System requirements for BMC Synthetic Transaction Execution Adapter

This topic lists hardware and software requirements for virtual machine-based components and for other components that must be met before installing and using BMC Synthetic End User Experience Monitoring components. The following topics are presented:

• • BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring environment
  • Scripting requirements and execution module
  • System requirements for the TEA Agent
  • Software requirements for the TEA Agent
  • Where to go from here
  • Related topic

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring environment

To run synthetic monitoring, you must have a functioning real monitoring environment. Specifically, synthetic monitoring requires the following components from the BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring environment:

• Real User Analyzer analyzes and aggregates the synthetic raw data received from a Real User Collector.

• Real User Collector receives the synthetic results from the BMC Synthetic Transaction Execution Adapter (TEA) Agent and makes the results available to a Real User Analyzer.

  Note

  You can also use the Real User Monitor, which combines the functionality of the Real User Analyzer and the Real User Collector.

• Application Management Console hosts the BMC Synthetic End User Experience Monitoring Plug-in and provides the interface for Business Service and Execution Plan configuration. From the Console, you can also add scripts and view the status of agents and view Agent Group information.
• If the Performance Analytics Engine is integrated with the Console, you can drill down to synthetic results by sessions, which are individual runs of the Execution Plans. You can drill down further to the execution log (TrueLog) of a specific transaction.

Scripting requirements and execution module

Borland Silk Performer Synthetic Transaction Monitoring for BMC Software is the utility that enables an application specialist to record or author .ltz scripts that simulate user transactions. BMC provides some basic scripts and you can create your own realistic and customizable scripts with Silk Performer. Synthetic monitoring supports script protocols created with Silk Performer, such as HTTP, SAP, and Citrix.

Each computer with the TEA Agent requires an execution module to run the scripts. On each TEA Agent computer, install the full Silk Performer installation, or a smaller execution-module-only installation.

To take advantage of support for the latest Silk Performer features, ensure that your system has the latest version of Silk Performer or the execution modules.

System requirements for the TEA Agent

Before installing a BMC Synthetic Transaction Execution Adapter (TEA) Agent to monitor synthetic transactions, ensure that the host computer complies with the requirements described in the following sections.

Hardware requirements for the TEA Agent

The TEA Agent computer requires the following minimum resource requirements:

• 50 GB of free disk space
• 4 GB of RAM
• 2 CPUs

If you run more than one agent on the same computer, you might need to expand computer resources (such as CPU, RAM, and disk space), depending on the complexity and resource use of your scripts.

Software requirements for the TEA Agent

Before installing the TEA Agent, verify that the Agent computer meets the following software requirements:

• Microsoft Windows operating system:
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2008 64-bit
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit
  • Microsoft Windows 8 64-bit
  • Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-bit
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2

• Execution module: On the Agent computer, install an execution module to run the scripts. You can install the full Borland Silk Performer Synthetic Transaction Monitoring for BMC Software scripting utility, or the smaller Silk Performer execution module.

  Note

  Run the Silk Performer installation utility as an administrator on the TEA Agent computer.

  Ensure that the installation directory for the execution module is included in your system’s PATH environment variable. Refer to your operating system's documentation to find how to add tool locations to the PATH environment variable.
  
  Environment variable, example
  

• Network: To ensure proper aggregation of synthetic transaction data, synchronize the BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring Analyzer and Collector, and all TEA Agents, with the same Network Time Protocol (NTP) server.