Deployment

There are two options for starting your deployment using Docker:

Create Your Own Image, start your agent from scratch.
Run an Existing Image, if you already have the .NET Agent enabled.

Create Your Own Image

You can use the ASP.NET sample application from Microsoft and a Dockerfile to build your own image, and get started:

Use a multistage build with appdynamics/dotnet-core-agent:latest to get agent binaries.
Update the Dockerfile variables to configure the connection to the Controller and your application identity in AppDynamics.
Create the Docker image.

The following is an example Dockerfile with commented instructions:

####### Instructions
# Building image: docker build --rm -t appdynamicstest:latest .
# Running container: docker run --rm -p 8000:80 appdynamicstest:latest
# Open the application using http://localhost:8000/
#######

FROM appdynamics/dotnet-core-agent:latest AS appd

FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/samples:aspnetapp
COPY --from=appd /opt/appdynamics /opt/appdynamics/dotnet

# Mandatory settings required to attach the agent to the .NET application
ENV CORECLR_PROFILER={57e1aa68-2229-41aa-9931-a6e93bbc64d8} \
    CORECLR_ENABLE_PROFILING=1 \
    CORECLR_PROFILER_PATH_ARM64=/opt/appdynamics/dotnet/libappdprofiler_arm64.so \
    CORECLR_PROFILER_PATH=/opt/appdynamics/dotnet/libappdprofiler.so

# Configure connection to the controller
ENV APPDYNAMICS_CONTROLLER_HOST_NAME=controller.saas.appdynamics.com
ENV APPDYNAMICS_CONTROLLER_PORT=443
ENV APPDYNAMICS_CONTROLLER_SSL_ENABLED=true
ENV APPDYNAMICS_AGENT_ACCOUNT_NAME=account-name
ENV APPDYNAMICS_AGENT_ACCOUNT_ACCESS_KEY=access-key

# Configure application identity in AppDynamics
ENV APPDYNAMICS_AGENT_APPLICATION_NAME="My Application"
ENV APPDYNAMICS_AGENT_TIER_NAME="Sample Tier"
ENV APPDYNAMICS_AGENT_NODE_NAME="MyNode"

# It is possible to configure .NET agent using AppDynamicsConfig.json configuration file instead of environment variables.
# To do so, rename AppDynamicsConfig.json.template to AppDynamicsConfig.json and update values in the file.
# ADD AppDynamicsConfig.json /opt/appdynamics/dotnet/

Run an Existing Image

To quickly deploy an existing Docker image with an agent enabled without building a new image, follow these steps:

Download the agent binaries. Ensure that the archive matches the target CPU architecture (amd64 or arm64).
Update the Docker command variables to configure the connection to the Controller and your application identity in AppDynamics..
Execute the Docker command from the directory where you extracted the agent binaries. You can replace $(pwd) in the command with the path to this directory.

This example runs the sample application. It assumes you have Splunk AppDynamics binaries in the current directory (which contains the extracted agent archive):

Example command to run existing image with .NET agent enabled:

docker run \
-p 8000:80 \
-e CORECLR_PROFILER={57e1aa68-2229-41aa-9931-a6e93bbc64d8} \
-e CORECLR_ENABLE_PROFILING=1 \
-e CORECLR_PROFILER_PATH=/opt/appdynamics/dotnet/libappdprofiler.so \
-e CORECLR_PROFILER_PATH_ARM64=/opt/appdynamics/dotnet/libappdprofiler_arm64.so \
-e APPDYNAMICS_CONTROLLER_HOST_NAME=controller.saas.appdynamics.com \
-e APPDYNAMICS_CONTROLLER_PORT=443 \
-e APPDYNAMICS_CONTROLLER_SSL_ENABLED=true \
-e APPDYNAMICS_AGENT_ACCOUNT_NAME=account-name \
-e APPDYNAMICS_AGENT_ACCOUNT_ACCESS_KEY=access-key \
-e APPDYNAMICS_AGENT_APPLICATION_NAME="My Application" \
-e APPDYNAMICS_AGENT_TIER_NAME="Sample Tier" \
-e APPDYNAMICS_AGENT_NODE_NAME="MyNode" \
-v "$(pwd)":/opt/appdynamics/dotnet/ \
mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/samples:aspnetapp

The command mounts agent files as a volume and sets environment variables required for the agent to attach.