This page describes how to estimate the hardware requirements for a remote Analytics Agent deployment where a single Analytics Agent is aggregating transaction events from multiple APM Application Agents. This page describes transaction analytics only.
You should consider these two questions when sending analytics data to a remote Analytics Agent:
- How many APM agents can report to one remote Analytics Agent?
- What are the machine requirements for hosting the remote Analytics Agent?
Do not extract the numbers on this page to size for Log Analytics because you must install the Analytics Agent on the local machine to capture Log Analytics.
Analytics Agent Sizing Based on Event Volume
Based on our testing, the volume of events being sent to the Analytics Agent is the limiting factor in determining how many APM agents can report to one remote Analytics Agent.
The tests were conducted on virtual hardware and programmatically generated workload. Real-world workloads may vary. To best estimate your hardware sizing requirements, carefully consider the traffic patterns in your application and test in a test environment that closely resembles your production application and user activity.
Calculate Analytics Event Volume
One business transaction can traverse many tiers. In each tier, one business transaction traverses one node. One node produces one request per business transaction when the transaction is synchronous. For async transactions, multiple events may be generated by a node for a single request. One request equals one analytics event. To calculate how many events a business transaction generates, you need to count the number of tiers/nodes that are sending data into the Analytics Agent.
You can estimate the number of events using the following formula:
One business transaction generates events at a rate = calls per minute times the number of tiers reporting analytics data for the business transaction.
In simple terms: #events for one business transaction = calls per minute times # of tiers.
Characteristics of the Amazon EC2 Instance Types
For complete information on Amazon EC2 instance types, see https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/.
The testing was performed using c3.large, c3.xlarge, and c4.4xlarge.
| Model | vCPU | Mem (GiB) | SSD Storage (GB) |
|---|
| c3.large | 2 | 3.75 | 2 x 16 |
| c3.xlarge | 4 | 7.5 | 2 x 40 |
| c4.4xlarge | 16 | 30 | EBS-Only |
Test Results
Raw Data
| Analytics Agent Host Machine | Analytics Agent events/min | Total CPU% | JVM Heap (Mb) |
|---|
| c3.large | 52313 | 17% | 468 |
| c3.large | 54831 | 17% | 470 |
| c3.large | 70746 | 24% | 475 |
| c3.large | 74541 | 24% | 477 |
| c3.large | 77344 | 23% | 487 |
| c3.large | 97074 | 28% | 512 |
| c3.large | 115999 | 36% | 519 |
| c3.large | 139143 | 43% | 526 |
| c3.large | 148782 | 47% | 587 |
| c3.large | 204073 | 65% | 527 |
| c3.large | 247543 | 80% | 624 |
| c3.large | 249261 | 81% | 637 |
| c3.xlarge | 196288 | 33% | 518 |
| c3.xlarge | 254586 | 44% | 727 |
| c3.xlarge | 302689 | 51% | 497 |
| c3.xlarge | 336879 | 58% | 913 |
| c3.xlarge | 372515 | 65% | 1024 |
| c3.xlarge | 513598 | 91% | 922 |
| c3.xlarge | 478954 | 78% | 922 |
| c3.xlarge | 420000 | 69% | 979 |
| c3.xlarge | 376034 | 61% | 1024 |
| c3.xlarge | 318000 | 52% | 1024 |
| c3.xlarge | 258000 | 43% | 1024 |
| c3.xlarge | 198000 | 32% | 1024 |
| c3.xlarge | 144000 | 22% | 1024 |
| c4.4xlarge | 534900 | 17% | 552 |
| c4.4xlarge | 604725 | 19% | 841 |
| c4.4xlarge | 716141 | 23% | 1024 |
