diagnostics Portal supports up to 1000 BMC Application Diagnostics Agents. The agents are divided among BMC Application Diagnostics Collectors (up to 5), allowing 200 agents per BMC Application Diagnostics Collector.
• BMC Application Diagnostics Collector. The BMC Application Diagnostics Collector communicates with one or more BMC Application Diagnostics Agents. It is used to store the information about the application that is monitored by the BMC Application Diagnostics Agent. Each Collector has its own MySQL database where all information is saved. You can install and define up to five BMC Application Diagnostics Collectors per BMC Application Diagnostics Portal.

BMC Application Diagnostics Agent

The BMC Application Diagnostics Agent monitors and collects information required for each application. It is supported on several major application server platforms.

Each agent is paired with a BMC Application Diagnostics Collector and sends captured information to the Collector.

The following agents are available:

• BMC Application Diagnostics Agent for Java. The BMC Application Diagnostics Agent for Java runs on the application server Java virtual machine (JVM), and captures designated information about application transactions. The Agent for Java runs on application servers running Java 1.5 and later. The binaries for the Agent for Java can be used to manage multiple application servers that are installed on the same host. BMC recommends installing and matching multiple instances of the Agent on a one-to-one basis with different application server types.
• BMC Application Diagnostics Agent for .NET. The BMC Application Diagnostics Agent for .NET consists of two components: Agent Core and Probe. Agent Core runs as a Windows service. The probe, a subcomponent of the BMC Application Diagnostics Agent for .NET, runs in the context of Internet Information Services (IIS) worker processes, and captures designated information about application transactions. The BMC Application Diagnostics Agent for .NET supports IIS 6.0 and later.

BMC Application Performance Management Console

The BMC Application Performance Management Console serves as the GUI for accessing BMC Application Diagnostics captured information. The Console enables you to monitor and diagnose multiple applications running on different application servers. To access the diagnostics data for applications you click the Diagnostics tab.

BMC Application Diagnostics and BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring and BMC Application Diagnostics are part of the BMC Application Management Suite. They both connect through the browser-based BMC Application Performance Management Console.

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring captures data about the end-user experience. It monitors applications and the interactions between applications and end users.

BMC Application Diagnostics monitors and identifies performance issues in these applications. BMC Application Diagnostics complements BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring by providing visibility of performance issues occurring behind the web server. BMC Application Diagnostics helps administrators isolate and detect issues in applications and provides a common application diagnostics platform.

BMC Application Diagnostics and event integration

BMC Application Diagnostics provides several options for sending event information to integrated technologies and external applications. The following types of events can be sent:

• Application events, such as crossing a latency threshold and percentage of errors
• Application server events, such as JMX metrics, thread pools, and connection pools
• System health events, such as issues with BMC Application Diagnostics agents, collectors, or the portal

The agent sends events to the server, and the portal sends the events to the active integrations. The following integrations are supported:

• BMC ProactiveNet
• SNMP
• SMTP
• Syslog
• CSV

BMC Application Diagnostics operational flow

After you install the BMC Application Diagnostics Agent on an application server, a sample of the transactions with latency violations or errors on that application server are captured. This captured data, and the metrics data for the application server, is sent to the BMC Application Diagnostics Collector and stored in the MySQL database.

The BMC Application Diagnostics Portal manages the BMC Application Diagnostics Collectors and Agents, and communicates with its managed collectors to gather the relevant data to be displayed in the BMC Application Performance Management Console.