ThousandEyes + AppDynamics

Using the ThousandEyes and AppDynamics Bi-directional Integration

With the bi-directional integration between ThousandEyes and Cisco AppDynamics, you now have a powerful way to correlate business issues ranging from end-user experiences to application transactions and their dependencies, with complete visibility into the network path and Internet routing.

Let's take a look at how to configure this in both of your environments and what it looks like once the data is being shared.

First, we'll configure on the ThousandEyes side. You can navigate to Integrations, which is now the centralized place for adding the AppDynamics as well as custom webhooks. We'll click on New Integration on the top right, and this will bring up a selection box. We'll choose AppDynamics for this. You can now give the integration a name, as well as point it to your AppD instance.

We'll use OAuth for authentication, and we'll enter in our information here. You can also select which services you'd like to connect to, so in our case, we'll connect to test recommendations, which will then populate the test templates with the data from AppDynamics. Once that's completed, click Save to save the integration.

Now, we've navigated to Test Settings. You'll notice along the top, there's the Add New Test button, which is how you've traditionally added tests to ThousandEyes. But now there's an Add From Recommendations button. Let's click on that.

This is now showing us a list of applications that have been discovered from AppDynamics. It also lists out the domains associated with each application. On the right, it tells you how many of those domains you're currently monitoring. For example, on this third application, we're already monitoring the one domain associated with it. If I click on it, you can see the test is grayed out, meaning I don't need to add it because it's already there within my environment.

And let's go back to a test that we're not currently monitoring. We'll click on the top one that says zero of two services monitored. It's now going to suggest those two different URLs that are associated with this application. If you'd like to add the test, just click on the checkboxes.

Now we'll configure the package and tests. It's pre-populated information about which domains and services it needs to monitor, and all you need to do is select your agents, so you can select from either Enterprise or Cloud Agents and then how often you want those tests to monitor. You can also give it a monitoring package name.

By default, it will use the application name. We'll click on Review Package now, and it's going to show you exactly what tests and items it's going to create. So it's going to create two agents of server tests for us, as well as a label so that we can find that test later on when we're viewing the test results.

y>If you'd like to deploy those tests, just click on Confirm and Deploy. Now, once we've navigated over to the test view, we can see this new application view, which has the test that we just created, as well as the agent server and BGP view. You can see all the data collected for this test, and then you'll notice a new tab called Dependent Applications. If I click on that, it's going to show me the application that we pulled from AppD and the current health status.

y>And that's how easy it is to set up AppDynamics integration within ThousandEyes. So you can set up the connection, then easily start getting in data for test recommendations that will allow you to quickly deploy tests for applications or URLs that you might be missing today.

Now, let's jump over to AppDynamics and take a look at the integration on that side. We're now looking at the AppDynamics dashboard. You can see we're under the App view for this e-commerce application. And we've actually already integrated in the connection to ThousandEyes, so we're getting those network metrics populated. Alongside all the other metrics graphs that AppDynamics normally provides, you're now seeing test data for latency, packet loss, and jitter coming directly from your ThousandEyes test.

In order to configure this, we can go to the Integrations tab under Administration and click on ThousandEyes. You'll be able to enable your integration here and give it the authorization token that you can retrieve from the ThousandEyes dashboard. Once you click Save, the integration will then connect ThousandEyes and start pulling in the network metrics.

n>Once the connection is made, if you navigate over to User Experience, you'll see all the different applications you have, but now you'll see the Domains covered by ThousandEyes field. So this allows you to quickly view which applications have tests associated within ThousandEyes already created for them.

n>And again, then you can navigate back to that dashboard if you wish to view the metrics for that specific application. You can hover over the timeline to view the individual data points and the values associated with them. And if you click on the Show ThousandEyes Test button, you can also view the tests associated with this application. This allows you to directly link to the ThousandEyes test and bring up that view within the ThousandEyes UI.

n>So it's really easy to get the ThousandEyes data into AppDynamics and start showing those network metrics alongside of the application stats. It also makes it really easy to view which applications have tests associated with them in ThousandEyes and view the individual stats to dive in further if you'd like. So that's a quick look at the bi-directional integration between ThousandEyes and Cisco AppDynamics. Easy to set up and start getting value on both products from the data that we can share.