Deployment Planning Guide

This page describes best-practice planning guidelines for the Splunk AppDynamics deployment.

It is important to plan your Splunk AppDynamics deployment according to your environment. Taking time to outline your system strategy provides a smooth process flow. You can use these guidelines to start working with Splunk AppDynamics.

Each Splunk AppDynamics customer account is a tenant of the Splunk AppDynamics cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. Splunk AppDynamics refers to this as a Controller Tenant. Once you install the necessary agents, Splunk AppDynamics automatically builds an environment of the chosen applications.

The Controller Tenant:

• Monitors your application workload.
• Uses machine learning to determine what is normal for your environment.
• Applies sensible defaults for detecting abnormal activity and application errors.

You can start using Splunk AppDynamics dashboards, flow maps, and monitoring tools in the Controller Tenant UI immediately without instrumentation and configuration. Later, you can customize the configuration for your specific environment and requirements.

Plan Your Deployment

See Getting Started to begin with a trial or investigatory installation of Splunk AppDynamics. For testing, you can easily get Splunk AppDynamics running with a trial SaaS installation within two hours. However, deploying to a production environment adds many considerations to the initial installation process. You must consider security, network, and change management requirements that your organizational policies govern.

Deployment Models

A Splunk AppDynamics deployment monitors your environment and collects data using agents. The Controller Tenant UI provides the access to view, understand, and analyze the data.

The Splunk AppDynamics SaaS deployment is a cloud-based solution that enables real-time visibility into the health and performance of your instrumented environment, with significantly lower cost and maintenance. A SaaS deployment provides these benefits:

• No need to install a Controller Tenant
• Splunk AppDynamics manages the server-side components of the Splunk AppDynamics Platform, including installation and upgrades
• Lower total costs, guaranteed availability, data security, significantly reduced maintenance, and automatic upgrades

Plan for Security

1. Determine the access control strategy for Controller Tenant UI users, including locally authenticated users and externally authenticated users (LDAP, SAML, and so on).
2. Determine SSL requirements and key management.

Devise an Agent Rollout Strategy

1. Determine your rollout strategy as manual, automated, or scripted.
2. Integrate rollout with your application deployment process.

Plan Splunk AppDynamics Model

1. Understand how your application maps to the Splunk AppDynamics concept of application, tier, and node. Determine the naming strategy for the model.
2. Devise a Business Transaction strategy. Determine which end-to-end business processes in your environment you want to monitor as Business Transactions.
3. Devise End User Monitoring(EUM) and Analytics data collection strategy.
4. Consider database and hardware monitoring strategy.

Define the Users Who Will Access Splunk AppDynamics

1. Identify the monitoring team or others who will administer Splunk AppDynamics. Ensure that they have the resources and skillset to maintain the environment.
2. Identify stakeholders from each group that will use Splunk AppDynamics.

Define the Monitoring Strategy

1. Assess the alert and health rule strategy that meets your requirements.
2. Define the reporting strategy.
3. Determine integration points with other systems (using extensions or REST API).

First Day Tasks

First Day with Splunk AppDynamics

This procedure outlines a typical first day working with Splunk AppDynamics.

After you install agents and restart your applications, Splunk AppDynamics automatically builds an environment for your application. You can see the model in the dashboards and flow maps view of the Controller Tenant UI. The Controller Tenant:

• Monitors your application workload.
• Determines what is normal for your environment.
• Applies sensible defaults for detecting abnormal activity and application errors.

You can start using Splunk AppDynamics immediately without instrumentation and configuration. Later, you can customize the configuration for your environment and requirements.

1. Create an Account.
2. Download and install an Agent.
3. Create and add users to your account.
4. Assign Controller Tenant access.
5. Configure email/SMS settings to enable notifications. Splunk AppDynamics configures the SMTP server.
6. Review the Splunk AppDynamics default settings, such as built-in Health Rules and Dynamic Baselines.

First Week Tasks

First Week with Splunk AppDynamics

1. Learn about the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics.
2. Explore how the different Splunk AppDynamics products work together.
3. Create and organize your Business Applications.
4. View and customize Flow Maps.
5. Create Custom Dashboards.
6. Verify or adjust your tier groups, nodes, and remote services.
7. Customize your Health Rules.

First Month Tasks

First Month with Splunk AppDynamics

1. Tune your service entry points.
2. Manage user roles and groups, or connect the Controller Tenant to an external authentication provider.
3. Capture contextual information,information points, and data collectors.
4. Extend your health rules with custom actions.
5. Define Health Rule custom metrics, configure database custom metrics, or add integration modules to Splunk AppDynamics.