AppDynamics Interview Questions

Are you preparing for AppDynamics interview? Are you sure you have covered all the basic advanced-level questions? If not, then our guide on AppDynamics interview questions 2023 will help you crack the interview. In this blog, we have prepared AppDynamics interview questions and answers prepared by industry experts so that you can ace your interview.

But before moving on to the questions, let's know a little about AppDynamics. AppDynamics is an APM (a full-stack application performance management) and ITOA (IT Operations Analytics). The headquarters of this company is situated in San Francisco. The primary object of AppDynamics is to analyze and manage the performance and availability of applications across network architectures, threat detection, digital user experience design, cloud computing environments and many more.

Here are some important and interesting AppDynamics facts that everyone should know:

#1

Jyoti Bansal founded AppDynamics in 2008 and was initially a lead software architect at Wily Technologies.

#2

In January 2017, Cisco announced taking hold of AppDynamics for a net worth of $3.7 billion. 

#3

In the 2016 Forbes Cloud 100 list, AppDynamics finished 9th position.

 

The above key points clearly state the demand for AppDynamics professionals. We are confident that our AppDynamics interview questions can assist you in cracking the interview and bagging your dream job.

In this article, we will cover the following:

• AppDynamics Interview Questions
• AppDynamics Tool Interview Questions

Most frequently asked AppDynamics Interview Questions

What are app agents in AppDynamics? What is a flow map in AppDynamics? What are Tiers in AppDynamics? What is Dynatrace? What do you know about AppDynamics? Explain the different kinds of reports. Define Absolute Layout.

AppDynamics Interview Questions

Q1) What are app agents in AppDynamics?

Ans: These agents capture app data and metrics for creating specific flow maps with the help of built-in app detection and configuration parameters. The applications frameworks which are the most common in use are automatically discovered and suggested by the AppDynamics app agents. 

Q2) What is AppDynamics?

Ans: AppDynamics is a platform that monitors the performance of any business website or application.

Q3) What is a flow map in AppDynamics?

Ans: It is a visual representation of the application's components to help us understand the data revolution among them.

Q4) What is AppDynamics Node?

Ans: The smallest unit of the model environment of the application is called a Node. 

Q5) What are Tiers in AppDynamics?

Ans: The collection of a set of nodes in an AppDynamics design is known as a tier. The conceptual environment of the model determines the way of organization of the tier.

Q6) What is an entity in AppDynamics?

Ans: The entities AppDynamics monitors, generally the applications, tiers, nodes, etc., are called entities. Metrics, events and a healthy state are usually related to these entities.

Q7) What is Dynatrace?

Ans: Dytrance agents capture the stack traces of all the transactions which are executed. Still, the stack traces which are captured are in a limited amount, which is different from AppDynamics, which captures comprehensive and detailed stack traces, but only the threshold performance is affected.

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Q8) What do you mean by a Standalone Machine Agent?

Ans: This Standalone Machine Agent is a Java program that helps to add and edit custom metrics in the basic metrics given in the application.

Q9) How to monitor servers using AppDynamics?

Ans: To complete this task, we require the Controller and a Machine Agent installed on the device. The users need to specify the URI of the controller in the machine agent configuration. The agent then begins to report the machine metrics to the controller. The user can then do many tasks such as set alarms, make dashboards and many more.

Q10) Which is the best API does AppDynamics support?

Ans: There are several APIs shown on the APM platform of AppDynamics for customizing its functions, both to the controller and the agent. All the AppDynamics APIs currently available are shown in the given link:

https://docs.appdynamics.com/display/PRO21/AppDynamics+APIs

Q11) What is OpenTelemetry in AppDynamics?

Ans: It is a new framework that allows the users to observe how the telemetry data, such as logs, metrics, etc., are transferred to the backend platform of their choice.

Q12) What do you know about AppDynamics?

Ans: AppDynamics provides insight into application performance and usage to help you optimize applications. It contains tools to monitor your web, mobile, cloud and desktop applications and performance statistics that help discover issues before they impact your business.

Q13) What is the fundamental difference between an agent and a monitor in AppDynamics?

Ans: A monitor is a process that runs on a machine and collects data about how the machine is functioning. An agent is a program that runs on a computer and collects information about how applications work, such as how long they take to load and how much space they use on the hard drive.

Q14) How does AppDynamics increase the performance of an application?

Ans: AppDynamics provides real-time, deep insights into application performance and resource utilization behaviour. With this data, you can quickly identify and diagnose problems, better understand how your applications are being used across the organization, and improve their overall performance.

Q15) What is AppDynamics usually used for?

Ans: AppDynamics is a monitoring tool that helps you track down issues with your application and monitor its performance over time. AppDynamics can also help you provide capacity planning information on how an application uses resources.

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Q16) How should someone get started with AppDynamics in the best possible way?

Ans: AppDynamics is an excellent monitoring platform, but starting with a free trial is better. This will help the user to get habituated to all its features, and the user will get experienced in using the application, which will avoid many difficulties in the technical field.

Q17) What are the limitations of AppDynamics?

Ans: There are a few drawbacks or limitations while using AppDynamics. Firstly, the application is set up, which is complicated and will require some technical knowledge—the second is the load given to the server by the AppDynamics resources. Another drawback that needs quite the management is that it is a paid tool. When calculating the budget for the development of the server, the user must also consider this cost.

Q18) How can dashboards be customized in AppDynamics?

Ans: To customize the dashboard, you need to find the "Dashboard Builder" section and select "Edit". This will help you to add or delete widgets and customize the dashboard according to your will.

Q19) What are the applications that have used AppDynamics?

Ans: The applications that have used AppDynamics for their backend observations are Adobe, Cisco, eBay, and many more.

Q20) What languages are used in the designing of AppDynamics?

Ans: The languages used to design AppDynamics are Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python and Ruby.

 

AppDynamics Tool Interview Questions

Q21) How do you ensure data security while using AppDynamics?

Ans: The client and the backend developer can maintain data security by encrypting all data sent to and received from AppDynamics. We can also use a VPN to secure the connection between the server and the client. 

Q22) Why choose AppDynamics instead of other applications offering the same features, like Dynatrace or New Relic?

Ans: AppDynamics delivers the highest level of performance and security for your applications. Compared to Dynatrace or New Relic, We'll help you uncover the root cause of performance issues with application mapping, deep dive diagnostics, and custom dashboards and alerts, so you can fix what's broken.

Checkout: [Dynatrace Interview Questions]

Q23) How do you set up alerts in AppDynamics?

Ans: The "Alert & Respond" feature of AppDynamics is the best way to send alerts when there is a breach in the network. It can also be customized and automatically send a notification or an email response when a signal is triggered.

Q24) Why is APM (Application Performance Index) important in AppDynamics?

Ans: The AppDynamics APM is a crucial metric for a variety of reasons. For example, by monitoring the APM, you can identify issues before they cause significant disruption to your business. Additionally, the APM can help you track and optimize the performance of your application over time.

Q25) What are the different components of APM?

Ans: The Application Server Agent in AppDynamics, cares for the performance of your application, collecting data on its performance. The Database Agent monitors your database, creating reports that provide you with insight into your database's performance. The Machine Agent monitors server components and hard drives to indicate when something is going wrong. And last but not least, the Controller pulls all those disparate pieces together and presents a single interface for all user needs.

Q26) In which cases should we avoid AppDynamics?

Ans: AppDynamics should be avoided in cases where the traffic on the website is not much. Using AppDynamics on websites or platforms, which generally do not have much traffic, is not recommended because it will be overkill.

Q27) What metrics would you look at for Java to be monitored during any testing of applications?

Ans: If a web application is not responding, it will eventually stop serving the requests and shut down. The logs show which threads are used by that particular application then. This can be useful for us to fix or improve the performance of our website. If an application does not respond, we can enable debugging tools like Xdebug and Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MEM) to analyze the memory usage of all objects inside a running process. This is useful to identify memory leaks in applications or excessive memory consumption for some classes, which might slow down our application response time and performance.

Q28) In AppDynamics, what actions and policies can take place?

Ans:

• Notifications 
• Diagnostics 
• Remediation 
• HTTP request 
• Custom 
• Autoscaling

Q29) Name the different agents which are used in Appdynamics.

Ans:

• App agent
• Machine agent
• Browser agent
• Database agent

Q30) Which file contains the mail configuration details of the App Agent?

Ans: Controller-info.xml

Q31) Explain the different kinds of reports.

Ans: There are two types of reports, namely scheduled and on-demand reports.

Scheduled reports are the reports which are made and executed regularly according to its requirement.

On-demand reports are the reports made when there is a demand for them. For example,

• Memory utilization report (Multiple Tires/nodes)
• Hardware utilization report (Multiple Tires/nodes)
• Node Trend Report (Single Node)
• Node Performance Summary report (Multiple Tires/nodes)
• Custom report (Multiple Metrics)

Q32) Name the different dashboard layouts in AppDynamics.

Ans:

• Grid layout
• Absolute layout

Q33) What is Grid Layout?

Ans: Overlapping of widgets is not allowed in the grid layout.

Q34) Define Absolute Layout.

Ans: This is the complete opposite of a Grid Layout. Here, the overlapping of widgets is allowed, and one widget can overlap the other.

Q35) What is a Beacon in AppDynamics?

Ans: The browser's Java agent will gather the necessary information and send it to the EUM service whenever a web page is loaded. Beacon is another name for this information. Once this information has been retrieved, the controller will load a page in your app's browser containing the relevant content.