Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

We've been able to chase down some big problems with our website. When the problems are more obscure in nature, it's allowed us to drill down into our code and find things we wouldn't normally be able to find as easily.

It's actually saved us tons of man hours because we've been able to narrow in on where actual problems are, rather than having to chase our tails looking at everything along the way. It's changed the target area. It's reduced that dramatically, so we know where to look for problems quicker.

Things I struggled with most were the visual widgets in dashboards. I feel like there could have been more online guidance.

Synthetics would be much easier if we didn’t have to learn Python and could use a GUI tool like Dynatrace.

I would also like to see alerting if our transactions or log transactions daily allowance has been met.

I like the looks of the network feature coming. That looks really cool. As far as the product itself, I've been really happy. Everything I've needed from it has been easy to find. Beyond the items I’ve mentioned, I don't have any big ideas for enhancements. As I’ve mentioned, I've been happy with what we have.

It's worked when we needed it, all the time. It's been very stable. I've never had an issue with it.

I don't have much experience with scalability. We're smallish, I'd say. We're a web farm of 4-8 servers. Even during the busy times, it's scaled for what we've needed it. I've never had to test that.

Technical support has been awesome. I've only had to call them a couple of times. Every time I did, I got an immediate response and they weren't happy until I was happy. Of all the tech companies I've ever worked with, they're definitely one of my favorites to work with.

We did not previously use a different solution. That was the thing: It was an untapped area for us, really. I guess when we found them at another conference, Velocity, a few years ago, and decided it was something we really needed.

I think my boss at the time looked at New Relic and maybe Dynatrace. We didn't know much about APM at the time, but I think pricing was the overall factor there.
To be perfectly honest, to me, the most important criteria when selecting AppDynamics was the experience. We had a really great sales team to work with. They made it easy. The support we got along the way was phenomenal.

Take time to get into the forums. That wasn't something we did right away. The forums, the online AppDynamics University, all of them are really, really helpful.
I've been really happy with it and everything we want it to do, it's done. If it was something we thought couldn't be done when we reached out to support, we got help to the ends we needed it.

We will be using other AppDynamics products. We just started, actually; we signed a contract a few months ago. A lot of that stuff is new to us. We're mainly skilled in APM. We're learning the synthetics and the transaction analytics now, which look to be really promising. I'm excited about the demos we've seen. We've had some professional time with a couple of consultants, who showed us how to use them. It looks really, really valuable.

• End-to-end business transaction breakdown: clear picture of where the application is taking time
• Easy user interface to work on

In a critical project where, along with the monitoring solution, RUM is also deployed, it gives you complete clarity why my business transaction failed and what is technically causing that to occur. Instead of wasting time mugging up in logs, fighting with server logs, and manually capturing CPU resource statistics, AppDynamics does it a lot easier without a lot of installation effort, in a single dashboard. On top of that, if you also have RUM, life gets easy from the end-user perspective too.

This product still has to evolve with the latest technologies for which support is available. A lot of new technologies are being developed, such as Node.js, Docker, Play framework, Redis/Couchbase. Instead of just exposing the count number, average response time, and errors/sec, AppDynamics should dig deep into the request response of the transaction and offer a deep-sensing option like Dynatrace Ruxit.

Also, in my opinion, sometimes the values that appear in AppDynamics are skewed.

I have been using it for four years.

Nowadays, CI is very much in demand and because of that, Docker compatibility is increasing. However, to install AppDynamics on Docker is still a challenge. I have done it, but only after lot of consultation with AppDynamics support. Also, if the txn DB size increases, AppDynamics gets a bit tired and performance slows down.

Technical support is 7/10. There is still a lot to improve. If you contact them regarding a specific technology, then that person becomes the only person aware of the issue, which should not be the case.

We previously used Dynatrace. The AppDynamics interface was intuitive and more easy to understand. Also, deployment is easy.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Well, if it is a simple application, go with your in-house team for implementation. On the other hand, if there is a complex e-commerce app and you want to exploit every functionality of AppDynamics and integrate all of the interfaces, then go for external consultant implementation.

I cannot discuss ROI in terms of money, but, yes, RCA became easy, which ultimately saves time/cost/efforts and which becomes large with time-critical applications.

Have a look on all three solutions: AppDynamics, Dynatrace and New Relic.

The most valuable feature is the standard APM agent for Java and .NET. We always find bottlenecks in applications with these agents.

We've seen tasks the end users have to do on a daily basis that used to take 30-60 seconds been improved to take under two seconds, based on reports and recommendations we have written based on AppDynamics. The developers had been troubleshooting this specific issue for months before we installed AppDynamics. We installed AppDynamics, found the bottleneck, wrote the report and gave our recommendation within four hours.

In general, AppDynamics is by far the easiest APM tool to use. The biggest room for improvement is related to maintenance of the solution. A centralized upgrade of agents is sorely missed.

We have been delivering services around AppDynamics for two years now.

We have not encountered any issues with deployment, stability or scalability. However, it can be confusing deploying the analytics agents; this had to be planned carefully.

AppDynamics has hands-down the best technical support I've experienced, and I've worked with all the major APM vendors.

Initial setup, if you choose the SaaS solution, is very straightforward and well documented. Choosing the on-premise solution is more complex, but not any worse than its competitors.

I cannot discuss our customers’ ROI. I would advise to get as many APM agents as you have application servers, to start easy with EUM, and grow the EUM as your website/app grows. Don't do analytics at first, if you don't have a clear business case for it.

We have delivered, and deliver, services related to Dynatrace and HPE. AppDynamics is, today, the solution that is easiest to deploy and gives the quickest ROI.

Just try it. AppDynamics has a free, 14-day trial. If you don't have the needed staff or knowledge, talk to one of AppDynamics’ partners.

By stack trace exception I mean the automatic correlation between the exception stack trace with the request. For example, you can ignore specific know issue and In transaction snapshots, an ignored exception does not appear as an error in the Summary and Error Details sections of any transaction snapshot that was in progress when the exception occurred.

Concerning the ability to see the history of executionsI mean the ability to list of transaction snapshots, using Transaction Snapshot Flow Map displays.

You can see the history of the execution time, and timestamp of the transaction. The flow map also provides details of the overall time that is spent in a particular tier and in database and remote service calls.
The Applications dashboard and tabs, is a major point of the intuitiveness of the product, in fact It allows in a single view to have an overall impression of each application performance (for example Application Flow Map which depicts communications between different nodes and backends…).

The call Graph which is a powerful feature which allow to list the methods in a call stack and provides detailed informations about each call is another intuitiveness feature of the tool belong many other but the the better is to experiment the tool in a normal diagnostic case, my company and I can explain and assist your team more further with those features (we are based in France but also based at Montreal).

This product has improved the performance management of our applications before deploying them to the end user. (Les Douanes du Sénégal is our main reference.)

We used this solution for five years.

Sometimes different results appear for the same scenario.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have not contacted technical support.

I have not used a different solution.

Initial setup was more or less simple.

We have some experience with Dynatrace.

This product facilitates load testing and visibility of their results and facilitates diagnosis and analysis for code optimization (SQL queries, instructions and inefficient code).

The benefits are less man hours, less downtime, and faster resolutions. In the past, it was, "Oh no. The application isn't working. Let's fix it." It might get fixed within 24 hours because we did not have any idea what the issue was. It always came down to, “Well, reboot the servers. That usually works.” It worked, but we never knew what the root cause was.

Once we got AppDynamics, we could see that this part of the application is where the issue is. When they're trying to process these certain files, something's wrong in this sector. We may still have to reboot the servers to get the customers up and running immediately, but then we can circle back around that day and address the actual issue.

The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application: Are all of our transactions going smoothly? Are we having a bottleneck somewhere? Identifying problems before they impact the users. The live reporting and dashboard(s) allow us, at a quick glance, to see the overall health of our nationwide (US) application. We can see the health of our individual office locations (cities) and the individual users (PCs). At any given time we can tell which specific city and\or user is experiencing poor application performance. It even helps us determine if the issue is application, network, or user specific. Before we had AppDynamics APM, we were reactive. We’d wait for a phone call or email to tell us there was a problem and then go looking for it, find it, and resolve it. Now, after installing AppDynamics APM, we’re proactive. We can see the problems developing in real time. We can identify a problem and be half way to resolving it before we’ve even received a phone call or email. We’ve even discovered and resolved problems without the end users or management even realizing there was a problem.

A year earlier, if someone had asked me about room for improvement, I would've said end-user monitoring, which they have now. Analytics was great. I didn't even think that we would need that.

I think I would like to see a better way to deploy and upgrade the machine agents that we use. Currently, we have to use SCCM, and that might just be our environment with the customer. Personally, I am not the best with Linux commands; I'm learning. I'm a GUI person. Give me a button to click on with a mouse pointer, and that's just me.

I personally don't have anything I think they need to add. They're the great minds. They're the leaders of technology, so they'll think of what I need before I do.

I’ve never had a stability problem with it. It's always working; it's always operational. I’ve never had a glitch; never had the server just stop working. It's spot on.

I can't address scalability because we haven't been able to scale yet. As I’ve mentioned, the way the customer works, it's just one little group that wanted it, and everybody wants it now. Again, we have to go through the process of approval and funding. We haven't been able to touch on the scalability yet.

We have it on 400 servers and machines.

We use technical support all the time. They were great when we finally acquired it. They came in and they helped set it up in our environment; made sure everything was discovered, reporting was working; explained the transactions, reports, the dashboard, all of that to us. We had some more questions at the 2015 AppSphere, and it is great because you can see the guys. We got in touch with someone else and they helped us with licensing issues. There was a couple of extensions we were trying to get working that we couldn't. They got all that squared away.

Recently, we had some consultant hours we needed to use. One of their guys spent three days with us on WebEx, fully customizing even more on the dashboards and the reporting center; and explained baselines to us better.
Technical support is excellent.

We did previously did not use an APM at all. It was just, applications would stop working; there would be bottlenecks; they'd be real slow; and complaints. You'd have the network guys saying, "No, everything's good on our end." You’d have the middle-tier guys saying, "Nope, my servers are online and running." You have the devs for the application saying, "No, no, no, no, it's not my code." It was just, point the finger, pass the buck.

With AppDynamics, we're able to say, "No, it is the network. Something's going on in this city.”, or “No, it is the middle-tier servers because of this." We can tell where the issue is and what the issue is.

I do know that they tested with CA. There was a third one because with our customer, we have to have three competitors. We have to have three products and say, "This is why we're picking AppDynamics. This is why these two will not fit the bill." I don't remember who the third person was.

I think they ended up going with AppDynamics because of the personality of the marketing reps and the engineers that we talked to. It was pricing. It was the capabilities of AppDynamics versus CA and the third company. AppDynamics just brought more to the table.

Personality is quite big when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics. If you come in, and you're snotty, and high and mighty, you go down the list. That's just what it is; that's business.

Pricing: We don't want the cheapest; we don't want the most expensive; we want somewhere in the middle, like when you're buying a TV; you don't want something that's going to break in six months.

The historic background of the company: If you've only been around for six months, it's a bit of a gamble. If you've been around for six years, you're not going to have IBM, HPE, or Xerox buy you. We've had problems with that before. You are your company; you're not going anywhere. In five years, you'll still be there to support us.

Ongoing support: Can we give you a call on a Tuesday at 3:00 PM and get an answer? Or, do we have to submit a ticket, wait a week, maybe get a phone call back and then get a guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about, doesn't want to be at work that day?

It's the overall package.

Give them a call. Check out the field. I know that AppDynamics was more than willing to give us temporary licenses; come in and help us set it up in a dev environment; and show us how it works in our environment, not just the canned demo: “Here's the little website we made and this is how it works.” Of course, it works perfectly because we've made it work perfectly.

They will do a demo in your environment, on your servers, so you can see, “Yes, this is our data. This is what we will see. This is how it will help us.”

The only reason I did not give it a perfect rating is because I don't think anything is 100% perfect. Nothing is the best ever. There's always room for improvement. There's always room to grow. This is the highest I can give because I don't believe in giving that perfect rating.

We’re not yet using any other AppDynamics products. Due to our customer, we can't just buy the newest and greatest, and implement it. There is a long process for testing, approval, and funding; and then more testing and implementation. We're usually about a year and a half behind the latest and greatest.

It helps me monitor how well the front end of our application is working.

I think it has improved the way my organization functions, because for me, I think this application is more like the front end application where the user is the agent. The user is more like a real user. I think it does make an impact, because, right now, we already have that monitor in production. Actually, since I'm an engineer, they already have it deployed in production for that particular application, to see how the end user behaves in that production environment.

Stability might be something a system engineer might know more; they use it every day in production.

I just use it. For me, I think there is still room for improvement. I want to track it when I run it. I use LoadRunner to generate traffic to the environment. A lot of times, I know it's slow, but I need to know how it maps with the tracking I use with LoadRunner on the AppDynamics.

There is a workaround for that, and I did implement that. Based on documentation, the AppDynamics team recommended we just put a header in there and we use it. Whatever tracking we have in LoadRunner, it will show the name exactly in AppDynamics. So, there is a workaround, but it's not really official implementation. That's extra work that I have to do, and I don't really like that. I just wish we could just run it so whatever we see in LoadRunner, we can also see in the AppDyanamics EUM module.

Right now, it's just one application. I'm not sure how it will grow in the future. I don't have the roadmap to see how it will scale in the future. I do not know.

I have not used technical support. The system engineer is the guy who's in touch with technical support, but I heard it is not good. They do not provide a quick response. That is only what I heard. Do not take my word for it. We had a meeting where they said something like, “That is something we need to setup, something we need to get out.” Then they said, “Oh it's there, but it's not resolved yet.’" That's just what I overheard in the meeting.

I got invited to a meeting. There were people from AppDynamics that came to my company and talked about a new version upgrade. They talked about, "OK, these are the benefits the upgrade." I happened to be there. Before I came to the meeting, I tried to do research on my own about what AppDynamics is about.

One of the things I think I achieved this year is the mapping and matching the LoadRunner tracking with AppDynamic, the workaround and then the EUM. That's the thing that really helped me a lot with this year’s projects.

Normally, for me, I only look at free stuff. That's why I use Google Chrome. It just happened that they already bought it and the license was there. I just used the license without paying for it.

At a recent conference, I saw Business iQ, which I think is very interesting. We talk a lot about the transaction level for IT, but for business people, this is something that makes sense. We’re not just for IT, but we talk for the business group, too. This is what it is about. There's a mapping between business and how well the system behaves. So, we would normally only look at the back end. Everything is about the back end, but not really about the end user. However, the end user really makes the difference.

Right now, for me, if I go into an application and it is slow, I get frustrated and I don't want to use it. So, this product shifts the direction; it should streamline, maybe get more meaningful information to business. I think it's going in the right direction.

My rating of the product is because I haven't gotten a chance to try all the different devices. I haven't gotten the opportunity. I just ran a test with LoadRunner, but I haven't run tests with real devices; how a iOS device, how an Android device, how a Windows Phone device will send traffic to see how well they capture the information. I haven't gotten a chance, so I cannot give it a perfect rating.

Unless, after I do all of that, I can say, "Oh really, it does capture what I'm looking for." Then, I would maybe give it a perfect rating, but I have rated it based on what I need right now. I just haven't gotten a chance to explore to different areas.

Right now, we are using it for monitoring our mobile and user interfaces. We monitor the application in terms of the business transactions. We monitor end-user responses and then we track how many calls we are making from the balancer, which is impossible to track with any other applications.

We have moved our application from on premise to Azure. After we moved to Azure, we don't have an on-premise monitoring tool, for what we are supposed to be using it. AppDynamics has come in handy. We are able to monitor all of the cloud services, we are able to monitor all the VMs on it, and we are able to monitor the Azure services, too.

There are many features we’d like to see in upcoming releases, which we have already mentioned to the accounts team. They're working on it; we expect to get some kind of releases from them.

We have been using it for the past two-and-a-half years. We migrated from the older version to the current version. We feel like it's better, it's improving. Initially, we had stability issues but now it's fine.

We are using the HA version of it and we find scalability to be good.

Technical support is pretty good. They're very at you; we get the response immediately.

We are no longer using the previous solution. We were using it for on premise. When we moved from on premise to Azure, we started using AppDynamics. We evaluated some other tools, but we found AppDynamics to be very good.

When we did the initial setup, for the Windows platform, it was straightforward, but the Linux version was a little complicated, but it's not that hard.

We evaluated Logility; some other tools, such as Log Analytics, as well; and then even some related to Splunk. We do use Splunk, as well, with AppDynamics; both are currently used.

As far as the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, it's not my selection. The management finds out what AppDynamics can do and then looks at their business relationship with them. It's more like a business partner, as opposed to being just a customer that is using a product and not knowing what the product is going to come out with. In those terms, I think the AppDynamics team is very helpful to us and they have been like a part of our external organization.

We became 100% dependent on AppDynamics after we started using it. Apart from some performance issues, we haven’t found any major issues with AppDynamics. Some of the services are not available with Azure, such as IoT and so on, but other than that, 90% of our monitoring depends on AppDynamics.

We also use AppDynamics’ End User Monitoring and Mobile User Monitoring.

The most valuable feature is the immediate view into what the system looks like – how it's doing; how it's performing, and what are the connected pieces; that instantaneous, real-time view of what's going on.

A benefit of the solution is the ability to identify real-time problems before the customers even notice them. Even when customers do notice them, it gives us the ability to diagnose very, very quickly where the problem is and what's actually going on, so that we can do a much faster solution.

We're struggling a little bit with the way it auto-configures the various endpoints and how to work it. Some of the endpoints are not quite defined correctly, in its ability to sort of go in and tidy things up after the initial install and configuration. That's a little tough to get in and figure out. It's also made tough by there being very few people that are doing this as a job. It's basically me.

Other than that, I can't really think of anything.

The stability is fantastic.

The scalability’s been great. We've deployed it over two data centers; multiple agents; all over the place. It's great.

We have used technical support a couple of times, but it's pretty much self-explanatory, how to actually use it.

Technical support has been fine; very fast response times; taking us through to getting the question answered rather rapidly. It was good.

We previously tried a couple of different things, but it was really just the practice. I've been at the company a long time, 10 years. When issues would arise, a lot of the diagnosis was based on gut feeling. I've known the application for so long, and been a part of its development for so long, that if I felt like the problem was something, that's probably what happened. That's just not good enough as the business grew.

We started looking for solutions that would give us true, real data and scientific answers for everything that's going on in the system. That's how AppDynamics came to be part of the discussion.

We also looked at one other outfit. I think BMC was the one that we were looking at.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is, does it work?

Buy it. Buy AppDynamics, but you have to invest in your team too. It has to be someone's job to be setting the system up; to watching the system; making configuration changes. It has to be someone's job to report on the data that AppDynamics is coming with.

I have given it a perfect rating because of how quickly we can go in and see what's going on, diagnose issues before they become issues, but also respond. When we haven't got there first, when someone's reporting a fault, how quickly we can go in and see exactly what's going on, pull up the error message, see the red line on the errors, and so on. We're so much faster in responding to issues than we've ever been before.

We are not using APM with any other AppDynamics products at this time.