Microagents and Methods

A TIBCO Hawk agent interfaces the managed objects on its local machine using microagents. Microagents represent managed objects such as operating system subsystems, agent components, log files, or event logs. TIBCO Adapters also have microagents for monitoring adapter application metrics.

Each microagent exposes a set of methods to the agent that the agent uses to collect information and take action. Each agent provides information about its microagents and associated methods, including method names, arguments, and return types. This permits dynamic discovery and use of microagents.

You can access the methods in different ways, from a TIBCO Hawk monitoring console or by using TIBCO Hawk Console API. Method characteristics and behavior are consistent, regardless of how the method is accessed.

Each adapter has three microagents: a standard TIBCO Hawk microagent, a class microagent, and a custom microagent. These microagents include methods that provide:

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Business level statistics that report the progress of the adapter as it interacts with the target system. For example, in TIBCO ActiveMatrix Adapter for Database, you can know from such statistics whether objects were successfully or unsuccessfully inserted, updated, or deleted in the database.

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Queries that return information about the state of the adapter. This can be an important tool for seeing the internals of an adapter and debugging it if an exception occurs. For example, methods can return information about threads, internal queues, or connections to the target system. Using these methods, you can identify certain bottlenecks or gauge how successfully an adapter is scaling in the current environment.

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Updates of the adapter runtime parameters. This includes retrieving the current runtime parameters and setting new runtime parameters without restarting the adapter. An example of this is getting and setting the polling interval. Updating a runtime parameter through the microagent only affects the setting of the instance that is running. It does not make a permanent change of the setting in either the project repository or the TRA file that stores the properties for deployed services.