Smart Agent for AppDynamics

Okay, without such further ado, I am very happy to hand things over to our 1st speaker of the day.00:09Essentially the only speaker besides me popping up now and then, joining us from Melbourne Australia. We have Paul. Paul is our customer success specialist who works closely with our customers on adoption, operational efficiency as well and definitely an expert or go to person for.00:18The best practices around AppDynamics.00:38Paul is definitely the most, one of our most practical oriented and brings in the field driven perspective. So he'll walk us through how smartations work, common challenges it solves, and what essentially it looks like in real time environments. So.00:41Over to you Paul. Thanks very much Ankur. I must say that it's probably one of the best intros I've heard for these EIS sessions, so well done as Ankur has said, I'm Paul Mateous based out of maer.01:00Open.01:19So now everyone is well acquainted with myself and Anchor, so so please during this call and definitely after this call, feel free to to reach out to us now that you know us, personally, we're we're definitely more than happy and delighted to continue your observability.01:20Ability journey after this call. So this is smart agent. It's something that I'm quite passionate about because I I do think it adds extreme value to our customers. It's one of the most significant inn innovations that have come out of AppDynamics in the last few years.01:40And if you're still in that holiday mode, hopefully this feature can continue giving you peace and, and my peace of mind and and easy use of AppDynamics especially within the agent management management space.01:57I just have a few slides, as Ankur said, there's definitely not a sales pitch, but we do want to put into context why I think and we think this feature is quite significant. And as Ankur had mentioned this slide here showing the amount of effort and expense that actually is involved in ensuring your.02:18Agents are up to date, and that you have the most recent features, to get the best value out of your out of your investment. Some of our customers are upwards of tens of thousands of agents, some pushing a million agents. So you can only.02:38Reimagine, the amount of work and effort it takes them to, to plan out and coordinate and ensure successful agent upgrades. Hopefully this tool will start mitigating and eliminating those those efforts.02:58The tool in itself is is evolving very, very rapidly with every every customer feedback request that we get. You know, our, our engineers are very, very open and, and, and actually quite motivated in, in ensuring that this feature.03:19Becomes best of class and drives AppDynamics agent management into the future. So apart from things like instrumentation, upgrades, rollbacks, installations, we are also looking at auto discovery.03:39And making sure all of this ties into your CICD pipelines. So a lot of different capabilities that are that are presented to you today and we're gonna try to to cover those in the hands on demo.03:59So, hopefully you're familiar with the the new screens we've added in AppDynamics, but if not, this is the agent management screen that where you will see all of your agents and the current versions that, that they're currently sitting on and the.04:19We also we've provided some type of currency in terms of whether your agents are out of date or requiring upgrades or at the latest versions. The the UI also facilitates the ability to do bulk.04:39Manage your agents, so you can select more than more than one and many agents at a time to do your agent management.04:59So everything here in this UI is also available in our, in our CTL, command where you can drive everything through the command line, and also obviously that then allows you to customize your CICD or automatic.05:10Scripts to interact with the smart agent features.05:30So as it entails, it is push button upgrades, so our basic vanilla upgrades are very very simple. Select the agents that are showing that there are available newer versions and then follow the, the prompts in terms of upgrading those agents.05:38You can select from default upgrade settings, where it will essentially pull down the required binaries from our AppDynamics portal. Or there are definitely custom upgrade options where your binaries maybe stored in your own secure.05:59Your repositories.06:18We'll definitely go through an installation. We won't go through an upgrade today, but we'll go through an installation and you'll see the a very similar process. So as I said, this is definitely rapidly evolving. We have some new features that are currently available to us at the moment such.06:23Is auto attach, we're we're looking at these other features that are also enhancing and making quick work of your agent management such as auto detect and auto deploy. These are all in our roadmap and and have been playing around with some of the.06:43It's already. I'm happy to, to say that we could we will be able to demo the auto attached feature today. But hopefully in future sessions I'll be able to also demonstrate the other, the other features that are rolling out this year.07:03And as I said, the th the feature is fully capable and integratable into your CICD pipelines because now it is a API driven tool, then we'll start, you know, utilizing those capabilities using.07:24Your preferred.07:45CICD toolsets, DevOps toolsets. So definitely a lot of benefits once this is rolled out. I'm very, very keen for all of our customers to gain the, the benefits that this feature does provide.07:47Operational efficiency for your teams, access business critical capabilities, so as I said, you know, we are receiving a lot of good feedback from our customers and what they're wanting to see. This tool to allow them to do, and then hopefully, you know, that.08:07Those new features and return the value that that they're looking for from their AppDynamics investments. Performance and business context in in minutes, so you know that you that UI definitely shows all your agents in the one and and their current versions in the one place. You can.08:27And, you're automatically told or or shown which agents are critically needing upgrades. So you're not all you're not having to worry about you know these.08:46These loss cheap in the wilderness that may, be running very old or critical versions that, that are requiring upgrade. Everything is there for you to see and you can act accordingly.09:03So as I said it was only a short set of slides. This is a, you know, an expert insight so we will be going through the demo straight away. But I just wanted to show a couple of next steps. So take a good guided tour. If you have not already reach out to your rsmiss, your, your.09:21Ses or myself and Anchor and and we can definitely bring this into your organization and and take more deep deep dive deep dive guided tools of the, of this feature.09:41Please join our Spark community. You know, everything that our customers require and the feedback that they they that they give us, a lot of conversations happen through the the Spark community. Download the smart agent.10:02It's free. So, there is NO extra license required to download or to use. You know, as I said it it provides great value and knowing that it's free, you can test it out today. It's in, it's in, it's been in GA for, for.10:18For quite some time now, as I said, we're rolling out features every release, so so definitely after this call if you have not already, I I highly encourage that you download it, and start having to play.10:38Okay, so there's our contact details on the screen now. As I said, you know, after this call, we hope that Anchor and I and my team can continue your observability journey. The call doesn't end just with a presentation here, but hopefully it starts with a good sold relationship that we can build on.10:55Alright, I'll stop this and I'll prepare my anchor if you'd like to take the presentation for a second while I prepare my screen. Sure I think what might be I pull up a question that I've like received and.11:17I.11:37Q and A, maybe we can just prep it up where for the later part of the session. There were two questions around the cost part of the licensing like for the smart agent, so it says are there any hidden costs like increased data ingestion or storage?11:37She's using smart agent.11:57Yeah, definitely, definitely not, definitely not. The, the entire use of smart agent is free, apart from obviously, allocating some resources to run the agent on, on your side. There is, there's absolutely NO licensing or consumption.12:01Costs that are required.12:21That's a relief Paul. In fact, it makes it more comfortable or convenient for anybody who wants to go and give their hands on what smart agent essentially is all about. So I think there is NO roadblockers here if anybody wants to give it a try. Right, thank you. Alright, let's see.12:24If we can continue our demo, thanks very much for that Ankur. No worries.12:43Right, so everyone can see my screen here. I'm on the AppDynamics download page. Okay, so our journey will start by, by actually downloading the smart agent. So you've identified a a host machine that you'd like to start using as a, as a host.12:48Most for your applications and you would like to start monitoring those applications. Now normally, we would just download our, our, let's say.net agent or machine agent, and then we would, install it manually on that machine, and then modify.13:08There's some configuration files so that the monitoring is enabled on the machine. What we, what we're doing here is we're doing a manual install of smart agent on that, on that host, but.13:27In the real world in a production environment, this manual process would become an automated process that your CICD tool set would, would manage. So it would do something like grabbing a curl or a.13:40A binary endpoint where you can then start installing smart agent on your particular host. And in this case, we're going to do, we're going to do my laptop.13:59Yeah, let's get that screen. All right, so I'll just look for a.14:17There have a folder that we can put smarter agent into.14:36Okay, great, let's just create one here great and then let's see if we can get the binaries from our webpage.14:44Okay, great, and then let's see if we can unzip this.15:21Okay, so I'll just do it from Windows because I don't know what commands I've got available to me in my.15:38Let's see. Okay.15:45Okay, I actually need it.16:05In this folder, so I'll just move it up one folder.16:11Okay, so one of the things that we need to do, like any agent in AppDynamics is actually connect the agent back to the controller. So there is a config file that we need to edit.16:31And we're I'm going to use one of our demo AppDynamics controllers, and we're going to provide some.16:57Connection and authentication values and I'll just move the screen out while I type in the access key.17:16Okay.17:55Yeah, so our binaries are ready. Our configuration file is set, and now all we have to do is run our smart agent, and it will run it as a, as a.18:02Service. So let's go to that directory.18:21Let's see. Yep.18:30Oh sorry ok let's see. Alright, let's find the command that's required.18:48So in our, and this is a good segue to our documentation, so in our Splunk AppDynamics documentation, you will find a smart agent section here. And then in this you'll should see a installed smart agent. And then we've we've already done a couple of our steps.19:13C12 and three and then now we're doing this step here, but we're doing it for Windows.19:33Now I'm pretty sure that's what that's the command I put, but hopefully, why is that not working?19:43There we go. Okay, great. Let's check to see if it's running. Great. And if I.20:10Look for some services.20:23I should now see that appdynamics smart agent is running as a service on my Windows machine. Okay, great. Let's have a look at whether the controller can now see, this smart agent.20:32So if we go to our SE lab controller, and if you go to agent management.20:49Smart agents. Now we should see here this one here. Now, this one is a pre prepared one that we'll use later, but this is the one that I've just installed recently. So it's on my machine, on Windows.21:11Right, and it's showing that it's the latest version. Now that that's it from from a manual installation of smart agent, right? As you saw in the installation guide.21:29There is a step by step guide on how to do this manually, but if this was to be automated, then you would we would then translate this and and use either this remote YAML feature, to or or script this out as a, as a.21:44An independent script to, to roll out the installation of smart agent.22:04Now the installation of the smart agent does have to go out to every single host that you want to, to start monitoring. It only, it only has a very small overhead, because of the fact that all it does is.22:09Does installations or updates or any any agent commands that, that are given to it to do. It doesn't actually monitor applications, it doesn't send back metric information or or.22:30Or beacons, it just sits there every every 5 min or so it checks for any new requests that have come in from the controller. If there's none, it won't do anything. But if there is then it will go off and, and, start kicking off.22:47That task that has been requested by, by its user.23:07All right, so let's use smart agent. We're here now, we have a smart agent on my machine, I want to install a machine agent. So if I go to machine agents at the moment and my machine I think starts with SCS.23:14Okay, this, this one sh is not associated ok so yeah I think I I've removed this before we started the presentation, so we'll, we'll install a new one, a machine agent. So this is the UI now.23:33That we're using for installing agents. As you can, as you saw here we've got these supported agent types that you can, you can use install. We're going to select the.23:52The host, the directory that the install will, will go to. Now there's a whole heap of configurations that can be applied to this. As you can see here, we've got all the different versions of machine agent that we can.24:11Install on that server. We're, we're currently using the AppDynamics.24:31Portal to download the, the binaries, but as you can see there are different options here to do installs from other locations. I'm gonna select Sim enabled so we can get some deeper machine insights, and other as I said, there's other configurations that we can apply while we're doing.24:36Our agent install.24:56So typically this is what our control info file would look like when we're doing our install, and the, the UI is basically summarizing what it's going to, to do and and these are the values that it's going to apply to those sets of binaries. So let's submit this.25:00Okay, so now the task has, has been submitted, so what does that actually entail? This bit of configuration is now available for the smart agent to pick up. So within a 5 min period, our smart agent that was installed on our machine will go.25:20Go to the controller and see if there are any.25:41Requests such as this that it needs to do. So then on the response of that request will be the values that are needed to register that new agent back to their controller. But in terms of actually doing the job, the smart agent.25:45Will do the job independent of the controller. So the smart agent will run its its Ansible Ansible scripts, and it will actually go out, and, and, get those binaries.26:04And then start running the installation procedure. Now, if you recall, we did request it to go to a folder here, so in a few moments we should see a new folder in this app dynamics folder called machine agent.26:22But while that is happening, let's have a look at another feature, which is quite quite new, only a few months now that it's been released and which is called the auto attach feature. So to show off this auto attached feature, it's going.26:39I get a little bit more technical now, I have three terminals here. I'll just show off our.26:58One of these, sorry, folders, it's a plassic Java application called pet clinic.27:09Now pet pet clinic, as I said, it's a, it's a classic Java application. I've I've compiled it here on my local machine, so I have now a, a little java.27:28Java.jar file that I can run and execute, right? When I run and execute this, it's going to start up a web application in that I can navigate through it and I can search, do some searches, add some records.27:44Now typically, if I wanted to, start monitoring this pet clinic application, I would have to instrument it with a Java agent. And to do that, I would have to start altering this startup command for this.28:01Java application, so adding the Java agent parameter into the startup command. What we've done with auto attach.28:21A smart agent is now smart enough to, understand what type of processes you're running on that host. So if it's a Java application in any type of deployment, whether it be Tomcat or Spring Boot and all the different.28:33Number of different ones. PHP, Python.28:53Not.net yet, it is still being worked on. But the premise is that when smart agent recognizes the processes that are running on your machine, you are then able to automatically attach the appropriate agent.28:58To that application, and that that agent will start up and start monitoring that application and start sending metrics to, to AppDynamics straight away. This is gonna happen quite quickly. So what I'll do is I'll I'll have I'll show you, applications.29:18And just so that I'm not that you're, that you you know I'm not, I haven't pre prepared anything. I've looked for Theos application. It's not here at the moment, right? And also, if I go to local host 8080 you'll see that.29:37There's NO application running.29:57So let's start up the spring, yeah, the pet clinic application somewhere. Here's the command. Hopefully I don't deliver oh there it is. Right, so java.jar-jar and then in my target folder, just run the jar file.29:59Okay, so as you can see, I've got some logs coming out referring to the Java agent already, right? Now, my startup script has NO reference to that Java agent.30:19As I said before, right? This is purely a smart agent recognizing that this process is, is a a Java application and now it is calling upon the Java agent, to actually instrument this this.30:39Application. So the Java agent has started up. So in my Java agent configuration, I have not mentioned anywhere about this application and now the pet clinic.30:59Java application is starting up So this will currently work with Python, with PHP.31:17All the different, Java deployments, and hopefully.net very soon.31:32Okay, so, now it's ready to open in our browser. Let's have a look. And there we go, our classic pet clinic application. Now let's do some transactions.31:58Because as you know, AppDynamics won't show anything on the controller unless there are there's traffic coming from our monitored application. So let's see if we can search some owners. No, ok, let's see if we can.32:15Search. There we go. Let's have a look at Betty let's have a look perhaps let's add some visit information for Betty's pet here. We can have a look at different veterinarians.32:32Maybe generate some error logs, add a new owner, e.g., maybe add a new pet.32:55Alright, let's go back to our application. Let's refresh. There you go. As you can see now we've got the agent reporting.33:18To the controller after we have auto attached our Java agent to the Java application.33:30Here we can drill down and have a look to see if there's any traffic. Yes, we have some traffic, and as you can see here, we've also got some business transactions.33:39Right, it's the tears of nodes information and as you can see, our agent in the last, let's just go 5 min, is showing that, you know, it has only recently started four.33:5504:38 and we are at 04:41.34:15Right? Okay, let's go back to our machine agent installation. There you go. You can see now we have a new machine agent folder. If we go to our services and refresh, we have a new.34:19New machine agent service that is also running.34:38Now if we go back to our controller, and servers, there we go. Now this is only just started so the full metrics haven't come through yet. It usually takes about 5 min to have all.34:42All this information available for us but hopefully you know in in a few moments that information will come through as well.35:01So if we go back now and lastly, if we go back to our agent management screen, in our agents, app server, if I see a C, there we go. There is my Java agent that was attached automatically to the.35:11The application, right? So we didn't do any installation through here or any manual attachment so it's automatically attached those, that Java agent to that app. Machine agent here should be now available.35:31Also, there we go, with the appropriate smart agent ID, and with our smart agent, this should show one, which is connected and then this.35:48Should show, oh, ok, there might be a problem there, this also should show one. It does it does show the the Java agent but our our number hasn't been updated, so there could be a problem there. Alright.36:05That concludes my demonstration of appdynamics, and hopefully I'm leaving some time for Q and A but in terms of its its main features and some more, complex capabilities that we've shown there, hopefully.36:21That is going to excite you in this coming new year, to free up a lot more time rather than managing app dynamics agents.36:41So with that, I will give you back to Anchor. Thanks Paul, very well presented and walked or we had a wonderful walkthrough session as well. I'm sure there will be questions around this, that's some something that people could grab on that.36:54Early on, but that definitely leads the scope for further conversations and perhaps makes it more interesting. So Paul while you were walking us through the demo, we did have some questions around smart agents.37:14And there is one particularly interesting one, which is from packet systems, if I'm not mistaken, and it entails Kubernetes related.37:29I think in the official implementation or installation of smart agent related to Kubernetes platform. So is there something that you could share us share with us, Paul? So at the moment we're, we're not looking at smart agent in a Kubernetes.37:45Setting. The reason being is that there, there are many different ways for agent management and installation, right? And we feel that that Kubernetes workloads and managing agents through Kubernetes deploy.38:04Humans there is too many different nuances that customers are applying. So for us to drive a best practice approach with smart agent and Kubernetes, we'll prom.38:23Probably start opening up pandora's boxes when it comes to customers specific deployment requirements. So technically, the, this is just a set of binary files that run Ansible code. So there is not a technical.38:43Limitation in terms of applying this for to a Kubernetes setting. We can definitely work with you to to achieve that if that's something specific that you want to do. But from, from what we see that our customers are doing with, with their Kubernetes.39:04Deployment management, There's definitely too many nuances that that apply for many different customers.39:23Makes sense Paul. Thanks for that. We do have one more interesting question from Srinivas who would like to understand if there were some practical real world examples you could share with us which are like a success stories for smart agents particularly?39:35Yeah, definitely. Obviously here we we would wouldn't be able to do it publicly, but if we, if we got on a call with you after this, we would want, we would wanna see if we can tailor the, the success story with the organization that you.39:53You're working with so that we can give better like for like reference. So yeah, so definitely after the call or or email us directly, and we're more than happy to you know to to bring that success story information to you.40:13That's definitely going to be helpful. Thanks Paul and we are looking, we will be looking forward to the next set of engagement on a one on one basis so that we can, you know, delve more deeper into the real world examples.40:31Paul, there's another interesting ask perhaps not a question though. If somebody would like to get on a one on one session instead of like this group, expert series, what should be the process to understand the smart agent thing better?40:48Yes, so we do have our, our our our caller consultant available and just, go to our calling consult website and register your requirement and one of our customer success people that are closest to your region.41:05We'll be able to pick that up and, and, and contact you and start those discussions. If you already have a a great relationship with your rsmiss and your, your SEs, you know, definitely reach out to, to, to them and you know.41:25And they'll probably end up forwarding it to, to us anyway, but, but yeah, as I, as I said in the beginning of the call, because you you're well acquainted with, with our team now, don't hesitate to contact us either through the call and consultant channel or flick us an email, at least.41:45It's the caller consultant channel, there'll be you know a number of consultants that will be able to take that call if they're closer to your region. But yeah, well happy for you to email us directly and we'll we'll make sure either we will or people in your region will be able to.42:05Assist.42:25Thanks Paul. Again, like it really helps had I been on the other side of the panel, which is in the audience. A one on one thing definitely goes a long way to secure all these questions and even like the simplest of doubts that we have. So I would definitely look forward to it.42:27Session like that and the best way ahead would be to get in touch with your csmiss or any specialist that you're already in touch with.42:46And we'll definitely love to take the conversation forward. Okay, ok. Paul, the last one that I have in the list here is, how are smart agents patched or upgraded over time? Good question, excellent question. As you can see on this screen here, we actually.42:53Have smart agent now, sending back its agent currency. So after the the manual or the automated install using your CICD tools, smart agent is then manageable through.43:14The same process as the other agents. So here if I select one of these agents, I can then actually.43:34Click upgrade and it will take me through the same upgrade process as I would use for upgrading any other agent. It will retain or you can choose to retain all the configuration that was there previously or you can apply new ones.43:42But basically, that's as soon as it's reporting back to the controller, smart agent can be managed through smart agent.44:02That's ok While we were on to this particular question, there is one, another one that's popping up. Are smart agents compliant with the security policies of an organization? Yes, definitely. This is, I I.44:14Yes, this is one big reason why smart agent took a little while to come out into the marketplace. Normally agent management is done from a central point such as the controller and and then what it what it does, what it does, it, it will, it will go out into the field.44:33Build and start managing hosts.44:53From that central controller, right? Or central points. And you you will know that from many many of our competitors and and different products that manage agents in that way. Now, AppDynamics is is one of only very, very few solutions that have focused.44:56Based on agent management and everything agent related managed by the, the host themselves and all communications from our agents are pushed back to the controller. So in terms of security as a consideration.45:16We we have segregated smart smart agents just like every other agent away from our controller so that our controller is never maliciously at attacked from from our agents, right? The only the only communication that we, we do is.45:36We actually, send requests for.45:56Configuration information and the controller will, will respond with that configuration information. And as I said earlier, the agent is independent and will solely do its workload on that host and not affect the agent other control at all. It's also.46:00Cured the same way by all our our standards as any other agent SSL T TLS encryption of of keys all available there in the smart agent.46:20Thanks Paul. Another question here from Anita where she asks, she wants to confirm whether smart agent is compatible with all app the controller version. There is a version that we released a long time ago in control.46:39The land of 20 one.9I think don't don't you I might have to be corrected on that but basically any, any controller that has the smart agent UI.46:58Someone allowed to correct me, I can't remember the version smart agent, oh there we go. Smart agent smart agent will be, will be compatible, right? So, not only do you need the agent, obviously, on the host, but the controller itself will have some.47:16The new user interface that you will be able to interact with, with the smart agent.47:36Thanks again, Paul. Any questions? More questions from anybody from the audience? Okay, I don't see anyone typing in there yet. So with that, like essentially speaking, it was a great.47:43Walk in as well as talk by Paul and definitely a smart agent makes managing agents a lot easier if I will use the word scale, right from installation to upgrades and rollbacks. Definitely very little overhead and less of the manual effort.48:02For that, I would really like to say a big thanks for everybody joining us and definitely the most special shout out to Paul for the great walkthrough we had today. So, thank you everybody for your time and it's definitely was a pleasure seeing.48:22Everybody here today. With that being said, there are a couple of links, which is.48:41Some relates to the documentation. There is a collateral for PDF collateral to present on an executive level as well. In the chat space. Yet if you miss onto anything, do not hesitate to contact any one of us or email or your csmiss in particularly they will get back to you.48:49With that being said, definitely that's a wrap for the day and thanks everybody for your time.49:07