- **Production** is the default operational mode that optimizes agent performance for your live environment. In production mode, the agent balances transaction visibility with low transaction overhead.
- **Development** mode is for pre-production or staging environments where overhead is less of a concern. When you activate development mode, AppDynamics disables limits on the number of call graphs and SQL statements to capture, thus increasing visibility into your application. As a safeguard, when the load breaches pre-defined thresholds for development mode, either calls per minute or heap utilization, AppDynamics re-enables the production limits. (It is recommended to NOT use this in Production)