Familiarize yourself with a list of common terms you may encounter as a Cisco 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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An agent is 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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An attribute is a unit of metadata for entities. The Properties panel, health rules, and application programming interfaces (APIs) reference attributes.

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

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A backend refers to databases, remote services, or any detected process components. See also Database Monitoring.

An action of your application. Business transactions represent your critical business functions. See also Business Transactions (AppDynamics SaaS) and Business Transactions (Cisco Cloud Observability).

Examples include login, browse, and checkout.

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Central Identity describes Cisco AppDynamics Controller user accounts whose authentication provider is managed in the Cisco Customer Identity (CCI) and AppDynamics Identity Provider (IdP).

  • Users of this type may have access to multiple controller accounts through this same identity served by the CCI and AppDynamics IdP granting them SSO across all Controller accounts.  Note that due to the dependency on the CCI and AppDynamics IdP, Central Identity is not available to Cisco AppDynamics On-Premises.
  • Central Identity is not an optional setting: it is the implementation of the "local" user in the Controller.  Any new "local" user created in the Controller user management experience is a Central Identity user and discernible by their email address as the username and the visible "View user details in Accounts" link in the User Management detail page.

Central Identity as a term is often overloaded to represent any user in the CCI and AppDynamics IdP; however, this is not strictly true. Any Central Identity user is a CCI and AppDynamics IdP user; however, some CCI and AppD IdP users are not Central Identity users. Any user of CCI and AppD IdP. even Central Identity users, may be assigned access to  Cisco Observability Platform tenants.  

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The Cisco AppDynamics Cloud Collectors are Cisco AppDynamics data collectors that collect metrics and entity attributes from Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform and send them to the Cisco Observability Platform.

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The Cisco AppDynamics Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector is a customized distribution of the open-source OpenTelemetry Collector. The Cisco AppDynamics Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector currently supports receiving data from OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) sources through the open source Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

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The Cisco AppDynamics Infrastructure Collector collects telemetry from the underlying host, container, or Kubernetes cluster and reports the data in OpenTelemetry format through the Cisco AppDynamics Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to the Cisco Observability Platform.

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The Cisco AppDynamics Smart Agent is an operator that is responsible for the life cycle management of Kubernetes-related agents.

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The Cisco Observability Platform is an extensible platform that enables observability experiences, as more fully described in the documentation available in the end-user Cisco Observability Platform documentation and the Cisco Observability Platform developer documentation.

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A cloud connection is a connection between Cisco Cloud Observability and a cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Cisco Cloud Observability will not only monitor the data flowing in from the cloud provider, but also the health of the actual connection (e.g., is data flowing, are there errors).

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A collector is software that receives or gathers data and formats it for ingestion into another application or system. A collector can act as an agent or as an intermediate step between an agent and another application or system.

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A collector collects data, such as metrics and entity attributes, from cloud and infrastructure providers and sends them to the Cisco Observability Platform.

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The connection state reflects the current condition of the cloud connection. You can find the connection state in Cloud Connections. 

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With on-premises deployments, it collects, stores, analyzes, and baselines performance data collected by agents. See also Tenant UI Overview.

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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. See also Manage Controller Tenant Users and Groups.

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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 Cisco 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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An entity is an instance of an entity type and uniquely represents a system that Cisco Cloud Observability observes and collects data about. Entity types include databases, services, applications, hosts, or other components comprising infrastructure. Each entity is unique and has its own ID that refers to a specific instance of an entity type.

An entity-centric page (ECP) is a UI page that displays everything of relevance (e.g., metrics, metadata, health status, events, logs, relationships) for a given entity. ECPs can be accessed from the Observe page. For more information on UI elements, see Observe UI Overview.

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An entity type refers to a specific category of entity. For example, a disk attached to a machine is a different type compared to a container or a service. In this case, disk, machine, container, and services are types, while /dev/sda1, host.company.com, containerLoginService, and LoginService are entity instances of those types respectively. Characteristics of the entity are governed by its type.

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

Examples include JVM restart, deadlock, and error. See also Monitor Events.

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An event is comprised of unstructured data representing an action or occurrence.

Graphical view of information flow within a business application. See also Flow Maps.

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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. See also Health Rules and Alert and Respond.

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A health rule can be used to monitor any entity, from a service to a database. Health rules are not set at the application level.

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. See also Information Points.

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A log is a timestamped text record, either structured (recommended) or unstructured, with metadata.

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MELT is an acronym for metrics, events, logs, and traces.

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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 Cisco AppDynamics, a metric is a numerical value that an agent measures and reports. See also Metric Browser.

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A metric is a 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 Cisco Cloud Observability metrics are numerical measurements of an entity or interactions measured or sampled over a period of time.

The smallest unit of the AppDynamics modeling environment.

See also Glossary.

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A normalized host entity refers to a combination of host metrics that Cisco AppDynamics Kubernetes Infrastructure Collector ingests and retrains from all sources for an entity, such as the Infrastructure Collector Bundle, Cloud Platform Connections, and Kubernetes nodes in the entity-centric page.

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OpenTelemetry is a standardization for API and SDKs across languages and a collection of developer tools. You instrument these tools to generate, collect, and export telemetry data such as metrics, logs, and traces. The exported telemetry data helps you analyze your software’s performance and behavior.

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Provides a mechanism to automate monitoring, alerting, and problem remediation. See also Policies and Alert and Respond.

Consists of:

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

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Properties is the right-side navigation panel displaying metric or entity details. The details could describe user actions, metadata, health rule violations, and so on.

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Purge time-to-live (TTL) is the amount of time that an entity and its data remains in Cisco Cloud Observability after the entity becomes inactive. An entity is considered inactive when its retention TTL period ends. When the purge TTL period ends, the entity data and entity-centric page is removed from the system (purged). 

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Relationships is a panel in the Cisco Cloud Observability UI displaying entities related by entity type and ordered by topology or grouped by some criteria, such as user-selected time range, health status, or display count. From Relationships, you can click an entity to view the Entity Centric Page for more details.

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Retention time-to-live (TTL) is the amount of time that an entity is considered active in Cisco Cloud Observability after it stops reporting metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) data. When the retention TTL period ends, the entity is considered inactive and will no longer appear in the user interface or in queries for active entities.

Example:

  • An entity is created at D0.
  • The entity has a retention TTL of 3 days.
  • On D4, the entity stops reporting MELT data.
  • From D0-D7, the entity is considered active.
  • From D8 onwards, the entity is considered inactive.
    • If you query for active entities and the time period includes D8 or later, the entity will not be returned by the query.
    • If you query for active entities and the time period includes D0 - D7, the entity will be returned by the query.

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

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The Service Endpoint is a URL or connection point for accessing a service and sending data to Cisco Cloud Observability using OpenTelemetry to set up a collector.

Service Principals are identities, represented as code, used by created applications, services, and automation tools to access specific resources. They allow developers to write code that can securely connect to Cisco AppDynamics public APIs for your Cloud Tenant. These API calls use Open Authentication 2.0 (OAuth2) token-based authentication.

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The Service Topology enables you to observe the data flow and relationships between services (that is, services sending and receiving calls). This is also one of the shortcuts in Cisco Cloud Observability.

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A shortcut is a card located at the top of the Home or Entity pages that can be used for filtering, grouping, sorting, highlighting, and annotating content. 

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A span represents each unit of work in a trace. Spans are objects that represent work being done by individual services or components involved in a request as it flows through a system.

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A named collection of nodes, typically representing a service.

See also Glossary.

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A trace tracks the progression of one request called a trace as it is handled by services constituting an application. A trace is composed of multiple spans, starting with the root span.

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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.

See also Call Graphs, Diagnostic Sessions, Browser Snapshots, and Network Request Snapshots.

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The Unified Observability Experience is Cisco AppDynamics's integration of AppDynamics SaaS and the Cisco Observability Platform that helps leverage the capabilities of both applications. These capabilities can reduce tool sprawl, mean time to detect root causes, and mean time to resolve issues. It also allows you to contextually navigate between SaaS and the Cisco Observability Platform to address specific use cases.

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