Cisco: AppDynamicsPowerPack Release Notes, version 100

Version 100 of the Cisco: AppDynamics PowerPack is the initial version of the PowerPack. It introduces the ability to discover and monitor configuration and performance metrics for Cisco AppDynamics applications, tiers, and nodes. It also includes the ability to create device relationships between nodes and physical server devices.

  • Minimum Required SL1 Version: 8.8.0

NOTE: ScienceLogic recommends running the latest version of the AppDynamics Agent when monitoring Cisco AppDynamics applications in the ScienceLogic platform.

Before You Install

Ensure that you are running version 8.8.0 or later of SL1 before installing Cisco: AppDynamics version 100.

For details on upgrading SL1, see the appropriate Release Notes.

Installing the PowerPack

To install version 100 of the Cisco: AppDynamics PowerPack, perform the following steps:

To install this PowerPack:

  1. Familiarize yourself with the Known Issues for this release.
  2. See the Before You Install or Upgrade section. If you have not done so already, upgrade your system to the 8.8.0 or later release.
  3. Download the "Cisco: AppDynamics" version 100PowerPack from the Support Site to a local computer.
  4. Go to the PowerPack Manager page (System > Manage > PowerPacks). Click the Actions menu and choose Import PowerPack. When prompted, import "Cisco: AppDynamics" version 100.
  5. Click the Install button. For details on installing PowerPacks, see the chapter on Installing a PowerPack in the PowerPacks manual.

For more information about using the PowerPack, see the Monitoring Cisco: AppDynamics manual.

Features

Version 100 of the Cisco: AppDynamics PowerPack includes the following features:

  • Dynamic Applications to discover and monitor AppDynamics devices:

  • Cisco: AppDynamics Application Discovery
  • Cisco: AppDynamics Application Performance
  • Cisco: AppDynamics Component Count
  • Cisco: AppDynamics Health Rule Violations
  • Cisco: AppDynamics Node Configuration
  • Cisco: AppDynamics Node Discovery
  • Cisco: AppDynamics Node Metrics Producer
  • Cisco: AppDynamics Node Performance
  • Cisco: AppDynamics Node to Server Relationship

The Cisco: AppDynamics Node to Server Relationship" Dynamic Application is used to establish relationships between nodes and physical server devices. For more information, see the Monitoring Cisco AppDynamics manual.

  • Cisco: AppDynamics Tier Configuration
  • Cisco: AppDynamics Tier Discovery
  • Cisco: AppDynamics Tier Performance

To discover the applications, tiers, and nodes in your AppDynamics account, you must create a virtual device representing the AppDynamics Controller and manually align the "Cisco: AppDynamics Application Discovery" Dynamic Application to this virtual device using the appropriate credentials. When you do so, a series of "AppDynamics Applications created App1|App2" events will occur on the AppDynamics Controller device. These events in turn will trigger the discovery of the Application virtual devices. The events expire after 30 minutes.

After you align the "Cisco: AppDynamics Application Discovery" Dynamic Application to the AppDynamics Controller virtual device, it is important to let the Dynamic Application run at its predetermined polling interval; you should not run the Dynamic Application manually by clicking its lightning bolt icon (). Clicking the lightning bolt icon () for the "Cisco: AppDynamics Application Discovery" Dynamic Application will result in the Application virtual devices not being created. If this happens, you must delete the Controller virtual device and repeat the process again.

If the Application virtual devices are not discovered when you align the "Cisco: AppDynamics Application Discovery" Dynamic Application to the AppDynamics Controller virtual device or if the Application virtual devices are discovered but the Dynamic Applications aligned to those Application devices are using the incorrect credentials because the "Cisco: AppDynamics Application Template" Device Template was not modified to use your correct AppDynamics credentials, then you must delete all devices including the Controller virtual device and repeat the process again.

To determine the number of AppDynamics component devices that SL1 will monitor, you can manually align the "Cisco: AppDynamics Component Count" Dynamic Application to the virtual root device.

If you want to create a device relationship between AppDynamics nodes and the physical servers where they reside, you must manually align the "Cisco: AppDynamics Node to Server Relationship" Dynamic Application to the physical server device. You must also ensure that the server hostname matches the machine name collected by the "Cisco: AppDynamics Node Configuration" Dynamic Application. If the physical device name is an IP address or otherwise differs from the machine name collected by the "Cisco: AppDynamics Node Configuration" Dynamic Application, you can edit the physical device name to match the node machine name.

If a tier is renamed in AppDynamics, the device name does not update in SL1 unless you go to the tier's Device Properties page (Registry > Devices > wrench icon) and uncheck the Preserve Hostname option.

  • Device Classes for each type of AppDynamics component device SL1 monitors:
  • AppDynamics Controller
  • AppDynamics Application
  • AppDynamics Tier
  • AppDynamics .NET Application Server Tier
  • AppDynamics Application Server Tier
  • AppDynamics C/C++ SDK Tier
  • AppDynamics Golang SDK Tier
  • AppDynamics Node.JS Server Tier
  • AppDynamics PHP Application Server Tier
  • AppDynamics Python Server Tier
  • AppDynamics Web Server Tier
  • AppDynamics WMB Agent Tier
  • AppDynamics ActiveMQ Node
  • AppDynamics Node
  • AppDynamics Apache Node
  • AppDynamics DB Agent Node
  • AppDynamics DB Collector Node
  • AppDynamics Glassfish Node
  • AppDynamics IBM DB2 Node
  • AppDynamics IBM MQ Node
  • AppDynamics IIS Node
  • AppDynamics JBoss Node
  • AppDynamics Microsoft SQL Server Node
  • AppDynamics MySQL Node
  • AppDynamics Oracle Node
  • AppDynamics Postgres Node
  • AppDynamics Pound Node
  • AppDynamics Tomcat Node
  • AppDynamics Weblogic Node
  • AppDynamics Websphere Node

If your AppDynamics account has a large number of applications, tiers, or nodes, ScienceLogic recommends discovering your account on a Collector Group with a sufficient number of Data Collectors. For guidelines about the number of Data Collectors you might need, see the ScienceLogic Architecture manual.

  • Event Policies that are triggered when AppDynamics component devices meet certain status criteria
  • A sample SOAP/XML Credential for discovering AppDynamics devices
  • Run Book Actions and Policies that automatically create AppDynamics Application virtual devices
  • A device template that is used to align the PowerPack's Dynamic Applications to AppDynamics Application virtual devices

The "Cisco: AppDynamics Application Template" Device Template includes three sub-templates. For the Device Template to align the Dynamic Applications properly, you must manually align your AppDynamics Credential to each of these sub-templates and save them. For more information, see the Monitoring Cisco AppDynamics manual.

Known Issues

The following known issues affect version 100 of the Cisco: AppDynamics PowerPack:

  • Version 100 of the Cisco: AppDynamics PowerPack is not supported on Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)-compliant ScienceLogic systems.

  • SL1 is unable to discover applications with names that include special characters.
  • If a tier or node name includes special characters, SL1 replaces the special characters with empty spaces in the device name. This does not affect data collection, but it does prevent a relationship from being created between a physical server and a component node if the node's machine name contains special characters.
  • When discovering a large number of component devices, the discovery process can cause the appearance of numerous critical events with the message, "Large backlog of asynchronous jobs detected". You can safely ignore this alert as long as the number of asynchronous processes decreases over time.
  • The "Cisco: AppDynamics Application Template" Device Template that is included in the PowerPack can work with only a single credential at a time. Because of this, you cannot discover more than one AppDynamics account at a time. If you have multiple accounts that you want to monitor, you must discover them sequentially, one after the other. For more information, see the Monitoring Cisco AppDynamics manual.
  • Due to an API throttling issue, when monitoring an account with a large number of applications or component devices, some Dynamic Applications might generate an "Exception producing performance data" error message and experience some data gaps in the performance metrics. In this scenario, SL1 will attempt to collect the data again, but the issue might still recur.
  • When an application is deleted from AppDynamics, it should be deleted from SL1 automatically. (This process will also cause the application's tiers and nodes to vanish.) If the application does not delete automatically, the Dynamic Applications aligned to the device will generate error messages in the log and you might need to manually delete the application.
  • The "Cisco: AppDynamics Tier Configuration" Dynamic Application might occasionally generate "object of type 'NoneType' has no len()" error messages. This error does not impact data collection.
  • Due to an API throttling issue, some Dynamic Application requests might occasionally generate the following error messages: "Error collecting performance data. Error to retry the operation." or "Exception producing performance data. Error to retry the operation."