Configuring WebSphere Applications monitoring

Embedded data collector

Most of the WebSphere application servers can be monitored by the embedded data collector, except for the Liberty profile on IBM® Cloud. The embedded data collector can provide all available monitoring features.

To configure the embedded data collector, you must first install the WebSphere Applications agent on the system where the application server is running. After that, use the provided configuration utilities to configure the data collector interactively or silently.

Stand-alone data collector

The stand-alone data collector is applicable only for WebSphere Application Server Liberty on Linux® for System x and for WebSphere Liberty profile on IBM Cloud.

If you choose to configure a stand-alone data collector, you can skip the agent installation procedure and directly configure the data collector in Liberty.

However, some on-demand diagnostics data will not be collected by the stand-alone data collector, such as heap dump at the current time or in-flight request information. It means you can only enable the data collector to automatically collect heap dump information at specified intervals but you cannot take heap snapshot whenever you want by using the Take Snapshot button from the Cloud APM console. All in-flight request related dashboards, which can be provided by the embedded data collector, are not available to the stand-alone data collector.

Use Table 1 to determine the appropriate data collector for your application server.