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

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

Each AppDynamics customer account is a tenant of the AppDynamics cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. AppDynamics refers to this as a Controller Tenant. Once you install the necessary agents, AppDynamics automatically builds an environment of the chosen applications. 

The Controller Tenant:

  • 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 Tenant UI immediately without instrumentation and configuration. Later, you can customize the configuration for your specific environment and requirements.

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

If you require a custom URL, 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 adds many considerations to the initial installation process. You must consider security, network, and change management requirements that your organizational policies govern.

Deployment Models

An AppDynamics deployment monitors your environment and collects data using agents. The Controller Tenant 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 lower cost and maintenance. A SaaS deployment provides these benefits:

  • No need to install a Controller Tenant
  • AppDynamics manages the server-side components of the AppDynamics Platform, including 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 Controller Tenant 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 a 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 have the resources and skillset to maintain the environment. 
  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 install agents and restart your applications, AppDynamics automatically builds an environment for your application. You can see the model in the dashboards and flow maps view of the Controller Tenant UI. The Controller Tenant:

  • 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 and install an AppDynamics Agent.
  3. Create and add users to your account.
  4. Assign Controller Tenant access.
  5. Configure email/SMS settings to enable notifications. AppDynamics configures the SMTP 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 Tenant to an external authentication provider. 
  3. Capture contextual information, information points, and data collectors.
  4. Extend your health rules with custom actions. 
  5. Define Health Rule custom metrics, configure database custom metrics, or add integration modules to AppDynamics. 

Network Port Requirements

To deploy AppDynamics, you may need to modify the network components configuration to permit access to ports used in the AppDynamics deployment. The SaaS Domains and IP Ranges page describes the specific ports used in the system.