This page provides best-practice deployment planning guidelines for the AppDynamics Application Performance Management (APM) Platform.

It is important to plan your AppDynamics deployment according to your environment. Taking time to outline your system strategy provides a smooth process flow. Use these guidelines to start working with AppDynamics.

Once you install the necessary agents, AppDynamics automatically builds an environment of your applications.

The Controller:

  • Monitors your application workload.
  • Uses machine learning to determine what is normal for your environment.
  • Applies sensible defaults for detecting abnormal activity and application errors.  

You can start using AppDynamics dashboards, flow maps, and monitoring tools in the Controller UI immediately without instrumentation and configuration. Later, you can customize the configuration for your specific environment and requirements.

AppDynamics does not support user or agent requests that originate from any URL other than the Controller URL provided at registration or otherwise edited by AppDynamics. Due to system security improvements, requests from custom URLs will be rejected and may cause a service disruption.

If a custom URL is required, we recommend that you create a forward proxy in your environment.

See Getting Started to begin with a trial or investigatory installation of AppDynamics. For testing, you can easily get AppDynamics running with a trial SaaS installation within two hours. However, deploying to a production environment, however, adds many considerations to the initial installation process. For example, you need consider security, network, and change management requirements governed by your organizational policies.

Deployment Models

An AppDynamics deployment uses installed agents to collect data from a monitored environment. The AppDynamics UI provides the access to view, understand, and analyze the data. 

The AppDynamics SaaS deployment is a cloud-based solution that enables real-time visibility into the health and performance of your instrumented environment, with significantly reduced cost and maintenance. A SaaS deployment provides these benefits:

  • No need to install the Controller
  • AppDynamics manages the server-side components of the AppDynamics Platform, including its installation and upgrades
  • Lower total costs, guaranteed availability, data security, significantly reduced maintenance, and automatic upgrades

Plan for Security

  1. Determine the access control strategy for UI users, including locally authenticated users and externally authenticated users (LDAP, SAML, and so on).
  2. Determine SSL requirements and key management.

Devise an Agent Rollout Strategy

  1. Determine your rollout strategy as manual, automated, or scripted.
  2. Integrate rollout with your application deployment process.

Plan AppDynamics Model

  1. Understand how your application maps to the AppDynamics concept of application, tier, and node. Determine the naming strategy for the model.
  2. Devise Business Transaction strategy. Determine which end-to-end business processes in your environment you want to monitor as Business Transactions.
  3. Devise End User Monitoring (EUM) and Analytics data collection strategy.
  4. Consider database and hardware monitoring strategy. 

Define the Users Who Will Access AppDynamics

  1. Identify the monitoring team or others who will administer AppDynamics. Ensure that they can maintain it, from both a resource and skill-set standpoint. 
  2. Identify stakeholders from each group that will use AppDynamics. 

Define the Monitoring Strategy

  1. Assess the alert and health rule strategy that meets your requirements.
  2. Define the reporting strategy. 
  3. Determine integration points with other systems (using extensions or REST API).

In an on-premises deployment, you install and manage all platform components. 

Download the Enterprise Console

The Enterprise Console is the installer for the Controller and Events Service. Use it to install and manage the entire lifecycle of new or existing on-premises platforms and components.

  1. Start a free trial.
  2. Download the Enterprise Console from AppDynamics Downloads.

For information on on-premises installations, see Planning Your Deployment for Application Performance Monitoring Platform. 

Plan the Controller and Platform Installation

  1. Determine your deployment profile as small, medium, or large.
  2. Follow the hardware sizing guidelines for your profile.
  3. Discover network layout, bandwidth, and connectivity. View the port connections required for the AppDynamics components you are installing and address network requirements to permit the connections. 

Plan for Security

  1. Determine the access control strategy for UI users, including locally authenticated users and externally authenticated users (LDAP, SAML, and so on).
  2. Determine SSL requirements and key management.

Define Controller Operating Procedures 

  1. Set up High-Availability (HA) through the Enterprise Console.
  2. Determine the failover methodology as scripted or automated.
  3. Determine the data backup strategy as hot, cold, Logical Volume Manager (LVM), frequency, required storage, and metadata backup.

Devise an Agent Rollout Strategy

  1. Determine the rollout strategy as manual, automated, or scripted.
  2. Integrate rollout with your application deployment process.

Plan AppDynamics Model

  1. Understand how your application maps to the AppDynamics concept of application, tier, and node. Determine the naming strategy for the model.
  2. Devise Business Transaction strategy. Determine which end-to-end business processes in your environment you want to monitor as Business Transactions.
  3. Devise End User Monitoring (EUM) and Analytics data collection strategy.
  4. Consider database and hardware monitoring strategy. 

Define the Users Who Will Access AppDynamics

  1. Identify the monitoring team or others who will administer AppDynamics. Ensure that they can maintain it, from both a resource and skill-set standpoint. 
  2. Identify stakeholders from each group that will use AppDynamics. 

Define the Monitoring Strategy

  1. Assess the alert and health rule strategy that meets your requirements.
  2. Define the reporting strategy. 
  3. Determine integration points with other systems (using extensions or REST API).

First Day with AppDynamics

This procedure outlines a typical first day working with AppDynamics.   

After you have installed agents and restarted your applications, AppDynamics automatically builds an environment of your application. You can see the model in the dashboards and flow maps view of the Controller UI. The Controller:

  • Monitors your application workload.
  • Determines what is normal for your environment.
  • Applies sensible defaults for detecting abnormal activity and application errors.

You can start using AppDynamics immediately without instrumentation and configuration. Later, you can customize the configuration for your environment and requirements.

  1. Create an Account.
  2. Download a Controller.
  3. Download and install an AppDynamics Agent.
  4. Add users to the Controller UI. 
  5. Configure email/SMS settings to enable notifications. For SaaS, AppDynamics configures the SMTP server. For an on-premises Controller and SMS configuration, see Enable an Email Server. 
  6. Review the AppDynamics default settings, such as built-in Health Rules and Dynamic Baselines.

First Week with AppDynamics

  1. Learn about the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics.
  2. Explore how the different AppDynamics products work together.
  3. Create and organize your business applications.
  4. View and customize flow maps.  
  5. Create custom dashboards.
  6. Verify or adjust your tier groups, nodes, and remote services. 
  7. Customize your health rules. 

First Month with AppDynamics

  1. Tune your service entry points. 
  2. Manage user roles and groups, or connect the Controller to an external authentication provider. 
  3. Capture contextual information, information points, and data collectors.
  4. Extend your health rules with custom actions. 
  5. Create custom metrics or add integration modules to AppDynamics. 

Network Port Requirements

To deploy AppDynamics, you may need to modify network components configuration to permit access to ports used in the AppDynamics deployment. These pages describe the specific ports used in the system: