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Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] vs Splunk AppDynamics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 23, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Quest Foglight for APM [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk AppDynamics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
274
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), IT Operations Analytics (2nd), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

AK
Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Drill-down monitoring shows us the entire transaction chain, from the front end to back end. It needs HTML5 interface.
I want to see a new interface that contains HTML5 features. The current version of Foglight (on-premise edition) is so fusty in comparison with leaders of Gartner APM Quadrant - i.e. Appdynamics, NewRelic, Dynatrace. If you try to compare SaaS and on-premise Foglight versions you can see differences in UI-design. It's my subjective experiences, but SaaS version looks more modern. Hope this helps
Shamim Alsharif - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Test Engineer at TANIM CONSULTING, LLC
Real-time monitoring has improved our banking API performance and supports detailed business transaction analysis
The real-time monitoring is what we can see for anything that is needed in terms of CPU, memory, or the connections or the sessions related. It's real-time monitoring of performance of each of the components, which is what we need and use all the time. It's highly effective, I would say. Infrastructure visibility, transaction monitoring, to check the actual user experience in terms of the response time, MRT and all those things. We do the component monitoring like the API performance and the connections and all those things, but we also do the business process monitoring and business transaction monitoring.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"FxV is valuable as we can playback the session."
"The most valuable feature is drill-down monitoring, which shows us from one interface the transaction chain from the front end to back end."
"This level of viewable monitoring had many benefits such as alerting, scalability, reporting and service dashboard we could promote."
"With the APM you can replay the end user session and see issues quickly by viewing the session."
"We are able to capture the real time user experience of our solutions and we have an understanding of overall performance."
"It provides a history of the activities on our SQL servers."
"Having standard monitoring features and a central repository saves us a lot of time and reduces risk of incidents."
"We have no hard figures on the ROI on this product, however having the system has saved us time in terms of debugging and getting to the root cause of issues."
"The solution is great for database monitoring. You don't have to install an agent on the database. You just install the server to a database agent. It's a good product for some database administration if you don't want to install an agent on the database for security."
"This is purely an application instrumentation and monitoring tool with good features for business analytics."
"With AppDynamics, we were able to identify where the database query was taking more time, whether it was taking time on logical IOs or physical IOs, and it is also giving proactive alerts that help us to narrow down issues much more quickly and fix them before they start impacting our customers."
"The features of Splunk AppDynamics that I appreciate most are the business processes."
"AppDynamics is the best fit as an Application Performance Management solution."
"The most valuable feature is having our services being available and healthy."
"The most valuable features of AppDynamics is the scalability and monitoring."
"The product is very good for infrastructure monitoring."
 

Cons

"In an older version of Foglight, we were not able to get any of our custom agents to work properly so that feature was not as much use as we had initially hoped and haven't tried using since."
"We have not realized a good ROI on the product due to the fact that we were not able to monitor our core application which runs on Webmethods."
"It needs a more intuitive way to create and implement custom "Cartridges" to be deployed through out a Federated environment."
"The “cartridge” concept for every little thing is a bit of a bother to implement."
"I think installation and setup needs little more improvement especially when you are installing with external database."
"We had stability issues for FTR. The player used to get hung while running the robot scripts."
"The version compatibility needs work."
"They need to improve the stability of FxM and FxV."
"I install it frequently and sometimes when they fix something they break something else, so better QA is needed to ensure the quality of their fixes."
"AppDynamics Database Monitoring would be improved with more support for microservices architecture."
"Scalability-wise, I think it's a little limited on an enterprise-wide scale."
"I haven’t rated it higher because of the comparison between AppDynamics and Dynatrace."
"The networking monitor function could be better, we are not getting many details from it."
"There may be some older technologies that are still covered, however, it's not as plug-and-play. You can still do it, however, it takes slightly more effort for engineers to cover old technologies such as C++, Delphi, and so on. It still can be done. It's just not as easy as, for example, covering Java."
"It would help to maybe have a more graphical interface and more user-friendly graphics."
"There could log management features included in the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Foglight can be expensive I would go with the pricing at a three year deal."
"The price is expensive for us."
"I recall it being a very expensive solution relative to function and stability."
"Since the product split – the licensing is a bit more complex."
"You are required to purchase licenses whether you use it or not. It is not pay-as-you-use."
"I would say the solution is affordable because it is widely used across financial service sectors."
"AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring does have licensing cost associated with it."
"The way it is structured in terms of price could be better. You pay for individual modules and that adds on to the cost, which detracts you from implementing those modules and slows you down."
"It is a more expensive APM among the competitors, which is fine because it also does a lot more on the auto-detection and the AI side... It is not a cheap product. None of them are. The price is fair, but I could use it on more projects if they had a lower price."
"AppDynamics does not usually do monthly payments. They do it on an annual basis, at the very least."
"There is an annual cost to use this solution. The licensing model could be improved by making it more cost-effective."
"In terms of pricing, I feel that when you compare the benefits that we get to the price that we paid, it is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
16%
Marketing Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business64
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise205
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AppDynamics Database Monitoring?
The price is not cheap, however, considering the benefits and the price ratio, I would rate it nine out of ten.
What needs improvement with AppDynamics Database Monitoring?
Based on my experience, some databases like Couchbase, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB require a little bit of enhancement as they are newer and not as widely used as other databases. The limitations are o...
 

Also Known As

Foglight, Dell Foglight
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Anji Automotive Logistics, Unimat, Priceline.com
Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: August 2026.
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