Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

We use it to monitor the load testing environment.

It has improved our organization with its ability to catch issues quickly and fix them.

• Code profiling
• Monitoring

The cost is prohibitive.

Testing the customer behavior to learn their problems on a website, the heatmap flow, and other information.

• IT department
• Software production
• Test environment
• QA testing
• KPIs of the business
• Heatmap
• An APM

This tool is so good to work with.

The primary use case is application performance monitoring. It performs well.

It has improved my organization because we are able to proactively and reactively look at performance issues.

• Looking at every tier in the application's path. 
• Being able to correlate performance between tiers. 
• Being able to drill down within the individual tiers for metrics.

It needs strengthening in the database tiers.

It seems stable.

The scalability is very good.

We have used the technical support, and it is very good.

The previous solution seemed to be stagnated, in terms of its ability to monitor new technologies and its ability to move into a cloud/SaaS environment.

It was both straightforward and complex to set up, like any tool. General configuration is usually straightforward, and when you start to look for integration or enhanced capabilities, that is when things start to get complex.

Cost and licensing will constantly go up, so there are some cost opportunities there. 

The way it is structured in terms of price could be better. You pay for individual modules and that adds on to the cost, which detracts you from implementing those modules and slows you down. It would be better if there were more solutions incorporated into the base price. 

We evaluated AppDynamics vs New Relic APM and Precise. It was really a customer-driven mandate at the time, so I do not know if it was a fair comparison end-to-end of capabilities and cost. 

Look at the whole picture. Take into consideration what you get for specific pricing models and how much it costs to add on things you may need later.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: cost.

For customer journey monitoring: Stitch together complex journeys involving the entire ecosystem (internal through external IT) and multiple stakeholders.

Has helped us to increase customer acquisitions and reduce revenue leakage in the following:

• Conversion rates
• Average revenue per user
• Customer acquisition costs
• Rate of customer churn
• Recurring or incremental revenue
• Renewals and/or subscriptions.

End user experience monitoring, which includes:

• Uptime (availability)
• App response time
• Database response time
• Percentage of transaction time spent in database
• Resource utilization
• Database query times.

Areas which could be improved:

• Integrated dashboard for user
• Application
• Infrastructure
• Network layers.

There also needs to be an option to capture all the sessions for all the users, not just samplings.

The way APM works with the different applications, as well as the various analytics and metrics that it provides.

Right now we are not using it with any other products but we will soon be integrating AppDynamics with ServiceNow.

We just started using it so it is a little too early to tell but we have already seen how APM finds the issues with the different applications, which is very important for us. That has really improved a lot of business areas and business transactions for us.

It has been pretty stable for us so far.

We haven't gotten to the point yet where we have tested the scalability since we just started using it.

We were using Nagios but we wanted more application analysis, which Nagios does not provide.

The setup was not really straightforward. We were able to do it because we got help from AppDynamics. But it was definitely not straightforward.

I would recommend to my colleagues that they start using it as soon as possible for their applications.

I'd say BTs, and being able to set health goals. Those probably would be the best. Second to that would be being able to monitor what's going on in real-time, this is going to make a big difference.

I think that previously we were more reactionary than proactive. I hope that this is what we can really get out of AppDynamics, the switch to a more proactive stance. Before anybody else knows what is going on, we will know, and we will be able to cut down our meantime to fixes going out, and to identifying them.

Looking at it from the standpoint of a developer, I see the biggest improvement being that it gives the developers more visibility and ownership, it really lets them see what is going on. I feel that this will lead the devs to make better code and better decisions. It will help them be more cognizant of resources, and other things.

I went through the Power User training, and it was kind of like drinking from a fire hose. As a dev, I would like to see something that is more tailored towards us, instead of having just a general quick Power User session. 

I haven't been able to get the full benefit of AppDynamics yet because I haven't had any time to sit down and actually go through production.

I have not seen any problems with the stability. It seems to be very stable.

I have not heard of any problems with the scalability. 

We have used the technical support and it was very good. We had a good response.

We were not previously using a different solution. We decided to invest in AppDynamics because we wanted to move from being reactionary to being proactive, that's really what it comes down to. Instead of our customers calling us up and saying, "There is something going on," now we will know it before they do, and hopefully we will be resolving it before they even notice.

We are looking into also utilizing Database Monitoring. We're still checking that out.

My criteria when choosing a vendor would be the reputation behind them, the product they bring to the table, and of course the pricing. I wasn't involved in selecting AppDynamics but I know that these criteria always play a role in everything.

I would recommend AppDynamics to my colleagues, because the solution works. It really comes down to whether or not the price point works for them.

Being able to quickly diagnose customer issues and their performance problems.

It lets us quickly diagnose customer problems that occurred in production, but also lets us look at our system and load test in the quality assurance period so we find problems before they go to production.

The stability is generally pretty good. Sometimes you get anomalies which are hard to explain and sometimes data seems to disappear, but except for that it is generally pretty good.

Scalability has been fine. I have not had any problems.

The support that we received was pretty good. Around July, we had some technical resources come on site and help train us and the team on how to use it. We asked them a couple of questions but generally we figure stuff out using the help system.

We had built our own login and diagnostic tools but it was hard to add features to that, while at the same time try and diagnose any problems quickly. So it is nice to have something which is already done, which you just learn how to use and have a quick turnaround without having to worry about it. And if we have problems, we just phone technical support.

We looked at about three or four different vendors, one of which was Dynatrace. We talked to Dynatrace a lot, and even had it installed, but decided to go to AppDynamics as it seemed to work better for us.

AppDynamics does exactly what I want it to do. It diagnoses problems quickly so if one of our customers is having problems, we can tell him what's slow and maybe find a solution within a couple of hours. Customers don't mind if you have occasional problems, as long as you can fix them quickly. If it goes on for weeks and weeks, then they start getting annoyed. It is nice to be able to tell them, "This is what happened. This is why it happened. And this is what we did to fix it."

If a colleague of mine was researching AppDynamics I would get them to install it; use the evaluation copy and see if it works for them. It is pretty easy to use.

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.