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Nina.Wolinsky · ‎10-03-2018

As of October 15, AppDynamics has released the v4.5.2 of the Agents, Enterprise Console and Controller. This article includes information about these updates, current BETA programs, and a few other features and capabilities— see below for further details.

What are the highlights I should know about?

These release highlights will guide you through the newest features and capabilities. Notice in the grid below each feature enhancement identifies most interested or impacted users.

Product	Feature Enhancement	User and Performance Analyst	Admin and Implementer	Developer
Infrastructure	Platform Monitoring for Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)	✓	✓	✓
	Machine Agent Independent Release		✓
	Health Rules for Network Visibility Metrics	✓
Application Performance	Custom Correlation for Standalone Agents	✓	✓	✓
	Full Zend Opcache Support	✓	✓	✓
	IIB Agent: Auto-Discovery and Monitoring of Database Calls	✓	✓	✓
	EUM Correlation for Vert.x http	✓	✓	✓
	Enhanced Masking Capabilities for Sensitive Data Collection	✓	✓	✓
	Out of the Box Support for Jetty HTTP Client Versions 8 and 9	✓	✓	✓
Business Performance	ADQL String Manipulation Functions	✓	✓	✓
Extensions	AWS Kinesis	✓

Platform Monitoring for Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)

To separate the task of configuring APM and infrastructure monitoring, we've introduced a new tile on the Pivotal Network specifically for platform monitoring. There are now two AppDynamics tiles: Application Monitoring for PCF for configuring APM and Transaction Analytics, and Platform Monitoring for PCF for configuring infrastructure monitoring with KPI dashboards, health rules and alerts. Quick to install with minimal configuration, the new tile uses little memory and you can choose which AppDynamics Tile to deploy to each environment. We also updated the Nozzle implementation, replacing the Machine Agent-based metrics reporting mechanism with a light, Go Language-compliant Go SDK. To take advantage of this tile, you’ll need a Go SDK AppDynamics license. Read the full documentation and blog post for details, or learn about our recent Pivotal Award for Outstanding Solutions and Services.

pcf-kpi-dashboard-v2 (1).png

Machine Agent Independent Release

Starting in 4.5.2, you can take advantage of the newest Machine Agent enhancements and bug fixes without waiting for a Controller upgrade. The latest Machine Agents are backwards compatible with any 4.4.0+ Controller, so you can upgrade your agents while upgrading your Controller at a time that works best for you. Read the full documentation for more details.

Health Rules for Network Visibility Metrics

A new health rule type, Advanced Network, allows you to easily set health rules for metrics related to network activity, such as PIE (performance impact events), zero window, data retransmission, and errors. Read the full documentation for details.

Custom Correlation for Standalone Agents

Starting in 4.5.2, you can implement custom correlation to trace transactions spanning across tiers or parent-child threads using the .NET Microservices Agent for .NET Core and the .NET full framework. With custom correlation, you can gain deeper insight into your application, even when the default detection mechanisms are not capable of auto-correlating transaction. Read more configuring this for the .NET Microservices Agent here.

Full Zend Opcache Support

The PHP Agent is now fully compatible with Zend Opcache. Get the benefit of significant performance uplift by turning on Zend Opcache and get full visibility with AppDynamics. Review the full documentation on PHP versions and agent support.

IIB Agent: Auto-Discovery and Monitoring of Database Calls

The IIB Agent now automatically detects and monitors database interactions within flows, highlighting the impact of database performance on the performance of Business Transactions flowing through the IIB broker. Read the full documentation for details on the IBM Integration Bus Agent.

EUM Correlation for Vert.x http

Get the benefit of correlation EUM visibility and Business Transaction visibility with applications built on the Vert.x framework. Read the full documentation for details on supported Java frameworks.

Enhanced Masking Capabilities for Sensitive Data Collection

We've enhanced your data redaction capabilities to prevent sensitive personally identifiable information to be collected and exposed outside of the application. For more details, see the full documentation

Out of the Box Support for Jetty HTTP Client Versions 8 and 9

The out of the box configuration for the Jetty HTTP client, frequently used within Java applications, has been enhanced to provide automatic detection and correlation for versions 8 and 9 of the Jetty Client. For more details on out HTTP Client support, see the full documentation.

ADQL String Manipulation Functions

AppDynamics users who have collected data in the wrong structure, type, serialization, or format have previously needed to adjust their agent settings to specifically focus on insights of interest. Starting in 4.5.2, BiQ ADQL users have access to string manipulation functions, which empower ad-hoc data transformation for all event data in the analytics event service. With string information functions which return string length() and the indexOf() certain characters in a string, users can easily hone in on a substring(), combine multiple strings with the concat() operator, and trim() out unnecessary repeated characters from the beginning and ends of fields. Read the full documentation for details.

Extensions

This month, we developed four new AWS Kinesis extensions for capturing statistics from Amazon CloudWatch and displaying them in the AppDynamics Metric Browser:

See What’s Coming! Join a BETA today

We’re currently running several BETA programs and we’re looking for new participants:

To see a list of the latest active BETA programs, subscribe to the related discussion thread.

Resolved Issues

In September, we addressed multiple product issues in order to create an improved customer experience. Below are some of the key issues that were resolved:

Analytics

Funnel widget graphic shows no results even when results exist (ANALYTICS-8106)
When creating a Business Journey, choosing different data types for Primary Keys of different Milestones causes a validation error (ANALYTICS-8454)
Elasticsearch leader election fails in on-premises AppDynamics deployments (ANALYTICS-9498)

APM

OIT feature not working on JDK9 and JDK10 because of the absence of tools.jar (JAVA-3941)
4.5 agent does not start with WebLogic 10.0 (log4j) (JAVA-4020)
Missing Microsoft Azure search exit calls (DOTNET-2790)
SSRS crash due to agent-bootstrap-instrumentations (DOTNET-2787)

Database Visibility

Each Couchbase collector should consume one license per node (DBMON-3895)

End User Monitoring

Some internal errors are being reported as timeouts (SYNTH-2287)
Deep link to EUM Snapshot uses wrong appId (EUMUI-1337)
Correlated business transaction snapshots fail to open when no EUM session data exists (EUMUI-1496)

Comprehensive lists of resolved issues organized by product area are now available in 4.5.x Release Notes.

Get started>>

Download Essential Components (Application Agents, Enterprise Console and Controller (on-premise), Events Service. and EUM Components),

Product Announcements, Alerts, and Hot Fix Details
AppDynamics Upgrade Checklist For Any Release

Additional Resources

More on AppDynamics with Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, AWS, and PCF>>

If you are interested in learning more about what AppDynamics has to offer by way of cloud monitoring, check out our new Monitoring Cloud Applications documentation page. We think it’s a great resource— it’s a comprehensive guide on our cloud platform providers and how to keep track of changes in your infrastructure and components.

Update: Simplified Oracle and IBM DB2 Database Visibility Entitlements >>

Database Visibility for Oracle and IBM DB2 is now consistent with how we entitle for MS SQL server and MySQL, which is one license for each database instance.

Can’t find what you are looking for? Need more assistance? Ask a question in the Latest Release forum.

Nina.Wolinsky · ‎11-27-2018

Please note that we've published a Support Advisory regarding a compatability issue between the database agent and Controller. When upgrading to AppDynamics controller version 4.5.2, you may encounter issues with older database agent collectors.

As a resolution, you can upgrade to database agent version to 4.5.4, which is our latest stable build.

For details on this issue, including affected software, see the Support Advisory: Compatibility issue between database agent and controller