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This page provides an overview of event monitoring in AppDynamics.

In the AppDynamics model, events represent a change in the state of a monitored application. An event can represent an error/exception generated by the application, the crossing of a performance threshold, or an operational change in the application (such as a JVM restart).

You can define policies that generate notifications or perform actions when an event occurs. See Alert and Respond for more information. You can also use events to investigate application issues underlying performance problems. 

View and Monitor Events

You can view and analyze events in the Controller UI. From the Database Visibility, Server Visibility, or user experience application pages in the UI, you can view events by clicking Events from the left navigation tree. 

The Controller displays a subset of the types of events generated in AppDynamics. You can access additional event types through the REST API. See AppDynamics APIs for more information about internal events. 

To see events for application monitoring, access a dashboard such as a business application, business transaction, tier or node dashboard and select the Events tab. The tab shows the events generated in the selected time frame. 

In the Events list, you can filter the types of events displayed by clicking Filters and selecting the type of events to show.  

You can view more information about an event from the list. If the event is an application change, such as an application restart, the details contain a description of the event. If the event is a slow transaction or an error, the details are transaction snapshots from which you can drill down to the root cause of the problem. 

From the Event Details dialog, you can start a war room, delete or archive the event, or test action execution.

Event Details Actions

Archive Events

An event is purged after two weeks, at which point it is no longer accessible. To save an event beyond the default snapshot lifespan—for example, if you want to make sure an event associated with a particular problem is retained for future analysis, you can archive the event.  

Event Purging in Ephemeral Environments

Events associated with nodes that are deployed to machine instances in an ephemeral environment are subject to being purged. This occurs because the node associated with the events is identified by a label consisting of two discrete parts: a node name and a machine instance name. The node name is always fixed, but the machine instance name changes in ephemeral environments. Thus, when a node is redeployed to a new machine instance, the label identifying the node changes.

For example, the label for a node in an ephemeral environment might consist of the fixed node name "Node1" and the machine instance name "INSTANCE-M-T1": NodeINSTANCE-M-T1. When the node is redeployed to another machine instance, the label for the node could change because of the new machine instance to something such as "Node1INSTANCE-M-T2". If this occurs, the events associated with the first label "NodeINSTANCE-M-T1" could potentially be purged later.

Events Archived by Default

Application configuration change events are always archived by default. In the Controller UI, these events are displayed as Application Configuration Change. The APPLICATION_CONFIG_CHANGE event type be viewed in the Controller UI and also retrieved with the AppDynamics REST APIs.

However once APPLICATION_CONFIG_CHANGE events are archived or deleted, they can no longer be retrieved through the AppDynamics REST APIs.

Manually Archive Events

To manually archive events:

  1. Select the event from the events list. 
  2. Click Actions > Archive Event.
  3. Click Archive to confirm the action. 

The archive icon () in the right column indicates that an event has been archived. To view all archived events in a long list of events, you can click the column heading to sort by archiving. This groups the archived events together.

Modify Event Retention Period (On-Premises Controllers)

 For on-premises Controllers, administrators can modify the default two-week period by configuring the events.retention.period property in Administration > Controller Settings. 

Filter Custom Events

The AppDynamics REST API enables you to define custom events. You can then filter on those events by creating a custom filter: 

  1. Open the filter options on the Events page.  
  2. Find the Filter by Custom Events section at the bottom of the panel, and click Add Property (+). 
  3. In the Add Custom Event Filter dialog, enter the name of the custom event type. 
  4. Optionally, specify filtering event properties as key/value pairs. The custom event needs to contain the property values you specify to satisfy the filter. If you add multiple properties, a matching value of All applies an AND operator to the list, meaning all properties need to match for the filter to be satisfied. Any indicates a logical OR, meaning at least one property must exist and match for the filter to be satisfied. 
    Add Custom Event Filter