Idea Exchange Submission Guidelines

[Jeanie.Kedia]

What is the Idea Exchange?

The Idea Exchange is a place for AppDynamics customers to share, vote, and discuss product enhancements that need innovative thinking. Once an idea is submitted, customers are able to vote and comment on each other's ideas.

Here's what you need to know to participate in the Idea Exchange:

• How do I Access the Idea Exchange? 
• How does the Idea Exchange work? 
• What information do I need to include in my idea submission? 
• What do the Idea statuses mean? 
• What idea labels can I use? 

How do I access the Idea Exchange?

First, sign in to Community and then navigate to the Idea Exchange in the top navigation.
 https://community.appdynamics.com/t5/Idea-Exchange/idb-p/ideas 

PLEASE NOTE | the Idea Exchange is not available to trial or free users. 

How does the Idea Exchange work?

1. Search Idea Exchange. If your idea or a similar idea already exists in the Idea Exchange, add comments and vote for the existing one.

NOTE | Please avoid submitting duplicate ideas. Community managers will merge duplicate ideas together.

2. Upvote and Comment. If the idea already exists, vote it up and add your own experiences and details. The more we know, the better the chances the idea may come to fruition. Please return often to review and vote on submitted ideas.
   
   
3. Read Guidelines and Submit a New Idea. The better your idea write-up, the more persuasive it may be to other Idea Exchange participants.  Have a look at this guide for help.

4. Rally for votes. Once your idea has been submitted, we encourage you to influence your peers and fellow community members to bolster your idea.

5. Keep tabs on status. It is our commitment to you to be as transparent and communicative as we can be regarding Idea Exchange submission processes and status. While we can make no promises, we can help you be heard.
   
   See the list of possible idea status and their descriptions, below.

What information do I need to include in my Idea submission?

Be sure to start with a clear problem statement. Rather than jumping to a solution, tell us what's causing you pain and why you need this idea to be implemented in the product. Including use cases, business impact, and workaround(s) used can strengthen your idea.

Product Label

Choose at least one from the predefined list of product labels to help categorize the idea. See that list of predefined labels and their descriptions, below. 

Idea Tags ^optional

You can write in a freeform tag to call out keyword(s) that could help clarify your idea and help others find it. It's preferable to avoid duplicating the product label here, since it won't help and may actually blur the readability of your idea.

NOTE |Ideas aren't ready for voting until their information is complete. When a submitted idea is missing any required information, we'll reach out to complete it. 

What do the idea statuses mean?

Open For Comment
This is the default status for all Ideas. As long as the idea is complete, it will remain in this status. The more detailed your idea is, the greater chance it has of picking up more votes. 

Incomplete: Need More Info
Additional information is required to determine the customer impact of this submission. This idea cannot be further evaluated without more information. Help out where you can to unstick this idea!

We're Working On It
This idea submission is now in the product backlog. The product management team is in active conversation to work on this idea with the community.

Please continue to vote, and provide comments or feedback to further bolster or otherwise help the process along. Watch for AppDynamics product team comments as applicable.

Not Planned Yet
This idea may have been reviewed and deemed as “not planned yet” for various reasons including: it does not fit with the current product roadmap, low demand, lack of strategic fit, lack of tech feasibility, too heavy of a lift, etc. Please continue to actively vote on and give feedback on this idea submission. And please provide more use cases that could bolster it back into contention.

Now Available
Success! This idea has come to fruition and is now available in the AppDynamics product.

Thanks for influencing and contributing to this customer-driven enhancement.

What Idea labels can I use?

When you submit an idea/feature enhancement request to the Idea Exchange, please choose at least one label from this list. You can also choose an optional secondary label from these options.

Idea Label	Description (if any)
Accounts Admin	An AppDynamics administrator’s ability to register their users and manage those user’s access to AppDynamics.com services (e.g., Learn, Help, Community).
Agents	An agent is code that collects and reports data. Agents can refer to languages (Java, Node.js, Python, etc), machines (hardware and network data), databases, etc. Tag and Agent: All Agents; SAP; IBM; DCI (Deep Code Insights) Powered by Rookout
Alerts and Health Rules	An alert is an Email, SMS, or customized external notification interface that notifies you of a problem or event.
Analytics and BiQ	Business Impact. This provides business performance correlation with application performance. Includes Analytics Search, Business Journeys, Experience Level Management, Transaction Analytics, Custom Data Collection, Log Analytics.
Browser Real User Monitoring
Browser Synthetic Monitoring
Connected Devices (Mobile)	All mobile apps and devices — e.g., Mobile Phones and IoT sensors/devices
Controller	Collects, stores, analyzes and baselines performance data collected by agents. UI and Display.
Controller Admin	An account owner’s ability to administer controller identity settings, users, groups, and permissions.
Dashboards and Reports	This covers all dashboarding within AppDynamics, including Dash Studio, the legacy Custom Dashboards, and the Analytics dashboard builder.
Databases	Relational and/or NoSQL databases being monitored by AppDynamics Database Visibility. Databases can include Couchbase, DB2, MongoDB, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL and Sybase, as well as cloud-hosted DBaaS offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.
Extensions	Monitoring modules that are plugged into a machine agent or machine agent enabled for Server Visibility (sometimes called a SIM agent) to push "custom metrics" into the AppDynamics platform. Custom metrics are metrics not provided by default by AppDynamics agents.
Integrations	Modules that integrate AppDynamics with third-party systems by exporting AppDynamics business entities like applications, tiers, nodes, business transactions, backends, events, metrics, etc., into the third-party platform. It may also include importing some of the third-party systems' business entities into AppDynamics.  May also include Software Development Kits (SDKs).
IoT for Connected Devices
Licensing
Mobile Apps	Native mobile apps provided by AppDynamics for iOS and Android. These apps provide mobile-tailored user experiences and are available to all users of AppDynamics.
Mobile Real User Monitoring
My Profile and My Account	All things related to your AppDynamics profile and your preferences. NOTE | this is your profile/account for appdynamics.com services, not the Controller account or profile.
Networking
Notifications
On premises (On prem)	Refers to an AppDynamics installation where the Controller is installed on machines under the company's own administration.
Other	Use this catch-all label if you are not able to find a more relevant one among the available selections. Please do add relevant freeform tag(s) to help us categorize and surface your idea.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
SaaS	AppDynamics platform and applications delivered as SaaS - includes security of SaaS environment (i.e., SOC 2 items), data privacy requirements for SaaS specifically, upgrade experience, maintenance notifications and availability reporting via the status page.
Servers

[Jim.Ritchey]

Hi.  I was trying to post an Idea, but I don't see a button to create a new idea.  It appears that the Idea Exchange is relatively new, so maybe I don't have the necessary access?  (For example, I don't see "New! Idea Exchange" in the header of the Community page ... I was given a direct link to the Idea Exchange in a Support Ticket).   Thoughts?  Thanks.  

[Ryan.Paredez]

Hi @Jim.Ritchey ,

You should have access now! You should have been set up last week, something must have happened. Can you check again, please?

[Jim.Ritchey]

That fixed it.  The Community Page now has a tab/link at the top for the new Idea Exchange, and the "Suggest an Idea" button is now visible.  Thanks. 

[Tori.Walsh]

I created an idea but I didn't see how to add the two product labels. I made them tags - but that doesn't seem like what you were suggesting we do.

P.S. The website could use some performance improvements.

Thanks.

[Ryan.Paredez]

Hi @Tori.Walsh,

When on the create idea page, you would have seen this screen (image below), here you just click on one of the blue words/phrases to add those in. 

Can you provide a bit more details on the performance aspect? Was it a particular page or the community as a whole? 

 

[Ryan.Paredez]

Hello everyone,

When creating an Idea Exchange post, it's okay to reference a Support ticket, but we ask that you just leave the ticket number and not the full URL or a hyperlink. 

As an example: ^ Zendesk ticket #12345

Thanks,

Ryan, AppD Community Manager

[Richard.Haylor]

Hi.  I was trying to post an Idea, but I don't see a button to create a new idea.  It appears that the Idea Exchange is relatively new, so maybe I don't have the necessary access?  (For example, I don't see "New! Idea Exchange" in the header of the Community page ... 

[Ryan.Paredez]

Hi @Richard.Haylor 

I checked and you should have access to the Idea Exchange. Our navigation has changed and I have updated this TKB to reflect that change. The ability to create content is only available once signed in.

Please click on the Idea Exchange location in the nav, and on the right side, a little bit down is the option to create a new idea.

Please let me know if you still have issues!

[Ryan.Paredez]

Hi @Rajesh.Ganapavarapu,

I have reached out to you privately to help. 

[Claudia.Landivar]

Hello, Community — Just a heads-up that I've fixed the broken TOC links on this article, so they should work as expected now.