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 the SquaredUp observability portal.

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

Getting started with SquaredUp is simple. Just sign up for a free account at squaredup.com/sign-up.

Step 1: Connect to AppDynamics

Next, add the AppDynamics plugin. SquaredUp has 50+ plugins that allow you to easily connect to popular cloud platforms, monitoring tools, developer tools, databases, and more. See our blog for more plugin walkthroughs.

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.

Logging into SquaredUp for the first time, you’ll see a range of pre-built Dashboards visualizing static sample data. Use these to familiarize yourself with SquaredUp in your own time.

To add your AppDynamics plugin, click on “Settings” on the bottom left of the screen.

You’ll arrive at the Plugins configuration page, where you’ll see an Example Plugin with sample data and the option to “Add Plugin”.

Click “Add Plugin” and then select the “APM” category. Select “AppDynamics” within the drop-down menu.

The AppDynamics plugin will discover and import all your applications, user experience monitors, transactions, databases, and servers.

It’s worth noting that SquaredUp won’t ingest all this data at once (i.e., won’t create yet another database). SquaredUp plugins are lightweight connections that leave data in place and stream it on-demand via API (e.g., when viewing it on the dashboard). That makes connecting straightforward.

Simply enter an account name, API client name and API client secret.

Step 2: Choose the data you want to visualize

Once you’ve configured the plugin, you can create tiles on the dashboard for any data you want to see. Just choose:

(1) The scope (e.g., an application)

(2) A data stream (e.g., average response time), and

(3) How you want to see that data (e.g., line graph)

Continue adding tiles like this until you have your complete AppDynamics dashboard. You can also add more tiles from external tools such as your ticketing tool to get a complete overview of your services on one dashboard.

Needless to say, each team and organization will be looking to dashboard their data in different ways. The example dashboard above should hopefully give you a clearer idea of how you can visualize a range of data streams from AppDynamics in different ways.

Getting more mileage from your dashboard

Getting a dashboard up and running is a great start. But SquaredUp enables you to get so much more mileage out of its native integration with AppDynamics. Here are just a few things you can try:

To put these insights to use, you might want to set up monitoring and configure alerting (e.g., for Slack, Teams, or ServiceNow).
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—ITSM, CI/CD monitoring, etc.—to build a complete picture of your application and services.

All the best, and happy dashboarding!

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