Tiers and Nodes

The Tier list in the Controller UI lets you view and organize the tiers in your business application and the monitored nodes within each tier. 

View the Tier List

The tier list gives you a consolidated view of the tiers and nodes in the business application.  

To view the list, click Tiers and Nodes in the application tree. The page shows all tiers in the business application, along with health data for each tier.  

In the tiers list, the Machine Agent status column indicates whether the Standalone Machine Agent is reporting to the Controller. If the machine agent is not reporting, the column is empty. In this case, either an agent is not installed or it is not reporting for some other reason.

You can change the selection of data displayed in the list by choosing Health, Hardware, or Memory from the pulldown list.  If the machine agent is reporting to the Controller, Hardware shows additional metrics for the machine on which the app agent is installed.

Memory shows memory information relevant to your application environment. Note that the specific information shown for each environment can vary, depending on the nature of the environment. PHP memory management is different than other languages. The relevant memory metrics supplied by the App Agent for PHP are in the Metric Browser. 

View the Tier or Node Dashboard 

The tier and node dashboards show a flow map view of at a tier or node level. Select the tier or node (by first expanding the tier that contains the node) from the Tiers & Nodes page, as follows:

• For a tier dashboard, select the tier in the Tiers & Nodes page and click Details. The dashboard shows the tier flow map, the nodes in the tier (if viewing a tier dashboard), events, and slow response snapshots. 
• For a node dashboard, select expand the tier in the Tiers & Nodes page and double-click on the node. 

Create a New Tier in an Application

You can create a tier in the AppDynamics model of your environment by specifying the new tier in the agent configuration of your instrumented application. Most tiers are created in this manner. However, you can also create tiers manually by clicking Actions > Create App Server Tier button on the tier list.

After creating a tier, you can add nodes to the tier via the app agent configuration or by reassigning an existing node to the new tier, as described in the following section. 

Naming Node, Tiers and Business Applications in the UI

To rename a business application, tier, or node, see Interacting with Flow Maps.

The UI prevents you from using certain special characters for tier, nodes and business applications names. Besides numbers and upper and lower case characters, the special characters you can use in tier or node names include:

: ~ ! @ # $ % ^ * ( ) - _ + = / \ \ , . [ ] { } | ? .