What trade-offs do I need to consider when configuring my Applications?

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What should I be aware of when planning a multi-Application configuration?

Table of Contents

Overview

Trade-Offs

Use Cases

Overview

Business Owners, Application Owners, Service Owners, IT Operations, and Developers are involved in configuring their organizations' environments in AppDynamics. It is important for them to understand how their applications and infrastructure map to the AppDynamics Controller/Application/Tier hierarchy.

There are many ways to model complex environments within the AppDynamics hierarchy. Quite often, the solution is to configure an environment either:

1. Across multiple Applications
2. Across multiple Controllers

Below we’ve outlined common use cases for when an organization may have multiple Applications and the associated trade-offs to be aware of. For information on using multiple Controllers, see: What trade-offs do I need to make to consider when configuring my Controller?

Trade-Offs

Depending on how you set up your environment, you will need to make trade-offs regarding visibility. It’s important to understand these choices before implementing AppDynamics to avoid costly changes later. These trade-offs may include:

• Limited ability to correlate performance to business outcomes because modeling Services as Applications means that front-end Business Transactions can no longer trace all the way through an environment.
• Limited ability to troubleshoot if you split up Services or business units by Application because you’ll need to rely on cross-app correlation.
• Business Transaction (BT) explosion if you split up Data Centers by Tier because each BT may be registered multiple times.
• Having to choose which entity is more important to monitor rather than having equal visibility into all of them.

Use Cases

In some scenarios, it is beneficial to separate entities into separate Applications.

Use Cases		Best Practices for Configuration	Trade-Offs
Service Owners want to monitor API endpoints for first-line problem isolation.		Only Business Transactions can be used to create a request flowmap and snapshots for requests at the Application level. Put each Service in a separate Application.	IT Ops may have limited end-to-end visibility, making it harder to triage user-facing flows. Business Owners may not be able to connect user flows with business outcomes.
Business Unit Owners want to restrict access to sensitive and user data at the Tier level for security.		Role Based Access Control (RBAC) settings are only applied at the Application level. Separate more sensitive business units into separate Applications.	IT Ops may have limited end-to-end visibility, making it harder to triage user-facing flows. Business Owners may not be able to connect user flows with business outcomes.
Different IT Ops teams want to monitor an environment that spans multiple Data Centers in an active-active or active-passive configuration. The Data Center teams have different definitions of what qualifies as a “critical situation” and therefore have different alerting needs across Data Centers.		Performance data that can’t be distinguished by entry point can only be rolled up into Tiers or Applications. Put each Data Center in a separate Application to avoid hitting the 200 BT limit.	IT Ops will no longer have a single roll-up for end-to-end visibility, making it harder to triage user-facing flows. Without this single roll-up, Business Owners will not be able to connect user flows with business outcomes.
Service Owners want to suppress different types of errors because each Service is architected differently.		Error suppression settings can only be applied at the Application level. Put each Service in a separate Application.	IT Ops will no longer have a single roll-up for end-to-end visibility, making it harder to triage user-facing flows. Without this single roll-up, Business Owners will not be able to connect user flows with business outcomes.
App Developers want to monitor pre-production and production environments separately.		Configure your production and test environments in separate Applications.	App Developers, IT Ops, and/or IT Admins may need to rely on config import/export tools to keep configurations in sync across the separate Applications.
IT Admins want to provision each business unit with a specific license entitlement.		Licenses can only be provisioned according to Applications or Accounts. Configure each business unit in a separate Application.	IT Ops may have limited end-to-end visibility, making it harder to triage user-facing flows. Business Owners may not be able to connect user flows with business outcomes.