Chapter 6. Monitoring and Management in Bluemix

In this chapter, we will look at the services available in Bluemix that will users to monitor and manage the applications deployed on the platform. We will also learn how to use the monitoring and management services in Bluemix.

In this chapter, you will learn how to use some of these available monitoring and management services to monitor various parameters of your application in Bluemix.

This chapter will cover the following:

• Overview of monitoring and management services in Bluemix

• Monitoring and analytics service:

  • Creating the Monitoring and Analytics service instance

  • Creating an application to monitor using the M&A service

  • Binding the M&A service to your application

  • Simulating events in your application

  • Viewing reports in the M&A dashboard for your monitored application

• New Relic service:

  • Creating the New Relic service instance

  • Binding the New Relic service to your application

  • Configuring the application to send events to the New Relic...

Overview of monitoring and management services in Bluemix

Note

Discussions in this chapter will be based upon the services that are available in Bluemix at the time of writing this book (July 2016).

Some of the services that can be used to monitor and manage your applications on Bluemix are the following:

• Monitoring and Analytics, which is an IBM service

• New Relic, a third-party service

• JKool, a third-party service

• IBM Alert Notification, which is an IBM service

When you log in to Bluemix, and select All Items, you will see Get started now!, as shown in the following screenshot:

From here you can click Get started now! to view the services in the Bluemix catalog. Go to the DevOps category to view the monitoring and management services:

Let us now look in detail at how to use the Monitoring and Analytics service with your application in Bluemix.

Monitoring and Analytics service

Using the Monitoring and Analytics (M&A) service, you can get the details on the performance, availability and log analytics details for your application. In this section, we will learn how to create the service instance and how to configure it to enable monitoring of your application.

Note

M&A service is currently only supported for Java applications on Liberty Application Server and NodeJS applications.

Creating the Monitoring and Analytics service instance

When you log in to Bluemix, and select All Items, you will see Get started now! From here you can click Get started now! to view the services in the Bluemix catalog. Once you are in the Bluemix catalog, you can perform the following steps to create the M&A service instance:

1. In the catalog, filter the services by typing  Monitoring and Analytics as shown here:

   

2. Click Monitoring and Analytics service. The service details are displayed as shown here:

   

3. The available plan details of the M&A service...

New Relic service

The New Relic service is a third-party service which can be used to monitor applications on Bluemix. A user account in New Relic can be created by creating the New Relic instance from Bluemix.

Creating the New Relic service instance

To create the New Relic instance go to the Bluemix catalog using steps that we have carried out earlier while creating the Monitoring and Analytics service. Follow the steps to create the service instance:

1. Filter the services in the catalog by entering New Relic in the search field. Click New Relic service:

   

2. New Relic is offered under a Free plan. Click Create:

   

3. Once the service is created, go to the New Relic dashboard by clicking OPEN NEW RELIC DASHBOARD:

   

4. This will take you to the New Relic site. You will see a user space created for you. Click on the highlighted area, as shown in the following screenshot:

   

5. Select Account Settings from the drop-down menu:

   

6. The New Relic account details are shown for the user space created. You will see the...

Summary

In this chapter, we learnt about the different services that can be used to monitor and manage your applications. We learnt to work with the Monitoring and Analytics service for a web application deployed on Bluemix. Additionally, we also learnt to work with New Relic which is a third-party service on Bluemix.

Note

You can also explore the Availability Monitoring service from the Bluemix services catalog, to monitor the response time and uptime of your application.

In the next chapter, we will learn about the different compute options available in Bluemix and when to use them. We will also learn to develop and deploy applications on some of the available compute options.