Content of the playbooks

Using this playbooks, you can deploy a simple web application and monitor it with Appdynamics. First, the plain application is deployed. Afterwards, the application is instrumented using a Java Agent, a Server Agent, and a DB Agent.

You can use this architecture for the following use cases:

• Appdynamics Masters Certification
• training of partners and customers
• preparation for a Proof of Concept (PoC)
• creation of a personal lab environment
• Webinars and DevNet events

The deployment automates every step on server side. However, the configurations in the Appdynamics user interface must still be done manually.

Prerequisites

This playbook has the following requirements:

• for the host that executes the playbook you must have ansible-playbook --version => 2.9.27
• VMs based on CentOS7 (you can collapse the deployment using 1 VM for all 3 ansible hosts)
• Python 2.7 must be installed with valid ssh connection for ansible
• appdynamics controller and licenses (e.g. https://www.appdynamics.com/free-trial/)
• valid configurations files (hosts, ansible.cfg, vars.yml and vault.yml)

Configuration files

To set your hosts/IPs, your ssh connection and your remote user, edit

• ./hosts
• ./ansible.cfg

You need to setup your credentials, appdynamics configurations, proxy and nts server in

• ./group_vars/all/vars.yml
• ./group_vars/all/vault.yml

The settings itself are described in the comments of the configuration files. You can set the parameters in the files directly or reference environment variables.

Workflow

You can deploy the whole architecture using main.yml. However, you can start the plays seperatly as well:

ansible-playbook 0_download_agents.yml
ansible-playbook 1_deploy_centos.yml
ansible-playbook 2_deploy_supercars.yml
ansible-playbook 3_deploy_appd.yml
ansible-playbook 4_inject_java_agent.yml
ansible-playbook 5_create_db_user.yml

If you want to manually deploy appdynamics, you can perform the deployment steps 0-2. Afterwards, you can follow the description in the github Wiki to train a manual deployment and configuration of the Appdynamics agents.

Getting help

If you need help with this code, you can do the folloowing:

• create an issue (preferred)
• ping me on webex (lhintzsc)
• write me a mail (lhintzsc@cisco.com)

Please note that I will priotize my daily tasks. As a result, there will be no SLA when you get an answer. However, I am happy to support if it is possible.

Credits and references

The following github resources were used to create the playbook:

• Supercars App
• ansible role for MySQL server
• ansible role for tomcat server