Jenkins Automation

Introduction

This workshop demonstrates how to use Jenkins to automate the deployment and lifecycle management of AppDynamics Smart Agent across multiple EC2 instances. Whether you’re managing 10 hosts or 10,000, this guide shows you how to leverage Jenkins pipelines for scalable, secure, and repeatable Smart Agent operations.

What You’ll Learn

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to:

• Deploy Smart Agent to multiple hosts simultaneously using Jenkins
• Configure Jenkins credentials for secure SSH and AppDynamics access
• Create parameterized pipelines for flexible deployment scenarios
• Implement batch processing to scale to thousands of hosts
• Manage the complete agent lifecycle - install, configure, stop, and cleanup
• Handle failures gracefully with automatic error tracking and reporting

Key Features

• 🚀 Parallel Deployment - Deploy to multiple hosts simultaneously
• 🔄 Complete Lifecycle Management - Install, uninstall, stop, and clean agents
• 🏗️ Infrastructure as Code - All pipelines version-controlled
• 🔐 Secure - SSH key-based authentication via Jenkins credentials
• 📈 Massively Scalable - Deploy to thousands of hosts with automatic batching
• 🎛️ Jenkins Agent - Executes within your AWS VPC

Architecture Overview

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    Jenkins-based Deployment                      │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                                  │
│  Developer ──▶ Jenkins Master ──▶ Jenkins Agent (AWS VPC)      │
│                                          │                       │
│                                          ├──▶ Host 1 (SSH)      │
│                                          ├──▶ Host 2 (SSH)      │
│                                          ├──▶ Host 3 (SSH)      │
│                                          └──▶ Host N (SSH)      │
│                                                                  │
│  All hosts send metrics ──▶ AppDynamics Controller             │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Workshop Components

This workshop includes:

1. Architecture & Design - Understanding the system design and network topology
2. Jenkins Setup - Configuring Jenkins, credentials, and agents
3. Pipeline Creation - Creating and configuring deployment pipelines
4. Deployment Workflow - Executing deployments and verifying installations

Prerequisites

• Jenkins server (2.300+) with Pipeline plugin
• Jenkins agent in the same VPC as target EC2 instances
• SSH key pair for authentication
• AppDynamics Smart Agent package
• Target Ubuntu EC2 instances with SSH access

GitHub Repository

All pipeline code and configuration files are available in the GitHub repository:

https://github.com/chambear2809/sm-jenkins

The repository includes:

• Complete Jenkinsfile pipeline definitions
• Detailed setup documentation
• Configuration examples
• Troubleshooting guides