Best practice to decide the Tier Name , Node name and Probe name

[CommunityUser]

Hi,

We have 2 of the app servers on which we want to install the tomcat agent. These servers belong to the same application.

I am struggling to decide on the name to be given to the App name, Tier name, Node name and Probe name . Maybe i am still not clear on the usage of these variables in controller.xml file.

Any help is highly appreciated.

Thanks

[CommunityUser]

Hi,

Application Name refers to the over all application being configured on AppD. Tier name is like a high level (or i may call) grouping of individual nodes and nodes can be individual servers, app pool or jvms.

To give you an example, if you an application name AppDynamics and you have 2 datacenters one called East and one called West, in each data center you have 10 servers, each server has single JVM application. You can set your configuration like

Application name: AppDynamics

Tier Name: East

Node Name:

For each server, Combination of JVM name and server name can be your node name (i say combination since you may have cases where in you have more than one jvm per server)

Tier Name: West

Node Name:

For each server, Combination of JVM name and server name can be your node name (i say combination since you may have cases where in you have more than one jvm per server)

The same is true for .NET application as well.

[CommunityUser]

I understand that we can define the tier names, tier groups for Java application, but for .Net application i have seen it doing automatically and most of the times it sets the node name as the server name itself and doesnt name the tiers differently.

[CommunityUser]

Hi Robin,

You can configure Application Name, Tier name etc for .NET as well, please see below for a sample config file that I have using for .NET.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<appdynamics-agent xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

  <controller host="HOST_NAME.COM" port="8090" ssl="false">

    <application name="APPLICATION_NAME" />

    <account name="customer1" password="password_here" />

  </controller>

  <machine-agent />

  <app-agents>

    <IIS>

      <applications>

        <application path="/Appname" site="AppSite">

          <tier name="TIER_NAME" />

        </application>

      </applications>

    </IIS>

  </app-agents>

</appdynamics-agent>

[CommunityUser]

Hi Gurmit,

Below is the scenario:

1. We have 10 .Net application servers , all of them have around 4-5 IIS pools(applications), all the applications are common in all the 10 .Net servers. So the users hit the load balanced VIP and the request comes to any of the app server based on the load balancing and for a particular request the IIS application is invoked on any of the server.

1.  The problem comes when we find a slow transaction and when we look into the call graph and find that there were several WCF or https exit calls being made, and it also shows the TO and FROM thing for that call. But since we named the Tiers automatically , APPD created tiers based on the name of the Site\IIS applications. So the FROM thing is always shown as Tier name and we are never able to know which server was involved in the slowness.
2.  
3. Hence I renamed the tier based on the server name, so now each server is a tier (ex Server1), and under that there are several nodes (1 node for each worker process of that IIS app pool). But as soon as I renamed , I am seeing at each tier the BT limit is crossed and the BT list shows “Server1- All other traffic”.

What is the best way to name the tiers in .NET application now?