The Universal Agent is a new way to install and maintain AppDynamics agents. Basically, the Universal Agent controls the AppDynamics agent by using rulebooks or scripts to control the way the agent is installed and to make upgrading agents in larger environments much faster than the previous manual way.

The Universal Agent uses a repository created either on the Controller machine or on a shared network that all machines to be installed with AppDynamics Runtime agents have access.

You then download the binaries from the AppDynamics download site into the repository.

Install the Universal Agent onto your target application machines. Here you will create Rulebooks to connect to the Universal Agent on the Controller machine that then sends the requested agents to the machines to be instrumented.

You can start, stop, install, and upgrade agents by simply editing the Rulebooks.