In the modern era of application development, customers are widely adopting a containerized, micro-services-based architecture for all their business needs. However, most of the monitoring solutions and data collectors out there in the market still rely on a server-based monolithic architecture that does not meet the monitoring requirements of these dynamic environments.
At BMC, we constantly focus on our customer and partner pain points and how we can best support their digital transformation. We’re delighted to share the addition of BMC Helix Monitor Agent-Containerized to the BMC Helix family to help our customers monitor their dynamic infrastructure changes. Before we dive into specifics of BMC Helix Monitor Agent, here is a glimpse at containerized solutions and their advantages.
Container technology involves encapsulating or packaging up software code and all its dependencies so that it can run uniformly and consistently on any infrastructure. The technology is quickly maturing, resulting in measurable benefits for developers and operations teams as well as overall software infrastructure that include:
- Agility—Start, create, replicate, or destroy containers in seconds
- Portability—run anywhere
- Resource efficiency and density
- Container isolation and resource sharing
- High scalability
BMC has more than three decades of rich monitoring experience in infrastructure, public cloud, databases, applications, and more. BMC Helix Monitor Agent is a lightweight, containerized collector that is pre-configured and ready to be deployed for monitoring with support for vendor-agnostic public cloud monitoring, infrastructure, and database monitoring.
Key benefits:
- Unified agent for various monitoring
- Enterprise-grade performance
- Zero agent configuration
- Knowledge modules (KMs) are already deployed within the container
- Enables alarming using out-of-the-box BMC Helix Operations Management policies
- Highly scalable and reliable
- Enterprise-grade high availability
- Seamless upgrades
The diagram below depicts the wide variety of monitoring provided by BMC Helix Monitor Agent:
Figure 1. BMC Helix Monitor Agent
How do I consume this containerized image?
In the BMC Helix Operations Management Console, go to Administration à Repository, and click on the image highlighted below:
Figure 2. BMC Helix Monitor Agent-Containerized
How do I deploy this?
- The downloaded image should be copied to the Kubernetes cluster-accessible controller/bastion system.
- Pull the image from BMC Docker Trusted Repository (DTR) using the access token.
- Values.yaml file must be updated with required inputs for the deployment.
- Trigger deployment with the Helm command.
How do I identify the containerized agent in BMC Helix Operations Management?
In the BMC Helix Operations Management console, go to Configuration → Agents. The file versions that end with a “c” represent BMC Helix Monitor Agent-Containerized agents.
Figure 3. Helix Monitor Agent-Containerized file structure
How do I upgrade BMC Helix Monitor Agent?
- The existing version of the container must be destroyed.
- Create a new container with the latest version of BMC Helix Monitor Agent.
- Make sure the published host name is same as the existing host name.
Key considerations:
- Port 3181 is not exposed outside the container. Therefore, no PatrolCli or console connection is possible from the host computer or within the container.
- You cannot change or re-configure the default account for BMC Helix Monitor Agent.
- A KM push is not supported.
- You cannot modify the container contents after deployment.
- You cannot restart BMC Helix Monitor Agent.
