Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

The primary use we have for this product is application performance monitoring for mission-critical applications. We are a reseller.  

The old way that people would remediate when there was a problem with performance is that they would have to dig into the logs and manually find where the bottlenecks were. A solution like AppDynamics is a definite advantage because it can pinpoint the areas that the person(s) reviewing the issue need to focus on. This makes the technicians a lot faster in remediating issues that an application is presenting.  

Our customers are most interested in monitoring transactions, page loads, the infrastructure, the CPU, and memory monitoring.  

AppDynamics needs to consolidate their technology agent types into one agent that could be deployed on any host no matter what the technology is that it is running. It is really the implementation of AppDynamics that is very difficult because it is very manual. They really need to improve upon that and do more to simplify user processes. So, I would like them to have a single agent type instead of an agent-based on the technology. I think that having a single binary agent that you can put onto any host would make it a lot easier to work with.  

We have been partners with AppDynamics for about six years now.  

The stability of the product is there. It is fine.  

My impression of the scalability of the solution is that it is not very scalable. They are not the market leader anymore. Because they do not have the ability to monitor microservices and containers, I do not see the product having a huge future. For example and for comparison, there is Dynatrace which is a better solution and an easier solution to work with. AppDynamics has failed to lead the way.  

We usually have two engineers on staff for the deployment and maintenance for our clients.  

I think their technical support is good. There is no problem there that I know of.  

I think the initial setup is too complex. You have to figure out exactly what is running on the servers you are going to monitor. Many times — especially if there are older applications still operating — the clients do not even know what all the technologies are that are running on the server. It just takes a lot of time just to find that out. It is just very time consuming to have to go through the process and it should be quicker and easier.  

We do the deployments. Deployment usually takes several weeks and the strategy is just to get in there and get it done as quickly as possible. People regularly use an integrator, a reseller or consultant for the deployment. We are a reseller.  

The setup cost, pricing and licensing is different for every customer depending on how big they are and how many servers they are putting the product on. So I can not give a direct answer to that question. Really cost is based on the implementation.  

We have evaluated Dynatrace and eventually it could replace AppDynamics. It is a simple comparison of the pros and cons between the two products. Dynatrace is easier to instrument and implement and Dynatrace gives the clients quicker results. Also, Dynatrace points to the root cause of an issue instead of just correlations which are a lot more vague.  

As advice to people considering the solution, I would tell them to scope it out really well and to do a lot of research on their intended application and their business use cases. There may be another, better solution available for their needs.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven. I would rate them at a seven because they definitely have a better product than several other products on the market, they have good functionality, and I think they are fairly affordable. The reason I would not rate them higher is because there are other products on the market that are obviously better solutions that exist right now.  

Extensive use cases, dozens of primary and secondary use cases ranging from core application monitoring at the global level to micro level performance analysis at the transaction level. AppD provides the ability to also manage total interactions at the web/mobile browser level, the database and core infrastructure including server level and L4 network.

We are a services organization, so we use AppDynamics with our customers. It has allowed us to expand our footprint in the application management business with virtually all of our major accounts. We were able to expand and go into other applications that we weren't in or offering previously. We have a new value proposition for our customers- enhanced visibility, enhanced stability, and we can reduce our costs to them because our cost structure is reduced by using AppDynamics. We have other examples like this as well where AppDynamics has improved the way we function and operate. As of date of this article, our company has in excess of 30,000 AppDynamics agents deployed globally and we are monitoring billions of annual page views for major customers.

Furthermore, AppDynamics is a key toolset and drives tremendous value and efficiency in our remote performance management center which supports over 10,000 retail locations on behalf of our retail customers.

I have been using this solution for more than five years.

We didn't have any issues with stability. Highly stable with extremely light impact- negligible.

We didn't have any issues with scalability. Unbelievably scalable - we selected this solution for its ability to aggregate thousands and thousand of end point monitoring.

Customer Service:

AppDynamics redefines customer services, especially in post sales support- maybe one of the most responsive service desk teams in the industry.

Technical Support:

They have done a superb job of getting some obscenely bright software people with a passion for customer services and unleashed them in the market. Some of the finest technical support in the industry.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward- we can have an enterprise deployment with several dozen end points being monitored in less than 3 hours.

Our first few implementations we did ourselves and then for our first major customer implementation we got AppDynamics to assist. We currently support all of our internal and external deployments.

We're regularly looking at various options. Even before we made the decision to standardize on AppDynamics, we already had experience with BMC Appsight. We also had experience using Dynatrace, CA and Gomez at some of our customer's environments. We also heard our customers talking about their experiences with these other products.

You can't over-speak importance of deployment, configuration and infrastructure footprint because what happens is that people get excited when they see the output of various products (such as Dynatrace or CA Wiley). They say, "wow, it's very powerful, we've never had visibility, we're going to implement at all costs." Then they buy the solution and they realize they need 5X the amount of servers, a lot of storage, experts to manage it, etc.

It's mainly used to monitor both applications and databases. That's primarily how I use it.

Essentially, I use it for monitoring. I perform performance testing and use it to monitor database performance, CPU usage, and generate alerts on different nodes based on CPU utilization and other factors. It's mainly used to check the performance of the nodes.

I find it helpful, especially in terms of self-learning.

The major concern lies with reports, specifically their configurability. It's like, if I want to combine multiple reports and generate them all at once, that's not possible. Even though there's a setup for generating 25 reports, I wanted to group them all and generate them in one go, which isn't currently feasible. I have to manually run each report and set the time for it. There should be an option to schedule them collectively, like selecting 10 reports, setting a particular time, and having them scheduled.

The ability to schedule multiple reports at once, which is currently lacking. This is a challenge I face in my day-to-day work with AppDynamics.

I have been using this solution for more than a year.

It is a stable solution.

It's definitely scalable. The number of environments in our implementation has been increasing, so it's adaptable. It's a large enterprise, definitely not medium or small.

Maintenance is handled by the maintenance team.

In my experience, it's easy to use. There's nothing complex to learn or fear. You can quickly adapt to it without the need for extensive training. That's my advice.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use AppDynamics Server Monitoring to keep track of live errors, loads, calls per minute, etc.

We can view the server activities, including issues in the process, with a single click. In the case of a script, we can create one branch to learn about function failure and the reasons behind it.

The product's initial setup process needs improvement.

We have been using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for six months.

It is a stable platform.

We have 150 AppDynamics Server Monitoring users.

Every organization has different requirements to set up servers. The configuration is tricky and requires a lot of tools. In such cases, getting assistance from the product's support team is easy.

The initial setup is complicated.

I rate AppDynamics Server Monitoring a seven out of ten. Its setup process is tricky. It is very different for every server. I recommend using Microsoft, Linux, and VMware as they have their monitoring tools.

We use the on-premise deployment model of this solution. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for monitoring our critical applications. The automated data dynamics enables us to monitor the performance of an application and unknowns.

A way that it has improved my organization is from its notifications. We can get notified on our mobile app. We get notified spontaneously for mission-critical applications. It notifies us that the incident is going to happen in the near future, it's a predictive notification. The notifications have been on target for us and have improved my organization. 

The auto-discovery of the logs is the most valuable feature. It requires minimal configuration, we just need to set up on once and it automatically detects through the code. 

The solution should be coupled with its own analytic elastic search analytic model. It should push that data to other data models so the organization does not have to spend separately or to spend more on the analytics part. If a bank or any organization has its own dashboarding solution it should be able to push the data to that dashboarding solution. This is not available right now.

In the next release, I would like to see the configuration of the data and more support for new applications. It should support new languages.

I have been using AppDynamics for two years.

It's a fairly stable product and I would say that they are longer lived than new applications that have been on boarded. 

Our entire command center is using this solution which is around 15 to 20 users.

Their technical support isn't great. The geographical distance and the response time it takes to respond to emails from the technical team is very slow. 

For the setup, you need a good understanding of the solution and how it works so I would say it's not that simple. It's not that complex either but if you have the right people in place, it should have a medium level of complexity. For banks, it can be a little more complex because it needs to comply with a lot of security guidelines. If you're not in a banking environment, it should be more straightforward.

The setup took us around two to three weeks. 

We consulted directly with AppDynamics for the implementation. The experience was good but the geographical distance was always an issue because we don't have local support available in the area. Otherwise, when the people were on the floor it was okay but when the people were not on the floor then definitely there were some problems there. 

We have definitely seen an ROI. If you have a critical application that needs to be monitored you will see your indirect ROI within two to three years and you'll have the happy customers, not usual complaints.

You don't have to pay. You only pay for the implementation partners if you choose to get help. 

I would say be cautious on the licensing model. You should understand your exact needs. If your needs are in line with what this solution offers then I would genuinely recommend going for this solution, otherwise, if not, it might be too costly. 

I think from the product perspective it's fine but on the implementation descriptions there are a lot of issues. It's challenging without support. If someone is looking into it they need to look for any local organization partners in their area.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

Application Analytics is mainly used to get full visibility into the SAP stack in order to detect performance problems.

Application Analytics reduces the average time it takes to repair performance problems and improves cooperation between different IT departments.

Application Analytics' most valuable features are the real-user monitoring and the agents installed in the software stack on the application server.

Application Analytics' performance in pure and native cloud environments could be improved. It could also be more intuitive to use, especially regarding business IQ functionality, and the dashboard programming needs some manual intrusion. In the next release, I would like to see better integration with OpenTelemetry.

I've been working with Application Analytics for three years. 

Application Analytics is really stable.

Application Analytics is scalable.

AppDynamics' technical support is okay, though there's quite a lot of self-service.

Positive

The initial setup was pretty straightforward and took a couple of days, though installing the SAP agent takes a little longer in SAP environments.

We used an in-house team and an AppDynamics team.

The license fee for Application Analytics is in the range of 2.5 million over three years, with extra fees for service contingencies.

I would recommend Application Analytics to others as a professional tool and rate it eight out of ten.

We are using this product for application monitoring.

The most valuable feature in this solution, for our business, is the clear way of projecting the connections between the database and the traffic inflow. This is very helpful when troubleshooting issues.

We have also found that including additional features into this solution is straightforward and easy to do.

This product has an issue with initial lag upon opening that we would like to see improved.

We would also like the capability to open multiple sessions of this product in a browser at the same time.

We have been working with this solution for two to three years.

We have found the stability of this product to be an occasional issue during our time working with it.

We have found this to be a scalable solution.

The technical support team are quick, and respond immediately when we have raised issues. We have found them to be very knowledgeable whenever we have contacted them.

Positive

The initial setup of this solution was fairly easy.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use AppDynamics Database Monitoring to monitor application performance.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring's dashboarding is its best feature.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring would be improved with more support for microservices architecture.

I've been working with AppDynamics Database Monitoring for one year.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is less stable than Dynatrace.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is scalable.

The initial setup was easy, and deployment took around two days.

We used an in-house team.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is widely used, so it's given us some ROI.

I recommend choosing Dynatrace over AppDynamics Database Monitoring as it's easier to use. I would rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring seven out of ten.