July 19, 2022

How to build a dashboard for AppDynamics

Are you using AppDynamics for your application and infrastructure monitoring? And are you looking for complete visibility of your AppDynamics metrics alongside your ITSM or CI/CD pipelines?

There are several reasons you might want to build an AppDynamics dashboard in SquaredUp:

To visualize AppDynamics metrics alongside data locked in another tool or database (e.g., detect an infrastructure outage with AppDynamics and correlate the impact with the number of tickets received by your service desk)
To roll-up health from AppDynamics together with other tools to visualize the complete status of your application
To share AppDynamics dashboards with someone who doesn’t have access to the console

To publish AppDynamics data to a wall board
To set up more complex monitoring and send alerts to Slack, Teams, or ServiceNow
To automate the creation or modifications of dashboards (e.g., auto-provisioning)

If any of these appeal to you, check out this write-up we put together to help you plug into AppDynamics and surface any metrics in one place. You'll be able to see the big picture using SquaredUp.

Our AppDynamics plugin supports popular out-of-the-box metrics and any metric available in AppDynamics for the following functionalities: Application, EUM, Transactions, Databases and Servers.

Getting Started with SquaredUp

Creating an account and getting started with SquaredUp is simple. Just head over to squaredup.com/sign-up to register for a free account.

Once you’ve created and verified your account, you’ll be able to quickly connect to AppDynamics and start dashboarding! Let’s walk through the process.

Step 1: Connect to AppDynamics

SquaredUp has more than 60 out-of-the-box plugins (with more on the way) that enable you to connect to a range of cloud platforms, dev tools, databases, service management tools, and more. Feel free to check out our other blog posts to learn more after this walkthrough.

Upon creating your SquaredUp account, you’ll land in an empty workspace where you’re prompted to add a data source. For context, workspaces are where different teams can organize their data and knowledge across the tools they use, so feel free to leverage this organizational feature as you expand your monitoring.

Click ‘add data source’, and choose from over 60 options. You can search a specific data source using the search bar at the top, or browse using the filters on the right hand side.

Once you've selected AppDynamics, you’ll be prompted to configure the data source by choosing a display name and inputting any other required information (API keys, domain URLs etc). These requirements differ slightly between tools.

NOTE: if you are using an on-premise version of AppDynamics, you'll need to install a SquaredUp agent inside your environment. See more information here.

To get all available out-of-the-box dashboards automatically loaded up with your live data, simply hit the bottom toggle “Install Sample Dashboards”.

You also have the option to restrict access to your data source, which is available to everyone in your organization by default.

It’s worth noting that SquaredUp doesn’t store your data (i.e., won’t create yet another database). SquaredUp plugins are lightweight connections that leave the data where it is and stream it on demand via API (e.g., when viewing it on a Dashboard).

Step 2: Visualizing your data

Once you’ve successfully configured the AppDynamics data source, we index all of the objects and object types you have access to—applications, user experience monitors, transactions, databases and more.

Out-of-the-box dashboards

To get you started, these are the three dashboards we offer out-of-the-box.

Dashboard 1: User experience

Dashboard 2: Application status

Dashboard 3: Server status

Customize your dashboard

Out-of-the-box dashboards can easily be edited to make them your own. Simply hit the “edit” button in the top right.

Hover over an empty space on your dashboard and hit '+' to add a new data, image or text tile. You can then choose from a selection of pre-defined scopes.

To edit an existing tile, simply click ‘edit’ in the top right to add monitoring, KPIs and more.

Building your own dashboard

If you’d like to build your own custom dashboard, our revamped dashboard designer now makes it even easier. Find the metric you're looking for, shape the data, configure your visualization and add monitoring, all in a few clicks.

The tile editor allows you to configure the data from AppDynamics and display it in any way you wish.

Let’s jump right in and build our dashboard.

In the left nav bar, click the ‘+' sign next to the 'Dashboards’ tab.

You can add a title and description for your tile at the top of tile editor.

There are 3 tile types to choose from: Data, Image or Text. For the purpose of this example, let's start with data.

Configure the tiles on your dashboard by choosing the following (steps may vary depending on which data stream you select):

Data streams: a list of all available data streams for your chosen data source
Objects: scope the data stream to show particular objects you want to visualize (only necessary if you select a scoped data stream)
Visualization: choose from line graph, stacked bar, gauge visualization and more.
Monitoring: set custom monitoring thresholds and receive notifications to Slack, teams, email, or custom webhook.

The visualization options are shown on the right of the dashboard designer. Which visualizations are offered to you depends on the data available, for example Line Graph will only be offered if there is time series data.

Customize your tiles even further by sorting, filtering or grouping the data, and setting custom timeframes.

From here, we can continue adding and adjusting tiles until we have created our ideal dashboard.

Of course, each team and organization will want to dashboard different data in different ways. We hope the example above offers some inspiration and insight into the many ways you can visualize different data streams from AppDynamics.

See how SquaredUp Product Manger, Dave Clarke, uses the beautifully simple dashboard designer to create an AWS dashboard visualization in under a minute:

Getting more out of your dashboards

Getting a Dashboard up and running is a great start, but it’s just that...a start.

SquaredUp enables you to get so much more mileage out of its native integrations. Here are just a few things you can try:

To put these insights to use, you might want to set up monitoring and configure notifications (e.g., for email, Slack, Teams or ServiceNow). You can easily manage all your monitoring and notification settings in one place. Just head to the ‘Monitors’ tab of your workspace.
When you monitor individual tiles within a dashboard, you can then roll up status to the dashboard and workspace levels, enabling your team to easily report KPIs across different teams in your organization.
Additionally, you could scope this workspace to include additional, related tools to better connect, aggregate, and monitor crucial data across your tools, all in one place.

All the best, and happy dashboarding!

Start building with SquaredUp for free