Familiarize yourself with a list of common terms you may come across as an AppDynamics user. 


An automatic response to an event based on a policy.

Examples include sending alerts, taking diagnostic snapshots, remediation through scripts, or making a REST API call to integrate with other tools. Actions are customizable.

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Code that collects and reports data.

Agents can refer to languages (Java, Node.js, Python, etc), machines (hardware and network data), and databases, etc.

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Email, SMS, or customized external notification interface that notifies you of a problem or event. 

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A named collection of tiers representing a monitored environment. Also referred to as Business Application.

See also: Tier, Node

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Databases, remote services, and any detected out of process components that are involved in business transaction processing.

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An action of your application. Business transactions represent your critical business functions.

Examples include login, browse, and checkout.

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With on-premises deployments, it collects, stores, analyzes, and baselines performance data collected by agents.

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With a SaaS deployment, it collects, stores, analyzes, and baselines performance data collected by agents. Each AppDynamics SaaS deployment customer account is a tenant of the AppDynamics platform. An AppDynamics Controller Tenant can host one or more accounts. Each account represents one tenant on that Controller.

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Enables you to collect supplemental application data for business transaction snapshots and/or analytics.

There are three types of data collectors: Method Invocation (MIDC), HTTP, and SQL.

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Any object that AppDynamics monitors. Entities typically have associated metrics, events, and a health status.

Examples of entities are applications, tiers, nodes, and business transactions.

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Unstructured data that represents an action or occurrence detected by the agent.

Examples include JVM restart, deadlock, and error.

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Graphical view of information flow within a business application.

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Allows you to select specific metrics as key to the overall health of an application and to define ranges for acceptable performance of those metrics.

You can customize default health rules or create new ones.

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Instruments a method in application code outside the context of any business transaction.

Used for monitoring the performance of the method itself, or for capturing numerical data from the method's input parameters or return value.

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Numerical measurement over a time interval, typically with a fixed frequency. Because of this, metrics are represented through time-series visualization. Examples include "calls per minute" and "average response time." For the AppDynamics APM Platform, a metric is a numerical value that an agent measures and reports.

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The smallest unit of the AppDynamics modeling environment.

See also: Application, Tier

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Provides a mechanism to automate monitoring, alerting, and problem remediation.

Consists of:

  1. A trigger based on events
  2. An action in response to the trigger

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Provides basic metrics for one application service, or group of services, provided by a tier. 

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A named collection of nodes, typically representing a service.

See also: Application, Node

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A collection of detailed diagnostic information captured during a single invocation of a business transaction. 
Examples include call graphs and timing during a single user login, where login is the business transaction.

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