Its always great when customers want to build their own applications on top of your data and platform. A few weeks back one of our customers in Europe decided to build their own mobile application, so they could monitor the performance of their mission-critical business transactions from any smart phone or mobile device. Here is the unedited story we received of how this customer went mobile with AppDynamics:
I looked into AppDynamics’ REST API and was very keen to use that data but was unsure of how I could visualize the it. Since all data per monitoring point was available in either XML or JSON format, it seemed the ideal choice to go with a Javascript user interface. After searching around I found the Dojo Gauges and started to code up a simple webapp using AppDynamics’ REST API and data we collect everyday.
Technology Stack
Here is a quick overview of the architecture and technologies used in the mobile application. 
The Mobile Application
Our application is hosted within Django so I can use django’s powerful dynamic admin interface for a backend. Though this is not implemented yet so for now I am just using it to serve some Static content and proxy AJAX calls to AppDynamics.
The core application consists of:
- index.html
- dojo + jquery
- views.js + settings.js
- widget-glossygauge.js
- widget-jira.js
- images
Functionally, the webapp serves the basic static page layout to the browser on the client device and then instantiates the Dojo GlossyGauges which I have extended to include their own embedded self-update timers. The update timers update the gauge values by making REST calls to AppDynamics through the proxy module. The proxy module is necessary as the browser will block cross domain ajax requests. You probably don’t need it if you host the application on the same server as AppDynamics and use apache + mod_proxy.
Here is a screenshot of our mobile application:
The gauges update themselves in real-time so there is no need to refresh the page.
Adding new gauges is as simple as exporting the Information Point REST-URL from AppDynamics and adding it to my settings.js file and then creating a view for it in views.js. This manual process will be replaced by simply adding it to the Django admin interface at a later stage and then dynamically generating views.js and settings.js via a django view.
It was also simple enough to extend the interface to get current open cases from JIRA and retrieve current events from our CMS systems.
It is also possible to show our performance data by location on a map layout as shown below:
If you would like to share any applications, plugins or custom reports that utilize AppDynamics data then drop me an email at: appman @ appdynamics (.) com.
