Business Applications

As described in Overview of Application Monitoring, a business application serves as the top-level container in the AppDynamics APM model. Business applications contain a set of related business transactions and service endpoints, along with the infrastructure components and artifacts that interact to provide the services. 

Organizing Business Applications

You can model your environment into one or more business applications. When you have multiple business applications within the same AppDynamics account, you can use the cross application flow map to view relationships between the different applications. If you have a more complex environment with multiple AppDynamics accounts, you can establish federated friendship between the accounts to view the federated cross application flow.

Since access permissions in the Controller UI can be assigned by business application, organizing business application by teams in your organization may make the most sense. Keep in mind that configuration settings such as Health Rules are scoped to a business application, avoid having more business applications than needed to ease configuration.

When you model your environment, be sure to assign unique names to your business applications. Names must be unique among both Application Performance Monitoring and End User Monitoring.

Permissions

Creating applications requires the Can Create Applications permission. Permission to view, edit, or delete applications can be set as part of the default application permissions for a custom role or for specific applications. See Application Permissions for more details.

Viewing Applications

The Applications page, accessible from the menu bar in the Controller UI, gives you a high-level view of the business applications in your environment. At a glance, you can see performance for the applications.

There are several views and sorting options in the page. To view relationships between business application (i.e., when a business transaction in one invokes a service in another), choose the Flow View icon.

Modifying Applications

You can create new business applications from the Applications page, but it's not necessary to create the business application manually. The Controller creates a new business application automatically the first time an app agent registers itself using a new business application name.

Renaming Applications

You can rename applications by choosing the Edit Application Properties from the drop-down menu of an application.

If you change the name of an application, you also need to change it in the agent configuration at controller-info.xml. If you do not change the controller-info.xml application name field, agents will re-create the old application name and report to the old application.

Deleting Applications

To delete an application:

Select the application in the Applications drop-down menu and choose Actions > Delete.

The Controller prompts you to acknowledge a list of related items that will be deleted including the following:

• Number of tiers and nodes
• Number of business transactions
• Browser RUM Apps
• Mobile Apps

Application Performance Details

From the Applications page, click a listed application to configure and monitor the business application. In the business application instance Application Dashboard page, you can view:

• Top Business Transactions: The key performance indicators for the most expensive business transactions sorted by the various criteria, such as load, response time, errors and so on. Click View All in any of the panels in this tab to see a list displaying all the key performance indicators for the top business transactions in one panel.
• Transaction Snapshots: The transaction snapshots for the selected time range. From a transaction snapshot, you call drill down to the root cause of a performance problem.
• Transaction Analysis: Application performance over the selected time range as a graph. Use the graph to analyze the impact of different events on the application response time.
• Machine Snapshots: When an application has at least one .NET tier, this appears as a list of the machine snapshots for the selected time range. From a machine snapshot, you can drill down to view environmental conditions, such as running processes and memory usage for a particular machine. See Machine Snapshots for .NET