PO has decided to replace our Prometheus stack with AppDynamics

[Jason]

Hi

We run a Java application (Tomcat). We mainly use blackbox_exporter for
health and API endpoints (rules for bad response times, flapping
detection, parsing of health endpoint body and HTTP status). We use
node_exporter for the VM metrics (interactive Dashboards and some rules
for loadavg and CPU usage).

A Kubernetes monitoring is currently under construction, but this is far
from being in production.

The product owner has now decided that we will dispose of Prometheus and
migrate to AppDynamics. I don't know AppDynamics at all, but when
looking at marketing slides it looks like AppDynamics has a different
focus (performance management) than our Prometheus setup (probing).

Does anyone know AppDynamics and can say how easy a migration is and how
the tools differ? I hope you can't just replace Prometheus :-)

The only difference I know is Open Source vs. massive license fees.
However, our PO wants a strategy away from Open Source towards vendor
lock-in.

Are there things that I can implement in Prometheus that cannot be
migrated to AppDynamics ;-)?

cheers Jason

[Ben Kochie]

I don't have much comment on AppDynamics, as I've never used it.

But maybe what your PO is trying to get is something you're missing from the current Prometheus deployment. As you say, you're using probes for most of your monitoring.

What you're missing is instrumenting your java application directly with either the jmx_exporter of Prometheus client_java. 

cheers Jason

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[Jason]

On 14.06.20 06:26, Andy Kruta wrote:
> They're two completely different toolsets that provide different
> functionalities.  AppDynamics is much like New Relic.  It measures the
> performance from the end-user perspective, not from the system
> perspective.  Both are really needed.

Are you sure on that? There seems basic monitoring of CPU, Memory, I/O
included with Java agent (you install it on VM).

[Simon Lyall]

They do basic server/cluster monitoring that too but possible the APM is
what they want. Got that where I work. The Dev teams had no real
interest in the monitoring (prometheus had been setup) until someone with
New Relic experience joined.

The it's just "We just add in this library and we get all these pretty
dashboards" and now writing cheques as NR ramp up their k8s monitoring
product.

--
Simon Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.simonlyall.com/
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar

[Jason]

On 14.06.20 10:50, Ben Kochie wrote:
> I don't have much comment on AppDynamics, as I've never used it.
>
> But maybe what your PO is trying to get is something you're missing from
> the current Prometheus deployment. As you say, you're using probes for
> most of your monitoring.
>
> What you're missing is instrumenting your java application directly with
> either the jmx_exporter of Prometheus client_java.

I agree.