“Is it possible to run the AppDynamics controller within my own Microsoft Azure IaaS?”
I hear this question fairly regularly and would like to walk you through how to host the controller in your own Azure cloud. First off, the pros of having AppDynamics with Azure:
AppDynamics works by placing an agent running on your servers which reports to the controller. It’s common to have several agents monitoring your applications. To further the ease of use, we monitor Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, and now, C++ all in one single pane of glass. Your Azure architecture might look something like this:
A unique feature for AppDynamics is flexible deployment. Typically, legacy APM solutions rely on on-premise deployment, whereas newer companies are Saas-only. At AppDynamics you can run the controller on-premise, leverage the AppDynamics SaaS option, or deploy a hybrid mixture.
To run the controller in your Azure IaaS you can leverage the security of the on-premise deployment option and install the controller the same way as if you would in your datacenter. This allows you to have full control over the your data and be the gatekeeper to access that data.
Important to note:
The second is very important to configure as the controller installs a database which requires high I/O throughput. The recommended best practice is to treat the VM the same as you would be running a SQL server on it. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn133149.aspx
If you forget to do this, you run the risk that the performance of the controller will slow down. This will not slow down your monitored applications as the agents are implemented to be non-blocking. However, the slowness will cause controller UI to lag and hard to visualize the collected data.
Hope this helps and you can choose the option which works the best for your organization! Try it out now, for FREE!
