Agents and the controller

Monitor and analyze full-stack data with precision tracing and analysis across your highly distributed application landscapes.


What are agents and the controller?

AppDynamics agents are plug-ins or extensions that monitor the performance of your application code, runtime, and behavior. They’re  deployed to every corner of your application environment, from devices, to containers and hosts, to applications.


The AppDynamics controller receives metrics from agents and sends them instructions. All of this performance activity is displayed via the Controller UI, which allows you to view data insights from multiple applications in one place.

How agents deliver precision insights

Once deployed, Agents immediately monitor every line of code. Unique tags are assigned to every method call and every request header. This allows AppDynamics to trace every transaction from start to finish — even in modern, distributed applications.

Supported platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and multi-cloud.

Smart Agent

The Smart Agent is installed once per machine and orchestrates agent lifecycle management tasks such as installing agents at scale. The Smart Agent helps drive quicker adoption and more efficient management for APM needs and future-proofs your investment by ensuring you are running the latest in features and security offerings. 

How the controller helps resolve issues, fast

The Controller is updated in real-time, even in hyper-complex applications with thousands of Agents, helping you monitor, troubleshoot and analyze your entire application landscape — from backend infrastructure to the end user — in one simple interface.

Agent Management User Interface

The Agent Management user interface provides a centralized approach to agent management, providing a robust and friendly way to help streamline agent management tasks such as remote installations, upgrades, rollbacks, etc. of agents at scale. Perform bulk operations and gain insights quickly as to the status and version of your agents, allowing you, with push button functionality, to manage the entire agent lifecycle.

Some of the languages we support

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