OpenText Operations Agent (OA) is an important component of OpenText Operations Bridge – our Enterprise Observability and Performance Management solution. Operations Agent facilitates monitoring systems with a rich feature set. It continuously collects performance data, which it either saves in its local metrics datastore or forwards to a central store. Operations Agent can create health events based on a process status, complex threshold violations or log file evaluation, and execute automatic actions for remediation or for gathering additional troubleshooting information.

Introduction

Out of the box, Operations Agent collects a standard set of operating system (OS) metrics, but it is extensible and allows you to define more specific requirements in Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) via policy templates.

You can either create configuration policies for Operations Agent yourself or use the diverse set of Management Packs that are available from OpenText and partners. (Management Packs are pre-configured policy templates for monitoring specific applications, such as databases, web servers, etc.) For details on what is available, refer to the Full-Stack AIOps: Operations Bridge Integrations brochure.

The data collected by Operations Agent can also be used in Operations Bridge Analytics (OBA) for AI-based performance management and log analytics.

The following list introduces high-level benefits of using Operations Agent:

• Continuous deep monitoring of a wide range of systems and applications (physical, virtual, and cloud-based), including Windows and Linux servers, databases, middleware and custom applications. This monitoring can alert you to problems before they impact services.
• Maximized efficiency and availability with real-time monitoring of critical systems and applications, which allows you to detect and resolve issues before they become major problems.
• Customizable monitoring capabilities that allow you to finetune monitoring to meet your specific needs and ensure that you have visibility into your entire IT landscape.

The following diagram provides you an overview of the key functionality of Operations Agent:

Figure 1. Key features of Operations Agent

Now let’s look at how Operations Agent operates at a more detailed level:

• Discovery: Operations Agent can detect hardware and software components on a system and report these to OBM (where this data is collected from all Operations Agents and other sources), thus providing an up-to-date representation of your IT infrastructure
• Service/process monitoring: Enables you to monitor the status of services (on Windows) and processes (on any operating system that Operations Agent supports). You can configure a policy to create events and launch commands when a change occurs, either in the status of a service or in the number of running processes. See Configure Service/Process Monitoring policies for details.
• Log file monitoring (rule-based event log processing): This sophisticated event processing (including pattern matching and other features) allows you to check for certain conditions on a system. See Pattern Matching Details and Examples of Pattern Matching in Rule Conditions for more information. Note that you can also configure Operations Agent to run pre-processing scripts.

Performance monitoring: Includes sophisticated thresholding from a single-value comparison to complex script-based multi-value thresholding, with the possibility to ignore short term peaks and define reset values. See Create a Measurement Threshold Policy for details.

Figure 2. Thresholds in the OBM UI

• Extensible collection: You can feed in your own metrics and events via multiple ways (CLIs, APIs, REST-Web service, etc.). Read the topic for details on how to Configure Open Message Interface Policies and learn about the opcmsg CLI, Java and C APIs. The blog article Easily collect custom metrics using Perl and visualize in OBM describes our Perl APIs. In addition, you can check the OBM documentation to learn how to Configure REST Web Service Listener Policies.
• Collect data from various other data sources, such as Windows Event log, Windows Management Interface, Windows Performance Store, SNMP traps and MIBs (see Configure Windows Event Log Policies and SNMP trap handling and MIB monitoring)
• Extend the monitoring capabilities:
• We ship numerous out-of-the-box policies for system monitoring as part of the free Infrastructure Management Pack
• We also offer pre-configured policies for applications, such as databases, middleware, SAP, Microsoft 365, Amazon Web Services, etc. in the form of diverse Management Packs (see Management Pack Documentation for details)
• Store your metrics in the local Operations Agent Performance Store (see Measurement Threshold Policies) and/or to store them in the OPTIC Data Lake for central reporting (see Configure Metric Streaming Configuration Policies and Use OPTIC Reporting).
• The possibility to perform configured actions when certain conditions are met (threshold violation, a certain event occurred, etc.):
  • Call a command automatically (to solve a problem or gather more data)
  • Offer an action to the user

Figure 3. Configuring automatic actions in the OBM UI

• Log streaming: Enables you to collect structured logs and configure them for consumption by OBA. This way, you can benefit from the central configuration of log collection and normalization (via Operations Agent policies) and use OBA to perform log search, log analytics and anomaly detection on the logs streamed by the Operations Agent. See Stream logs with Operations Agent for more information.
• Operations Agent can detect and suppress message storms on a system and correlate events

Figure 4. Event correlation and event suppression

• Based on all the collected and reported data from Operations Agent, OBM can display Health and Key Performance Indicators (HIs and KPIs) for your systems and applications. The OBM performance perspective can display graphs of the collected metrics.
• OBA can use OA data to detect problems using Machine Learning. For more information, see the blog article Anomaly detection and metric analytics on OPTIC Data Lake.
• The data collected by Operations Agent can be used for reporting:

Figure 5. OPTIC Data Lake-based reporting

How you can benefit

Thanks to its customizability and a rich feature set, we have seen our customers using Operations Agent for many different use cases to meet their specific monitoring needs. Many use it to monitor their critical databases as well as web and/or application servers in the data centers – which is probably the most common use case. Other examples include using Operations Agent for monitoring all kinds of different systems and devices, such as Magnetic Resonance Tomography (MRT) systems, cashier systems or even soft drink vending machines (counting the cans left).

The possibilities offered by various uses of Operations Agent are huge. Keep in mind that many monitoring use cases can be addressed with Operations Agent and a simple easy-to-configure policy – for example, comparing a single threshold or reacting on a specific log file entry. Review the existing policies as examples. You may find the policy that you can effectively use with just a minor modification. For more complex monitoring use cases, rest assured that using Operations Agent with its powerful scripting, pattern matching and thresholding features will help you implement your monitoring strategy and achieve deep and comprehensive monitoring results.

For more information and specific details, please refer to the Operations Agent documentation.

We encourage you to try out our new features and enhancements! For further information on our offerings, visit the Operations Bridge product page, explore our documentation resources and check out our videos and blogs.

If you have feedback or suggestions, don’t hesitate to comment on this article.

Explore the full capabilities of Operations Bridge by taking a look at these pages on our Practitioner Portal: Operations Bridge Manager, SiteScope, Operations Connector (OpsCx), Operations Bridge Analytics, Application Performance Management (APM) and Operations Orchestration (OO).

Events

• On-demand: Operations Bridge 2022.11 Release Readiness Webinar
• On-demand: Operations Bridge Refresh 2023
• On demand: Operations Bridge 2022.05 – Has Observability, More SaaS

See all the OpenText events worldwide. 

Read all our news at the Operations Bridge blog. 

Related items 

• Operations Bridge – SaaS: Automated discovery, monitoring and automation
• Operations Bridge Technology Integrations eBook
• What is AIOps

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