Minimum EEC overhead in standalone OneAgents

[Enrico_F]

The current documentation about the EEC (Extension Execution Controller) performance profile does not mention the minimum overhead of enabling the EEC option on standalone OneAgents (e.g. when using a K8s application observability deployment or manually injecting the OA code module into a process) or even on "regular" OneAgents for that matter.

This would be important to know because in our case we have no useful way of selectively enabling the EEC for K8s workloads due to host and host-group settings being either "ephemeral" (i.e. not surviving container restarts due to changing host IDs) or not granular enough (i.e. host-groups are configured per Dynakube CR). Therefore, we are left with the only choice to enable it globally at environment level, regardless whether any extension configs are matching the detected host of the monitored K8s workload pods/containers.

I was wondering if anyone here has any experience with measuring the process cpu/mem overhead after enabling the EEC option on standalone OneAgents without actually running any extensions? If so, I would also be interested to know if there are differences depending on the technology of the injected process (Java, NodeJS, Apache/HTTP, Go, PHP, .NET etc.).

Thanks in advance.

[Julius_Loman · Accepted solution]

Standalone / PaaS OneAgents do not have EEC and cannot run extensions. Exception is only JMX (and PMI) data sources which are executed in the code module itself.

[Enrico_F]

Hi @Julius_Loman 

Thanks for the feedback.

That's interesting because the monitoring config wizard is informing us to "make sure that the selected hosts are enabled to run extensions":

And the option to enable EEC is available even for PaaS hosts.

So, I assume enabling the EEC option on PaaS hosts is completely pointless as it will have no effect whatsoever, would you agree?

[Julius_Loman]

Agreed.I never tried, but I don't think it necessary enabling it in your situation. I should not have any effect on paas oneagents as they do not even include the EEC binaries and cannot run extensions. Except the ones running directly in instrumented applications. EEC as it says, executes the extensions, validates certificates and sends and enriches data. 

Afaik for JMX extensions the certificate is not validated on host (only when uploaded to the environment).

[Enrico_F]

I can confirm that enabling EEC is indeed NOT required for JMX 2.0 extensions to work on standalone OneAgents (just tested). While this seems good news I'm still trying to get official confirmation from Dynatrace support. I also provided feedback to improve the current documentation as it seems lacking.

Thanks a lot @Julius_Loman !