Category Archives: MySql

Installing configuring the Appdynamics PHP Agent manually on Ubuntu 16.04.4

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The first step is to install the Appdynamics PHP Agent which will monitor the internals of PHP on this Ubuntu Server. We have downloaded the agent from https://downloads.appdynamics.com.

This agent has no pre-defined configuration file included so we need to do the installation and configuration manually. Upload the agent and unpack it into a desired location.

root@HUAPPD001-P1:/app/appdynamics/phpagent# bzip2 -d appdynamics-php-agent-x64-linux-4.4.3.1216.tar.bz2
root@HUAPPD001-P1:/app/appdynamics/phpagent# tar xvf appdynamics-php-agent-x64-linux-4.4.3.1216.tar
root@HUAPPD001-P1:/app/appdynamics/phpagent/appdynamics-php-agent-linux_x64# mv * /app/appdynamics/phpagent/
root@HUAPPD001-P1:/app/appdynamics/phpagent/appdynamics-php-agent-linux_x64# cd ..
root@HUAPPD001-P1:/app/appdynamics/phpagent# rm -rf appdynamics-php-agent-linux_x64
root@HUAPPD001-P1:/app/appdynamics/phpagent# ls -ltr
total 64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2343 máj 5 02:50 Install.txt
drwxrwxr-x 9 root root 4096 máj 5 03:00 proxy
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5062 máj 5 03:00 phpcheck.sh
drwxrwxr-x 4 root root 4096 máj 5 03:00 php
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4096 máj 5 03:00 logs
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 35 máj 5 03:00 LICENSE.txt
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 30113 máj 5 03:00 install.sh
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 305 máj 5 03:00 appdynamics_api_header.php

To install the application we will have to call the install.sh command. This command will perform the following:

  • Copy appdynamics_agent.so to the php extension library. This extension is called automatically anytime a php page is invoked.
  • Copy the appdynamics_agent.ini to the same directory where the php.ini resides
  • Configure the controller-info.xml file.
  • Creates the runProxy executable to start the agent.

The following parameters are mandatory – in this order – for the install.sh:

  • -a account-name@account-access-key which is your unique name and key assigned to you by appdynamics.
  • controller’s hostname  ( make sure host is resolvable and you can connect to the controller’s connection port.
  • controller’s port
  • Application’s name ( Appdynamics application you want the agent to report to )
  • Application tier ( The tier inside the application, it doesn’t have to be pre-created )
  • Application node ( The node belonging to the tier, it doesn’t have to be pre-created )

The full syntax looks like this:

./install.sh -a=account-name@account-access-key hostname-of-controller 8090 WordPress_Test_Environment WordPress_Server_Php wp-server

Install script for AppDynamics PHP Agent 4.4.3.0GA.5b071fef580bca60d0ed12ddb96d7be8864f342c
Found PHP installation in /usr/bin

Detected PHP Version:
 PHP 7.0.30-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 (cli) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2017 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2017 Zend Technologies
 with Zend OPcache v7.0.30-0ubuntu0.16.04.1, Copyright (c) 1999-2017, by Zend Technologies

PHP version id: 7.0
PHP extensions directory: /usr/lib/php/20151012
PHP ini directory: /etc/php/7.0/cli/conf.d
Controller Host: hostname
Controller Port: 8090
Application Name: WordPress_Test_Environment
Tier Name: WordPress_Server_Php
Node Name: wp-server
Account Name: account-name
Access Key: access-key
SSL Enabled: false
HTTP Proxy Host:
HTTP Proxy Port:
HTTP Proxy User:
HTTP Proxy Password File:

Writing '/app/appdynamics/phpagent/php/conf/appdynamics_agent_log4cxx.xml'
Writing '/etc/php/7.0/cli/conf.d/appdynamics_agent.ini'
Writing '/app/appdynamics/phpagent/proxy/conf/controller-info.xml'
rm -f "/usr/lib/php/20151012/appdynamics_agent.so"
ln -s "/app/appdynamics/phpagent/php/modules/appdynamics_agent_php_7.0.so" "/usr/lib/php/20151012/appdynamics_agent.so"
Writing '/app/appdynamics/phpagent/proxy/

As you can see above the installer found most of the settings automatically and installed the agent. In our case the location of the php.ini was incorrect so we manually locate the php.ini files by executing:

find / -name php.ini
/etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini
/etc/php/7.0/cli/php.ini

We found 2 php.ini‘s on our system, one of them is responsible for the settings for the client run php scripts and the other one  is responsible for the apache webserver run php processes. We want to monitor wordpress and mysql so we need to modify the apache one.

  • Open /etc/php/7.0/cli/conf.d/appdynamics_agent.ini
  • Copy all the settings in appdynamics_agent.ini to the end of the php.ini located in /etc/php/7.0/apache2/
  • Restart the apache2 server: service apache2 restart

Now we need to generate some traffic for the appdynamics controller. We have created a load plan with the Paessler Web Server Stress Tool and started loading the website heavily.

In a few minutes data starts flowing into the appdynamics application dashboard.

Transactions also show up in the other views.

Database calls are automatically detected and queries are displayed.

Installing Appdynamics Machine Agent on Ubuntu 16.04.4

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Downloading and installing the Appdynamics Machine Agent

We have recently set up a test environment with a PHP/MySQL based test Ubuntu 16.04.4 server. We will now set up monitoring for Linux OS, PHP 7.0 and MySQL.

The first step is to install the PHP Agent the next step is to downloading the machine agent. Open your Appdynamics console and select the Getting Started Wizard.

Then click the Server button on the What do you want to monitor? screen.

At the next screen check if the connection details are correct then click the click here to download  button to acquire the Machine Agent.

Upload the downloaded zip file to your ubuntu server, unpack it to a desired location. This is where you want to run the machine agent from.

Check if the hostname of the appdynamics server is resolvable by simply pinging it, and also check if you can telnet into the port defined in the Configure the Controller step ( above ). The Machine Agent zip should contain the configuration files pre-configured with all the connection details, so in this case we do not have to do this manually. Run the machine agent as root using the following command:

[Your-agent-director]/bin/machine-agent &

root@HUAPPD001-P1:/app/appdynamics/machineagent/bin# ./machine-agent
Using java executable at /app/appdynamics/machineagent/jre/bin/java
Using Java Version [1.8.0_111] for Agent
Using Agent Version [Machine Agent v4.4.3.1214 GA Build Date 2018-04-28 05:12:10]
[INFO] Agent logging directory set to: [/app/appdynamics/machineagent]
Machine Agent Install Directory :/app/appdynamics/machineagent
Machine Agent Temp Directory :/app/appdynamics/machineagent/tmp
Tasks Root Directory :/app/appdynamics/machineagent/controlchannel
[INFO] Agent logging directory set to: [/app/appdynamics/machineagent]
Redirecting all logging statements to the configured logger
15:05:30.460 [system-thread-0] DEBUG com.appdynamics.common.framework.util.EmbeddedModeSecurityManager - Installed
15:05:30.490 [system-thread-0] INFO com.appdynamics.analytics.agent.AnalyticsAgent - Starting analytics agent with arguments [-p, /app/appdynamics/machineagent/monitors/analytics-agent/conf/analytics-agent.properties, -yr, analytics-agent.yml]
Started AppDynamics Machine Agent Successfully.

Once the agent is started it should automatically show up on the appdynamics console in the servers section.

Click on the machine’s name to open the detailed OS monitoring dashboard.

If you run into connection errors you can check and change the connection settings in the configuration file:

[Your-agent-director]/conf/controller-info.xml

Assign the machine agent automatically to an application and to its tiers and nodes

If you only want to use the machine agent on this server, you can hard wire the Application, Tier and Node details in the contoller-info.xml. Please note that if you use for example the PHP Agent on the same box this might stop the PHP Agent to connect to the controller.

There is no need to create the tiers and nodes manually they will be created on the dashboard automatically. We only added the WordPress_Test_Environment Application before the agent assignment. You will need to add the following to the controller-info.xml configuration file:

<force-agent-registration>true</force-agent-registration>
<application-name>WordPress_Test_Environment</application-name>
<tier-name>WordPress_Server</tier-name>
<node-name>huappd001-p1</node-name>

Change the name of the application, tier and node according to your specifications and restart the agent. Once the agent is restarted navigate into the application and verify if the machine agent has been added successfully.

Adding a MySQL Data Source to TEPS using JDBC

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We had a requirement to display data from a remote MySQL database on TEPS. There is absolutely no documentation on how to do this so I attempt to explain how we managed to sort this out.

1: Check if you can get to the MySQL database from the TEPS server. You can run the following PHP script if it is not giving an error the connection is working fine! Replace
the highlighted variables with your own details.

<?php

// opening DB connection

$dbhost = ‘database_hostname‘;
$dbuser = ‘database_username‘;
$dbpass = ‘database_password‘;

$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die (‘Error connecting to mysql’);

$dbname = ‘database_name‘;
mysql_select_db($dbname);

?>

2: Add the MySQL data source to the TEPS datasource list. We used the following command:

/opt/IBM/ITM/bin/tacmd configurePortalServer -s DSUSER2 -p UID=database_user PWD=database_password CONNECTION_TYPE=JDBC KFWJDBCDRIVER=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver KFWDSURL=jdbc:mysql://database_hostname:3306/database_name

This will create the DSUSER2 datasource.

3: Download MySQL JDBC connection driver from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/

4: Add MySQL JDBC connection driver to cq.ini this will ensure that the driver is loaded.

KFW_JVM__CTJDBC__CLASSPATH=$CANDLEHOME$/$BINARCH$/$PRODUCTCODE$/lib/tepjdbc.jar:/app/mysql-connector-java-5.1.24-bin.jar:$KFW_EWAS_HOME$/derby/lib/derby.jar:$KFW_JDBC_DRIVER$

5: Restart TEPS

Once teps is restarted the new data source should show up when you try to create a custom query on TEPS. Simply enter the SQL you would like to run against the MySQL database and the data should show up on teps in table format.

Handling Hungarian character set from PHP – Ő Ű problem

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I have started to write an app in php and run into the good old character set problem.Ő and Ű characters were not displayed correctly however I have converted the data back and forth. The key is to use UTF-8 encoding.

You have to tell php what encoding to use you can achieve this either using the HTML or the PHP definition. Whichever suits you. Add this to the header section of the HTML code:

<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ >

You can achieve the same using the header php command:

header(“Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8”);

Now we have to make sure that the data coming from the mysql database is UTF-8 encoded. Add this right after the database connection line.

$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die (‘Error connecting to mysql’); // Add UTF-8 converting after this line
mysql_query(“SET NAMES UTF8”);

Make sure that the php file itself is saved from the editor in UTF-8 format. Each progamming editor has the capability to change the character encoding.

Finally check your database if  the tables and the database are utf8_hungarian_ci encoded. MySQL connection collation should be set to utf8_general_ci.

That should be it 🙂