Overview

Application performance issues cause 60% of customer-impacting incidents, making proactive monitoring critical for production systems. This course equips operations engineers to build observable distributed applications through hands-on work with AppDynamics for automatic discovery, transaction analysis, and intelligent alerting. You'll diagnose performance bottlenecks using snapshot-driven troubleshooting, eliminate alert fatigue by configuring baseline-driven health rules integrated with IT operations tools, and democratize observability through executive dashboards with automated reporting. This course eliminates the hours spent on manual log analysis across microservices. With hands-on labs, you'll simulate production scenarios including checkout slowdowns, database N+1 query patterns, and alert integration workflows. This course is designed for operations engineers, DevOps practitioners, SREs, application developers, and anyone responsible for monitoring, supporting, or optimizing production applications. If you work with distributed systems or want to strengthen your observability and incident-response skills, you’re in the right place. A basic understanding of web applications, APIs, and how backend services communicate will help you move quickly through the course. Familiarity with command-line tools and general application architecture (tiers, services, databases) is useful but not required. By course completion, you'll identify performance bottlenecks within minutes, reduce alert noise by 50%+, configure multi-channel notifications for sub-5-minute incident response, and deploy enterprise-scale monitoring with RBAC governance.

Syllabus

Foundation: Monitor Applications Automatically

This module establishes the foundation for understanding how AppDynamics automatically discovers and monitors application performance without manual instrumentation. Learners will explore the controller architecture (Flow Maps, business transactions, tiers, and nodes), identify performance patterns in the Commerce Cloud demo application (checkout flows, payment processing, database queries), and understand how AI-powered baselines detect anomalies in response times and error rates. Through agent configuration and hands-on exercises with real e-commerce workloads, students will learn to capture transaction snapshots, interpret call graphs and SQL query performance, create intelligent health rules that alert before customers are impacted, and prepare their monitoring environment for proactive performance management across distributed systems.

Operations: Integrate Alerts with IT Tools

This module empowers learners to transform AppDynamics monitoring into actionable incident response by integrating alerts with existing IT operations workflows. Students will explore multi-channel notification strategies (email with deep links and Slack webhooks), configure policy-driven alerting that routes critical issues to the right teams, and master action suppression to eliminate alert fatigue during planned maintenance windows. Through hands-on integration exercises connecting the Commerce Cloud demo to real communication and ticketing platforms, learners will configure webhook actions for ChatOps visibility, map health rule violations to incident priorities, test escalation chains with simulated production failures, and establish best practices for organizing policies by severity to ensure that performance degradations trigger automated remediation workflows rather than manual firefighting.

Build Dashboards & Scale Enterprises

This module transforms learners from AppDynamics operators into enterprise architects who can synthesize monitoring insights into executive dashboards, automate reporting workflows, and deploy observability at scale across multiple teams and environments. Students will explore dashboard composition strategies (essential widget types, event overlays, tag-based filtering), implement automated email digests that deliver PDF performance summaries to stakeholders without controller access, and master enterprise deployment patterns including multi-environment architecture, role-based access control, and agent deployment across containerized infrastructures. Through hands-on exercises building operations dashboards for the Commerce Cloud demo, tracking release performance improvements with tag filters, and designing governance frameworks for 50+ microservices, learners will establish naming conventions for organizational consistency, configure RBAC to protect production from accidental changes, plan controller scaling strategies, and create team onboarding checklists that democratize observability data across engineering, product, and business stakeholders.