Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

We use it for service level monitoring.

Currently, we use AWS. Recently, we started using Serverless AWS as we use communities for all our other services. For containers, we use Serverless AWS, and we use databases, like Cassandra Aurora. The product integrates well with all of them.

We previously had an operations team continuously monitoring applications. Now, they just have set things up and our developers can monitor, view, and act on them, accordingly. Also, we set up alerts recently so we can fix any issues more quickly in production.

It shows inter-service activities very easily. We were having issues with this primarily, so this was one of the most important areas for us. 

We have been using Cassandra. So, it has agents specific for each middleware, helping us check this application.

They are using Flash for their website, which is very slow. We had hoped the website would be much faster to use, and that is definitely what we want to see. 

Their agents sometimes claim to be very lightweight, especially with databases, but they are very heavy. They can take up more compute than the actual work that we need to do. I do hope that they can improve on this.

There is no issue with stability. However, most of the time, it is just slow.

Currently, scalability is not that great. We are a B2B company, so we have currently enabled it for about ten customers. We would like to proceed and have it more customer environments as well. However, we see with just ten customers that the dashboard is very slow. We would like them to improve on this.

We have had many AppDynamics engineers come to our office and explain us how to use it and set it up. They have come onsite many times and explained to the developers different topics.

The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment was not trivial. We needed experts to come onboard and explain it to us. With their help, it was easy.

We have partially seen ROI.

We checked out Datadog, but we just wanted a monitoring solution. We already had a logging solution and other relevant solutions, so we narrowed it down to AppDynamics.

It was easy to jump onto AppDynamics's limited licensing plan, so we easily could evaluate it. Later, we received good customer support and could interact with them easily. That is how we finally decided.

Depending on your use case, this is only a monitoring solution. If you don't have an in-house logging solution, or if your primary use case is to debug, you should consider choosing other alternatives. If only you want monitoring, AppDynamics will do.

We are only using the AWS version.

We are using it for monitoring.

Our applications are in AWS, and the monitoring system is part of AppDynamics.

We have been able to monitor our applications more accurately.

It has better dashboards and more control over everything.

The stability is fine. We have had downtime. However, we do receive alerts when we have downtime. Downtime has been the result of config, application, or cord issues.

The scalability is good.

We were previously using Dynatrace, then we shifted to AppDynamics because it was more convenient. For example, it was fast and easily accessible for all our data.

We had no issues with the integration.

Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace was good.

I was just looking into Datadog, and it seemed like it might be a better solution that AppDynamics.

I would definitely recommend AppDynamics.

Monitoring log and statistics using graphs to see how we are monitoring our network traffic, and whether systems are healthy or not.

In real-time, when we have our peak seasons, we can determine if customers are experiencing something that they are not supposed to, such as customer impact on a service being down or not.

The most valuable feature is having our services being available and healthy. We can determine whether or not, at a given point in time, something is wrong. Then, we can dive deeply into the product to see what is happening by troubleshooting, debugging, and monitoring.

Sometimes, it is hard to navigate through and find if something is wrong or figure out where an error stemmed from. I would like AppDynamics to be easier to navigate in.

I have not seen any issues with stability.

I usually don't see any issues with scalability, and we have pretty large servers.

Our environment is huge. Within a season, we have hundreds of thousands of current users.

I haven't used technical support.

The integration and configuration of the product in our AWS environment was easy. AWS made it easy.

I was not involved in the decision-making process.

I would still use AppDynamics now, because I haven't seen another player on the market give us exactly what we want that AppDynamics can't. There are a lot of companies who are doing the exact same thing and trying to put their own spin on it, but there is no reason for me to pick another competitor.

AppDynamics allows users a complete application monitoring solution for making better products/applications.

It has definitely helped the trainees with using the tool in the best possible way for creating products and applications without any glitches or manageable glitches.

• Dashboard
• Reports
• Monitoring slow queries
• User experience management
• Business transaction breakdowns, and many more of its features.

• Synthetic monitoring of applications and products in a better way would help to improve the product better.
• More OOB reports also would help.

The primary use case is everything related to monitoring.

It provides everything into one view, so we can track information from one place to another. This allows us to be able to track information all day.

It provides all the monitoring that we need in one place.

The integration with cloud services is still pending with AppDynamics. We would like the product to be serverless. 

We have seen ROI, because we are able to view whatever issues there are in the application, then resolve them faster.

We are looking forward to purchasing the solution on the AWS Marketplace.

We are comfortable with the pricing.

We also evaluated Splunk. However, AppDynamics provided more features, agents, and monitoring capabilities.

It provides all the features that we need for on-premise applications.

The product integrates with all of our applications, because it has be deployed on all the servers so it can collect data.

AWS has not provided us the code. They will be moving it to their AWS services later. Right now, it is providing us a framework, like with Java. The AWS agents are able to capture all the information related at the code label, which is a benefit for us.

Right now, this tool is very good for on-premise applications, but there might be an issue with cloud applications.

If we have an issue, it is useful for finding the root cause of incidences. So, we use it for troubleshooting.

When we have a large issue, we bring our teams together, working with AppDynamics. This has allowed us to reduce the time to recover applications (for example).

• Performance monitoring
• The real user monitoring: It helps us evaluate our customers' real experiences, which is valuable as an eCommerce company. We can look into their detail, one by one. It is helpful because it is deterministic.  
  

I would like them to change their business model for scalability to accommodate growing companies. The business model should be more flexible.

I am okay with the stability. 

The scalability is good. However, the issue is you need to know in advance how many agents that you will use. With companies similar to ours (in growth mode), this is difficult to forecast. 

They have a very good customer service team that checks in with customers, asking about our experiences.

It took about two weeks to complete the entire implementation and integration of the product. It was easy.

With some training, we were able to implement and configure AWS with a little help.

It is expensive. However, our time to recover has been reduced, and this product has helped recuperate costs and provided us with ROI.

We did not originally evaluate any other solutions.

It is an interesting application. We have tried others: New Relic and Dynatrace. Finally, we decided to stay with AppDynamics because its graphical configuration is very intuitive for our teams to work on.

AppDynamics is doing a very good job.

We used it on-premise, then moved to AWS. On-premise is very similar to using AWS.

For monitoring application performance: I worked for a company which concentrates on application performance consulting service. Cisco AppDynamics was one of the tools used.

• Quickly triaging problems: Before using the APM tool, I had no adequate information about the application's detail. 

• APM tool provides comprehensive information about several elements like performance, errors, and resources.

Stack information: I use this function to explain the problem to customers most of the time.

Its cost: Most of the customers do not have enough budget to deploy the APM agent to their whole applications.

The primary use case is to monitor our applications and get a handle on any issues ahead of time, such as memory leaks, complete utilization of CPU, and the need to spin up a new server. Being able to know all of these things ahead of time and act on them is a primary requirement. And once an application is placed on top of that, we would also like to monitor what's happening with the application

The solution is doing great.

The key benefits it offers us are that it helps us know the infrastructure and performance issues, as well as if a customer is experiencing latency issues. It helps us know about them ahead of time so we can act on them, proactively, and improve the customer experience. That's important for us as we transform ourselves and call ourselves a digital company.

Being able to install it on-prem and monitor our on-prem infrastructure is important for us. We are in the process of migrating to cloud, but most of our infrastructure is on-prem. We have highly scalable systems and AppDynamics will help us monitor our load on-prem. Our systems range from simple to the most complex and it gives us the visibility across transactions, in one dashboard.

I would like to be able to monitor both cloud an on-prem infrastructures, displayed in one dashboard.

I would also like more flexible pricing: A pay-per-use model, rather than just a fixed-price model.

I'm not aware of any stability issues. We have deployed it in MEA, a few countries in Asia, and in the US. I haven't heard negative comments. People are happy.

We do use their technical support and they are very responsive.

In terms of advice, I would ask you to have criteria. Most of the time there will be some general aspects that are pretty common, that are covered by the various third-parties that provide industry ratings. But within that, you have to have customization of the features to match to your own infrastructure, the technical stack you have: mainframes, ICDs, modern platforms, cloud, etc. You need to compare the tools that work with your technical stack.

The most important criteria, for me, when selecting a vendor are 

• flexible pricing
• full coverage of monitoring of our technical stack, both on-cloud and on-prem
• customer service.

I would rate this solution at eight out of 10. I took away the two points for the two reasons I mentioned: being able to monitor both cloud and on-prem with a single dashboard and flexible pricing.