Monitoring AppDynamics (private preview)

AppDynamics is an Application Performance Monitoring tool that you can use to collect CPU, disk, memory, network metrics, and events from AppDynamics. The AppDynamics sensor imports AppDynamics monitored data into Instana. For more information about the AppDynamics product, see the AppDynamics documentation.

After you install the Instana host agent, the AppDynamics sensor is automatically installed. You can view metrics for the hosts that are monitored by AppDynamics in the Instana UI after you configure as outlined in the Configuring section.

Supported information
- Supported versions
- Gathering data
Prerequisites
Configuring
Viewing metrics
- Configuration data
- Performance metrics
Troubleshooting
- Static agent issues
- Agent OutOfMemoryError error

Supported information

Supported versions

Instana supports metrics and events for cloud hosted AppDynamics.

Gathering data

The AppDynamics sensor is a remote-only sensor that connects to an AppDynamics instance and collects the following information:

Entities: Hosts and processes
Events
Metrics:
- Host: CPU, memory, disk, and network
- Process: CPU and memory

For server visibility, you must enable the server visibility in the AppDynamics agent configuration.

Prerequisites

Before you configure the AppDynamics sensor, complete the following instructions:

Log in to AppDynamics
Create an API client with the following role:
- Server Monitoring User
Take note of your API client’s secret and client name.

Configuring

The AppDynamics sensor must be configured with the endpoint and API key for the AppDynamics instance that you want to connect to. You need to configure the following fields in the agent configuration file <agent_install_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yaml:

com.instana.plugin.appdynamics:
  enabled: true
  endpoint: 'https://<client-instance>.saas.appdynamics.com'
  client_secret: 'redacted'
  client_name: 'redacted'
  account_name: <accountname>
  poll_rate: 30
  target_zone: 'AppDynamics'

The following table contains the supported configuration options:

Name	Type	Required	Default	Description
`enabled`	boolean	No	False	Verifies whether the sensor is enabled
`endpoint`	string	Yes	NA	The endpoint of your AppDynamics server API
`client_secret`	string	Yes	NA	The secret of the API client
`client_name`	string	Yes	NA	The client name of the API client
`account_name`	string	Yes	NA	The name of the AppDynamics account
`poll_rate`	integer	No	30	The number of seconds between metric queries. This time might need to be adjusted to account for any poll rate limit that is imposed by your endpoint.
`target_zone`	string	No	NA	The name of the generic zone where hosts that are monitored by AppDynamics are displayed on the Instana Infrastructure map. If not specified, the hosts are displayed in the `Undefined Zone`.

Viewing metrics

To view the metrics, complete the following steps:

In the sidebar of the Instana UI, select Infrastructure.
Click a specific monitored host.

Then, you can see a remote host dashboard with all the collected metrics.

Configuration data

OS (name, version, and architecture)
CPU count
Total Memory
Hostname/FQDN
Disk Capacity

Performance metrics

CPU Used %
CPU Load
Memory Used
Swap Used
Swap Total
Disk Used
Network RX/TX Bytes
Network Incoming/Outgoing Errors/sec
Network Incoming/Outgoing KB/sec

Troubleshooting

Static agent issues

If you encounter any issues with the static agent, check the error messages in the instana-agent/data/log/agent.log file.

Agent OutOfMemoryError error

If you are connected to the AppDynamics server that is monitoring many hosts, the JVM heap size of the Instana agent might need to be increased. If you find OutOfMemoryError error in the agent log, consider increasing the Instana agent's max heap size. For more information, see the JAVA_OPTS environment variable in the Environment variable reference.