Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

Our main use cases for Splunk AppDynamics involve monitoring our web stores.

Splunk AppDynamics has helped improve my organization's business resilience.

The features of Splunk AppDynamics that I prefer most are the monitoring aspect, making sure we can drill down and find problems. Splunk AppDynamics features benefit our organization by being effective; we use it consistently, and it is definitely utilized.

My impressions of Splunk AppDynamics' ability to predict, identify, and solve problems in real-time are that we've been using synthetic monitoring, and that's been really helpful, allowing us to see issues before customers experience them.

AppDynamics helped improve our organization's business resilience.

Splunk AppDynamics can be improved. 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. There aren't any additional features that should be included in the next release because everything they're discussing at the conference is what we want to make the software better, so I appreciate that aspect of what they're doing.

I have been using Splunk AppDynamics for two years.

I assess the stability and reliability of Splunk AppDynamics as generally reliable, and we don't have issues accessing it, being SaaS.

I assess how Splunk AppDynamics scales with the growing needs of my organization as good, since we are growing and adding more servers. I have not expanded usage currently because we're in a freeze, and we don't try to update anything. Before the freeze, I did expand usage. The expansion process was pretty smooth.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support with Splunk AppDynamics as generally good since they usually respond to us within 24 hours.

Positive

The initial deployment wasn't so good. Smart agents didn't work. Trying to upgrade didn't work. On Linux, there are a lot of locking issues. You gotta make sure that libraries aren't getting updated. So there's always some type of conflict. When we do get to work, it works great, however, you have to go through all these steps before you can make it work properly. We spend hours, days trying to figure out what's wrong with it. Then, we contact support and go back and forth.

I have not seen ROI with Splunk AppDynamics from my level.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Splunk AppDynamics is that it's extremely expensive, and we completed a three-year deal for Splunk and for AppDynamics, which costs millions of dollars.

My impression of Splunk AppDynamics' AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis in diagnosing performance issues is that we don't have the latest versions to get all that functionality, however, we're working on it, and we have an issue with smart agents.

I assess Splunk AppDynamics' infrastructure monitoring as doing the job in correlating infrastructure and application performance, and it has been around for a long time.

My advice to other organizations considering Splunk AppDynamics is that they demonstrate how everything's interconnected immediately, but there's substantial customization required around your own business, and out of the box, you need to configure it to make it work better for you. We spent significant money on professional services to help us accomplish that.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Splunk AppDynamics overall a nine.

A main use case for Splunk AppDynamics is monitoring the applications in production environment. We are doing infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring.

For all the applications, we monitor the infrastructure such as CPU, disk, and memory. If there are any issues with CPU, memory, or processes, we send alerts to the teams. Similarly, we do application monitoring for JVM and server availability.

We are using Splunk AppDynamics for troubleshooting predominantly, and sometimes for capacity planning as well.

The best feature about Splunk AppDynamics are the Business Transactions. It automatically detects and captures them, which helps most of the application teams.

Whatever the important business transactions are, it automatically captures them and their performance as well. If there are any performance issues, business transactions will help point out exactly where the performance has been degraded. This helps the development team to troubleshoot and rectify if there are any modifications required in their code.

Splunk AppDynamics monitoring is helping our organization. Because of this tool, we have reactive monitoring. Whenever there are any issues, the application will get the ServiceNow ticket. This is the policy in our organization. If the threshold criteria is exceeded, it creates a ticket and assigns it to the application team. The application team investigates that issue, and in that way, we avoid downtime. Apart from that, if there are any application performance issues, with the help of business transactions or memory leak functionality, the development team will be able to drill down that issue and fix it faster than the traditional way.

We have seen application availability increase. There is a twenty-five percent reduction of the application downtime.

With Splunk AppDynamics mapping, it captures the business transactions and provides the feature to add business transactions or eliminate those which are not necessary. This auto-mapping helps most of the applications.

With the help of infrastructure monitoring in Splunk AppDynamics, server availability is one of the key features. It captures the memory, CPU, and disk. These are helping my organization to keep all the applications up and running with minimal downtime.

We are looking for some more common extensions and custom extensions. Specifically, we are doing log monitoring, URL monitoring, and port monitoring. We are looking for cloud monitoring if there are any features available in Splunk AppDynamics.

Splunk AppDynamics can be improved specifically by providing the log monitoring feature that is currently not available, centralized log monitoring. I know that is available in Splunk. Apart from that, we are seeking to address a couple of issues in Splunk AppDynamics. Specifically, machine agents are not reporting, or we have to restart our machine agents. Another issue is with disk utilization. For disk utilization, it will automatically detect the mount path, but we have seen for many mount paths, even though they are mounted, the data is not reported in Splunk AppDynamics. If the Splunk AppDynamics tech team fixes these issues, that is going to help significantly. Additionally, there is one more feature regarding how we can do cloud monitoring with the help of Splunk AppDynamics. Regarding the market trending with AI, how will Splunk AppDynamics help with artificial intelligence?

In the technology stack, I believe Python is going to be heavily used in AI applications. I'm not certain about this. We currently monitor Python, but it is not as extensive as Java monitoring. If Splunk AppDynamics provides more information on Python monitoring or artificial intelligence application monitoring, that will be helpful.

Customer support takes time. Whenever we face any issues, we have to open the vendor case and then there will be back and forth happening. I can see there is an opportunity to improve the customer support in Splunk AppDynamics.

I have been using Splunk AppDynamics for the last four years.

We have not seen any issues with Splunk AppDynamics. It is stable. We haven't seen any outages.

We have not seen any issues with scalability. We were able to scale up as the number of applications increased.

Customer support takes time. Whenever we face any issues, we have to open the vendor case and then there will be back and forth happening. I can see there is an opportunity to improve the customer support in Splunk AppDynamics.

Positive

Earlier we were using some other monitoring tool, and troubleshooting in that monitoring tool was difficult. We switched to Splunk AppDynamics because of the business transaction feature specifically and other customized extensions available.

Before choosing Splunk AppDynamics, we evaluated some other tools as well. Specifically, we tried our hands with the Tivoli monitoring tool. We are still using OpenText as well, which is also a monitoring tool. We have used some other tools as well, but we chose Splunk AppDynamics because of its user-friendly UI and because it is easy to understand.

Splunk AppDynamics is user-friendly and it's easy to monitor applications and troubleshoot. This helps the entire organization.

It requires minimal training to get onboarded for the application team as well as the support team.

Recently we are exploring how Splunk AppDynamics can be integrated with OpenTelemetry, but we are in a very initial stage.

Depending on the organization's requirement, we will definitely recommend Splunk AppDynamics because of its features, specifically all the custom extensions, and to maintain the application uptime. Splunk AppDynamics will help. It requires minimal training to get onboarded for the application team as well as the support team.

I think with the current era, we can see Splunk AppDynamics being a costlier tool. Most of our clients have shown an inclination toward open source tools, such as DataDog. Many applications and many organizations are using Grafana, and there are other tools available, so they are exploring that possibility because of the pricing.

There were a few issues that we have noticed with Splunk AppDynamics. Data is not reporting, and custom extensions are not readily available. That is why I have chosen seven out of ten.

This metric is not currently available on top of my head.

I believe you have covered all the points, and I am satisfied. My overall review rating for Splunk AppDynamics is seven out of ten.

The root cause analysis they have is exceptional. It is a satisfying product, especially the smart agent collectors, which help us significantly. 

The real user monitoring and digital experience monitoring effectively track actual user experience with the applications, including page loading, interaction time for both desktop and mobile applications.

AppDynamics' AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis in diagnosing performance issues is good. It doesn't have many false positives.

They have one aspect that needs improvement. They should combine the cloud and EPM on-premises together and provide a unified single pane of glass for all their modules because they currently have different modules for infrastructure monitoring. My expectation is to unify the management console into one single pane of glass console to manage everything and have all visibility from one place.

We have completed three years with Splunk AppDynamics.

It is good.

The scalability is fine. Many people are using it. We are a system integration company selling this to clients. Our clients are medium to large-sized businesses, typically ranging from 800 to 8,000 users.

I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

It's a bit complex; it's not exactly easy. It's moderate in difficulty. You need some experience to implement it.

It is a good solution. It has strong capabilities. You cannot compare Splunk AppDynamics with others. If you want quality, you need to pay, so the cost is justified.

I would recommend it for financial institutions and banks, as well as any companies that rely heavily on online applications, like e-commerce service providers.

I would rate Splunk AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

Our use case is in the lower environment. We are not using it in the production environment. We are part of the performance testing team, so we monitor the users on this server through performance testing, and during that time, we use all the agents, install them on the server, and monitor any bottlenecks. We use Splunk AppDynamics for deep dive analysis and provide inputs to the team. That is our use case.

We are using it only for the on-premises environment, but we are exploring options for Azure-hosted applications and AWS-hosted applications.

Splunk AppDynamics helps us in identifying bottlenecks and providing fine-tuning recommendations. We have many sites. We do deployments and analyze products. Before, as a performance testing team, we were not in a position to tell the team where the issue was happening, only able to provide numbers. With Splunk AppDynamics, we can pinpoint exactly where we need to concentrate and provide recommendations for fine-tuning. Without it, it was a nightmare. We wouldn't have been able to provide this information. 

The metrics browser is very useful, and the deep dive feature is very useful for us. 

Product-wise, everything is good, but the main concern is the extensions and their documentation, particularly for the installation of Azure app services. It is lacking some documentation, which is why we are always with the AppDynamics team for support to get the details.

Additionally, whenever they upgrade or add new features, we do not get notifications, which makes it very hard for us to find out new information. If they could fix this, it would be helpful, and our satisfaction score would increase.

We have been using Splunk AppDynamics for almost three years.

We are using the cloud version only and not an on-premises installation. I am not sure what to expect on the scalability front, but it is useful for us. We have tried it with a maximum of 500 concurrent users, and it provided all the required information.

Initially, we had some hiccups getting technical support. After some time, we got a contact, an account manager, to work directly with for technical support. He immediately finds a resource and assigns it to us.

Positive

We haven't done that exercise. We are working on a mix of applications, such as SaaS, AWS-hosted, Azure, and on-premises applications. It's very hard to find ROI because we are currently focused only on the on-premises applications. In a year, we work on about 20 projects, but we get only two or three projects using Splunk AppDynamics. For the others, because they are vendor-hosted, we don't utilize it. We are still trying it, and maybe once we develop that capability, we'll start finding ROI. Currently, we are not performing any exercise on calculating ROI.

We find its pricing reasonable and competitive. After it was acquired by Cisco, we found it acceptable.

I would rate Splunk AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

It is used as an APM. We utilize Splunk as a SIEM for security and infrastructure observability.

What I like the most about Splunk AppDynamics is the end-to-end observability for the application, along with traces. It enhances productivity and aids in cost avoidance.

Splunk AppDynamics is no longer available as a standalone product in the market. Cisco has integrated it into their full-stack observability solution called the Splunk Observability Cloud. Therefore, purchasing Splunk AppDynamics as a standalone product is no longer an option, which presents a challenge for us. After Cisco acquired Splunk in 2023, Splunk AppDynamics, initially a separate product, became part of Cisco's full-stack solution. This change means that I can no longer deploy it as before.

Splunk AppDynamics does not support the complete MELT framework, which includes metrics, events, logging, and tracing for the entire stack. It lacks maturity in correlation within the observability spectrum. Splunk AppDynamics provides an end-to-end view of the application but misses the infrastructure part, which is crucial.

I have used this solution for nearly six years, dating back to 2019.

It is quite stable. We have faced challenges with Splunk agents and Splunk AppDynamics agents. You often have multiple agents running simultaneously in the infrastructure. This can sometimes cause conflicts with your application, so it is necessary to conduct appropriate testing before deploying them in production to prevent potential outages.

We are facing issues at the moment with Splunk and scalability. We have reached maximum capacity in our tier, and extending capacity has not been cost-effective from Splunk's perspective.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I find the initial setup to be of medium to high complexity. It requires appropriate initial planning for the tools to be successfully implemented.

After implementation, it takes a little bit of time to realize its value.

We leveraged professional services from both Splunk and Cisco for the deployment of Splunk AppDynamics.

The pricing is quite comparable to similar solutions in the market. All these solutions at the moment are cheap, but it is like paying for insurance; you pay insurance to avoid major damage.

I would rate Splunk AppDynamics a seven out of ten. When addressing observability concerns, one should not only focus on the application layer. A full observability approach is required. New tools focus on the entire stack end-to-end, offering correlation to facilitate root cause analysis and minimize MTTR. Therefore, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

Normally, we require end-user monitoring for our digital banking services. Since we operate in the financial sector, we need monitoring for our mobile apps and web browsers, particularly for our online banking systems. This is our main use case.

The feature that I appreciate in AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is the intuitive and user-friendly dynamic mapping it creates for workflows. The application flow presents a streamlined interface, making it easy to navigate across different interfaces and troubleshoot applications. This interface is particularly valuable for identifying and resolving application issues effectively.

One aspect that requires improvement is the agent. Without an agent, gathering sufficient information on applications is challenging. Additionally, the agent sometimes creates performance issues in production environments. If AppDynamics could develop a means to monitor without an agent, it could significantly improve application performance and reduce potential problems. Moving to an agentless solution, like what some competitors are doing, would be beneficial.

We have been providing the solutions using AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring for three years.

The solution is stable overall. I can rate it nine out of ten. Occasionally, the agents stop working, which disrupts monitoring, but such instances are rare.

AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is scalable. However, I did not find any Docker solution available with it, and a separate instance has to be installed. 

Overall, scalability is fine, and I rate it eight out of ten.

The customer service and support are helpful and responsive. I can rate their support nine out of ten.

Positive

Normally, two to three engineers are involved in the installation process from our side.

AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring uses a token-based pricing model, which is complex and can be confusing for customers. Previously, there were different pricing models for web browsers and mobile apps, but now they have unified it. Customers have to pay a premium price, however, they receive considerable value from the product.

We are aware of competitors in the market like Dynatrace and Riverbed. We do not work with them.

Overall, there is room for improvement in AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring, so I rate it eight out of ten. 

The complex token-based pricing model can confuse customers when calculating costs.

We had several applications that were facing performance issues. To improve our observability, alerting, and monitoring of these performance problems, we onboarded the applications onto Splunk AppDynamics. This allowed us to gain better insights into the issues and identify the business transactions that were causing the problems.

I haven't used the APM feature. It's primarily been configuring database collectors on a database.

Splunk AppDynamics has been effective in auto-discovery and mapping and visualizing our application ecosystem. There have been instances where we've needed to fine-tune the auto discovery feature. When we installed it on Unix and Windows applications, it retrieved a substantial amount of information. We then had to configure the information to meet our specific needs. The tool goes out and summarizes all the business transactions, but we need to limit or filter out the excess data. This is particularly important for gaining visibility into application performance and proactively resolving issues.

Using Splunk AppDynamics for business transaction monitoring significantly impacts my ability to prioritize transactions such as logins or checkouts, and it has improved the process.

I've worked on an application where users book trades into a system. Each booking translates into a transaction. Similarly, users query these trades, which corresponds to other transactions. I can see the speed of these transactions and identify issues when trying to write them into the database. I can also monitor when transactions are being queried. Additionally, there are other applications accessing the database, and I can observe their interactions as well. Overall, it enhances my ability to visualize what’s happening behind the scenes.

I find Splunk AppDynamics' AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis to be very effective in diagnosing performance issues. I can quickly identify if there's any blocking on the database. Using the APM tool or the graphical user interface, I can track slow SQL queries. I can sort all those transactions to see which ones are consuming a lot of CPU and identify the long-running queries. This allows me to quickly assess the situation and understand what is going on.

Based on the issues we observe in Splunk AppDynamics, we know where to focus or where to spend money in improving the application. It gives us that flexibility to be able to improve and know where to focus our spending power.

I like the fact that you can self discover business transactions. It's easy to onboard your applications and configure your collectors or your agents.

The ability to monitor transactions and identify slow SQL queries in a database is valuable. We can detect issues such as blocking. It allows me to visually analyze the database's performance and understand its current state. Additionally, users can configure a dashboard to provide an overview of the database activities. 

When I onboard applications onto AppDynamics, I configure database agents or collectors to gather metrics and monitor business transactions. This setup enables me to see what is occurring within the database environment. I have extensive experience in configuring agents and collectors for databases, as well as for Windows and Unix machines.

I would probably suggest making the tool more real-time and allowing for integration with a wider range of DevOps tools. This is particularly relevant when comparing it to something like Genius, which I recognize is a different tool altogether. Ideally, I would prefer a situation where I don't have to use two or three different observability tools, allowing me to focus on just one.

When you self-discover observable business transactions, there should be a better way to focus on the specific transactions that matter to us. In our environment, we have numerous business transactions, but not all of them are relevant for monitoring. It would be helpful to easily identify and target the business transactions we want to concentrate on without it being too cumbersome.

I've been using Splunk AppDynamics for about three to four years.

It has gotten a lot more stable over the years in comparison to when I first started using it. I would rate it a seven out of ten for stability.

It's easily scalable. I would rate it a seven out of ten for stability.

There are approximately 100 global users in my organization who work with Splunk AppDynamics.

The technical support for Splunk AppDynamics deserves a solid eight out of ten.

It's down to the complexity of our environment. We've got a lot of legacy applications, so it is a little bit complex trying to implement it. We had about 200 machines or databases. It took some time to get it implemented. It took a couple of months.

From an end user's perspective, I often need to coordinate with my infrastructure team. Ideally, I would like to implement it without having to rely on them. For example, if I don’t have full access to a database, I have to reach out to my infrastructure team to gain full access or to create a collector on the database. It would be much more efficient if I could log into the database and create a collector myself. In my experience, having to wait for administrators with full access to take action slows down the implementation process.

The only maintenance I could think of is having to make sure that the accounts are onboarded and the password is reset because the password sometimes expires. That's the only issue. It's quite straightforward. Once you reset those passwords, you're good.

I estimate it saves 10% to 15% in various resources.

Genius is likely more intuitive and offers greater functionality. It can be easily integrated with many other DevOps tools. In comparison to AppDynamics, Genius provides much more flexibility. However, one downside of Genius is that it does not automatically discover business transactions. From that perspective, AppDynamics has an advantage due to its self-discovery feature for transactions.

I would rate Splunk AppDynamics a seven out of ten.

My main use cases for Splunk AppDynamics include APM, application performance monitoring.

The features of Splunk AppDynamics that I appreciate most are the business processes. These features benefit my organization by providing a bigger picture, not only of their own systems, however, how it influences other parts of the environment and how we are being influenced by other parts. For its time, Splunk AppDynamics helped improve my organization's business resilience quite a bit.

To improve Splunk AppDynamics, it should migrate seamlessly into observability Splunk, which is called Splunk Observability Cloud.

I have been using Splunk AppDynamics for around 15 years.

The stability and reliability of Splunk AppDynamics were okay. I did not experience unusual downtime, crashes, or performance issues; no software is perfect, but it was within the expected parameters.

Splunk AppDynamics had some confusion about the SaaS, no SaaS, only SaaS strategy, which wasn't clear. Some time ago, they committed again to on-premises, however, it was too late.

I evaluate customer service and technical support as good, seven out of ten.

Positive

Prior to adopting Splunk AppDynamics, I was not using another solution to address similar needs; this was our first step into the APM world.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that it was very expensive.

Sadly, I did not see return on investment with Splunk AppDynamics.

The solution I was using prior was Grafana Cloud.

What caused me to stop using the solution is that we failed to bring the product to our DevOps teams so that they could easily use it and learn how to use it, this is something we had to learn again. I would advise other organizations considering Splunk AppDynamics to take a sharp look at the whole Splunk product portfolio and how they merge to observability cloud, integrating many AppDynamics features; this is very interesting, but I don't know whether or not they are already there.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Splunk AppDynamics seven out of ten.