Blue-green deployment is a well-known pattern for updating software components by switching between simultaneously available environments or services. The context in which a blue-green deployment strategy is used can vary from switching between data centers, web servers in a single data center, or microservices in a Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) deployment.

In this blog I will show some best practices for instrumenting Docker containers, using docker-compose with a few popular AppDynamics application agent types. The goal here is to avoid rebuilding your application containers in the event of an agent upgrade, or having to hard-code AppDynamics configuration into your container images. In my role as a DevOps engineer working on AppDynamics’ production environments, I use these techniques to simplify our instrumented container deployments.

At AppDynamics, we are firm believers in demonstrating the value of our platform as quickly as possible. Many of our customers are able to address critical performance issues within minutes of getting their application instrumented. Below is an example of how we use AppDynamics with a fictional customer, AD-Betting, to analyze and troubleshoot the company’s business environment soon after AppD is up and running.

New users of APM software often believe their company has hundreds of critical business transactions that must be monitored. But that’s not the case. In my role as Professional Services Consultant (EMEA) at AppDynamics, I’ve worked at dozens of customer sites, and the question of “What to monitor?” is always foremost in new users’ minds.