Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

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.

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.