How to Monitor Your Atlassian Tools With AppDynamics

As part of our Application Performance Management solution, AppDynamics automatically discovers the topology of your distributed application (application flow map shows the interconnections between different parts of your application – Figure 1) and provides a unified monitoring capability for your application and infrastructure components.

Figure 1: Unified Monitoring Capability with the help of application flow map.

It also automatically discovers the business transactions in your applications (Figure 2), computes performance baselines and generates alerts based on various configurable conditions.

Figure 2: Business Transactions as shown in AppDynamics.

As part of the Infrastructure Visibility tool, AppDynamics provides the notion of extensibility through AppDynamics Extensions where it can monitor or integrate with any of your existing tools with minimal efforts. We now have 140+ extensions covering a wide range of categories like Big Data, Message Queues, Cloud Providers, databases (SQL/NoSQL) etc. and can be downloaded from the AppDynamics Community Exchange.

This blog will provide a brief overview of the AppDynamics extensions that specifically allow for integration with Atlassian’s products, including JIRA, HipChat, Bamboo, BitBucket, and Confluence.

Types of AppDynamics Extensions

AppDynamics Extensions are broadly divided into two categories: monitoring and alerting.

Monitoring Extensions: The sole purpose of these extensions is to extract performance and infrastructure metrics from any software artifact. Automatic baselines are created from the metrics and you can create dashboards and health rule alerts based on these.

Figure 3: Dashboard created using metrics extracts through CouchDB Monitoring Extension.

Alerting Extensions: These extensions are connectors that integrate events generated in AppDynamics to any third party alerting system being used in your environment.

Figure 4: Health rule violation Alert in AppDynamics.

Support for Atlassian Products

AppDynamics has partnered with Atlassian to integrate their products with the AppDynamics ecosystem. Below is a deep dive into each of the integration

1. AppDynamics Alerting Extension for JIRA

AppDynamics integrates directly with JIRA to create JIRA tickets in response to events being generated in AppDynamics. With theAppDynamics Alerting Extension for JIRA extension, you can leverage your existing ticketing infrastructure to notify the operations team and resolve performance degradation issues.

Resolve issues in a more efficient, automated process.

Figure 5: AppDynamics health rule violation as shown in Atlassian’s JIRA

2. AppDynamics Alerting Extension for HipChat

The AppDynamics Alerting Extension for HipChat enables AppDynamics to post custom notifications as messages to a HipChat room. Chat room members can see a brief description of the health rule violation or event and get more detail on AppDynamics by following the URL provided in the alert message.

Team members can now collaborate in real-time, wherever they are to resolve issues quickly.

Figure 6: AppDynamics health rule violation as shown in Atlassian’s HipChat.

3. AppDynamics Monitoring Extension for Confluence

The AppDynamics Monitoring Extension for Confluence extracts various usage statistics from Confluence and shows them in the AppDynamics Metric Browser. These metrics are then baselined in the AppDynamics ecosystem. You can also create custom health rule alerts and custom dashboards from these metrics.

4. AppDynamics Monitoring Extension for Bamboo

The AppDynamics Monitoring Extension for Bamboo extracts various build statistics like the number of tests failed from Bamboo and shows them in the AppDynamics Metric Browser. Again, custom dashboards, baseline computation and configuration of health rule alerts is possible on these metrics.

5. AppDynamics Monitoring Extension for BitBucket

The AppDynamics Monitoring Extension for BitBucket extracts various repository statistics from BitBucket.

For more action on AppDynamics Extensions, please join us at AppSphere.