AppD Archive

How to set up Appdynamics Environment

CommunityUser
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee
 

I am trying to install Appdynamics APM tool. It has three components :

1. Appdynamics Controller
2. Application Server Agent
3. Machine Agent

I have few queries:

1.How to install all the three? 
2.What are the roles of all of three ? 
3.DO i need to configure all of three again and again for each application
0 Karma
7 Solutions

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hello Jyoti,

Please find our responses to your queries inline:
>>>>> 1. How to install all the three?

Answer:  refer doc links that addresses steps to install the AppDynamics controller , app server agent and machine agent:

http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Install+the+Controller
http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Install+the+App+Agent+for+Java
http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Install+the+Standalone+Machine+Agent

>>>>>> 2. What are the roles of all of three ?

Answer:  
Controller: The Controller collects, stores, baselines, and analyzes performance data collected and sent by app agents to controller and shows the data persisted in controller db in controller UI at http://<controllerHost>:<port>/controller context in browser. A Controller can be installed On-Premise or you can use the AppDynamics SaaS model.

App Server Agent: An app server agent or app agent monitors an application server. The App Agent for Java monitors a JVM. The App Agent for .NET monitors a CLR.

Machine agent:
A machine agent instruments a machine to report data about hardware, memory and the network to the Controller. AppDynamics provides both a Standalone Machine Agent and an embedded machine agent in the App Agent for .NET. The Standalone Machine Agent functionality can be extended to add additional metrics

>>>>> 3. DO i need to configure all of three again and again for each application?

Answer: We understood that "application" is web app here running on a server or application in controller UI,
We confirm you do "not" need to configure controller for each web app or application in controller UI.

One AppServerAgent will monitor all webapps on particular server(tomcat/jvm) and one machine agent can monitor all machine level stats for particular machine where it is installed and as stated earlier a controller can monitor multiple app server agents and machine agents associated to different business applications in controller UI, refer doc for more info:
http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Logical+Model

Let us know if that answers your queries.

Regards,

Arun

View solution in original post

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

Please find our response to your queries:

>>>>>> I would like to know that what is the difference between standalone machine agent and agent type for java,.net,php ?

Answer: We see Standalone Machine Agent provides the capability to use extensions (plugins, metric listener, orchestration) in addition to default suppport for h/w metrics (disk I/O, network I/0, memory ,cpu metric etc).

Java agent captures metrics specific to JVM like heap, Major/Minor GCs, memory pools, JMX, and the Business transactions (servlets, struts, ejb, springs etc) metrics.

App agent for .NET monitors Business transactions (ASP.net, WCF, etc) requests in addition to IIS CLR metrics 

Agent for PHP monitors BTs and server on which PHP is configured like other agents.

>>>>>> Also I would like to know the prerequisites of installing Machine Agent ??To execute the Jar we need to have java preinstalled also ??

Answer: Yes we confirm that to run machine agent java 1.5 or higher version needs to be installed.

Regarding the latest query on error in console, we see you are not passing any runtime parameters to ./install.sh script and we request you to pass the values as follows if you want to configure agent and associate to controller running on host "192.56.78.19"  and at port 8090 (the ip 192. may change as per your actuall contorller ip):

shell> ./install.sh 192.56.78.19  8090 myPHPApp myApacheTier myApacheNode

the above steps associcates your php agent at controller UI running at http://192.56.78.19:8090/controller 

Hope that answers your queries.

Regards,

Arun

View solution in original post

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

Please find our response to your queries inline:

>>>>>>> Is it necessary to setup AppDynamics Controller while using SAAS product??

Answer: If you are using SAAS controller UI you do not need to install onPremise/local controller until unless you want to monitor your appserver agent/machine agent data in your local/onPremise controller UI.

>>>>>> Server monitoring through AppDynamics is licence based or this is free like new Relic ??

Answer:  It depends, if yours is saas trail / onPremize trial version than you should be able to monitor server with agent License units provisioned for without any charges involved. If yours is paid saas/onPremise controller than one agent license unit is per JVM/CLR for monitoring java server/IIS and one machine agent installation is considered as one license unit.

>>>>> Can we capture the load testing data in graphical form as it is available in New Relic??

Answer: We show data served at each BT level and app dashboard level as shown below as long as the load is served by server with agent configured we will load show response time/CPM metric data as listed below in dashboard:
image.png

>>>>> Can we setup certain alarms based on CPU, Memory??

Answer: Yes you can define health rules on hardware metrics and select cpu/memory metrics on condition section as per your requirement, and then attach alerts (email etc) to the health rule defined to get alerts, hope the information in doc helps to provide more insight to the alert feature: http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Alert+and+Respond
http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Configure+Health+Rules

>>>>> Can we integrate  AppDynamics through Service Now??

Answer: We see monitor service now using machine agent extension, check if that helps here: http://community.appdynamics.com/t5/AppDynamics-eXchange/ServiceNow-Alerting-Extension/idi-p/751

>>>>>>>> Regarding your latest query on hardware stats missing, Can you please check under node dashbard -> hardware tab section as listed below and see if you could see CPU, memory statistics fine?

image.png

Let us know if that answers your queries.

Regards,

Arun

View solution in original post

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

We see it is not required to install appserver agent to monitor hardware metrics, installing machine agent is enough, please send the complete screenshot from browser depicting the issue and machineagent.log under <machine_agent_dir>/logs path to assist you further

Regards,

Arun

View solution in original post

0 Karma

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

Thanks for the screenshot and logs, it seems you have started the machine agent without application-name, tier-name details as per logs:
[main] 17 Jul 2014 17:41:23,652  INFO MachineAgent - Full Agent Registration Info Resolver using application name [null][main] 17 Jul 2014 17:41:23,652  INFO MachineAgent - Full Agent Registration Info Resolver using tier name [null]

Please be sure that machine agent requires app/tier name details to be provided in <MachineAgent_dir>/conf/controller-info.xml if there is not appserver agent installed on hyotibhanot1 host.

Please provide the <application-name>, <tier-name> details in <MachineAgent_dir>/conf/controller-info.xml and restart the machine agent process after saving changes and Click "Applications" -> select <application-name provided in machine agent controller-info.xml> at the left panel -> and navigate to Servers -> AppServers -> click "Jyoti-Local-Machine" and then select "Hardware" section to see hardware metrics graphs

Let us know how it goes after making suggested changes.

Regards,

Arun

View solution in original post

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

Please find our response to your queries inline:

>>>>>>>>>  if I dont have any application on the server then why it is mandatory to give the Application name and Tier-name??

Answer: When we referred application-name in controller-info.xml , we mean we are referring to logical naming of applications in controller UI , this application-name in controller-info.xml may not require to actually represent a real server application name, for any agent node to register in UI application-name is require to be provided and if the agent node is machineagent with no appserver agents from the same machine associated to the target controller than app/tier/node details are required , as node register requires app and tier name for the auto agent registration to succeed, hope that clarifies the product behavior.

>>>>>>>>> Also what does the Tier-name depict ??

Answer: Tier name can be any valid string name and we recommend to provide the server/host name in your case to reflect the instance details you are monitoring for h/w metrics using machine agent.

>>>>>>>>> How to restart the machine agent ??

Answer: Go the windows command prompt and change to directory "D:\MachineAgent" where you have started the machine agent process using command:
java -jar machineaegnt.jar

Press "CTRL + C" to terminate the java process and do the changes in D:\MachineAgen\conf\controller-info.xml file as suggested and restart the machine agnet using "java -jar machineagent.jar" as you started earlier from machine agent directory after saving changes to controller-info.xml with app and tier name details provided.

Hope that answers your queries.

Regards,

Arun

View solution in original post

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

It seems you have started with different values multiple times and hence we see multple applications in your saas UI and we understood that machine agent is reporting fine under application "windows" in controller UI if the above said is right, you can delete the second machine agent entry by deleting the application "windows-local-app" by confirming Actions -> delete operation in UI as listed below:

 image.png

Please be sure to kill machine agent java process before issuing "java -jar machineagent.jar" under same <machienagent_dir>/ next time to avoid such issues, let us know if that information helps 

Regards,

Arun

View solution in original post

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hello Jyoti,

Please find our responses to your queries inline:
>>>>> 1. How to install all the three?

Answer:  refer doc links that addresses steps to install the AppDynamics controller , app server agent and machine agent:

http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Install+the+Controller
http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Install+the+App+Agent+for+Java
http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Install+the+Standalone+Machine+Agent

>>>>>> 2. What are the roles of all of three ?

Answer:  
Controller: The Controller collects, stores, baselines, and analyzes performance data collected and sent by app agents to controller and shows the data persisted in controller db in controller UI at http://<controllerHost>:<port>/controller context in browser. A Controller can be installed On-Premise or you can use the AppDynamics SaaS model.

App Server Agent: An app server agent or app agent monitors an application server. The App Agent for Java monitors a JVM. The App Agent for .NET monitors a CLR.

Machine agent:
A machine agent instruments a machine to report data about hardware, memory and the network to the Controller. AppDynamics provides both a Standalone Machine Agent and an embedded machine agent in the App Agent for .NET. The Standalone Machine Agent functionality can be extended to add additional metrics

>>>>> 3. DO i need to configure all of three again and again for each application?

Answer: We understood that "application" is web app here running on a server or application in controller UI,
We confirm you do "not" need to configure controller for each web app or application in controller UI.

One AppServerAgent will monitor all webapps on particular server(tomcat/jvm) and one machine agent can monitor all machine level stats for particular machine where it is installed and as stated earlier a controller can monitor multiple app server agents and machine agents associated to different business applications in controller UI, refer doc for more info:
http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Logical+Model

Let us know if that answers your queries.

Regards,

Arun

CommunityUser
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Thanks Arun for responding to my queries.

I would like to know that what is the difference between standalone machine agent and agent type for java,.net,php ?

Also I would like to know the prerequisites of installing Machine Agent ??To execute the Jar we need to have java preinstalled also ??

Thanks & Regards,

Jyoti Bhanot

0 Karma

CommunityUser
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Hi Arun,

Yes the the environment is set up now.

Couple of questions:

  1. Is it necessary to setup AppDynamics Controller while using SAAS product??
  2. Server monitoring through AppDynamics is licence based or this is free like new Relic ??
  3. Can we capture the load testing data in graphical form as it is available in New Relic??
  4. Can we setup certain alarms based on CPU, Memory??
  5. Can we integrate  AppDynamics through Service Now??

Thanks

Jyoti Bhanot

0 Karma

CommunityUser
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Also the machine agent dows not give any details about the CPU memory. I insatlled it on my local machine

Here is the screenshot of metrics

image.png

I cant see the CPU and memory

0 Karma

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

Please find our response to your queries inline:

>>>>>>> Is it necessary to setup AppDynamics Controller while using SAAS product??

Answer: If you are using SAAS controller UI you do not need to install onPremise/local controller until unless you want to monitor your appserver agent/machine agent data in your local/onPremise controller UI.

>>>>>> Server monitoring through AppDynamics is licence based or this is free like new Relic ??

Answer:  It depends, if yours is saas trail / onPremize trial version than you should be able to monitor server with agent License units provisioned for without any charges involved. If yours is paid saas/onPremise controller than one agent license unit is per JVM/CLR for monitoring java server/IIS and one machine agent installation is considered as one license unit.

>>>>> Can we capture the load testing data in graphical form as it is available in New Relic??

Answer: We show data served at each BT level and app dashboard level as shown below as long as the load is served by server with agent configured we will load show response time/CPM metric data as listed below in dashboard:
image.png

>>>>> Can we setup certain alarms based on CPU, Memory??

Answer: Yes you can define health rules on hardware metrics and select cpu/memory metrics on condition section as per your requirement, and then attach alerts (email etc) to the health rule defined to get alerts, hope the information in doc helps to provide more insight to the alert feature: http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Alert+and+Respond
http://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO14S/Configure+Health+Rules

>>>>> Can we integrate  AppDynamics through Service Now??

Answer: We see monitor service now using machine agent extension, check if that helps here: http://community.appdynamics.com/t5/AppDynamics-eXchange/ServiceNow-Alerting-Extension/idi-p/751

>>>>>>>> Regarding your latest query on hardware stats missing, Can you please check under node dashbard -> hardware tab section as listed below and see if you could see CPU, memory statistics fine?

image.png

Let us know if that answers your queries.

Regards,

Arun

CommunityUser
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Hi Arun,

On my local machine, I have just installed the standalone machine agent and cannot find the metrics like CPU,memory on the dashboard.

Is it required to install the application agent also on the smae machine to monitor the system metrics ??

0 Karma

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

We see it is not required to install appserver agent to monitor hardware metrics, installing machine agent is enough, please send the complete screenshot from browser depicting the issue and machineagent.log under <machine_agent_dir>/logs path to assist you further

Regards,

Arun

0 Karma

CommunityUser
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Hi Arun,

Thanks for your quick response.

I have attached the machine-agent logs with the reply.

Here is the screenshot of the SAAS controller :

Capture.PNG

Also when i click on the jyotibhanot1 machine I just get the following details:

Screenshot.PNG

I cant find the "node"option on the dashboard also for the jyotibhanot1 machine.

0 Karma

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

Thanks for the screenshot and logs, it seems you have started the machine agent without application-name, tier-name details as per logs:
[main] 17 Jul 2014 17:41:23,652  INFO MachineAgent - Full Agent Registration Info Resolver using application name [null][main] 17 Jul 2014 17:41:23,652  INFO MachineAgent - Full Agent Registration Info Resolver using tier name [null]

Please be sure that machine agent requires app/tier name details to be provided in <MachineAgent_dir>/conf/controller-info.xml if there is not appserver agent installed on hyotibhanot1 host.

Please provide the <application-name>, <tier-name> details in <MachineAgent_dir>/conf/controller-info.xml and restart the machine agent process after saving changes and Click "Applications" -> select <application-name provided in machine agent controller-info.xml> at the left panel -> and navigate to Servers -> AppServers -> click "Jyoti-Local-Machine" and then select "Hardware" section to see hardware metrics graphs

Let us know how it goes after making suggested changes.

Regards,

Arun

CommunityUser
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

But if I dont have any application on the server then why it is mandatory to give the Application name and Tier-name??

Also what does the Tier-name depict ??

How to restart the machine agent ??

0 Karma

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

Please find our response to your queries inline:

>>>>>>>>>  if I dont have any application on the server then why it is mandatory to give the Application name and Tier-name??

Answer: When we referred application-name in controller-info.xml , we mean we are referring to logical naming of applications in controller UI , this application-name in controller-info.xml may not require to actually represent a real server application name, for any agent node to register in UI application-name is require to be provided and if the agent node is machineagent with no appserver agents from the same machine associated to the target controller than app/tier/node details are required , as node register requires app and tier name for the auto agent registration to succeed, hope that clarifies the product behavior.

>>>>>>>>> Also what does the Tier-name depict ??

Answer: Tier name can be any valid string name and we recommend to provide the server/host name in your case to reflect the instance details you are monitoring for h/w metrics using machine agent.

>>>>>>>>> How to restart the machine agent ??

Answer: Go the windows command prompt and change to directory "D:\MachineAgent" where you have started the machine agent process using command:
java -jar machineaegnt.jar

Press "CTRL + C" to terminate the java process and do the changes in D:\MachineAgen\conf\controller-info.xml file as suggested and restart the machine agnet using "java -jar machineagent.jar" as you started earlier from machine agent directory after saving changes to controller-info.xml with app and tier name details provided.

Hope that answers your queries.

Regards,

Arun

CommunityUser
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

I restarted the machine agent by issuing the command

java -jar machineaegnt.jar

and changed the node name ,application name and tier name it registerd the machine again. It means it has been registed twice. How can I resolve this issue ??

0 Karma

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

It seems you have started with different values multiple times and hence we see multple applications in your saas UI and we understood that machine agent is reporting fine under application "windows" in controller UI if the above said is right, you can delete the second machine agent entry by deleting the application "windows-local-app" by confirming Actions -> delete operation in UI as listed below:

 image.png

Please be sure to kill machine agent java process before issuing "java -jar machineagent.jar" under same <machienagent_dir>/ next time to avoid such issues, let us know if that information helps 

Regards,

Arun

CommunityUser
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Here is the machine log:

http://pastebin.com/FbMyabX2

0 Karma

CommunityUser
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

I am also trying to install PHP agent on a linux machine. I have set the values for controller host, port, access key etc. but getting this error:

./install.sh
Install script for AppDynamics PHP Agent 3.8.4.0GA.4276.5dc2d8d219673e698b0b455657ac469bc8b59337
Found PHP installation in /usr/bin
Missing required arguments
Usage: install.sh options controller-host controller-port application-name tier-name node-name
Options:
  -a,--account-info           Account name and access key.
                              Use separator @ between name and access key.
                              This needs to be set if the controller is in multi-tenant
                              mode.
  -p,--php-executable-path    File for PHP executable [/usr/bin]
  -e,--php-extension-dir      Directory for PHP extensions [/usr/lib64/php/modules]
  -i,--php-ini-dir            Directory for PHP INI files [/etc/php.d]
  -s,--ssl                    Enable SSL communication with the Controller
  --enable-cli                Enable agent for CLI mode
  --ignore-permissions        Ignore file and directory permission issues
  --http-proxy-host=<host>    HTTP proxy host needed for communication with the Controller
  --http-proxy-port=<port>    HTTP proxy port needed for communication with the Controller
  -u                          Uninstall agent
  -h,--help                   Show this message

Example: install.sh -s -a=accName@accKey controller1.appdynamics.com 8090 myApp myTier myNode
Note: Please use quotes for the entries where ever applicable.

 Please help me resolve the issue ?

0 Karma

Arun_Dasetty
Super Champion

Hi Jyoti,

Please find our response to your queries:

>>>>>> I would like to know that what is the difference between standalone machine agent and agent type for java,.net,php ?

Answer: We see Standalone Machine Agent provides the capability to use extensions (plugins, metric listener, orchestration) in addition to default suppport for h/w metrics (disk I/O, network I/0, memory ,cpu metric etc).

Java agent captures metrics specific to JVM like heap, Major/Minor GCs, memory pools, JMX, and the Business transactions (servlets, struts, ejb, springs etc) metrics.

App agent for .NET monitors Business transactions (ASP.net, WCF, etc) requests in addition to IIS CLR metrics 

Agent for PHP monitors BTs and server on which PHP is configured like other agents.

>>>>>> Also I would like to know the prerequisites of installing Machine Agent ??To execute the Jar we need to have java preinstalled also ??

Answer: Yes we confirm that to run machine agent java 1.5 or higher version needs to be installed.

Regarding the latest query on error in console, we see you are not passing any runtime parameters to ./install.sh script and we request you to pass the values as follows if you want to configure agent and associate to controller running on host "192.56.78.19"  and at port 8090 (the ip 192. may change as per your actuall contorller ip):

shell> ./install.sh 192.56.78.19  8090 myPHPApp myApacheTier myApacheNode

the above steps associcates your php agent at controller UI running at http://192.56.78.19:8090/controller 

Hope that answers your queries.

Regards,

Arun

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