App Agent Network Bandwidth Usage

These guidelines can help you estimate how much bandwidth overhead will be added to your environment by deploying Splunk AppDynamics agents.

Keep in mind that the exact bandwidth required for a deployment varies greatly depending on the nature of your application, the agent configuration, and the Splunk AppDynamics features you use. The best way to determine the bandwidth overhead is to test the Splunk AppDynamics deployment in a staging environment that mirrors as closely as possible the live operating environment.

  1. The approximate bandwidth used by a single Java Agent with the default configuration is five to eight kilobytes per second.
  2. Scaling of additional agents is linear. That is, if the average bandwidth usage for an app agent in a given deployment is five kilobytes, adding 10 means that bandwidth usage will be 5 × 10, or 50 kilobytes.
  3. While the average bandwidth used is five to eight kilobytes per second, agents send data to the Controller in bursts rather than as a steady stream of data. When testing bandwidth usage, to determine the actual kilobytes per second used by an agent, you need to observe and average out traffic over the course of at least several minutes.
  4. When testing bandwidth usage in the environment, keep in mind that different types of tiers will generate a different amount of load. For instance, a database tier tends to generate more traffic between the agent and Controller than an application server tier. For the best possible estimate, the test should take this into account.