Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

We use AppDynamics to evaluate an application we were using. The name of the application was called Liferay and it is an open-source portal, and we wanted to evaluate the performance of our application.

AppDynamics is a solution that requires extra learning and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, automated reports would helpful similar to have they have in Google Analytics.

I have been using AppDynamics for one week.

AppDynamics is scalable.

I have not contacted support from AppDynamics.

I was evaluating AppDynamics and applications inside Microsoft Azure.

I rate AppDynamics a five out of ten.

AppDynamics is used for performance management. It monitors the application's performance on a monthly basis.

I assist in the configuration of AppDynamics, which is used to measure the performance of the application.

AppDynamics will assist the company in managing its overall systems, capabilities, and performance. It will also assist the company in projecting the system's capacity.

Capacity planning is, in my opinion, the most useful.

While it is scalable, it could be better.

AppDynamics has been in place for a couple of years, but we only started using it this year.

AppDynamics is stable in terms of product features, but the core is a major concern.

AppDynamics is a scalable product.

I have not contacted technical support.

The initial setup is easier for the client.

In our environment, we already have the standard procedure in place to set up AppDynamics, to make it simpler.

I was not involved with the procurement of AppDynamic, but I believe it's expensive.

There are no minimum or maximum sizes; you can use AppDymaics regardless of your company's size. It is appropriate for small, medium, and large enterprises.

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for effective application monitoring. 

It helps us to find out where the bottlenecks are. Once you know, you can go and try to fix that issue. One of the challenges, when you use an ERP system, is the performance and the experience. Whenever we had issues, it was an opportunity for us to find out where the problem is and try to figure it out. It's been helpful in terms of improving system response, in terms of trying to look at that. When there's a problem, we can always go and try to find out. AppDynamics gives synopsis information so we're able to at least find out where exactly the problem is. So that's been very, very helpful on that.

Even though we do not have an end-user experience or database agent, at least on the application side, we still are able to get the information. Otherwise, finding it, trying to find this information, or having a manual process could take some time. It's a time-saving solution for us for sure.

The dashboards of the solution are excellent. They can be customized very easily.

The stability is good.

The solution helps us save a lot of time on certain tasks.

I have not been able to really spend time on the product itself. Developers are more likely to discuss if there are any shortcomings. My usage is quite limited. It would be unfair for me to comment on missing features. I don't spend enough time with the solution, exploring its capabilities. 

Nothing comes to mind in terms of lack of features. I haven't witnessed any aspect that I felt was lacking.

The cost is an area of concern to me on that one. The cloud licensing needs to be improved. It's quite pricey. There are cheaper options other there - including open-source options. 

I've been using the solution for about four years or so. It's been a while. 

The stability of the solution is good. I haven't witnessed any issues that would make me worry about its capabilities. It doesn't crash or freeze and there are no bugs or glitches. The performance has been reliable.

We have two users on the solution currently.

I can't speak to how scalable the solution would be as I've never tried to scale the solution myself. I have no knowledge of how easy or hard it would be to scale.

I haven't worked on other tools personally.

I can't speak to the implementation process. I did not help set anything up. Therefore, I don't have any experience.

The initial setup was done by our application service provider, an ERP application service provider. They configured it, and therefore we never ran into any kind of setup issues in that respect. 

They were fine. We had a good experience with them overall.

There are other options that are open source that wouldn't cost the company any money.

There are many other open-source tools available. When it comes to price comparison, maybe it falls into different categories. It seems to be an expensive product overall, and with other cheaper options on the market, such as DataDog, companies may prefer to pay less or nothing at all.

At some point, we had decided to look for an alternate. Unfortunately, our hands were full and continue to be. We have so many other projects on that, we don't have time to do anything as time-consuming as switching to something else. If I had three months of free time, I would probably go and pick up an alternate, an open-source solution, and maybe implement that due to the fact that the AppDynamics cost is very, very high.

From time to time I do look at some other things, New Relic and some of the other things out there. However, I haven't properly evaluated anything per se. 

We are customers and end-users.

We're always using the latest version of the solution. It's SaaS-based and therefore it is consistently updated immediately as new versions are ready for release. We don't need to manually handle the process. We use AppDynamics' own cloud. We don't use a third-party cloud.

The one area of concern for me is the cost. There are other options - including open-source options.

Overall, I'd rate the solution at a serve out of ten. I'd rate it higher if the solution's price was better.

I am using this product to monitor all microservice environments. I check all services and performance issues and implement some alerts and dashboards. We are also monitoring all applications that are not in a microservices environment. They are in a WebLogic environment. So, we use it to monitor WebLogic applications, Tomcat applications, and microservice applications that are running in the OpenShift environment or Kubernetes environment.

AppDynamics is in the middle of our monitoring environment. It is connected with all other monitoring applications. It helps us to check all the errors and performance issues because all our alerts, related to the performance of our website or backend applications, are implemented through this. So, it is one of the most important monitoring applications.

The ability to check parameters for microservice applications is most valuable. It is important for me. I can manually create new business transactions for applications and individually monitor business transactions. 

I can also use a lot of extensions. It has a lot of extensions to monitor other third-party applications, such as NoSQL applications, memory cache applications, Kafka applications, and Couchbase applications. It is very useful. We are also using the end-user monitoring site to follow all end-user activities. It is important for us to check the errors on the customer site.

We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is good when you constantly check it. In our company, we use AppDynamics a lot. We are monitoring all applications with AppDynamics. Therefore, all the time, we need to check if there is something that needs to be improved and all related applications are okay. For example, our database might be getting bigger and bigger. If you are used to checking frequently, it is okay. I have prepared some procedures for checking all AppDynamics components. It is not hard for us.

In terms of the users, mostly the DevOps team is using this solution. On the development site, we have more than 100 users because all developers on the test system are checking all the processes.

It depends on the issue. It is mostly good. Sometimes, we had really difficult issues, and the support team was really trying to solve the problem, but it took a bit more time.

Its initial setup is easy. We are installing all the components on the same server. We don't need to install another database. It is included in its own database, so all the configurations are on just one server site.

As compared to other applications, its price is moderate. Its price is neither very high nor very low.

I recommend doing a central configuration for agent installation. It is really easy to run when we are upgrading our agents. The standard installation is good in my opinion.

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

The best feature is the live view in database monitoring because you can see exactly what's going on. As soon as you know there is something wrong with your database, you can go and see which query it is. We were trying to do that for some time. We would contact the DBA, but by the time you do that, the query is gone. That's the best thing about it.

It's still in UAT, but we saw that most of the third-party products are running some queries that we don't have any visibility into. Now, we have access to the database view, live view. We can see which queries are taking a long time. We can go back to the vendor and we can tell them, “You need to do something about this. Why is it taking such a long time?” Then, they will recommend something, to do some maintenance on the DB, or they might give us a patch or something. So, this product helps.

At a recent conference, I saw the log analytics, and I was very impressed with it. We are not going to use it, but I would like to see how that works out and whether it can be of any use with our applications. That is one thing I'm looking forward to if it comes to us, and if we get to implement that.

The way it was explained in the presentation is that we can actually correlate a particular event and we can see all of the aspects: on the database side, what happened at the time; in an application; and from the end user perspective – that holdup that you get in the one place by just a simple query. That's very interesting.
One thing for which we didn't get a clear answer is how taxing or how much overhead it can create on a database. We were told that the remote monitoring is the best way to do it. However, sometimes we have databases located across data centers that might be thousands of miles apart. That is something which I might want to see in the documentation: What are the specific recommendations about over WAN, within country? How they want to implement it?

I would rate the product higher if they improved the documentation.

Stability-wise, it looks good. We have not seen any abrupt crashes or anything like that. It's pretty stable.

We used technical support once. We applied a new license, and it was not getting connected. We contacted them, and they gave us a very standard document. We just used that ourselves. It wasn’t even on the phone. We just used that, and it was very easy to do it.

I joined the company after they started using the solution. They asked me to evaluate it, it is. We were evaluating it in our team. We kind of liked it. And then we went forward.

I come from a customer service background. I worked at BMC Software before. In general, when I’m looking to work with a vendor, the first thing is that you need to be very prompt with the responses, because the customer expectations are very high. The answers need to be very clear. Sometimes, with some other vendors, we ask them something and they just keep asking for logs.

I was working on a case. I won't name them, but they asked for the same log three times. It took a week just to get them the logs. We were like, "You could have asked for all of the three steps in first email." When we are opening a case or have to deal with customer support, they need to first talk to us, understand what the problem is. Most of the customer support representatives, they try to deal with everything by email. They need to understand that if it's a severity 2 or severity 1 issue, you should get on the phone and discuss the whole thing. Then, accordingly, you can start troubleshooting or asking questions. That's what my expectation is because I worked on the other side. I know what I’m looking for.

Just implement it. I've never seen anything like this, so I would tell everyone, “You should try this.”

One thing that everyone needs to understand: If APM is for their application or not. That's the most important part. If you think that you have a lot of deadlocks, or something is happening with your application, and you're spending months figuring it out, then APM is the only way you can sort this thing out.

I've seen some presentations. They were very impressive. There was one case from healthcare. They were saying that they were investigating an issue for 18 months. They rolled out AppDynamics. In 36 hours, they got their root cause. That's impressive.

I was just doing a UAT for something. We were running some jobs and suddenly everything froze. We went to AppDynamics, and we saw that one query was taking everything on the database. It's very transparent in that way. It's one of the best database monitoring solution I've ever seen.

My company uses other AppDynamics products, but I belong to a different line of business. We are looking into it. We are going to use the machine agent and the app agent, especially the .NET and Java agents.

The ability to alert, respond and monitor standard deviation: If it’s not broken, don’t go fix it!

• Root cause analysis of issues in real time when they happen, alerted upon within moments of identification.

Enhancements for Docker would be great (log aggregator for Docker logdriver, etc.). No competitors are doing this well today, either.

I have used AppDynamics for two years.

We have not had stability issues for end-users, but for admins specifically, the UI can be slow, since they can see all applications/nodes/etc.

We have not had scalability issues so far, although there is not a strong federated aggregate model for on-premise controllers.

Technical support is excellent (5/5). They are very responsive and technically intelligent.

We didn’t switch.

Initial setup was straightforward/simple.

If you can go SaaS, that might be your best option. I was not able to do so in my environment.

Architecture of the platform and license management need improvement. They’re working on both per my understanding. We have many lines of business and licensing for on-premise has been difficult to meet our needs (segregation of costs), but we’ve could work through it.

We evaluated many simultaneously. We use many of them still.

• Dynatrace
• New Relic
• BlueStripe
• Pinpoint APM (free and pretty awesome honestly). It is open source, and we may eventually contribute back to it as time permits.

It is an up-and-coming company that operates like a startup. They’re fast to find ways to implement changes for their customers.

The features we find most valuable are real-time monitoring, seeing transactions, being proactive and easy to focus on the real problem.

I remember a case that would have taken maybe four or five days to find the cause. Now, we find it in two or three hours. APM has really made it more efficient. It really helps.

Well, it's not really about APM, but the network monitoring I'm really interested by that.

We're basically starting so we're not yet very good at it. Again, we still have a good support to help us.

We have not had any stability problems.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have used technical support a few times and we found it to be very good. Response time is good and their tips are good; very helpful.

We did not have any previous solutions.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup.

We compared AppDynamics with the IBM Tivoli IT. They failed so that's why we went to AppDynamics.

APM probably applied more to us than others perhaps. This is an application monitoring tool so you need to really understand it and implement it properly. The application team needs to know about its features and capabilities to get the most out of it. We're new at this, so it's a new paradigm that we have to bring in our company. Being on the event team, I'm not looking at the application for the app team. Sometimes we're looking at the dashboard and we see something wrong. We feel that they're not really taking action. Sometimes we just call them, "Hey, by the way, can you have a look at it?" So, integration with the actual application team could be an improvement.

I think a vendor should be available, have deep product knowledge, and be helpful.

The most valuable feature is giving end-to-end, about the business transactions, specifically, which is an area everybody struggles with. What they are looking for, basically, is how customers are viewing the transaction, from the end-user perspective, which is useful for the business people. They can streamline where they want improvement, but it also gives you the details down to the nitty-gritty that the developer teams are responsible for. Along the way, it's also showing you the overall performance for the infrastructure that you have for the application.

A benefit is ease of use, compared to other products that we have seen before, such as Wily. You get to the information a lot quicker, instead of spending an hour trying to get to the point that you're looking for, especially with the workflow maps that they have. It's really very easy and intuitive also. Looking at snapshots, you can quickly pinpoint where you want to look at.

Specific to what our experience is, because we're using Cloud Foundry, we're using an extension to monitor the infrastructure for that; that's probably the weakest point for it, because it basically collects JMX metrics. One of the things that we see missing when compared to Wily Introscope is the concept of calculators. You get a group of metrics and you make calculations based on it. That's something I've seen people require. It's something they want to see on their dashboard. They have the metric browser; it's not capable of doing such a thing. That's one thing that people would like to see.

Dashboards, at least the basic ones that we have, because we are not licensed for Analytics, as of yet; it seems basic and not the best area of the product. The dashboards could use some improvement.

So far, it is pretty stable; no downtime. Our implementation is high availability also, so it's a clustered environment. So far, we haven’t had any issues that I am aware of.

So far, we haven’t had any no scalability problems; we size it properly, as far as hardware. Maybe we even oversize it sometimes. So far, we haven’t had any issues.

So far, personally, I opened three tickets so far and I got what I wanted to get. I was pleased with the resolution.

The only complication with initial setup was the PCF, the Cloud Foundry monitoring. I guess it wasn’t something AppDynamics had planned for before. I don't know. It's a new area to everybody. They rolled it out because it's microservices; there were a lot of teams involved, just to get the tiers and nodes in check. That took a lot of work. Also, we have multiple data centers that are sharing the same application, so we needed to take steps to distinguish the data centers from each other as well.

Take the training; take the time to learn it; explore it. That's my advice.