Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

Ability to identify end user performance issues and drill down into root cause to improve MTTR and application availability.

Reduced MTTR and put us on a trajectory to be more focused on the end user experience. Provides monitoring more around business processes versus just servers, applications, etc. E.g., with complex systems, where a business process passes across multiple applications, the business needs us to monitor the heath of the process, not just a segment of the application.

• Business transaction capturing
• Analytics
  

Needs more integration with applications suites, like Oracle Enterprise Server or BMC Remedy.

More than one year.

• The analytics are great.
• The business and session monitoring are great.

One thing that could be improved is the user interface. Things could be more intuitive.

I have used AppDynamics Application Analytics for a few months. I have used Dynatrace for a few years.

It is a stable product.

It is very good from a scalability perspective.

Technical support is great.

It's difficult to install. AppDynamics uses multiple agents. The challenge in the installation is that you have to configure a lot of things manually. The way you install and configure it is not straightforward.

AppDynamics is a great tool but Dynatrace is slightly ahead in terms of user-friendliness.

I would recommend it.

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.  

What we do in general is analysis on the application side. When we have slow SQL requests we jump on the database monitoring to see, for example, the total time the request has been pending in the database. We can solve SQL requests by their pending time. 

The explain plan is the solution's most valuable feature.

The database monitoring is quite simple.

An improvement could be if the monitoring was able to be summarized into something more clear and simple for people who don't have the technical skills on the database side.

The solution needs to have some prepared dashboards on the database. When we use AppDynamics we have a lot of screens and we have to jump from one screen to another. It would useful is if, on the database, monitoring required merely a click on a button and then you have the monitoring dashboard that you can display for easy access.

I've been using the solution for three years now.

The solution is very, very stable. We haven't faced any bugs or glitches on the system.

The solution does not offer good scalability. It's quite technical, but basically, when we have to monitor one database we have to check if our Java program allows for the amount of monitoring we need. If it doesn't, we'll need to restart and get more database agents and perhaps spend more money to scale.

We don't have a lot of users on the solution on the database monitoring portion. It might be as many as 20 people. They are software engineers and database admins.

We only use the solution occasionally when we suspect there are problems on the database side. It isn't used daily.

We create a lot of support tickets with AppDynamics. We've been using the solution for a few years now. The support is quite weak. There's a lot of back and forth, however, eventually, they give us decent solutions.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex at all.

It only takes about 10 minutes to create the user on the database.

The initial setup is actually done in two parts. The first part is to create the user on the database that we want to monitor. This part is done by the database teams etc. The second part is handling the AppDynamics controller. This part is handled by me or someone on my team.

A company only needs one person to handle the maintenance once it is up and running.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

I'm not in charge of licensing. I don't know what the costs associated with it would be.

For me, the first recommendation I would have to other organizations considering implementation would be to have a person or people who have good skills on database monitoring. How AppDynamics works is basically just monitoring the metrics that already exist in the databases. These metrics are really technical metrics, so a company has to have some people that are really specialized in reading them. They need to have a good database administrator or database analyst in place.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for database monitoring. We also have defense solutions available to monitor the database performance. We use AppDynamics in our pipeline.

The feature that is most valuable to us is the snapshot feature. It allows us to get a snapshot of different SQL scripts that are being executed simultaneously and we can identify everything we need on them.

The solution offers good monitoring.

I'm only working as an administrator on the solution, so I'm not in a position to really discuss too many technical aspects of it. 

The application monitoring needs improvement. It needs to be easier for someone who isn't a proficient developer. 

For example, if we use Java for monitoring events to gather history-based data in regards to the application, it should provide a better core-controller. When we monitor any Java application, the approach for us is to identify a set of classes as part of Java programming. These particular classes needs to be executed so any end-user using AppDynamics would be able to see the culprit class. There shouldn't be a need for a final report. Yet, we don't have a feature like that at this time. A person who is monitoring everything needs to have very good knowledge about the solution and not everyone is a proficient programmer.

I've been using the solution for two years.

I haven't personally faced any issues with scaling. However, we have a limited number of licenses available. We've been allocated four licenses to monitor four different items. Therefore, I don't have the availability to scale currently.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The initial implementation is quite simple. It takes about one day to fully set everything up. However, sometimes we have compatibility issues. For example, AppDynamics is compatible with the C language.

Our sales team initiates the AppDynamics license and then an internal team handles the events around implementation. We have a good team available from Citrix as well.

The solution we are using is SaaS-based. The controller is deployed on the cloud, and we have integrated different Linux environments with it. There are a couple of Java agents as well as machine engines and a DB agent that we utilize.

I don't have too much interaction with the teams that handle the solution, so I don't know if I have any advice to give other companies in relation to implementation. I don't have too much exposure when it comes to database monitoring and am not overly familiar with the application itself.

I'd rate it at least a six out of ten based on my experience with the solution so far. I only use limited features for Oracle database monitoring. 

I am using AppDynamics in order to monitor Java applications.

It helped to find quick solutions for specific business transactions. For example, in the case of slowness or a job being stuck at some stage.

The most valuable features are Data Flow and memory monitoring.

As per my experience, the drill-down feature can be improved at the class level.

It should generate a report similar to what Oracle provides.

I have been using AppDynamics for two years.

We primarily use the solution for monitoring the transactions of our user's in-app purchases. 

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to discover and track transactions.

We also use Oracle Fusion and the actual tracing of your transactions on Oracle Fusion is difficult because they use an asynchronous type of tracking between the nodes. It makes it difficult for AppDynamics to track.

The user access management could be a bit better.

I've been using the solution for two years.

The stability has been good so far.

In terms of scalability, you may need a bit more resources in terms of hardware to scale the solution properly. The solution collects a lot of data, so you need a lot of capacity to handle it. However, if you are on the cloud, I believe there would be fewer restrictions. 

We have 50 people on the solution and we use it every day.

We've been very satisfied with technical support. Whenever we've had an issue they've been able to assist.

We previously used DynaTrace, but we switched to AppDynamics because the pricing was much more reasonable. DynaTrace was also not easy to implement. We needed someone who knew about how to code it.

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment took about half a day.

We typically have a local supplier assist us with the implementation.

The pricing is very good. You get good value, especially if you compare it to DynaTrace.

We currently use the on-premises deployment model but we are in the process of moving over to the cloud.

The solution is a good tool. I'd advise others to use the cloud deployment model so that you don't need to worry so much about having enough infrastructure if you you want to scale.

I'd rate it eight out of ten.

The primary use case of the solution is for end-to-end visibility for all applications we choose to monitor.

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. AppDynamics does not install directly on the database but can monitor core transactions.

If we have different applications with different language and databases from different vendors, or different versions, we are still able to monitor the performance and delay for all the applications and discover the root cause for delays.

The solution should add some monitoring similar to Oracle monitoring tools for databases. Oracle has a lot of features to monitor SQL queries, and make some recommendations to resolve them. AppDynamics is just monitoring for delays and doesn't provide any recommendations. It's a deficiency.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support from AppDynamics is excellent.

The initial setup was very easy. You do not have to install any agent for the database. You just take and install the server for database agents and it will take care of all the connections and transactions as well as the database. It makes for a very simple installation. We had four or five people that assisted in the implementation and currently, we have one engineer who performs ongoing maintenance.

We had a consultant that assisted with the implementation.

Licensing for the solution is very complex. A different type of agent means a different type of license and subscription. Different languages, database types, and agents make a Dynamics license complex. 

They do offer great discounts when bundling other AppDynamics licenses. For example, if a customer needs some license for a database agent, they can also take a license for end-user monitoring. I think AppDynamics has good options for budgets. 

We use the private cloud deployment model.

I would advise new users to not install AppDynamics for their database only. Just the database portion isn't dynamic enough without other portions of the AppDynamics suite.

I would rate all database applications nine out of ten, but I would rate just the database monitoring four out of ten.