Elastic APM with IBM Websphere

Elastic Observability APM
1

I have a requirement to install APM agent to monitor a application in IBM websphere 9.0 ND, does ELK APM support it?

2

Hi @ramm, welcome to the forum !

While we haven't tested APM agent on Websphere (especially this version), there are users that are already using it without much difficulties, for example here with version 8.5.5

We do not "officially" support Websphere application server in the sense that we don't have (yet) continuous integration tests that ensure there is no issue with this application server.

The most common issues we have with Websphere often fall into one of the following:

  • using a security policy that prevent the agent from instrumenting & communicating with APM server
  • requiring to change the OSGI boot delegation configuration (as in the exemple listed above).

Both those issues are quite easy to diagnose from agent/websphere logs, thus the easiest way for you should be to try with your own setup.

If you want to test only the agent without having to setup all the other parts from the stack (APM server, Kibana, ES), you can use the disable_send configuration option to make the agent not send any of the captured data.

3

thank you very much for the response, we are not using Java2 security, here are the JVM settings, but after I enable the settinngs JVM is not coming up. can I have the sample config?

-javaagent:C:\Temp\elastic-apm-agent-1.25.0.jar -Delastic.apm.service_name=appname -Delastic.apm.server_url=http://hostname:8200

4

Good news for Java2 security, that will make things easier !

When the JVM does not starts, it's usually an issue with providing the -javaagent option, as you are using the C:\Temp folder if the file is not present the JVM won't start and fail with an explicit errror message in logs/standard output.

Also, as you are using Windows, I would recommend to use / instead of \ for the agent path, in your case that means replacing C:\Temp\elastic-apm-agent-1.25.0.jar with C:/Temp/elastic-apm-agent-1.25.0.jar

Two things to check here:

  • what is displayed in the server/JVM logs or standard output when the JVM fails to start ?
  • what is the actual command line that is used to start the JVM ? Depending how you provided the JVM options, there might be a formatting error and/or escaping that may make the options invalid. This would likely be logged into the server logs.
5

I am using "-javaagent:C:\Temp\elastic-apm-agent-1.25.0.jar " as per Windows path standard

6

thank you @Sylvain_Juge , will try one more time

7

This topic was automatically closed 20 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.