Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

The transaction snapshots are probably by far the most used feature because it gives a lot of details. It adds a lot of value. You can really get to the details really, really quick. You can drill down very, very quick. When you show it to somebody who's a stakeholder, they typically get it right away. You don't have to explain. You don't have to “translate.” That really helps with the communication. That really gets people focused on the task at hand, rather than trying to pass the buck around. That really helps quite a bit.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere about correlation, it's really helpful because I don't have to spend time with multiple teams. A lot of times, what might have happened in the past was where, if there was a problem, we would call like six, seven, or eight different SMEs from different domains: network, storage, compute; not on all problems, but at least some of the ones that we suspected. Application; if you have multiple applications, sometimes you have a different person who owns each of the different applications; maybe the database guy. You can really start adding more people in there. If you think about it from a productivity point of view, it's a waste of a lot of time, if you have to keep doing that for every single problem day in and day out.

Whereas, when you have AppDynamics, it's actually tracing the call. So, if three out of four services are functioning fine, for the most part, I don't even have to worry about them. It is common to call the networking guy because nobody really knows where the problem is. Now, he's or she’s out of the picture. I'm sure he's or she’s a lot happier about it, too. Same with the storage and compute: You start leaving these people out of the conversation that don't need to be there, which is a good thing for the company, and us. We don’t also have to spend that time explaining and hearing what they have to say. That’s not to say they don't have value to add, but if there's really nothing there, we're wasting their time, as well. So, it's really helpful.

AppDynamics helps me not just rule in the areas, but rule out where I don't have to talk. More often than not, the rule-out gets hidden away, but it's a really good add-on because I'm only focusing on the problems.

I can think of 2-3 complex problems that probably would be helpful to most customers. Heap analysis is one; memory leaks. That's already there, so maybe that does not count at this point. The second one I would probably call out is connection leaks. So, heap analysis and connection leaks; those would be very helpful.

I think they've already started working on the next version of license management. That should be pretty helpful.

Stability’s very good. Once in a while, we've had some hiccups around the UI being slow, but that typically gets resolved pretty quickly. A lot of times, we don't even have to talk about it. Once in a while, we've had to raise a couple of tickets. I think one time it was us using the environment a little more aggressively than maybe we should have been, and we could have been, for that matter. Most of the time, stability’s not an issue. Once in a while, you do get the spinning circles. I've experienced worse. This is nowhere near that bad. It's very good for the most part.

We're a fairly large install. It scaled well, but then again, it's a SaaS solution. They've got their magic sauce working, of course, really well for us.

We use technical support quite a bit. We've got a team of engineers and there are at least five or six of them that have the capability to open up tickets. We typically get really good responses. Every time I've opened a ticket, I usually get a response in good time. Not just a response; it's usually a good response; it's a meaningful response; it's something that helps you solve the problem that you have.

Once in a while, as you can imagine with any product, they get dragged out because maybe it needs a longer-term solution. I don't think I've seen anything that would cause concern.

We were using a tool prior to this that was not doing any of the stitching; the correlation. We tried another one that was doing some of it, but we found AppDynamics was doing it better.

We went through the PoC because we had our fingers twisted the wrong way a few times with our old tools. It was using up a lot of our time. Of course, when we heard that they could do it, we really wanted to see what they had to offer. The PoC was very helpful. We actually used it on live projects – testing projects not production – to figure out if it would be able to help. We were able to do a lot of it, without much overhead. It was a game changer right out the door.

I was involved in the PoC, as well as the initial setup. The initial engagement is a little complex, but when you look back – hindsight, they say, is 20/20 – but in this case, it really made good sense on how it's structured. Initially, it felt a little limited but then, as you see it over and over and over again, you realize that there's good thought process that's gone into it. It was pretty smooth sailing for the most part.

There were hiccups that we had with an arrival tool that tool's vendor was not able to resolve. This was during the PoC stage. With AppDynamics, we went through the technical support team. They really had the right answers in the right places. They knew how to solve it.

We did a PoC with New Relic for about eight months, in 2014. We haven't really gone back since then to look at New Relic, to really be able to compare in a meaningful manner, but we looked at them at that time.

There were other areas where New Relic wasn't planning on supporting; some of our legacy footprint, such as WebSphere 6 and Oracle E-Business Suite. AppDynamics was doing that, as well. It was another add-on that really mattered a lot because that was a very large footprint of our agents.

In general, ease of use was definitely one of the most important criteria when we selected the vendor; ability to correlate in an automated matter; and be able to gather diagnostic data or just even transaction data. We'd already seen how transaction data is helpful with Dynatrace, for which we just had a limited on-prem set of licenses. We were really happy with the PurePath and so on, but we didn't want to take Dynatrace into production for a variety of reasons. A prime one was that they capture all the snapshots, which we know would've added a lot of overhead. That's probably another really good criteria: added overhead. Then, of course, breadth of coverage, when it comes to different technologies because, if you have to buy a different license or a different tool for everyone, you’re kind of setting yourself up for other problems down the line. Those are some of the key points.

Give it a shot. If you want to do a PoC, definitely do it. You should definitely have AppDynamics in there. I have no qualms about recommending the tool outright, but I think for your use case, you should probably PoC it on your own because you will really see the value add. If you don't, of course, then it is what it is, but I think most people will see the value add very, very quickly. They have a very competent team. They have the right people in the right places. Once they decide to commit to something, they actually do it and do it well. That's definitely a good plus.

I have not given it a perfect rating because I would like to see the heap analysis and the connection leak. There are some hiccups, I feel. I probably have to keep visiting the new feature sets that are coming with the leak analysis. Those minor things, those problems, the heap analysis and the connection leaks, are pretty time consuming, but in the grand scheme of things, the rest of the feature set is really, really great.

I haven’t even mentioned elsewhere the vast set of metrics that we have available to us, which is very helpful. I can create my own metrics if I want, if I choose to.
It definitely ticks a lot of checkboxes and there are a lot plus marks.

We also use AppDynamics End User Monitoring a little bit; not as much as APM. APM is used by a lot more of our internal clients. End User Monitoring is used and that's also helpful. There's a feature where you can actually see the traffic going from the End User snapshot down to the APM snapshot. That correlation is very, very helpful because then I don't have to do it manually. If you have to do it manually, a lot of it is a bit of guessing game, unless you have other ways of doing the manual correlation, which is a lot tougher, especially when it comes to production, where you want to really get things moving faster rather than slower. That can be very helpful.

A couple of things that it's done is that it's allowed us to become a bit more proactive as opposed to reactive. We can see from the dashboards when a problem is happening before it becomes too serious. It allows us to react much quicker than we had in the past, so our mean time to resolution is improved.

For example, we know that there's a particular report in our system that whenever it's executed, it can cause some performance issues. So, we have created a specific business transaction that looks for that specific call in our application. Whenever that call happens, it issues out an alert to let us know that somebody is running that report. We can then make sure that it's not consuming too many resources.

What I like about the APM is that it allows us to quickly identify where there are issues. It allows us to configure health rules so that we can, based on our own experience, determine when an application is behaving incorrectly. It's very configurable, but also has a lot of functionality right out of the box.

It has become a very integrated tool in our company, to share with developers, as well, some of the information that AppDynamics APM is showing us. It's becoming a bit of a cultural change for us to really look at AppDynamics and to leverage its full capabilities.

If you look at, for example, the two big updates that are coming out, as mentioned in the keynote address at a recent conference, I think those are two really big ones. For example, the ability to automate the deployment of the agents and the updates of the agents.

Licensing, as well, is very key. Again, we have many types of agents across different segments of our corporation; being able to manage those license keys in one central location.

We've encountered the business transaction limit. We didn't even know, but when we encountered that, a lot of business transactions were actually being lost because they couldn't be captured any more. Again, we're making tweaks to the system and constantly learning about it. It's a very complex application, and requires almost a full-time person to be in there working on it all the time.

I think training would probably be a good idea, as well. One thing that I found is that when we purchased the Application Performance Management solution and we purchased the agents, when we finished a sales thing, "Okay, great. Well, good luck." It would have been nice for them to recommended to us, “With this, we're going to provide training for your team. And we're going to also include, let's say, two or three days, or a week, of professional services. We can help not just install it and show you the best practices, we'll also start to tweak it for you so you can start to see what you can do with it. Then, we'll let you go on your own. Then, of course, if you want more help, you can always come back.” Just to give us a little bit of a head start.

These tweaks are the reason why I have not given it a perfect rating. I feel like there's a lot of configuration and a lot of work that needs to go into it. I feel that there is still a lot to learn.

With some of the problems that we've had so far – the business transactions, the deploying of the agents - if they can finish that, as the new versions come out and whatnot, I think that they're going to get there. It's a constantly evolving space, constantly evolving product. They're going to get there.

We have had stability issues. One thing that we found very nice about AppDynamics is that they are very quick to respond to issues. We've opened tickets in the past. For example, one of the collectors, for the .NET agent, was causing our IIS service to crash intermittently. That was a bug that we raised to AppDynamics. They did a deep-dive investigation and their recommendation was to lower the frequency with which it takes snapshots. That was one issue that we ran into. It was a production issue, so it did cause a little bit of a problem. We were able to resolve it with AppDynamics, though.

Scalability is also something that we brought up with AppDynamics. Again, they're very helpful and quick to respond. When you have an environment where you have deployed multiple agents, different types of agents, SQL agents and .NET agents, for example, and a new version comes out, how do you update all those agents? How do you go about doing it? We've had a lot of talks with them. Right now, it's a manual process to update the 50-odd agents. We have to go and uninstall, and reinstall the new one.

From the keynote address at a recent conference, I think that there's going to be a way now to automate the deployments of the agents.

Moving to APM was an initiative from the ops team. We knew that we needed visibility into the application. We already have very good visibility into the infrastructure, but the application was always something that we didn't have.

I was the project manager working on the project to deploy it. I didn't do the actual deploying itself; it was our senior network engineer who did it.

I think it's pretty straightforward to install. Installing the agents themselves, that's really fast; simple configuration. So, the initial setup was pretty fast. You get a lot of value right from the initial setup.

I think the one part that requires a little bit more thought and a little bit more time is how to now take it from the initial install, in that vanilla sort of setup, to really fine tune it for your own application. That's a lot of back and forth with dev, with the performance team, with the ops team, with the devops team, the CM team, and a lot of iterations to get it right. That's a constantly evolving and learning process.

We looked at a few competitors. We looked at Dynatrace. We looked at New Relic, as well. Then, we saw AppDynamics.

When we first purchased it about three years ago, our sense was they were still kind of new to the market, but we wanted to give them a chance, as well. They had a pretty compelling vision, an idea, and a story; then, a good personal touch; the sales team, as well. So, we decided to go with them to give us that visibility, but we knew we needed it.

In general, one thing that we look for in a vendor is completeness of vision. I think that's important; being able to understand the needs, our needs, as well; expertise in the space.

It's a fantastic product. Just make sure that you take the time to really understand it. Know what you're getting into. It's not just, "Let's purchase it, let's install it. Okay, it's great. Now it's working, let's put it up on the dashboard."

There's so much to it; you can just scratch the surface or you can really dive into it and it can do a lot. Look at those extra features and spend the time to do it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we also use AppDynamics SQL and EUM. We are very happy with them. The EUM, End User Monitoring, is really, really cool. The database one, as well, for SQL, it's also something that we've just started using. We're not fully leveraging it yet. We've just purchased it and we're starting to deploy it, so it's something that we're still learning. I know that we're right now in a PoC, proof of concept, with Log Analytics, as well. And we may be looking at the Synthetics module, as well, in the future.

The most valuable features are transaction correlation, application flow map, business transactions, and the key metrics that are displayed on the dashboard.

It gives a complete, end-to-end visualization of an environment. That's where it is a little easier to analyze any issue in production compared to the other APM tools. That's the key difference between the other tools and AppDynamics.

The first thing is that they are going in the right direction. That's the great thing because they're linking IT with business. That's why we mostly like it because the other APM tools are just talking about your IT. They're not linking that context to the business. You have your monitoring; your instrumenting; you're doing a byte-code instrumentation; you're doing a threat analysis. You have enough information. All you need to do is just play around with the data and give the visualization of business. What other APM tools are not giving, AppDynamics is great on that point.

As far as the features that we're expecting, the main thing is the universal agent that I’ve mentioned. They're not clear on what month or what year. I think next year, but they're not clear on the release date. That's one killer that we're really expecting. Because that will save a lot of time for an enterprise like us to go for a massive deployment. That's one of the key features I can say that we're looking forward to.

Stability is good so far. We haven't experienced any issues. But after a recent controller upgrade, we experienced a couple of downtimes of the controller, which is not good. On the agent side, not much. We do not see agents stop all of the sudden. We haven't experienced any such things. But in the APM space, the agent is a little tricky, so we have to be a little careful with the agent. With the previous experience around the Dynatrace agent we had, that killed the entire box. The box was completely down.

With this tool, we are taking a few more precautions; meaning, we're not going to production with the agent as of right now. We're putting enough load, enough applications, enough boxes and testing it for 2-3 months. Once we get confident, only then are we planning to go for the production.

Apart from the stability side – as I mentioned, the controller was down a couple of times recently, and the agent is working fine – the agent overhead is not good. It's taking a minimum of 200-300 MB per JVM or per CLR, which is the case with any of the APM tools in the current market. But we expect the overhead to come down. Then, it'll benefit us a lot. For an enterprise like us, we have a lot of shared environments. A box has 50-60 JVMs. A box has 300, 400, 500 virtual machines. In that case, if the overhead is 2-3 personned, we end up killing the box because we have the VM environments.

How we look at scalability is in the controller's scalability. I think AppDynamics is not really there yet. The scalability should be very easy. I think that's what our expectation is. I think it's not even there yet. Controllers won't talk to each other. In a keynote session at a recent NetApp conference, someone was talking about or mentioned controller-to-controller communication. Once that is there, as long as controllers talk to each other, the scalability will become a little easier. That's on the controller side.

On the agent side, the scalability is the main focus area for us now, because we have 100,000 boxes, and we can't really deploy agents app-by-app, machine-by-machine, or manually. We can't really do that. Our approach is automated deployment. But with AppDynamics, the really tricky part is, they expect the application to be modeled in a certain way. They want us to define the app name, tier name, and node name, which is a little tricky.

I can just do mass deployment of agents, but then I have to do configuration also. That is where I think we're a little lagging, so we're working closely with them. We end up developing our own automation scripts to achieve that stage. Again, at that keynote session, people were talking about a universal agent. I think that might really solve the problems from both the deployment and licensing angles.

With their support, if you raise a ticket, the response is very good. But the concern is the consulting days. I think they're offering some consulting days. In the first year of a contract, they offer a certain number of consulting days. After that, the consulting days are free. But to book a consultant, I think we need to book the consultant at least one or two weeks in advance. We can't really do that in the enterprise. A lot of things will happen. All of a sudden, we need support. That's a little tricky. We shared the feedback with AppDynamics. One or two days is what we can spend, but one or two weeks is really a problem.

For us, a large enterprise, the audits and the compliance issues; these things are serious concerns. We have 6,000 applications. We have 100,000-plus boxes. If management asks us, "Hey. Can you tell me what happened with a certain number of the boxes? Why did they go down?” Or “Why did certain applications go down? Can you please pull up the reason? Or can you tell me all of the applications a X person has accessed? Which boxes did he touch? Which routers did he touch?" We have no clue in a large enterprise like us. That's where instrumentation is key for us.

Our model is, we're shifting towards platform. Once we shift towards the platform, we want to offer instrumentation as a built-in stack in it. For that, there are two key things. One is explicit instrumentation, and the other is implicit instrumentation. For the explicit instrumentation, we already developed a solution last year. We’re now planning the implicit instrumentation. That's where we did a lot of market research. Our technology labs did a lot of market research. That's when we also went to the Gartner Report. Then, we finally chose AppDynamics.

Initial setup was straightforward. There are two angles to it. The controller setup is pretty straightforward. The agent setup is also straightforward, but only if you are a simple tech startup or you have only one e-commerce application. For those kinds of companies, I think it makes sense. All they need to do is spend 2-3 days to set up everything. But in our case, we have 6,000 applications. I think AppDynamics is expecting the application to be modeled in certain way. I think we were asking them about this as well. I was expecting to get an update at that conference that they are moving away from that application modeling to something else. Once they move to that, I think that is also going to speed up the initial setup process.

There weren’t really any other vendors on our shortlist at the time. We are using Introscope extensively in production and we are using Dynatrace extensively in the lower-end environments. If this tool works out well, we're probably going to replace the other two.

As far as the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, we have different stakeholders. Each stakeholder has their own use cases. The development team expects certain use cases. The support team expects certain use cases. The SWAT team expects certain use cases. Engineering expects certain things. TA expects certain things. We evaluated the tools from all the angles. On top of that, the future is cloud. The future is platform as a service. So, we want a tool that supports that era. That's where AppDynamics is the winner.

The main point is every company is a software company. Invariably, you talk about it. Every button click is important. What if a customer shares feedback with his colleagues, friends or family? Every button click is important. Having said that, you should know what is happening out in your environment, out on your machines, out on your applications. So, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and end-user monitoring are definitely very important.

We have our own use cases. According to those use cases, we chose AppDynamics. But whatever the product, don't get married to any product; whether it is CA APM, Dynatrace or AppDynamics. Even now, we're not married to any tool. We will always go with a tool which is going to fit in to our model. That's our message to anybody who's researching this case.

One important thing to note is that my rating doesn't mean AppDynamics is not great. AppDynamics is great. It is going in the right direction. At the conference, the CEO or somebody mentioned that they can't shove this product and develop everything that people are expecting for release by 2020. It's being done in a phased manner, in iterations. So far, whatever they have release to us, that's what the rating is for. That will probably be higher in the coming years. With the features that it has and with the expectations that we have, that's the rating we can say. And on top of that, AppDynamics gets the highest rating of any vendor in the APM space. If I rated the other tools, I'd rate them lower.

We have a complex application. We do payments which are highly transactional in nature. With different kinds of workloads that you see in the production environment, how do you really track down specific issues which your lab testing environment can't really reproduce? Your production environment gives you certain workloads, which basically enable you to look at your application more closely. No lab test could really simulate that sort of a load. APM really helps us in getting down to the bottom of these sorts of workloads; how code responds to these sorts of workloads and how we can make our application deliver better latency and a better end-user experience.

Given an extremely transactional, highly complex workload, you just cannot use your testing lab to stress all of your code parts. First of all, it has made us very agile. What happens is, now, you can actually take any one of your deployments or releases, roll it out into production into a very limited set of servers, look at how the APM works, and it gives you insights onto the how the code that you just pushed out is performing.

If everything is fine over a period of a few minutes or a few hours, you can actually roll your deployment out very quickly. You don't have to have an extremely complicated test harness in your preproduction environment. You don't have to go through extensive testing cycles before releasing something into production. It really makes us agile in terms of releasing to market quicker.

For me, the single largest area with room for improvement that I've been requesting the AppDynamics team to deliver for us is APM support for Ruby on Rails and for HHPM. These are the two language environments that we use quite heavily in production. That's something that I'd like to see support for.

Stability depends on the configuration. We work very closely with our solution architects, with AppDynamics, because there's always this question in the minds of consumers: A tool which can do so much as AppDynamics, how do you ensure that it runs with minimal overhead? You've really got to work with the AppDynamics team to size out your environments; that makes it stable for you. That's been our experience.

I can't comment on scalability because our infra is fairly small. We have a total of around 150 nodes that we could probably end up instrumenting. Right now, we do far less than that, so I can't really comment.

Technical support has been pretty good. In our case, we use a few programming languages which are still not supported by AppDynamics, so we've reached out to them to help us with road map information. They've been pretty transparent about when support could get rolled out to these sorts of languages that we use.

For the more run-of-the-mill sort of tickets, where we have issues with the configuration or using the product, it's been pretty good. We've liked our experience with the tech support team.

We had been using a mix of proprietary tools that we developed in house, along with third-party solutions. We were able to get the job done, no doubt about that, but the problem is never having an integrated view of how your application performs. We have uptime alerting running differently; we have business KPI monitoring being done differently; and we have end-user behavior being tracked differently. It was very hard to find a correlated view across all of these four. To debug specific sessions or to debug specific instances, I think that's where AppDynamics really comes in. The integrated view that it gives of your application.

I was not directly involved in the initial setup but my team was. It's pretty straightforward. I think it's really important that whoever is setting up the application first fundamentally understands what the application does. I think that's critical. The tool is fairly complex and powerful. The setup needs to be handled by someone who, on this side, really knows what the application being monitored can do. If you put a rookie on the job, it's going to be really tough.

We did consider other vendors. We were looking at New Relic. As a developer and as someone who builds and has a team who builds stuff, I feel New Relic is actually a very powerful option. However, as I mentioned, we wanted something that could work on-premise.

We went with AppDynamics because we are in the payments industry and from a compliance perspective, we needed an on-premise solution and AppDynamics was, I think, the best solution that also worked on-premise.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics for us is, first of all, from the product perspective. As I mentioned, we had a mix of various proprietary and third-party solutions that we were using earlier. We needed a product that could provide end-to-end visibility into the infrastructure and the application. That was a high priority for us. Beyond that, what we really needed was a global presence with enough strong local support. That was something that AppDynamics brought to the table.

Make use of all of the training material and the university. There's some really useful information in there. Also, the two other things that I’ve mentioned elsewhere:

• Ensure the person who is deploying AppDynamics in your environment is among the top-most performers of your team, someone who knows your application in and out.
• Combine that with good, strong consultation by the AppDynamics team. Get these two in place and you've got a winner on your hands.

The reason why I have not rated it higher is the lack of support for HHPM and Ruby; bring them both and I would rate it higher.

The most valuable feature is primarily the ability to do business transaction analysis in real time; for us to be able to use it for multiple areas. We use it for our cloud services, as well as our in-house application stack. Pretty soon, we're going to go into the analytics side; that's one of the next big ones for me.

It has improved the speed at which we are able to respond to issues. Typically, production issues for us in the past used to take hours and several people to resolve. Now, it's a matter of minutes and a couple of people to isolate, do a root-cause analysis and quickly to solve the problem.

The turnaround time is the biggest benefit for me.

The analytics is definitely one good one; the federated services would be great; and hopefully something that will give us a little more integration with some of our log and event management tools, such as Splunk, etc. That would be the big one.

I had this implemented about 16-18 months ago.

We use the SaaS model. I wouldn't say I'm really, really comfortable with it yet. We seem to have a lot of issues, with the agents going down repeatedly. We're still finding some issues with the SaaS model, from the controller. I wish it would get a little more stable; hopefully, in the next release.

Scalability-wise, so far, so good. The next big one is the cloud services. That's where I'm really interested in the scalability, but everything I've heard so far and what I've seen, I've been very happy.

Technical support is great. We’ve got great resources on that team, both on the delivery side, as well as on the support side.

We weren’t previously using any solution, and that was the problem. Everything was a manual effort. My team would spend hours trying to figure out the root cause of an issue and it was not helping our customers, because any time lost in our e-commerce environment is money lost. We needed to get a tool that would help us turn this around really quickly. That was when we started looking at this. I had this implemented about 16-18 months ago. Since then, it's been great.

Initial setup was relatively straightforward. There was some nuances but I guess a lot of that has to do with the company and the way we've set up our application stack; dictates how the agent is installed. By and large, it was pretty straightforward.

There were other vendors on our shortlist. We actually got a couple of others that I'm trying to migrate away from.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor like AppDynamics are ease of use, good support, really good stability, ability to extend easily, and native integration to a lot of application stacks.

It's a great tool. I definitely recommend looking at it. At least go to a conference and attend one of the sessions; see what the tool can do. It's definitely valuable.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating because of stability, the SaaS controller. If it's as stable as I hope it'll be in the next release or two, I'll probably give it a perfect rating.

It reduces the time to resolve issues and requires less manpower. When issues happen, we have the whole triage going on and we used to have like 30 people on the call trying to figure out what's going on. AppDynamics cuts that down; you don't need that many people. You need two or three key people going into the console to see what's going on and pinpoint the root cause, as opposed to people trying to figure it out from all different sources. That takes forever, and that's very inefficient.

Being able to monitor transactions end-to-end, throughout all the layers, basically, is very valuable; the ability to pin-point issues irrespective of the layer in which they happened. That's really helpful and very valuable.

The network diagnostics that they are adding will be really useful. They could add more detail into what is going on in the network. Right now, that is one area where we have to use other tools. That would be very, very useful. I think that should give us a better view of the entire system.

It's pretty stable. We haven’t had any major issues, anywhere we implemented it. It's pretty stable and it's very light as well.

Scalability is good for our systems; we have 7+ million lines of code. It works with that big of a system, so it does scale.

We have used technical support sometimes, when we had some questions and issues or whatever. They're pretty knowledgeable. They know their stuff and they provide solutions pretty quickly, as well. They have very quick turnover time.

We had IDCAMS from IBM. That was not really useful. They're pretty heavy on the actual JVMs. They don’t help that much with resolving issues or finding issues. We had this challenge where we actually had to use a new system that was built to replace the legacy mainframe system, and it was not scaling at all. With 100,000 users, it was barely working. We had to scale it from 100,000 to 10 million members. That's when I looked around for different solutions, what is out there, and found AppDynamics, and that's what we brought in. It really helped us a lot with scale it.

Initial setup for most of the regular pieces are straightforward but we have a complex system, so we needed to do some tweaks. AppDynamics helped to detect some endpoints and so on. We have custom batch jobs and so on, which usually have a different way of having endpoints. AppDynamics guided us with how to configure those. It took a little time because it's not like a regular web application. It's a very complex healthcare system.

Price can get really expensive sometimes, depending on the type of setup you have. Sometimes you have smaller JVMs instead of larger ones, for some reasons, such as architectural reasons. Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools.

It gets a little pricey.

I looked at New Relic as well. We just evaluated it quickly. Because of our system’s complexity, it can't actually track everything in our system. We did not try other things such as Wiley. We knew what that is capable of. We knew the shortcomings, too. We didn't try that, but these two we tried, New Relic and AppDynamics.

When selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, the most important criteria is that the product has to be great. It has to be useful. That's the first criteria. Then, when we need support, we need knowledgeable resources who can help us get through. AppDynamics do a really good job with it.

I definitely recommend it. It's a pretty robust tool. For monitoring APM, all the DevOps and whatever they want to use it for, it's a pretty robust tool. It has all of the features; whatever is needed. I recommend it without thinking twice.

We do have licenses for AppDynamics EUM, but we cannot implement it yet because our system is a little more complex and it's a little older technology, the UI part of it. We'll roll it out at some point, when we get the chance.

What we are looking at is the real-time user experience. We are a retail business and the customer walks in, he places an order for the material. We would like that to be efficient, the order to be processed, and it should immediately get delivered. The performance is a key factor for us. We are a franchising business and the application is deployed in the cloud. Most of the time, the users complain about the slow performance. For us, it's very important to track down where exactly the problem is; for example, in which geographical region is there a problem. Then, we nail it down and find out what session is causing a problem there. That's the whole idea. That's where we're seeing that AppDynamics is able to help us.

We have been able to identify the application issues or the user experience issues. We are able to address that. If the user has been complaining that they are experiencing a problem, we get to know that proactively. We are able to find out which geographic region, what store is having an issue with it so that we can monitor it; it comes as an alert, we try to diagnose it, and try to fix the issue.

We've not been able to get one answer to all of our problems; for example, if there is anything else happening on the networking side. I'm pretty excited to learn about the infrastructure monitoring.

One thing that is missing is the desktop monitoring. The desktop monitoring is not there. A lot of times, the problems are created or caused by some other applications, which is blocking or causing an issue with the application.

These kinds of things I still see as missing pieces in AppDynamics, and that’s the reason for my rating.

I just started using the database side. I haven't gone through that. At a recent conference, I was looking forward to participating in one of the sessions so that I could learn more about the product. I started to see some valuable things. I was especially excited to see Business iQ. I need to learn about that. I see there is potential for being more productive and helpful to the business. But, it's too early for me to comment on that.

We haven't used AppDynamics very extensively. If I had to rate its stability, I would say that AppDynamics is about 8/10. There is a little room for improvement. Sometimes, we do have performance issues on AppDynamics. The metrics take a long time to load. I raised this point when I was in one of the sessions at the conference.

It is scalable. The good part is that we can add as many nodes as needed. We can do that. We can add as many clients as we need; we can do that. I don't see an issue with scalability. That seems to be good.

They have been pretty good with technical support. In fact, one of the technical support persons helped me in terms of doing the proof of concept. I've been able to get that support. They're very good. In fact, the day before I provided this review I pointed out a problem and I see some communication going on there; they're pretty good. They're very good.

The ERP system that we have used has partnered with AppDynamics. They suggested this. We weren’t really looking for evaluating solutions; it just came along with that. Then, as we started to use that ERP application more and more, we encountered performance issues. The need arose to find one tool that can help us and that could give us end-to-end monitoring.

There are many tools available, but they cover only one segment of that. The good part with AppDynamics is that you get all three layers, even though there still are some missing links. Looking at the vision and listening to them at the conference, I'm very positive and optimistic that AppDynamics is going to come forward with new ideas and new solutions that can help us.

We had some initial setup challenges because our application is different than regular web-based applications. I had to engage with our application vendor to have that issue resolved. After some initial hiccups, everything went smooth. The support has been very active. Whenever I needed it, I want to have a call, a joint session, it was there. That was support.

There are some other monitoring tools, such as SolarWinds, ExtraHop, and so on, but they are for different verticals. There are also open-source database monitoring tools out there. There are many tools out there. It becomes really hard to focus.

We already had the AppDynamics license, which we got when we acquired the ERP system. We got a license with that because AppDynamics was partnered with our ERP system. That basically gave us an advantage, and it's a good tool. I did some reviews on it, and found that they're doing very well.

As I started looking into other products, such as end-user monitoring, AppDynamics was really good with that and the database side. If there is an application available which basically gives you end-to-end visibility, why not go with that one?

Performance is a real challenge for any application. It's very hard to get a single solution that gives us complete visibility. I would certainly recommend looking at AppDynamics, that kind of a tool, that basically provides complete visibility.

I use Browser Real-User Monitoring with AppDynamics’ Database Monitoring and Java Application Monitoring products.

The most valuable feature is the ease of just putting it in right out of the box and its being able to traverse our environment and bring those problem areas to light. That's basically it.

One of the applications that we use was having some very bad slowdowns. We were able to throw AppDynamics in there. We were able to identify the root cause within probably 45 minutes, which took our process time from 33 days down to 18 days. Then, eventually, a few more efficiencies were actually found a few hours later, which brought it down to three days. It was pretty awesome.

Because we didn't have anything before, this is like the Taj Mahal, compared to what we didn’t have.

The only thing is that maybe it collects too much right away. There's a lot of noise. You need to have those people that know the application very well in order to tune it down. Maybe that would be an area with room for improvement.

Beyond that, I don't know yet. Give me some more time in it and let me figure it out a little more but I can't think of anything else.

Stability is excellent; no worries at all with that.

Scalability is excellent; no worries at all.

We haven’t used technical support because we are still in the PoV. Our sales guy is beside us. He's been awesome with everything.

We weren't using something like this before. We were using an NPM, network performance monitoring, tool called Truview. It wasn't giving us our application insight. It did everything for the network but not the application itself. We've had a lot of slowdowns on our website and things like that. Through our homegrown tools, we couldn’t figure out what those slowdowns were until we threw AppDynamics in and those kind of started floating to the top.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It was basically just downloading an agent, recycling, and you're up and running. That was how easy it was.

New Relic as well as CA were also on the shortlist at the time. New Relic couldn't actually give me the breadth of what we wanted, as AppDynamics could. CA was kind of very intrusive to our network and we wanted something that didn't have a whole lot of resource dependencies out there.

My rating is because of the top three that we looked at. I also had our developers look into it, as well as our release management and our systems engineers. All of us came together and we were able to put the pros and cons together on what AppDynamics gave us or didn't give us over the other ones. AppDynamics just came in head over heels above everybody else. Unfortunately for the others, it was just the writing on the paper, as well as the proof in the trial period and what we saw in our environment.

Be patient. They do things very procedurally. Usually, I'm used to downloading an application and trying it on my own. If I would have done that on my own, I probably would have thought, I can't do this; there's too much there. But, they kept coming back, saying, “No, we want to show you. We want to make sure you're doing this right.” Even though I wanted to say, “No. Just leave us alone and let us do it”, I'm glad I did take their advice and bring them in, so they could teach us a little more about it.

We're doing APM but we also are right now evaluating the Analytics side of it. That's been pretty awesome but we haven't really gotten very deep into that one. We’re basically just using APM.