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Akamas supports the integration with virtually any telemetry and observability tool.
The following table describes the supported Telemetry Providers, which are created automatically at installation time.
Telemetry Provider | Description |
---|---|
Notice that Telemetry Providers are shared across all the workspaces within the same Akamas installation, and only users with administrative privileges can manage them.
collects metrics from CSV files
collects metrics from Dynatrace
collects metrics from Prometheus
collects metrics from Spark History Server
collects metrics from Tricentis Neoload Web
collects metrics from MicroFocus Load Runner Professional
collects metrics from MicroFocus Load Runner Enterprise
collects price metrics for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (ec2) from Amazon’s own APIs
Akamas provides the following areas of integration with your ecosystem, which may apply or not depending on whether you are running live optimization studies or offline optimization studies:
Telemetry Providers tools providing time series for metrics of interest for the system to be optimized (see also Telemetry Providers) - this integration applies to both offline and live optimization studies;
Configuration Management tools providing the ability to set tunable parameters for the system to be optimized - this integration applies to both offline and live optimization studies;
Value Stream Delivery tools to implement a continuous optimization process as part of a CI/CD pipeline - this integration applies to both offline and live optimization studies;
Load Testing tools used to reproduce a synthetic workload on the system to be optimized; notice that these tools may also act as Telemetry Providers (e.g. for end-user metrics) - this integration only applies to offline optimization studies.
These integrations may require some setup on both the tool and the Akamas side and may also involve defining workflows and making use of workflow operators.
The CSV provider collects metrics from CSV files and makes them available to Akamas. It offers a very versatile way to integrate custom data sources.
This section provides the minimum requirements that you should match before using the CSV File telemetry provider.
The following requirements should be met to enable the provider to gather CSV files from remote hosts:
Port 22 (or a custom one) should be open from Akamas installation to the host where the files reside.
The host where the files reside should support SCP or SFTP protocols.
Read access to the CSV files target of the integration
Versions < 2.0.0 are compatibile with Akamas until version 1.8.0
Versions >= 2.0.0 are compatible with Akamas from version 1.9.0
The CSV File provider is generic and allows integration with any data source, therefore it does not come with support for a specific component type.
To operate properly, the CSV file provider expects the presence of four fields in each processed CSV file:
A timestamp field used to identify the point in time a certain sample refers to.
A component field used to identify the Akamas entity.
A metric field used to identify the name of the metric.
A value field used to store the actual value of the metric.
These fields can have custom names in the CSV file, you can specify them in the provider configuration.
The Install CSV provider page describes how to get this Telemetry Provider installed. Once installed, this provider is shared with all users of your Akamas installation and can be used to monitor many different systems, by configuring appropriate telemetry provider instances as described in the Create a CSV provider instance page.
To create an instance of the CSV provider, build a YAML file (instance.yml
in this example) with the definition of the instance:
Then you can create the instance for the system
using the Akamas CLI:
timestampFormat
formatNotice that the week-year format YYYY
is compliant with the ISO-8601 specification, but you should replace it with the year-of-era format yyyy
if you are specifying a timestampFormat
different from the ISO one. For example:
Correct: yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss
Wrong: YYYY-MM-dd HH:mm:ss
When you create an instance of the CSV provider, you should specify some configuration information to allow the provider to correctly extract and process metrics from your CSV files.
You can specify configuration information within the config
part of the YAML of the instance definition.
address
- a URL or IP identifying the address of the host where CSV files reside
username
- the username used when connecting to the host
authType
- the type of authentication to use when connecting to the file host; either password
or key
auth
- the authentication credential; either a password or a key according to authType
. When using keys, the value can either be the value of the key or the path of the file to import from
remoteFilePattern
- a list of remote files to be imported
protocol
- the protocol to use to retrieve files; either scp
or sftp
. Default is scp
fieldSeparator
- the character used as a field separator in the CSV files. Default is ,
componentColumn
- the header of the column containing the name of the component. Default is COMPONENT
timestampColumn
- the header of the column containing the timestamp. Default is TS
timestampFormat
- the format of the timestamp (e.g. yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss zzz
). Default is YYYY-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss
You should also specify the mapping between the metrics available in your CSV files and those provided by Akamas. This can be done in the metrics
section of the telemetry instance configuration. To map a custom metric you should specify at least the following properties:
metric
- the name of a metric in Akamas
datasourceMetric
- the header of a column that contains the metric in the CSV file
The provider ignores any column not present as datasourceMetric
in this section.
The sample configuration reported in this section would import the metric cpu_util
from CSV files formatted as in the example below:
The following represents the complete configuration reference for the telemetry provider instance.
The following table reports the configuration reference for the config
section
The following table reports the configuration reference for the metrics
section
Here you can find common use cases addressed by this provider.
Note that the metrics are percentages (between 1 and 100), while Akamas accepts percentages as values between 0 and 1, therefore each metric in this configuration has a scale factor of 0.001.
You can import the two CPU metrics and the memory metric from a SAR log using the following telemetry instance configuration.
Using the configured instance, the CSV File provider will perform the following operations to import the metrics:
Retrieve the file "/csv/sar.csv" from the server "127.0.0.1" using the SCP protocol authenticating with the provided password.
Use the column hostname
to lookup components by name.
Use the column timestamp
to find the timestamps of the samples (that are expected to be in the format specified by timestampFormat
).
Collect the metrics (two with the same name, but different labels, and one with a different name):
cpu_util
: in the CSV file is in the column %user and attach to its samples the label "mode" with value "user".
cpu_util
: in the CSV file is in the column %system and attach to its samples the label "mode" with value "system".
mem_util
: in the CSV file is in the column %memory.
To install the CSV File provider, create a YAML file (called provider.yml
in this example) with the specification of the provider:
Then, you can then install the provider with the Akamas CLI:
The Dynatrace provider collects metrics from Dynatrace and makes them available to Akamas.
This provider includes support for several technologies. In any case, custom queries can be defined to gather the desired metrics.
Dynatrace SaaS/Managed version 1.187 or later
Kubernetes and Docker
Web Application
Ubuntu-16.04, Rhel-7.6
java-openjdk-8, java-openjdk-11, java-openjdk-17
java-ibm-j9vm-6, java-ibm-j9vm-8, java-eclipse-openj9-11
Refer to to see how component-types metrics are extracted by this provider.
This section provides the minimum requirements that you should match before using the Prometheus provider.
Dynatrace SaaS/Managed version 1.187 or later
A valid Dynatrace license
Dynatrace OneAgent installed on the servers where the Dynatrace entities to be monitored are running
Connectivity between Akamas and the Dynatrace server on port 443
A Dynatrace API token with the privileges described .
The Dynatrace provider needs a Dynatrace API token with the following privileges:
metrics.read (Read metrics)
entities.read (Read entities and tags)
DataExport (Access problem and event feed, metrics, and topology)
ReadSyntheticData (Read synthetic monitors, locations, and nodes)
DataImport (Data ingest, e.g.: metrics and events). This permission is used to inform Dynatrace about configuration changes.
To instruct Akamas from which Dynatrace entities (e.g. Workloads, Services, Process Groups) metrics should be collected you can some specific properties on components.
Different strategies can be used to map Dynatrace entities to Akamas components:
By id
By name
By tags
By Kubernetes properties
You can map a component to a Dynatrace entity by leveraging the unique id of the entity, which you should put under the id
property in the component. This strategy is best used for long-lived instances whose ID does not change during the optimization such as Hosts, Process Groups, or Services.
Here is an example of how to setup host monitoring via id:
You can find the id of a Dynatrace entity by looking at the URL of a Dynatrace dashboard relative to the entity. Watch out that the "host" key is valid only for Linux components, other components (e.g. the JVM) must drill down into the host entities to get the PROCESS_GROUP_INSTANCE or PROCESS_GROUP id.
You can map a component to a Dynatrace entity by leveraging the entity’s display name. This strategy is similar to the map by id but provides a more friendly way to identify the mapped entity. Beware that id multiple entities in your Dynatrace installation share the same name they will all be mapped to the same component. The Dynatrace display name should be put under the name
property in the component definition:
You can map a component to a Dynatrace entity by leveraging Dynatrace tags that match the entity, tags which you should put under the tags
property in the component definition.
If multiple tags are specified, instances matching any of the specified tags will be selected.
This sample configuration maps to the component all Dynatrace entities with tag environment: test
or [AWS]dynatrace-monitored: true
Dynatrace supports both key-value and key-only tags. Key-only tags can be specified as Key-value tags with an empty value as in the following example
By leveraging dedicated properties, you can map a component to a Dynatrace entity referring to a Kubernetes cluster (e.g., a Pod or a Container).
To properly identify the set of containers to be mapped, you can specify the following properties. Any container matching all the properties will be mapped to the component.
You can retrieve all the information to setup the properties on the top of the Dynatrace container dashboard.
The following example shows how to map a component to a container running in Kubernetes:
To properly identify the set of pods to be mapped, you can specify the following properties. Any pod matching all the properties will be mapped to the component.
If you need to narrow your pod selection further you can also specify a set of tags as described in the by tags. Note that tags for Kubernetes resources are called Labels in the Dynatrace dashboard.
Labels are specified as key-value in the Akamas configuration. In Dynatrace’s dashboard key and value are separated by a column (:
)
The following example shows how to map a component to a pod running in Kubernetes:
Please note, that when you are mapping components to Kubernetes entities the property type
is required to instruct Akamas on which type of entity you want to map.
Dynatrace maps Kubernetes entities to the following types:
You can improve the matching of components with Dynatrace by adding a type
property in the component definition, this property will help the provider match only those Dynatrace entities of the given type.
The type of an entity can be retrieved from the URL of the entity’s dashboard
Available entity types can be retrieved, from your Dynatrace instance, with the following command:
In some circumstances, you might want to map multiple Dyantrace entities (e.g. a set of hosts) to the same Akamas component and import aggregated metrics.
This can be easily done by using tags. If Akamas detects that multiple entities have been mapped to the same component it will try to aggregate metrics; some metrics, however, can not be automatically aggregated.
To force aggregation on all available metrics you can add the mergeable: true
property to the component under the Dynatrace element.
To install the Prometheus provider, create a YAML file (provider.yml
in this example) with the definition of the provider:
Then you can install the provider using the Akamas CLI:
The installed provider is shared with all users of your Akamas installation and can monitor many different systems, by configuring appropriate telemetry provider instances.
You can find detailed information on timestamp patterns in the Patterns for Formatting and Parsing section on the page.
Field | Type | Description | Default Value | Restrictions | Required |
---|
Field | Type | Description | Restrictions | Required |
---|
In this use case, you are going to import some metrics coming from , a popular UNIX tool to monitor system resources. SAR can export CSV files in the following format.
To generate an API Token for your Dynatrace installation you can follow .
Akamas property | Dynatrace property | Location |
---|
Akamas property | Dynatrace property | Location |
---|
Kubernetes type | Dynatrace type |
---|
| String | The name of the metric in Akamas | An existing Akamas metric | Yes |
| String | The name (header) of the column that contains the specific metric | An existing column in the CSV file | Yes |
| Decimal number | The scale factor to apply when importing the metric |
| List of key-value pairs | A list of key-value pairs that will be attached to the specific metric sample | No |
namespace | Kubernetes namespace | Container dashboard |
containerName | Kubernetes container name | Container dashboard |
basePodName | Kubernetes base pod name | Container dashboard |
state | State | Pod dashboard |
namespace | Namespace | Pod dashboard |
workload | Workload | Pod dashboard |
Docker container | CONTAINER_GROUP_INSTANCE |
Pod | CLOUD_APPLICATION_INSTANCE |
Workload | CLOUD_APPLICATION |
Namespace | CLOUD_APPLICATION_NAMESPACE |
Cluster | KUBERNETES_CLUSTER |
The Prometheus provider collects metrics from a Prometheus instance and makes them available to Akamas.
This provider includes support for several technologies (Prometheus exporters). In any case, custom queries can be defined to gather the desired metrics.
This section provides the minimum requirements that you should match before using the Prometheus provider.
Akamas supports Prometheus starting from version2.26.
Using also theprometheus-operator
requires Prometheus 0.47 or greater. This version is bundled with the kube-prometheus-stack
since version 15.
Connectivity between the Akamas server and the Prometheus server is also required. By default, Prometheus is run on port 9090.
Node exporter (Linux system metrics)
JMX exporter (Java metrics)
cAdvisor (Docker container metrics)
CloudWatch exporter (AWS resources metrics)
Jmeter (Web application metrics)
The Prometheus provider includes queries for most of the monitoring use cases these exporters cover. If you need to specify custom queries or make use of exporters not currently supported you can specify them as described in creating Prometheus telemetry instances.
Kubernetes (Pod, Container, Workload, Namespace)
Web Application
Java (java-ibm-j9vm-6, java-ibm-j9vm-8, java-eclipse-openj9-11, java-openjdk-8, java-openjdk-11, java-openjdk-17)
Linux (Ubuntu-16.04, Rhel-7.6)
Refer to Prometheus provider metrics mapping to see how component-type metrics are extracted by this provider.
Akamas reasons in terms of a system to be optimized and in terms of parameters and metrics of components of that system. To understand which metrics collected from Prometheus should be mapped to a component, the Prometheus provider looks up some properties in the components of a system grouped under prometheus
property. These properties depend on the exporter and the component type.
Nested under this property you can also include any additional field your use case may require to filter the imported metrics further. These fields will be appended in queries to the list of label matches in the form field_name=~'field_value'
, and can specify either exact values or patterns.
Notice: you should configure your Prometheus instances so that the Prometheus provider can leverage the instance
property of components, as described in the Setup datasource section here above.
It is important that you add instance
and, optionally, the job
properties to the components of a system so that the Prometheus provider can gather metrics from them:
The Prometheus provider does not usually require a specific configuration of the Prometheus instance it uses.
When gathering metrics for hosts it's usually convenient to set the value of the instance
label so that it matches the value of the instance
property in a component; in this way, the Prometheus provider knows which system component each data point refers to.
Here’s an example configuration for Prometheus that sets the instance
label:
This page describes how to set up an OracleDB exporter in order to gather metrics regarding an Oracle Database instance through the Prometheus provider.
The OracleDB exporter repository is available on the official project page. The suggested deploy mode is through a Docker image, since the Prometheus instance can easily access the running container through the Akamas network.
Use the following command line to run the container, where cust-metrics.toml
is your configuration file defining the queries for additional custom metrics (see paragraph below) and DATA_SOURCE_NAME
an environment variable containing the Oracle EasyConnect string:
You can refer to the official guide for more details or alternative deployment modes.
It is possible to define additional queries to expose custom metrics using any data in the database instance that is readable by the monitoring user (see the guide for more details about the syntax).
The following is an example of exporting system metrics from the Dynamic Performance (V$) Views used by the Prometheus provider default queries for the Oracle Database optimization pack:
This page describes how to set up a CloudWatch exporter in order to gather AWS metrics through the Prometheus provider. This is especially useful to monitor system metrics when you don’t have direct SSH access to AWS resources like EC2 Instances or if you want to gather AWS-specific metrics not available in the guest OS.
In order to fetch metrics fromCloudWatch, the exporter requires an IAM user or role with the following privileges:
cloudwatch:GetMetricData
cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics
cloudwatch:ListMetrics
tag:GetResources
You can assign AWS-managed policies CloudWatchReadOnlyAccess and ResourceGroupsandTagEditorReadOnlyAccess to the desired user to enable these permissions.
The CloudWatch exporter repository is available on the official project page. It requires a minimal configuration to fetch metrics from the desired AWS instances. Below is a short list of the parameters needed for a minimal configuration:
region: AWS region of the monitored resource
metrics: a list of objects containing filters for the exported metrics
aws_namespace: the namespace of the monitored resource
aws_metric_name: the name of the AWS metric to fetch
aws_dimensions: the dimension to expose as labels
aws_dimension_select: the dimension to filter over
aws_statistics: the list of metric statistics to expose
aws_tag_select: optional tags to filter on
tag_selections: map containing the list of values to select for each tag
resource_type_selection: resource type to fetch the tags from (see: Resource Types)
resource_id_dimension: dimension to use for the resource id (see: Resource Types)
For a complete list of possible values for namespaces, metrics, and dimensions please refer to the official AWS CloudWatch User Guide.
Notice: AWS bills CloudWatch usage in batches of 1 million requests, where every metric counts as a single request. To avoid unnecessary expenses configure only the metrics you need.
The suggested deployment mode for the exporter is through a Docker image. The following snippet provides a command line example to run the container (remember to provide your AWS credentials if needed and the path of the configuration file):
You can refer to the official guide for more details or alternative deployment modes.
In order to scrape the newly created exporter add a new job to the configuration file. You will also need to define some relabeling rules in order to add the instance
label required by Akamas to properly filter the incoming metrics.
In the example below the instance
label is copied from the instance’s Name
tag:
Notice: AWS bills CloudWatch usage in batches of 1 million requests, where every metric counts as a single request. To avoid unnecessary expenses configure an appropriate scraping interval.
Once you configured the exporter in the Prometheus configuration you can start to fetch metrics using the Prometheus provider. The following sections describe some scripts you can add as tasks in your workflow.
It’s worth noting that CloudWatch may require some minutes to aggregate the stats according to the configured granularity, causing the telemetry provider to fail while trying to fetch data points not available yet. To avoid such issues you can add at the end of your workflow a task using an Executor operator to wait for the CloudWatch metrics to be ready. The following script is an example of implementation:
Since Amazon bills your CloudWatch queries is wise to run the exporter only when needed. The following script allows you to manage the exporter from the workflow by adding the following tasks:
start the container right before the beginning of the load test (command: bash script.sh start
)
stop the container after the metrics publication, as described in the previous section (command: bash script.sh stop
).
The example below is the Akamas-supported configuration, fetching metrics of EC2 instances named server1 and server2.
| String | The address of the machine where the CSV file resides | A valid URL or IP | Yes |
| Number (integer) | The port to connect to, in order to retrieve the file | 22 | 1≤ | No |
| String | The username to use in order to connect to the remote machine | Yes |
| String |
|
| No |
| String | Specify which method is used to authenticate against the remote machine:
|
| Yes |
| String | A password or an RSA/DSA key (as YAML multi-line string, keeping new lines) | Yes |
| String | A list of valid path for linux | Yes |
| String | The CSV column containing the name of the component. The column's values must match (case sensitive) the name of a component specified in the System |
| The column must exists in the CSV file | Yes |
| String | The CSV column containing the timestamps of the samples |
| The column must exists in the CSV file | No |
| String | Timestamps' format |
| No |
| String | Specify the field separator of the CSV |
|
| No |
The installed provider is shared with all users of your Akamas installation and can monitor many different systems, by configuring appropriate telemetry provider instances.
To create an instance of the Dynatrace provider, build a YAML file (instance.yml
in this example) with the definition of the instance:
Then you can create the instance for the system
using the Akamas CLI:
When you create an instance of the Dynatrace provider, you should specify some configuration information to allow the provider to correctly extract and process metrics from Dynatrace.
You can specify configuration information within the config
part of the YAML of the instance definition.
url
- URL of the Dynatrace installation API (see https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/extend-dynatrace/dynatrace-api/ to retrieve the URL of your installation)
token
- A Dynatrace API Token with the proper permissions
You can collect additional metrics with the Dynatrace provider by using the metrics
field:
In the case in which Akamas cannot reach directly your Dynatrace installation, you can configure an HTTP proxy by using the proxy
field:
This section reports the complete reference for the definition of a telemetry instance.
This table shows the reference for the config
section within the definition of the Dynatrace provider instance:
This table reports the reference for the config
→ proxy
section within the definition of the Dynatrace provider instance:
This table reports the reference for the metrics
section within the definition of the Dynatrace provider instance. The section contains a collection of objects with the following properties:
This section reports common use cases addressed by this provider.
Check the Linux optimization pack for a list of all the system metrics available in Akamas.
As a first step to start extracting metrics from Dyntrace, generate your API token and make sure it has the right permissions.
As a second step, choose a strategy to map your Linux component (MyLinuxComponent) with the corresponding Dyntrace entity.
Let’s assume you want to map by id your Dynatrace entity, you can find the id in the URL bar of a Dyntrace dashboard of the entity:
Grab the id and add it to the Linux component definition:
You can leverage the name of the entity as well:
As a third and final step, once the component is all set, you can create an instance of the Dynatrace provider and then build your first studies:
To create an instance of the Prometheus provider, edit a YAML file (instance.yml
in this example) with the definition of the instance:
Then you can create the instance for the system
using the Akamas CLI:
When you create an instance of the Prometheus provider, you should specify some configuration information to allow the provider to extract and process metrics from Prometheus correctly.
You can specify configuration information within the config
part of the YAML of the instance definition.
address
, a URL or IP identifying the address of the host where Prometheus is installed
port
, the port exposed by Prometheus
user
, the username for the Prometheus service
password
, the user password for the Prometheus service
job
, a string to specify the scraping job name. The default is ".*" for all scraping jobs
logLevel
, set this to "DETAILED" for some extra logs when searching for metrics (default value is "INFO")
headers
, to specify additional custom headers (e.g.: headers: {key: value}
)
namespace
, a string to specify the namespace
duration
, integer to determine the duration in seconds for data collection (use a number between 1 and 3600)
enableHttps
, boolean to enable HTTPS in Prometheus (since 3.2.6)
ignoreCertificates
, boolean to ignore SSL certificates
disableConnectionCheck
, boolean to disable initial connection check to Prometheus
scope
, value of the X-Scope-OrgID header
urlSuffix
, a suffix to postpone to the prometheus url. Such as http://prometeus:9090/<mysuffix>
scope
, value of the X-Scope-OrgID header
The Prometheus provider allows defining additional queries to populate custom metrics or redefine the default ones according to your use case. You can configure additional metrics using the metrics
field as shown in the configuration below:
In this example, the telemetry instance will populate cust_metric
with the results of the query specified in datasource
, maintaining the value of the labels listed under labels
.
Please refer to Querying basics | Prometheus for a complete reference of PromQL
Akamas pre-processes the queries before running them, replacing special-purpose placeholders with the fields provided in the components. For example, given the following component definition:
the query sum(jvm_memory_used_bytes{instance=~"$INSTANCE$", job=~"$JOB$"})
will be expanded for this component into sum(jvm_memory_used_bytes{instance=~"service01", job=~"jmx"})
. This provides greater flexibility through the templatization of the queries, allowing the same query to select the correct data sources for different components.
The following is the list of available placeholders:
This section reports common use cases addressed by this provider.
To gather kubernetes metrics, the following exporters are required:
kube-state-metrics
cadvisor
As an example, you can define a component with type Kubernetes Container
in this way:
Check Java OpenJDK page for a list of all the Java metrics available in Akamas
You can leverage the Prometheus provider to collect Java metrics by using the JMX Exporter. The JMX Exporter is a collector of Java metrics for Prometheus that can be run as an agent for any Java application. Once downloaded, you execute it alongside a Java application with this command:
The command will expose on localhost on port 9100 Java metrics of youJar.jar
__ which can be scraped by Prometheus.
config.yaml
is a configuration file useful for the activity of this exporter. It is suggested to use this configuration for an optimal experience with the Prometheus provider:
As a next step, add a new scraping target in the configuration of the Prometheus used by the provider:
You can then create a YAML file with the definition of a telemetry instance (prom_instance.yml
) of the Prometheus provider:
And you can create the telemetry instance using the Akamas CLI:
Finally, to bind the extracted metrics to the related component, you should add the following field to the properties
of the component’s definition:
Check the Linux page for a list of all the system metrics available in Akamas
You can leverage the Prometheus provider to collect system metrics (Linux) by using the Node exporter. The Node exporter is a collector of system metrics for Prometheus that can be run as a standalone executable or a service within a Linux machine to be monitored. Once downloaded, schedule it as a service using, for example, systemd:
Here’s the manifest of the node_exporter
service:
The service will expose on localhost on port 9100 system metrics __ which can be scraped by Prometheus.
As a final step, add a new scraping target in the configuration of the Prometheus used by the provider:
You can then create a YAML file with the definition of a telemetry instance (prom_instance.yml
) of the Prometheus provider:
And you can create the telemetry instance using the Akamas CLI:
Finally, to bind the extracted metrics to the related component, you should add the following field to the properties
of the component’s definition:
By default, only requests at the service level are imported by the telemetry provider.
To import specific key requests you can follow these steps.
Currently only average response time, throughput, and error rate metrics are available for key requests.
Create a new component of type Web Application for each key request you want to import. This allows tracking response time, throughput, and error rates separately.
You can use the following yaml file as an example and customize it to suit your needs.
In order to instruct Akamas to import a specific key request you just need to change the id
field of the yaml above to the one that matches your key request on Dynatarce.
To obtain that ID open the analysis page for the request as in the example below, take note of the URL of the page, and look for the SERVICE_METHOD
keyword. The id is the one starting with SERVICE_METHOD
and ending before the character %14
Considering the example below the id is SERVICE_METHOD-D4BCC949D5DD656A
Create a telemetry instance for your system using the yaml specified below as an example and modify it to provide your Dynatrace account and credentials. This will instruct Akamas to use key request metrics instead of service metrics.
To install the Spark History Server provider, create a YAML file (called provider.yml
in this example) with the definition of the provider:
Then you can install the provider using the Akamas CLI:
The installed provider is shared with all users of your Akamas installation and can monitor many different systems, by configuring appropriate telemetry provider instances.
To install the NeoLoad Web provider, create a YAML file (called provider.yml
in this example) with the definition of the provider:
Then you can install the provider using the Akamas CLI:
The installed provider is shared with all users of your Akamas installation and can monitor many different systems, by configuring appropriate telemetry provider instances.
The NeoLoad Web provider collects metrics from a NeoLoad Web instance and makes them available to Akamas.
This section provides the minimum requirements that you should match before using the NeoLoad Web telemetry provider.
NeoLoad Web SaaS or managed version 7.1 or later.
The NeoLoad Web API must be reachable at a provided address and port (by default ).
NeoLoad Web API access token.
Versions < 2.0.0 are compatibile with Akamas untill version 1.8.0
Versions >= 2.0.0 are compatible with Akamas from version 1.9.0
Web Application
This section lists the workflow operators this provider depends on.
Akamas reasons in terms of a system to be optimized and in terms of parameters and metrics of components of that system. To understand which metrics collected from NeoloadWeb should refer to which component, the NeoloadWeb provider looks up the property neoloadweb
in the components of a system:
The Spark History Server provider collects metrics from a Spark History Server instance and makes them available to Akamas.
Prerequisites
This section provides the minimum requirements that you should match before using the Spark History Server telemetry provider.
Apache Spark 2.3
Spark History Server API must be reachable at the provided address and port (the default port is 18080
).
spark-application
You can check to see how component-types metrics are extracted by this provider.
Versions < 2.0.0 are compatible with Akamas until version 1.8.0
Versions >= 2.0.0 are compatible with Akamas from version 1.9.0
This section lists the workflow operators this provider depends on:
Akamas uses components to identify specific elements of the system to be monitored and optimized. Your system might contain multiple components to model, for example, a Spark application and each host of the cluster. To point Akamas to the right component when extracting metrics you need to add a property called sparkApplication
to your Spark Application component. The provider will only extract metrics for components for which this property has been specified.
When you create an instance of the NeoLoad Web provider, you should specify some configuration information to allow the provider to correctly extract and process metrics from NeoLoad Web.
You can specify configuration information within the config
part of the YAML of the instance definition.
accountToken
- NeoLoad Web API access token.
The following YAML file describes the definition of a telemetry instance.
The following table provides the reference for the config
section within the definition of the NeoLoad Web provider instance:
Notice: the NeoLoadWeb provider imports data points matching at least one of the configured values for both metrics
and actions
.
This section reports common use cases addressed by this provider.
This example shows how to configure the NeoLoad Web provider in order to collect performance metrics published on the SaaS web API.
You must create a YAML file with the definition of a telemetry instance (neoload_instance.yml
) of the NeoLoad Web provider:
and then create the telemetry instance using the Akamas CLI:
You can then configure the workflow in order to trigger the execution of a NeoLoad test using the NeoLoadWeb provider, as in the following example:
This section reports common best practices you can adopt to ease the use of this telemetry provider.
filter the imported metrics: import only the required metrics using the metrics
and actions
filters, in order to avoid throttling on the NeoLoad Web instance.
To create an instance of the Spark History Server provider, build a YAML file (instance.yml
in this example) with the definition of the instance:
Then you can create the instance for the system spark-system
using the Akamas CLI:
When you create an instance of the Spark History Server provider, you should specify some configuration information to allow the provider to correctly extract and process metrics from the Spark History server.
You can specify configuration information within the config
part of the YAML of the instance definition.
address
- hostname of the Spark History Server instance
The following YAML file describes the definition of a telemetry instance.
The following table reports the reference for the config
section within the definition of the Spark History Server provider instance:
This section reports common use cases addressed by this provider.
As a first step, you need to create a YAML file (spark_instance.yml
) containing the configuration the provider needs to connect to the Spark History Server, plus the filter on the desired level of granularity for the imported metrics:
and then create the telemetry instance using the Akamas CLI:
This section reports common best practices you can adopt to ease the use of this telemetry provider.
configure metrics granularity: in order to reduce the collection time, configure the importLevel
to import metrics with a granularity no finer than the study requires.
wait for metrics publication: make sure in the workflow there is a few-minute interval between the end of the Spark application and the execution of the Spark telemetry instance, since the Spark History Server may take some time to complete the publication of the metrics.
The protocol used to connect to the remote machine: or
The path of the remote file(s) to be analyzed. The path can contains expressio
Must be specified using .
Field | Type | Value restrictions | Required | Default Value | Description |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Field | Type | Value restrictions | Required | Default value | Description |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Field | Type | Value Restrictions | Required | Default value | Description |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Placeholder | Usage example | Component definition example | Expanded query | Description |
---|---|---|---|---|
You can check to see how component-types metrics are extracted by this provider.
Field | Type | Description | Default value | Restrictions | Required |
---|
Check the page for a list of all web application metrics available in Akamas
Field | Type | Description | Default value | Restriction | Required |
---|
Check for a list of all Spark application metrics available in Akamas
This example shows how to configure a Spark History Server provider in order to collect performance metrics about a Spark application submitted to the cluster using the operator.
Finally, you will need to define for your study a workflow that includes the submission of the Spark application to the cluster, in this case using the :
url
String
It should be a valid URL
Yes
The URL of the Dynatrace installation API (see the official reference)
token
String
Yes
The Dynatrace API Token the provider should use to interact with Dynatrace. The token should have sufficient permissions.
proxy
Object
See Proxy options reference
No
The specification of the HTTP proxy to use to communicate with Dynatrace.
pushEvents
String
true, false
No
true
If set to true the provider will inform dynatrace of the configuration change event which will be visible in the Dynatrace UI.
tags
Object
No
A set of global tags to match Dynatrace entities. The provider uses these tags to apply a default filtering of Dynatrace entities for every component.
address
String
It should be a valid URL
Yes
The URL of the HTTP proxy to use to communicate with the Dynatrace installation API
port
Number (integer)
1 <port
<65535
Yes
The port at which the HTTP proxy listens for connections
username
String
No
The username to use when authenticating against the HTTP proxy, if necessary
password
String
No
The username to use when authenticating against the HTTP proxy, if necessary
metric
String
It must be an Akamas metric
Yes
The name of an Akamas metric that should map to the new metric you want to gather
datasourceMetric
String
A valid Dynatrace metric
Yes
The Dynatrace query to use to extract metric
labels
Array of strings
-
No
The list of Dynatrace labels that should be retained when gathering the metric
staticLabels
Key-Value
-
No
Static labels that will be attached to metric samples
aggregation
String
No
avg
The aggregation to perform if the mergeEntities property under the extras section is set to true
extras
Object
Only the parameter mergeEntities
can be defined to either true
or false
No
Section for additional properties
$INSTANCE$
, $JOB$
node_load1{instance=~"$INSTANCE$", job=~"$JOB$"}
See Example below
node_load1{instance=~"frontend", job=~"node"}
These placeholders are replaced respectively with the instance
and job
fields configured in the component’s prometheus
configuration.
%FILTERS%
container_memory_usage_bytes{job=~"$JOB$" %FILTERS%}
See Example below
container_memory_usage_bytes{job=~"advisor", name=~"db-.*"}
This placeholder is replaced with a list containing any additional filter in the component’s definition (other than instance
and job
), where each field is expanded as field_name=~"field_value"
. This is useful to define additional label matches in the query without the need to hardcode them.
$DURATION$
rate(http_client_requests_seconds_count[$DURATION$])
rate(http_client_requests_seconds_count[30s])
If not set in the component properties, this placeholder is replaced with the duration field configured in the telemety-instance. You should use it with range vectors instead of hardcoding a fixed value.
$NAMESPACE$
, $POD$
, $CONTAINER$
1e3 * avg(kube_pod_container_resource_limits{resource="cpu", namespace=~"$NAMESPACE$", pod=~"$POD$", container=~"$CONTAINER$" %FILTERS%})
1e3 * avg(kube_pod_container_resource_limits{resource="cpu", namespace=~"boutique", pod=~"adservice.*", container=~"server"})
These placeholders are used within kubernetes environments
| String | A valid access token | Yes |
| URL | Hostname of the NeoLoad Web API |
| A valid url | No |
| List of strings | List of component metrics to import |
| No |
| List of strings | List of "User Paths" to import | No |
| URL | Spark History Server address | Yes |
| String | Granularity of the imported metrics |
| Allowed values: | No |
| Integer | Spark History Server listening port |
| No |
To install the LoadRunner provider, create a YAML file (called provider.yml
in this example) with the definition of the provider:
Then you can install the provider using the Akamas CLI:
The installed provider is shared with all users of your Akamas installation and can monitor many different systems, by configuring appropriate telemetry provider instances.
The LoadRunner Enterprise provider collects metrics from a LoadRunner Enterprise instance and makes them available to Akamas.
This section provides the minimum requirements that you should match before using the LoadRunnerEnterprise telemetry provider.
LoadRunner Enterprise 12.60, 12.63, 2020 SP3, 2022, 2022 R1, 2023 and 2023 R1
InfluxDB 1.7 and 1.8
Port 8086 between Akamas VM to InfluxDB host, opened in both directions. This port is used to gather metrics.
The provider requires a user that can access InfluxDB.
The user must have read permission on the database containing the LoadRunner metrics.
Web Application
You can check LoadRunner provider metrics mapping to see how component-types metrics are extracted by this provider.
This section lists the workflow operators this provider depends on.
To set up the integration between Loadrunner Enterprise and InfluxDB please follow the official Microfocus documentation. Akamas does not require any additional setup on the data source.
Akamas reasons in terms of a system to be optimized and in terms of parameters and metrics of components of that system. To understand the link between metrics collected from LoadRunnerEnterprise through InfluxDB and a specific component, the LoadRunnerEnterprise provider looks up some properties in the components of a system:
loadrunnerenterprise
You can use this example to start building your component specification:
To install the LoadRunnerEnterprise provider, create a YAML file (called provider.yml
in this example) with the definition of the provider:
Then you can install the provider using the Akamas CLI:
The installed provider is shared with all users of your Akamas installation and can monitor many different systems, by configuring appropriate telemetry provider instances.
To install the AWS provider, create a YAML file (called provider.yml
in this example) with the specification of the provider:
Then you can install the provider with the Akamas CLI:
The installed provider is shared with all users of your Akamas installation and can monitor many different systems, by configuring appropriate telemetry provider instances.
The LoadRunner provider collects metrics generated by a LoadRunner instance (converted to their JSON format and placed in CIFS network share) and makes them available to Akamas.
Prerequisites
This section provides the minimum requirements that you should match before using the LoadRunner telemetry provider.
Micro Focus LoadRunner 12.60 or 2020
The network share is reachable at port 445/TCP
The network share is reachable at port 139/UDP
Username, domain (if required), and password of the network share.
Read permission on the network share.
Web Application
You can check LoadRunner provider metrics mapping to see how component-types metrics are extracted by this provider.
The provider expects that its required data are on a CIFS share. If you are using the LoadRunner operator, please follow the instruction on here below on how to export LoadRunner results in a network share by setup a share on the LoadRunner Controller.
To share a folder on Windows, please follow these steps:
Right-click on the folder, then select Properties
Go to Sharing tab, then select Advanced Sharing
In the opened window, enable Share this folder
In the "Share name" textbox type the name of the share. This is the name of the share over the network\
Then click on Permissions, then Add
In the textbox type the name of the user or the group (with the domain if required) that you want to grant access to the share, then click "OK"\
Select the added user (or group) and grant the required permissions\
Click OK, OK, and then Close
Open "This PC" from the Start menu, then click on "Map network drive"\
In the "Map Network Drive" window, select a suitable drive letter name and enter the remote folder path of the network share that has been given to you by your storage admin (it should be something with the format \\mycompanyshareserver.mycompany\foldername)\
Make sure to check "Reconnect at sign-in" and "Connect using different credentials".
Click Finish
In the "Windows Security" window enter the username (with the domain, if required) and the password for the network share and check "Remember my credentials".
Click "OK"
Akamas reasons in terms of a system to be optimized and in terms of parameters and metrics of components of that system. To understand the link between metrics collected from LoadRunner and a specific component, the LoadRunner provider looks up the property loadrunner
in the components of a system:
To create an instance of the LoadRunner provider, build a YAML file (instance.yml
in this example) with the definition of the instance:
Then you can create the instance for the system
using the Akamas CLI:
When you create an instance of the LoadRunner provider, you should specify some configuration information to allow the provider to correctly extract and process metrics from LoadRunner.
You can specify configuration information within the config
part of the YAML of the instance definition.
hostname
: The hostname or IP of the server that hosts the CIFS share where the LoadRunner results have been exported. See LoadRunner operator.
username
: The username and the domain required to access the network share. Supported formats are:
username
domain\username
username@domain
password
: The password required to access the network share
shareName
: The name of the network share as it is exposed by the server
The following YAML file provides the reference for the definition of a telemetry instance.
The following table describes the reference for the config
section within the definition of the LoadRunner provider instance:
To create an instance of the LoadRunnerEnterprise provider, build a YAML file (instance.yml
in this example) with the definition of the instance:
Then you can create the instance using the Akamas CLI:
When you create an instance of the LoadRunnerEnterprise provider, you should specify some configuration information to allow the provider to correctly extract and process metrics from Prometheus.
You can specify configuration information within the config
part of the YAML of the instance definition.
address
: The address of the InfluxDB instance, in the form of schema://address (i.e https://influxdb.mycompay.com)
port
: The InfluxDB port
username
: The username required to connect to InfluxDB.
password
: The password for the username
database
: The database name where LoadRunner metrics are stored
This table reports the reference for the config
section within the definition of the LoadRunnerEnterprise provider instance:
The AWS provider collects price metrics for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) from Amazon’s own APIs.
This provider imports just one metricaws_ec2_price
which is available in the EC2 component type of the AWS Optimization pack.
This section provides the minimum requirements that you should match before using the AWS telemetry provider.
This telemetry provider makes use of parameters aws_ec2_instance_type
andaws_ec2_instance_size
to identify the price. When using this provider make sure that your system has a component of type EC2 and that those parameters are defined in the baseline and, if optimized, in the parameters selection.
An IAM user who has been granted the AWSPriceListServiceFullAccess
policy, that is the following permissions:
DescribeServices
GetAttributeValues
GetProducts
You may find more information on AWS cost permissions here.
Versions >= 2.0.0 are compatible with Akamas from version 1.9.0
EC2
In order to gather price information about a component you’re required to input an extra field in its definition:
region
, which tells the provider the AWS region of the modeled instance
Please note this field is mandatory and must be specified as follows:
Here is a complete list of AWS region names, together with their Akamas-compatible codes:
To create an instance of the CSV provider, build a YAML file (instance.yml
in this example) with the definition of the instance:
Then you can create the instance for the aws-system
using the Akamas CLI:
When you create an instance of the AWS provider, you should specify some configuration information to allow the provider to correctly extract and process metrics from your CSV files.
You can specify configuration information within the config
part of the YAML of the instance definition.
accessKeyId
- the access key id of your chosen IAM use
secretAccessKey
- the secret access key of your chosen IAM user
The following represents the complete configuration reference for the telemetry provider instance.
Then you can create the instance for the aws-system
using the Akamas CLI:
When you create an instance of the AWS provider, you should specify some configuration information to allow the provider to correctly extract and process metrics from your CSV files.
You can specify configuration information within the config
part of the YAML of the instance definition.
accessKeyId
- the access key id of your chosen IAM use
secretAccessKey
- the secret access key of your chosen IAM user
The following YAML file represents a template to define the telemetry provider instance.
The following table describes the configuration reference for the config
section
The focus of this guide is how to integrate Akamas with MicroFocus LoadRunner in order to leverage LoadRunner as a performance testing tool in an Akamas optimization.
A working LoadRunner >=12.60 or LoadRunner Professional 2020 installation including a Controller, at least one Load Generator, and a valid license (see LoadRunner section below)
The server hosting the Loadrunner Controller should have:
Microsoft Windows Server 2016 or 2019
Powershell version 5.1 or greater
Winrm (see "Install Winrm" section below)
A Windows user (see "Create Windows users" section below):
with read capability on the LoadRunner results folder
with read capability on the Loadrunner test files (VuGen scripts and folder, lrs files, etc…) and their parent folders
and member of the following groups:
Remote Desktop Users
Remote Management Users
Users
The LoadRunner result folder must be configured either as a shared folder on the Controller itself or as a remote share, mounted on the Controller. (see "Create Shared drive" section below)
A working LoadRunner scenario (lrs file)
The server hosting the LoadRunner Controller must be reachable from the Akamas server at ports (see the schema here below):
5985/TCP or 5986/TCP (see "Install Winrm" section below)
445/TCP (see "Create Shared drive" section below)
139/UDP (see "Create Shared drive" section below)
In the integration with LoadRunner WinRM is used to both invoke the performance test execution and to collect the resulting data. Therefore, the WinRM protocol must be enabled and configured on the Windows host where the LoadRunner Controller resides.
By default, Akamas' communication with Winrm is on port 5985 over HTTP and port 5986 over HTTPS (the latter is the recommended option). Both protocol and port fields need to be set accordingly in the Akamas operator configuration.
Notice that while Winrm is already installed out-of-the-box on every Windows deployment, additional configurations may be required for the Akamas integration to work.
You can verify the Winrm listeners' communication protocols & ports on the controller server by running the following command in a PowerShell console:
Then check if a listener with a communication protocol (Transport) and port of your interest is present (both HTTP and HTTPS examples below, the output may vary)
If you have ssh access to the Akamas server, you can also verify the connectivity from Akamas to the controller server on the desired port by running the following commands on the Akamas CLI:
If the output looks like the following one no additional configuration is required:
Otherwise, see below for a complete set of instructions on how to configure Winrm to work with Akamas.
To configure Winrm on the controller server open a PowerShell console (as Administrator) and run the following command:
Then press "y" to accept the basic configuration as per the following example:
Enable HTTPS
Akamas default and recommended approach is to connect to LoadRunner Controller using HTTPS protocol (default: port 5986).
Since Winrm out-of-the-box configuration does not include an HTTPS listener, you need to set it up as follows:
create a valid certificate (or a self-signed one);
create the listener and bind it to the certificate;
add a Windows firewall inbound rule on port 5986.
To create the certificate on the controller server, open a PowerShell console (as Administrator) and get the host HOST_DNS_NAME
running hostname
. Take note of the HOST_DNS_NAME
and replace it in the following command line to generate a self-signed certificate:
To get the CERTIFICATE_THUMBPRINT
from the certificate manager, run the command certlm.msc
. The Certificate Manager will open, then choose:
open Certificates (local computer) → Personal → Certificates
open the certificate issued to HOST_DNS_NAME
copy the CERTIFICATE_THUMBPRINT
from the details tab.
Take note of the CERTIFICATE_THUMBPRINT
, substitute it and the HOST_DNS_NAME
in the following command line and execute the resulting command line to create the Winrm https listener and bind it to the certificate.
To check the newly create Winrm HTTPS listeners run:
Then check if in the output a listener is present with Transport set to HTTPS and Port set to 5986, as in the following example:
To allow inbound connections on port 5986 in the Windows firewall run
If you have ssh access to the Akamas server, you can also verify the connectivity from Akamas to the controller server on port 5986 by running the following command from the Akamas CLI:
The output should look like the following one:
Akamas requires a Windows user to start the Loadrunner test execution and retrieve the test data. The user account can be a local or a domain one.
All LoadRunner test files (VuGen scripts and folder, lrs files, etc…) and their parent folders, must be readable and writable by the user account used by Akamas
Please note username, password since you will need to add them to the operator configuration.
User groups
The user must be a member of the following groups:
Remote Desktop Users
Remote Management Users
Users
To add the user to the groups run the following steps:
Right-click on Start in Windows task
Open "Computer Management"
Expand "System Tools", then "Local Users and Groups", finally select "Users"
Select the appropriate user, right-click on it, and then select "Properties"
In the dialog window, select the tab "Member Of" and use the "Add" button to add the user to the required groups
A user requires specific permissions to run a program through a WinRm session. To grant them, follow these steps on the controller instance:
Open a PowerShell terminal;
Run the command winrm configSDDL default
. An ACL dialog window will open;
Use the "Add" button to add the appropriate user and then select "Read", "Write" and "Execute" permissions.
Close the dialog with the "OK" button.
The results generated by LoadRunner are imported into Akamas using the LoadRunner Telemetry Provider.
In order to upload the data, the results must be available on a CIFS network share which must be configured on the LoadRunner Controller instance. This can either be a shared Controller folder or a network share mounted on the server. Please notice that *this target folder should never be the default LoadRunner result folder (usually LoadRunner_home_folder/results).
Notice: the user created in the previous section should have read access only to the shared folder.
Please note the share name you have chosen, since you will need to add it to the operator configuration.
Right-click on the folder, then select Properties
Go to Sharing tab, then select Advanced Sharing
In the opened window, enable Share this folder
In the "Share name" textbox type the name of the share. This is the name of the share over the network
Then click on Permissions, then Add
In the textbox type the name of the user or the group (with the domain if required) that you want to grant access to the share, then click OK
Select the added user (or group) and grant the required permissions
Click OK, OK, and then Close
Open "This PC" from the Start menu, then click on "Map network drive"
In the "Map Network Drive" window, select a suitable drive letter name and enter the remote folder path of the network share provided to you by your storage admin (it should be something with the format \mycompanyshareserver.mycompany\foldername)
Make sure to check "Reconnect at sign-in" and "Connect using different credentials".
Click Finish
In the "Windows Security" window enter the username (with the domain, if required) and the password for the network share and check "Remember my credentials".
Click Ok
According to the standard Akamas implementation process, the following three steps are required to complete the integration with LoadRunner:
create one or more component(s): this requires specific LoadRunner properties to set for each web-application component modeling the service layer;
create one or more telemetry instance(s): this requires information on how to connect to the LoadRunner instance;
create the workflow task: this requires using the LoadRunner operator in a workflow task so as to get LoadRunner test execution (via Winrm) to be run as part of the workflow.
The following represents a working example of a LoadRunner Web Application component:
The following is an example of a LoadRunner telemetry instance definition:
Check LoadRunner metrics
Please verify the availability of a metric before defining your goal, constraints, and returned metrics.
The following is an excerpt of a workflow definition featuring a LoadRunner operator configuration:
Please notice that in this excerpt:
All slashes on the scenarioFile and resultFolder paths should be escaped (\).
Regarding the resultFolder
:
the placeholders between braces ..\{study}\{exp}\{trial}
are replaced by Akamas at runtime in order to save the LoadRunner results of each study, experiment, and trial in a separate folder. Since this could lead to a huge disk usage in case of long-lasting studies, before starting a study please be sure to:
adopt all the LoadRunner best practices to reduce the size of the result (e.g.: log, snapshot, etc);
have enough disk space on the LoadRunner server (the space required by a study = expected size of the LoadRunner results * max number of planned experiments);
the full path, up to the ..\results
folder, must exist;
the ..\results
folder has to be shared and the share name has to match the shareName
provided in the telemetry instance configuration; in our provided examples "C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\lr\results" has to be shared as "akamas" and be to be available as \lr_hostname\akamas;
the path \{study}\{exp}\{trial}
can be modified or completely removed to save the LoadRunner results over and over in the same folder to save disk space; in any case, this change must be reflected in the resultFolder
of the telemetry instance (in our example, where resultFolder
is set to 'C:\\Users\\Administrator\\Desktop\\lr\\results\\{study}
, a resultFolder
needs to be set to "{study}"
in the telemetry instance)
In the controller section, if you set HTTP as protocol, then port 5985 needs to be used to communicate with winrm daemon on the LoadRunner instance. Notice that if only the port is specified, then Akamas will default to the HTTPS protocol to communicate with the LoadRunner instance.
The focus of this guide is how to integrate Akamas with Tricentis NeoLoad in order to leverage Neoload as a performance testing tool in an Akamas optimization.
To be able to execute a test from Neoload and to collect the Neoload metrics you will need:
Neoload 7.0+
a valid Neoload license;
a working Neoload test script;
a fully working Neoload farm composed by:
NeoLoadWeb (saas or on-prem);
a Neoload "zone" composed of 1 controller and (at least) 1 loadgenerator;
URL (and port if it is not the default one) of the NeoLoadWeb server;
to whitelist the connections between:
Akamas server and NeoLoadWeb server over port 8080 and 8081 (if NeoLoadWeb is deployed on-premises);
Akamas server and internet if NeoLoadWeb is managed as a SaaS platform
A NeoLoadWeb user with a "tester" role ("guest" role cannot be used due to limitations in triggering test execution). For compatibility reasons, the user related to the generated token must belong to the default workspace.
A NeoLoadWeb API token created with the above user to inherit the same rights
At the component level, the NeoLoad integration is trivial and only requires specifying a single NeoLoad property at the Web Application component. These properties will be used during the telemetry phase to map the NeoLoad metrics (e.g. transactions response time, error rate, etc..) to the right Akamas component.
The example below provides an example of a component definition with the appropriate NeoLoadWeb property:
At the telemetry level, the NeoLoad integration relies on the NeoLoadWeb telemetry provider.
The following is an example of a NeoLoad telemetry instance:
The workflow configuration changes depending on your NeoLoadWeb deployment, since it could be Saas or on-premises.
For compatibility reasons, the user related to the generated token must belong to the default workspace.
Some properties can be retrieved from the NeoLoad application or NeoLoadWeb.
Notice: for compatibility reasons, the user related to the generated token must belong to the default workspace.
You need to have a controller and at least one load generator in place in the zone you have configured in the workflow step
Assuming that the NeoLoad scripts are hosted on your instance (thus you didn’t upload them on NeoLoad Web) the following command will run the load test scripts deployed in folder neoload-project on your NeoLoad farm:
where neoload-project
is the name of the mount point that the container is expecting. Please do not change it. Docker will mount your project folder in an internal folder named neoload-project
The project folder can contain:
A NeoLoad project folder including .nlp, config.zip ...
A single zip file containing the NeoLoad project
A single YAML file containing the NeoLoad project as code
Problem Test file upload on NeoloadWeb fails with the following error:
Solution
The user related to the token you are using must belong to the default
workspace.
Akamas supports the integration with virtually any load testing tool.
This section describes how to setup the integration with some of the most common options:
Akamas can integrate virtually with any Configuration Management tools to support the ability to set the configuration of tunable parameters.
This integration is typically done as a part of a and by using specific or general-purpose .
The integration relies on InfluxDB acting as an external analysis server for LoadRunner Enterprise (LRE).
The following schema illustrates the components and networking connections you need to configure to setup the environment:
connection granted between the Akamas server and the LRE server (the one exposing LRE APIs) on port 443 - this connection is used by Akamas to invoke LRE APIs over HTTPs;
bi-directional connection granted between the LRE server (the one exposing LRE APIs) and InfluxDB on port 8086.: this connection is used by LRE to store analysis data into InfluxDB;
connection granted between Akamas server and InfluxDB on port 8086 - this connection is used by Akamas to collect LRE analysis data from InfluxDB.
Once you have an InfluxDB deployment, you can configure it by running the following commands:
Since Akamas starts importing the LRE analysis data immediately once the execution is ended, there is no need to store data for a longer period of time than 1 day, which is the value set in the last command.
Please take note of the admin user credentials (akamasinfluxadmin
| password
in the example above) as you will need them later in order to configure the external analysis server on LRE.
It is recommended to create a dedicated LRE project to store the scripts and tests that you want to run using Akamas. It is also a good practice to also create a dedicated domain.
This can be done by accessing the administration panel on your LRE installation, whose URL should either look like the following:
or, in a multitenancy-enabled environment, like:
First, navigate to the Projects
menu:
then click on the Manage domains
button, add a domain and then fill in the required information:
Second, click on the Add project
button and add a project:
and fill in the required information (make sure to select the correct domain), then click on the Manage domains
button, add a domain and then fill in the required information:
Access the administration panel of your LRE installation and navigate to the Analysis Servers
menu:
and then click on the plus button to create a new Analysis Server by filling in the required information:
Make sure that the linked projects section lists the dedicated project you have created in the previous step. This step is required to let LoadRunner publish the performance test metrics to InfluxDB for the selected projects.
Notice: you may want to test that the connection to InfluxDB is working correctly by clicking on the Test connection button.
It is recommended to reserve a dedicated user for executing performance tests that you want to run using Akamas.
To create this user please access the administration panel of your LRE installation, then navigate to the Users menu:
then click on the plus button to add a user by filling in the required information:
Please notice that:
this user must be associated with the project created before and it must have the Performance tester role
this user does not need to have any special admin privilege
As a final step on the LRE environment, you need to retrieve the Test Identifier (ID) and the Test Set associated to the performance tests what will be executed by Akamas.
aside positive In the following it is assumed that you already have a test scenario defined in your LRE environment that Akamas will execute as part of an optimization study.
These test ID and test set can be retrieved from LRE Loadtest panel, which you can access it through a link which looks similar to:
or, for a multitenancy-enabled environment:
You can retrieve the ID by selecting the Test Management menu:
and then by clicking on the test that you want to execute: the ID is displayed next to the test name:
You can also retrieve the test set from the test details page: the test set is displayed in the upper right corner of the screen:
At this point, your LoadRunner Enterprise is ready to be integrated with Akamas.
First of all, check whether the telemetry provider for LoadRunnerEnterprise is installed:
Then, create a telemetry instance as follows:
where:
address
: it is the FQDN of the server hosting your InfluxDB instance
port
: the port where InfluxDB is running
username
and password
: credentials of the InfluxDB schema created in the previous steps
database
: the name of the InfluxDB database schema created in the previous steps.
The following only represents an example of a simple workflow that you can use to test your LRE integration. It contains just one task that triggers the execution of the specified performance test on LoadRunner Enterprise:
where:
address
: it is the basic address of your LRE farm, where the tenant and any other URL or path parameter have been removed
username
and password
: the credentials that you have previously created in the LRE admin panel
domain
and project
: the domain and the project you have previously created in the LRE admin panel
tenantID
: the ID of the tenant your project and user belong to - in case multitenancy is not enabled on your LRE environment, you can skip this parameter or set to the default value, thus fa128c06-5436-413d-9cfa-9f04bb738df3
testId
: the test ID of the test that will be executed by Akamas (you should have already identified it in the previous steps)
testSet
: the test set related to the test specified by testId (you should have already identified it in the previous steps)
timeSlot
: it specifies the amount of time that LRE will reserve for running your test, therefore it must be greater or equal of the test duration
verifySSL
: a flag to enable or ignore the SSL validation when connecting to LRE APIs - this flag is especially useful if your LRE environment exposes APIs over HTTPs with a self-signed certificate.
Akamas can integrate virtually with any pipeline tools to support the ability to optimize systems as part of a Continous Integration / Continous Delivery (CI/CD) process.
When integrated into a CI/CD process, the Akamas optimization becomes an additional step that can ensure a new version that is being released will not cause incidents due to bad configurations pushed to production that nobody has time to look at and that can require adjustments to make the new release perform best.
By integrating Akamas in the CI/CD pipeline, it is possible to also ensure the new release is not only passing functional and security tests but also that:
performance regressions with respect to previous builds are avoided, such as regressions with respect to some key performance indicators (or SLOs) such as service response time or resource consumption;
configuration settings are properly tailored for the new release, thus avoiding configuration bottlenecks (e.g. wrong JVM settings or smaller Kubernetes pod resources for the new release) and decreasing the risk of performance or availability incidents.
Field | Type | Description | Default Value | Restrictions | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Field | Type | Description | Default value | Restrictions | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Region Name | Region |
---|---|
Field | Type | Description | Default Value | Restrictions | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
is the Microsoft implementation of WS-Management Protocol, a standard Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based, firewall-friendly protocol that allows hardware and operating systems from different vendors to interoperate. Akamas leverages WinRM as a general communication mechanism with Windows hosts.
Additional useful documentation is available on
Additional useful documentation about is available on Microsoft KB.
At the component level, only a single empty property "LoadRunner" needs to be specified for the reference component type "Web Application". For more details about the component, see .
Akamas provides a dedicated LoadRunner telemetry provider which can be deployed as a telemetry instance. If the telemetry provider is not available on your Akamas installation (please check the telemetry provider section of the UI) you can get it installed by following the instruction on page.
After installing a telemetry provider a LoadRunner telemetry instance can be created by following the instructions provided on page.
For full details about the telemetry instance please refer to in the Akamas documentation.
Please notice that the Akamas integration to LoadRunner has been designed to only collect a subset of the metrics available on the LoadRunner Controller (e.g.: transactions_response_time_p99 or other percentiles values are not returned). The full list of the supported LoadRunner metrics is described on the .
A dedicated task based on the LoadRunner operator needs to be created in a workflow to test the integration. The LoadRunner operator is documented on the page.
The overall configuration is described by the page.
In case the NeoLoadWeb telemetry provider is not already installed on the Akamas server, please follow the instructions on the page. After installing the telemetry provider, a NeoLoadWeb telemetry instance can be implemented following the instructions on page.
At the workflow level, the NeoLoad integration requires implementing a dedicated task based on the .
The operator configurations required by NeoLoad are described on the .
Property | Steps |
---|
Property | Steps |
---|
You might want to use docker container which can be useful for quickly troubleshooting your NeoLoad integration instead of building and running a full study on Akamas.
The following assumes that you have already deployed your InfluxDB instance. For more information on how to deploy an InfluxDB instance. As a reference, please see for a native deployment or for a containerized deployment.
To leverage the integration with LoadRunner Enterprise via InfluxDB, a needs to be created on the Akamas side.
A needs to be created for your specific offline optimization study by leveraging the LoadRunnerEnterprise
operator to trigger the execution of a performance test.
hostname
String
the hostname or IP of the server that hosts the CIFS share where the LoadRunner results have been exported. See LoadRunner operator
-
IP address or FQDN
Yes
username
String
The username and the domain required to access the share
-
Supported formats:
username
domain\username
username@domain
Yes
password
String
The password required to access the share
-
-
Yes
shareName
String
The name of the share as it is exposed by the server
-
-
Yes
resultFolder
String
The name of the folder where to look for test results. The final path is {pathPrefix}{resultsFolder}.
The default path is
{studyName}\{experimentId}\{trialId}
A valid Windows path segment, might contain the placeholders: {studyName}, {experimentId}, {trialId}
No
pathPrefix
String
A prefix the for path where to look for test results.
-
A valid Windows path
No
address
String
The address of the InfluxDB
-
A valid URL
Yes
port
Integer
The port of the InfluxDB
-
A valid port
yes
username
String
The username to connect to InfluxDB
-
-
Yes
password
String
The password of the specified user
-
-
Yes
database
String
The database with the metrics
-
-
Yes
verifySSL
Boolean
Wheter to check the certificate, of InfluxDB API is exposed in HTTPS
true
true/false
No
transactions
List of string
Restrict metrics collection to the listed transactions names. If not specified the provider will collect metrics of all transactions
Empty
-
No
US East (Ohio)
us-east-2
US East (N. Virginia)
us-east-1
US West (N. California)
us-west-1
US West (Oregon)
us-west-2
Africa (Cape Town)
af-south-1
Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
ap-east-1
Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
ap-south-1
Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local)
ap-northeast-3
Asia Pacific (Seoul)
ap-northeast-2
Asia Pacific (Singapore)
ap-southeast-1
Asia Pacific (Sydney)
ap-southeast-2
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
ap-northeast-1
Canada (Central)
ca-central-1
China (Beijing)
cn-north-1
China (Ningxia)
cn-northwest-1
Europe (Frankfurt)
eu-central-1
Europe (Ireland)
eu-west-1
Europe (London)
eu-west-2
Europe (Milan)
eu-south-1
Europe (Paris)
eu-west-3
Europe (Stockholm)
eu-north-1
Middle East (Bahrain)
me-south-1
South America (São Paulo)
sa-east-1
AWS GovCloud (US-East)
us-gov-east-1
AWS GovCloud (US)
us-gov-west-1
accessKeyId
String
The access key id of your chosen IAM user
Valid IAM credentials
Yes
secretAccessKey
String
The secret access key of your chosen IAM user
Valid IAM credentials
Yes
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