AppDynamics MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol server that gives LLM clients (Cursor, Claude Desktop, etc.) full access to your AppDynamics monitoring data — plus the ability to create and manage dashboards and health rules.

Features

30 tools across 8 categories:

• Discovery: List and search applications by name
• Health Monitoring: Full health rule CRUD, violations, and anomaly detection
• Application Performance: Business transactions, service endpoints, and their metrics
• Infrastructure: Tiers, nodes, and backend/remote service dependencies
• Diagnostics: Transaction snapshots and error events
• Root Cause Analysis: Automated composite diagnosis across all signal types
• Metrics: Browse the metric tree and query any metric with rollup support
• Dashboards: Full CRUD — list, view, create, update, add widgets, clone, delete, export, import, auto-build, per-rule health status widgets

Key capabilities

• Natural language friendly: Accept application names, not just IDs
• Metric tree browser: Discover available metrics interactively, including custom/machine-agent metrics
• Rollup control: Per-widget rollup for time-series vs. aggregate metric views
• Dashboard auto-builder: Create full multi-section dashboards from a single prompt
• HealthListWidget scoping: Each widget can be pinned to a specific health rule (not "all rules")
• Health rule CRUD: Create, update, enable/disable, and delete health rules — including custom metrics scoped to a specific tier or node
• Smart defaults: Sensible time ranges and result limits out of the box

Quick Start

1. Install dependencies

npm install

2. Configure environment

Copy .env.example to .env and fill in your credentials:

cp .env.example .env

Required variables:

Variable	Description
APPD_URL	Controller base URL (e.g., https://mycompany.saas.appdynamics.com)
APPD_CLIENT_NAME	OAuth client name or API key
APPD_CLIENT_SECRET	OAuth client secret
APPD_ACCOUNT_NAME	Account name (for clientName@accountName format)

3. Add to your MCP client

Cursor (~/.cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "appdynamics": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["tsx", "src/index.ts"],
      "cwd": "/path/to/appdynamics-mcp-server",
      "env": {
        "APPD_URL": "https://your-controller.saas.appdynamics.com",
        "APPD_CLIENT_NAME": "your-client-name",
        "APPD_CLIENT_SECRET": "your-client-secret",
        "APPD_ACCOUNT_NAME": "your-account-name"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "appdynamics": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["tsx", "/path/to/appdynamics-mcp-server/src/index.ts"],
      "env": {
        "APPD_URL": "https://your-controller.saas.appdynamics.com",
        "APPD_CLIENT_NAME": "your-client-name",
        "APPD_CLIENT_SECRET": "your-client-secret",
        "APPD_ACCOUNT_NAME": "your-account-name"
      }
    }
  }
}

Tools Reference

Discovery

Tool	Description
appd_get_applications	List all monitored applications (with optional name filter)

Health Monitoring

Tool	Description
appd_get_health_rules	List health rules or get details of a specific rule
appd_create_health_rule	Create a new health rule with warning and/or critical conditions. Supports OVERALL_APPLICATION_PERFORMANCE, BUSINESS_TRANSACTION_PERFORMANCE, TIER_NODE_HEALTH, and CUSTOM entity types. Use affectedTier or affectedNode to scope rules to a specific tier/node for custom metrics.
appd_update_health_rule	Update an existing health rule's name, conditions, thresholds, or scope
appd_delete_health_rule	Permanently delete a health rule
appd_enable_health_rule	Enable or disable a health rule
appd_get_health_violations	Get health rule violations for one or all apps
appd_get_anomalies	Get anomaly events (open-only by default)

Application Performance

Tool	Description
appd_get_business_transactions	List BTs for an application
appd_get_bt_performance	Get response time, throughput, errors for a BT
appd_get_service_endpoints	List service endpoints (API-level granularity)
appd_get_service_endpoint_performance	Get performance metrics for a service endpoint

Infrastructure

Tool	Description
appd_get_tiers_and_nodes	Get tiers with their nodes (agents, machines, IPs)
appd_get_backends	List backend dependencies (databases, APIs, caches, queues)

Diagnostics

Tool	Description
appd_get_snapshots	Get transaction snapshots (deep diagnostic captures)
appd_get_errors	Get error and exception events

Root Cause Analysis

Tool	Description
appd_diagnose_issue	Automated root cause analysis — fetches violations, anomalies, error events, and snapshots in parallel, then returns ranked candidates, a merged timeline, error breakdown, and investigation steps

Metrics

Tool	Description
appd_browse_metric_tree	Browse the metric hierarchy to discover available metrics, including custom machine-agent metrics
appd_get_metric_data	Query any metric by path. Supports rollup control: true returns a single aggregated value, false returns individual time-series data points

Dashboards

Tool	Description
appd_get_dashboards	List all custom dashboards
appd_get_dashboard	Get full dashboard definition with widgets
appd_create_dashboard	Create a new dashboard with optional widgets
appd_update_dashboard	Update dashboard properties and/or widgets
appd_add_widget_to_dashboard	Add a single widget without replacing existing ones
appd_clone_dashboard	Clone a dashboard with a new name
appd_delete_dashboard	Delete a dashboard (permanent)
appd_export_dashboard	Export dashboard as portable JSON
appd_import_dashboard	Create a new dashboard from a saved JSON definition
appd_save_dashboard_file	Build a complete dashboard JSON file locally without creating anything in AppDynamics — ready to edit and import
appd_auto_build_dashboard	Auto-discover tiers, BTs, and health rules, then create a complete multi-section dashboard in one shot

Dashboard widget types

Widget type	Description
TIMESERIES_GRAPH	Time-series line chart for one or more metrics
METRIC_VALUE	Single aggregated number (gauge tile)
GAUGE	Gauge dial
PIE	Pie chart
HEALTH_LIST	Health rule status list. Set healthRuleIds: [id] to pin a widget to a specific health rule instead of showing all rules for the application.
TEXT	Static text / label

Example Conversations

"What's the health status of my production apps?" → Uses appd_get_applications + appd_get_health_violations + appd_get_anomalies

"Show me the slowest business transactions for the Orders app" → Uses appd_get_business_transactions + appd_get_bt_performance

"What databases does the Payment service connect to?" → Uses appd_get_backends with typeFilter="JDBC"

"Create a health rule that fires when Custom Metrics|RequestCount > 1000 on the WebTier" → Uses appd_create_health_rule with affectedEntityType="TIER_NODE_HEALTH", affectedTier="WebTier", metricPath="Custom Metrics|RequestCount"

"Create a dashboard for the Checkout app with response time and error rate" → Uses appd_get_applications → appd_browse_metric_tree → appd_create_dashboard

"Build me a full monitoring dashboard for the Orders app" → Uses appd_auto_build_dashboard — auto-discovers all tiers, BTs, and health rules, creates a complete dashboard in one shot

"Create one health widget per URL Monitor service, each scoped to its own rule" → Uses appd_create_health_rule (one per service) + appd_create_dashboard with healthRuleIds on each HEALTH_LIST widget

"Clone the production monitoring dashboard for staging" → Uses appd_get_dashboards → appd_clone_dashboard

"Why is my Payment app slow? Diagnose the last hour" → Uses appd_diagnose_issue with application="Payment", durationInMins=60 — returns ranked root cause candidates, merged event timeline, error class breakdown, and step-by-step investigation guide

"Are there any errors spiking in the Orders app right now?" → Uses appd_diagnose_issue with application="Orders", focus="errors"

Health Rules — Custom Metrics

Custom metrics reported by machine agents are stored per-node under:

Application Infrastructure Performance|{Tier}|Individual Nodes|{Node}|Custom Metrics|{MetricName}

When creating health rules for custom metrics, use affectedEntityType=TIER_NODE_HEALTH and provide the relative metric path (not the full absolute path):

affectedEntityType: "TIER_NODE_HEALTH"
affectedNode: "my-server-hostname"          # scope to specific node
metricPath: "Custom Metrics|MyMetric"       # relative path only

Architecture

src/
├── index.ts              # Entry point, registers all tools
├── types.ts              # TypeScript interfaces
├── constants.ts          # Shared constants
├── services/
│   ├── auth.ts           # OAuth2 token management
│   └── api-client.ts     # Authenticated HTTP client
├── utils/
│   ├── error-handler.ts  # Error → MCP response
│   ├── app-resolver.ts   # App name → ID resolution
│   └── formatting.ts     # Response formatting
└── tools/                # One file per tool domain
    ├── applications.ts
    ├── health-rules.ts        # CRUD + enable/disable
    ├── health-violations.ts
    ├── anomalies.ts
    ├── business-transactions.ts
    ├── bt-performance.ts
    ├── service-endpoints.ts
    ├── tiers-nodes.ts
    ├── backends.ts
    ├── snapshots.ts
    ├── errors.ts
    ├── metrics.ts             # browse + query with rollup
    ├── dashboards.ts          # full CRUD + auto-build + HealthListWidget scoping
    └── root-cause.ts

Development

# Run in dev mode (auto-reload)
npm run dev

# Build TypeScript
npm run build

# Run built version
npm start

Authentication

The server supports two authentication modes:

1. OAuth2 Client Credentials (recommended): Set APPD_CLIENT_NAME, APPD_CLIENT_SECRET, and optionally APPD_ACCOUNT_NAME. The server acquires and caches tokens automatically.

2. API Key: Set only APPD_CLIENT_NAME (as the API key). No secret needed.

License

ISC