Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

Monitoring and mediating the risks are the most beneficial features.

Before we moved the code to AppDynamics, we had to compare the agile process and also had to make sure that they're following the standards. Thus, monitoring the actual quality of work in AppDynamics is the most valuable feature to us.

It would help to maybe have a more graphical interface and more user-friendly graphics. I don't think that Java is so adaptable since the marketplace has improved a lot. Thus, they have to improve in terms of the GUI.

There was not that much downtime experienced.

It is scalable across the board. We have implemented it across our company. It will meet the needs of the company, going forward.

The other team took care of the support. I am only a DBA but as far as I know, I haven't heard of any issues as such.

The setup is very simple. To be honest, it is pretty straightforward. They sent a team to help us out with the implementation. From the database side, we worked with the product team members to put in the database and also for the infrastructure laydown. It was straightforward.

It is a good product and I would highly recommend it.

Whilst looking for a vendor, the most important criteria is honesty. I don't want to waste time, so I want honest feedback. We don't want any lame excuses such as, there is no patch or that they are still working on it and so on. Thus, honesty is most important.

The totality of the product has allowed us to decrease our mean time to resolution when issues are detected. Also, because we’ve implemented this in our test dev environments, we now use it to measure and quantify performance improvements prior to ever releasing to production.

The modules that we are finding most valuable are as follows:

• Applications: This provides us insight into how our applications are performing within our environments and affords us the ability to identify opportunities and make changes to code / environment to effect positive performance lift.
• Databases: This module is amazing; allows our developers the ability to view into the SQL nodes themselves to quickly rule in/out any hardware issues. It also provides them with access to download execution plans directly via AppDynamics, which in turn helps improve turnaround time for fixes and such.
• End User Monitoring: Whereas the Application module gives us insight as to how our applications are performing within our environments, End User Monitoring provides us similar data from a browser perspective. In other words, it provides us the complete experience from the clients’ perspective; tremendously valuable indeed.

The product has a pretty diverse metrics browser, but I’d like to see better out-of-the-box visual reporting so that we can roll this up to management. I have no doubt that will be improved in the next release.

The product has been rock solid from a stability standpoint.

Scalability is easily controlled via scripting, a REST API and included utilities for copying configurations between applications.

Technical support is 10/10. They are very responsive to support requests.

The initial deployment of .NET and database agents was done in minimal time. We had our first application set up in a matter of minutes.

We chose to deploy in-house and that turned out to be the correct decision for us, as it allowed us to become more familiar with the behind-the-scenes workings of the software. As far as advice, while auto-discovery is nice, we’ve found that prior planning in regards to configuration of applications, tiers and nodes pays off by ensuring the returned data is in a format that is most digestible to your organization.

We are still in the process of completing our ROI calculations, but we already have examples of a 89% reduction in MTTR for one application... and a multitude of examples of money saved in others, including savings of around $150,000 for one particular issue that we were almost set to throw more hardware / software at.

We evaluated several other products in addition to AppDynamics (Ruxit, New Relic & Dynatrace). While each possesses some great tools, none provided the totality or completeness of toolset that we required for our complex environments.

Take the time to plan what exactly it is you are looking to get out of the software; it will pay dividends after implementation.

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.

Once all the metrics are collated during the analysis phase, the troubleshooting section is very important to me. It provides the entire overview of the performance bottlenecks at different layers of the application landscape.

It helps me to prioritize my activities in solving or fine-tuning the application. It helps me in my interactions with the development, infrastructure, and operations teams.

This solution helps us conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of critical performance issues. We can communicate clearly with detailed insights. This saves time and prevents ambiguities.

As a performance engineering architect and a practice evangelist for performance engineering practice, this has enabled our performance tester to provide more engineering value-based solutions/deep dives. These showed how the applications fared during the load conditions and linked the performance bottleneck to the exact line of code.

This practice has transitioned our testers to “engineers”. AppDynamics solutions complement performance testing.

I would like to see the following:

• A better way to export data to reports.
• A better way of distributing the AppDynamics reports with deep dive details.
• Better integration with load testing tools such as NeoLoad and JMeter. The current integration is very cumbersome.

I have been using APM tools since 2004. I have been implementing this solution across different industries for the past year and a half.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

Technical support is very good. We have a good team working with Wipro and AppDynamics.

The auto-discovery was good. It was a straightforward configuration of agents on web and app servers.

I truly appreciated the SaaS license mode that provides the AppDynamics controller on the cloud. There are bits and pieces of licenses that need to be procured in order to have a complete APM. This includes application, server health, browser-level monitoring, UEM, and DB monitoring.

When you add this all up, the price is not appealing. The procurement of AppDynamics licenses is a bit tricky. You need to be careful with it.

AppDynamics has come a long way in terms of user friendliness with day-to-day use. This solution has an edge over others in terms of adaptability between team members with different roles and responsibilities.

You should start off with application monitoring licenses which provide very user-friendly functionality. You need to spend more time to generate the reports with deeper insights.

It automatically detects “slow” and “error” as transaction snapshots. The transaction snapshots help me find the root cause of the problem. Transaction snapshots collect business transaction information such as the application call stack and SQL statements.

It also captures important information about business transactions, such as method parameters and HTTP information (header, session, and cookie). The snapshots also correlate application calls among all monitoring nodes. It can identify the entry point to help us trace from the first tier to the back-end tier.

The solution helped me to find out if the slow transactions are caused by SQL statements or by external system calls. We also use it to trace the socket leak issue that occurred with the old mobile device version.

Adobe Flash Player is a forbidden program in many companies' IT security policies. AppDynamics was using HTML5 to improve its UI and replace Flash Player over the course of the last two years. However, its UI still has some features that require Flash Player as a display interface. They need to update their UI to HTML5 customer can easy to use and optimize UI performance.

We have used this solution for four years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give it the highest rating in terms of technical support. The support engineer responds to questions very quickly and his answers clarify the issues.

Our previous solution did not fulfill our monitoring requirements, so we chose AppDynamics to replace the old solution.

The AppDynamics initial setup is a very easy, out-of-the-box installation.

We evaluated Dynatrace and New Relic.

AppDynamics provides a complete online document. Everyone can learn by him/herself through the instructions provided in that document.

AppDynamics monitors the ICT environment by just installing a Java or .NET agent and machine agent on the server. It shows how all the components in the infrastructure work together to run an application. You can pinpoint easily where the performance issues for your application are.

We once installed an agent on an IIS server and then noticed that there was a memory issue on this server. Also, we once had performance issues on a Websphere application server, which was caused by memory leaks in the JVM. The IBM tooling did not warn for this, but AppDynamics showed it was a problem, because you can look at the data over a longer period.

We solved one issue with performance on our online application, which was caused by a slow batch application running on the same server/database.

One thing that can be improved is the license structure. It is not easy to see which agent is included in the license and which is not.

We have been using AppDynamics for about four years now.

The controller and the agents are easy to deploy; 30 minutes at the most.

In the years that we have used AppDynamics, we never encountered stability problems.

We only encountered scalability issues when switching agents over servers related to the license structure.

The level of customer service is very good.

Questions are answered within 24 hours. When there is an issue, real effort is made to help.

Previously, we used the hardware monitoring and logging tools of the hardware vendors. This meant several different views on our environment.

We used IBM tooling and Oracle monitoring tools. For Java applications, we used the monitoring tools of the JVM.

It was very easy to install and setup. If the environment is complex, AppDynamics will help to make the best suitable setup.

We made an in-house implementation and configuration with help of technical support.

Configuration in the IT environment is very important. It has to be done with the vendor, our development teams, our infra support teams and the business.

The fast setup of AppDynamics independent from the details of the application landscape is valuable.

We mainly use AppDynamics in our test lab to monitor the application undergoing testing together with its surrounding systems. The possibility to quickly drill down into problematic requests in combination with the drill down into all kinds of different monitoring data greatly reduced the time to analyze problems which we uncover during our load tests.

The graphical display of the monitoring data is very simple and unscientific. Histograms should be plotted as histograms. An easy export of the data of a graph in CSV or Excel format would be helpful for the creation of individual reports.

The advantage of a histogram plot is that you see the measuring intervals (bins) and are not mislead

to believe in a linear increase or decrease, where there was none. As for the export to .csv-files. It is very often necessary to prepare reports for customers or management. For those people the data need to be prepared individually with different kind of plots to emphasize the important point. Therefore a .csv-Export is very helpful.

We have been using this solution for four years.

AppDynamics was very stable. It needed maintenance about 1-2 times a year.

We did not encounter scalability issues, but our test laboratory does not host a large scale application landscape.

We got our questions answered in a timely manner.

At the time of our decision about which product to use, we tried several of the ‘main’ products and settled on AppDynamics.

The initial setup was straightforward. The most difficult part was the procedure until we had the correct license installed.

If you go in this field, consider that you will build a long-term solution, which will include a large part of your infrastructure. The tool is then very helpful, but you have to plan the long-term cost in your budget.

The simplicity of usage implies that you need not get a decent course on how to use this product. But if you go to a course, you can learn different approaches and you can get into contact with people to whom you might ask questions at a later time.

If you talk about the Application Analytics, we have different systems, all kinds of integrations from the application space, I have so many systems to integrate. For business transactions, I have more than 20-25 systems. Without getting these analytics, where there are bottlenecks in the system, and where I see an issue, it's very difficult to track and debug.

If I spend a long time debugging an issue, I'll see more revenue loss; more bad customer experiences, which impacts my business’ revenue. What we do with the analytics, we have installed AppDynamics, instrumentation, and everything. At any point in time, if we want instrumented data, we just go back and take it, pull up the analytics, and see what it is throwing up. It's drilling down; showing snapshots of everything; bringing together different systems. It's really helping us. It's easy. It doesn’t take too much time and does not impact any performance on the servers. It's not too complicated of a system to understand. It's very easy, more readable to the users; just go over and grab the snapshots, and say, “Hey, here is the issue.” Just go over and fix it, drill down to see what is causing a problem.

Recently, it helped us discover some security issues, which now we see have been there for few years. There is a loophole in the security system. It was taking way too long. I've been running millions of transactions, and we were not able to discover it. But with AppDynamics, we just started monitoring. It simply brought our attention to analytics, saying “Hey, here it is. It's behaving weird.” We were able to drill down and we found a few servers that were behaving weird. We're able to develop a fix. There was previously no way to discover the issue. If it’s working fine, it’s working fine, but those few transactions were taking a long time.

It's really helping. We're so happy. That's why we want to understand, see how much further we can leverage it. It is not just the analytics, but how can we take it to the business; how can we turn this into a business-centric tool, as well as application monitoring. We have seen some of other vendors and it's really awesome.

As of right now, we are just going with demand-based monitoring, when there is an issue, a performance bottleneck or something. However, we are also exploring how we can set the continuous monitoring system, where we can get more of the analytics, see more of the long snapshots and see what the actual problems are and where, even if we're meeting customer experience very well, we can go beyond these customer expectations by improving some things. These analytics are helping us to build on those areas.

In the Business iQ, I don't know how much they’re trying to grab it, but we want to see more of the transaction, each and every area, from the users’ perspective to the end of the transaction, from the user to the network. There could be situations where the user is sitting in some other region, trying to access a system that is located in US data centres; there wasn't a problem from that. I want the transaction details from the data centre to the back end systems, and the back end systems to third-party integration. I should be able to correlate different transactions; all the pieces onto the dashboard, saying, “This is how it turns out.” That's what we are actually looking for.

We want a single monitoring tool. We don't want thousands in there because right now, I am discarding analytics monitoring tools. It's difficult to compare. Each tool has a different perspective but if you have a monitoring tool across everything, that’s where we see scope for improvement.

We want to explore more. We just started. We were on a different technology. We just started, so we want to explore it more and then see how it scales up.

It works as usual. I'll give an example. We have seen some other application monitoring systems from other vendors I won’t mention, where, as soon as we implement the monitoring system and start the application, the monitoring itself kills the performance, which is severe and so complicated in solutions. AppDynamics is just simple to put in. The agent shows a zero impact on the application servers, which we use Oracle. It's really good.

We've never used technical support, because it’s easy, super easy. We have reached out a few times just to understand more of how much we can use it, but not on the performance which AppDynamics is causing. There were misconceptions in the beginning that maybe it is causing a problem, but even after turning it off, the problem did not go away. We later realized it is not the problem. There were some interpretations about it later on, but it was pretty good.

We were previously using a different technology.

I was not involved in the setup. We have separate team for that. We are the architects. We requested they put it in the first place but there is an infrastructure team. They do the setup. The guidance which AppDynamics provided was really helpful.

I definitely would recommend AppDynamics. After looking at the snapshots, I think I see we're using less than 5-10% of what AppDynamics is capable of. I would definitely recommend exploring not just the analytics and the Business iQ, but I would also encourage you to show the network stats on the Business iQ, which is very important, very critical, and is very difficult to find out those things. Definitely those are really helpful.

We do not use any other AppDynamics solutions, but we were exploring the Business iQ at a recent AppDynamics conference. There was another application, End User Monitoring. I wanted to see that piece of it. It looks pretty interesting and I want to see how it takes.