OneAgent on ActiveGate itself

[karanbirsingh]

Hey Folks, 

I have installed activegate on-prem and wondering if there is a way to install OneAgent on same VM itself where ActiveGate is running to monitor the processes and internal state of AG VM closely?

Has anyone tried this? Did it work out or there are possibly downsides to it/bad practice?
Either way if someone can shed some light 🙂

Thanks,

Karanbir

[AntonioSousa]

@karanbirsingh 

Yes, I have cases where that monitoring exists. But ActiveGates also have some self-monitoring capabilities, and you can even have metrics in dashboards, for instance (check out the dsfm: metrics)

[The_AM]

ActiveGates and dsfm: metrics also do not consume licensing (eg. DDU)

OneAgent does consume host units.

[dannemca]

Doing the self monitoring using the OA here in our AGs too. Using infra-only for the Routing and Synthetic , but full-stack is required for zRemote (we need to watch for our HostUnits, right?)

No issues nor downsides so far.

[mcabiya]

Thanks for the info that zremote needs fullstack

[karanbirsingh]

Thanks @AntonioSousa and @dannemca for super swift response. 
I will take a look at "dsfm: metrics" and zRemote for self monitoring.

[Peter_Ralston · Accepted solution]

Hi,   

We do a combination of Agent in 'infrastructure only' mode, so we can monitor the host and processes, and then for Internals we use the following dashboard.  There is no need to run the agent in full stack on the Active Gates as internal monitoring provides significantly more information (and whats important) than the agent does. 

You probably don't need to use the agent if licensing is a concern, but it has saved us a couple of times where other issues on the server like patching / scanning has occurred that resulted in contributing issues that otherwise would not have been picked up.

[The_AM · Accepted solution]

As others have mentioned, there are self-monitoring metrics available. See more at: https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/self-monitoring-metrics#activegate-insights

These do not require OneAgent to be deployed. If you do go with OneAgent, as already pointed out you would want only Infrastructure mode.

Advantages:

• Can monitor host level availability, so when ActiveGate process is offline (dsfm metrics unavailable), the host is still monitored (fault-domain isolation)

Disadvantages:

• Infrastructure mode still enables network monitoring, which can still detect process connections
  
  • As a result, if you use the same Dynatrace environment for the OneAgent on your ActiveGate as everything else, you will 'pollute' your Smartscape as most hosts will connect with your ActiveGate host.
• For above reason, you may require a separate Dynatrace environment dedicated to self-monitoring of the ActiveGates
• OneAgents consume host-unit licensing. ActiveGates themselves do not consume a license in this way.