Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

It helps us find the root cause quicker, so it's helped us with MTTI and MTTR. In fact, just last week, we had an issue. They used our other tools to try to find the solution, and they said, “This is the root cause.” Then, we were analyzing it in AppDynamics, and we said, “You know what? We're seeing something different.” They doubled back and realized that what AppDynamics had shown was actually the root cause, not what they were initially thinking was the root cause.

AppDynamics is very easy to use, and easy to deploy in our environment, especially because we're a central organization that helps other application teams with their APM solution. For me, that flow map makes all the difference for the customers. You show them the flow map. You tell them, “OK, green is good, yellow is a problem, and red is warning. Where do you see your problem?” They're like, “Right there.” That makes life a lot easier, compared to all the other tools that I've used in the past.

That visual representation’s been really good, also the overhead that AppDynamics creates is quite small. We've tried Dynatrace in the past. Some of the applications didn't work as well with Dynatrace. Those are two of the things that makes AppDynamics different.

Get me Blitz; basically, their next generation architecture, which they're actually running in their SaaS environment. Instead of having just one, big controller with a gigantic database behind it, they're moving towards a more distributed storage, which would be horizontally scalable. We've been looking for it for almost a year now.

I would be willing to pilot it in my non-prod environment, just to see how it works, because ultimately that's going to give us the same visibility that we're getting right now, but we can just keep scaling; just keep pumping more and more applications. As the controller gets bogged down, we just add more hardware. That's going to be key for us.

We've had some growing pains with AppDynamics but overall, the products been very stable. Their support’s awesome, so whenever we have issues, we open a support ticket. They jump on and they come up with a solution to help us. Even with the few minor hiccups that we've had, I would say overall, it’s very stable.

Scalability is excellent. In the last year, we've gone from a few hundred metrics to close to 10,000 metrics per minute injestion.

I haven't seen any other vendor even come close to AppDynamics’ support. I've been raving about them. I have told the guy that runs their support organization, how great he's doing the job.

The thing that sets them apart is, if I have an issue, I open a ticket with them. Within 2-4 hours, I have the solution. I don't get an email saying, "We're looking into it.", and then not hear from them for two days or for a week, which I've had with other APM providers.

With AppDynamics, they're on it. If they can't find a solution, they're going to get on a GoToMeeting to duplicate the problem. They'll get their engineers involved. We've had multiple times when they got the developers involved on the GoToMeeting because the support guy couldn't get beyond that. He just got the developer for that product involved to come up with a solution.

It’s a funny story. The PoV was done before I joined the company. I was a Dynatrace user, Intrascope, New Relic. I've done pretty much all the major APM providers in my career. At my previous job, I was using Dynatrace and my entire interview was, “Why are you guys using AppDynamics instead of Dynatrace?” I'd done a PoC of AppDynamics about five years ago. At that time, the product was in its infancy and it didn't really provide what we were looking for. There were a lot of issues; they were at version 2 or something like that at that time. When I joined the company, it had already been decided that AppDynamics was what we were going to use, so I didn't have a say in that.

Very quickly, my impression of the product changed. As I used it, I was like, "Whoa!" Between version whatever that I PoV'd with in the past compared to version 4, there was a night-and-day difference. Very quickly, I became a proponent of AppDynamics.

Our setup was quite complex. Our leadership decided that we were going to use one controller for everything, and we've got thousands of applications. Now, they're reaching the point where they’re realizing that it's not feasible to have just one controller for our huge infrastructure.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, until we started pushing some really heavy applications, and then we started seeing problems. We got involved with some of their tuning experts. They're basically getting every ounce of power out of the machine that they can. It's been an excellent journey.

Dynatrace was on the short list. My predecessor did a comparison between the two tools. One of the issues that we saw with Dynatrace was scalability. Dynatrace itself pushes so much information. It's capturing every single transaction, compared to AppDynamics, which captures a subset of the transactions. For Dynatrace, you just need massive hardware and you have to have multiple servers because you run out of space very quickly. That was one of the issues with Dynatrace.

The other issue was it didn't play nicely with some of our applications. We actually saw problems with one of our critical business applications that we were doing a PoV with. When we put AppDynamics on that same application, we didn't see any issues. Dynatrace was creating quite a large memory overhead; AppDynamics, under 1%.

When I'm looking for a vendor, before, the most important criteria used to be, what does the tool provide, but after working with AppDynamics, it's support. It doesn't matter how great the tool is; if the support isn't that good, you can't get the most out of the tool.

Do a PoV of AppDynamics on a critical application. Get that initial win, and use that win to drive adoption throughout the organization.

I haven’t rated it higher because of the comparison between AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Dynatrace does give you more, richer information, but it's not scalable. There are certain things that I kind of miss with AppDynamics but it's not something that I'm going to cry about because of the other overall value that it provides, and the ease of use of it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we're also using RUM and Mobile UM.

I'm pretty new to the product. For me, the most valuable feature is defining the health rules and seeing the metrics; defining the health rules so that I can get alerted in time. I think so far, I have only dealt with that.

I'm trying to learn new features that I have come across; use cases that I don't know if it's possible with AppDynamics, but I'm trying to find that out.

It has definitely improved us with performance. Now, we get alerted in time. We can see the call graphic and see where it's taking the most time. Then, we can go back to our code, improve it and optimize it. That's one thing I have seen happening.

Server visibility is an area with room for improvement. I use .NET services for one of my applications. When you see the CPU usage or memory for the .NET services, it gives you that data for the server, not for the individual service. I wanted to see them separated, how much each one of them is consuming.

I spoke to the AppDynamics guys about it. I found out that it's already coming in the next release, 4.3. That's something I wanted to see and it's already coming out.
I cannot think of anything other than that.

I wouldn't say I am 100% satisfied. There have been times that it fails. Sometimes I think the controller is down and I'm getting alerts. I'm still trying to figure out a way around that, because I don't want to be alerted when there is no issue.

But, it's good. Overall, it's good.

I think scalability's good because we are adding a lot of new applications. It's actually very easy to configure AppDynamics for all of those. I'm not involved with the implementation part. The DevOps guys do that. I cannot comment a lot on that.

Technical support is really good. The response is very fast. They are helpful. I get answers to my questions. I'm happy about that.

I definitely recommend it. When I was at my previous company I had no idea about AppDynamics. I got introduced to it when I came to my current company and I realized that this could solve so many problems.

The reason why I have not rated the product higher is mostly not a reflection on APM. It's just that I am new and I'm still trying to figure things out. The documentation is pretty good. I get to learn a lot from that. Still, I think it can improve a bit more when I have to find answers. There is the AppDynamics community. You can ask questions on that, but there have been times when I haven't got answers to my questions or my ticket is still pending. They are responding, and it's not like they don't help. Sometimes, I just feel that it could have been better. There have been some answers that I have been looking for and I haven't gotten for quite a long time. That's one reason.

I’m only using APM at this time. I’m not using any other AppDynamics product.

The most valuable feature is the view it gives me about the wait states in the database. It shows me the snapshots for the database queries; some of the details behind what might be contending on the database if there's an issue. I think that's really insightful for the applications that we use. That's pretty helpful and beneficial for troubleshooting.

The biggest benefit we have found is that we are quickly able to identify the root cause, especially if it's in the database layer. We also use AppDynamics on the app layer as well. It quickly helps us get to the root cause. That's been the number one benefit of using it.

I definitely want to see some drill down capabilities, especially at the database layer, because the snapshot gives me up to a certain point where I can see the wait states. I can't really see at that particular point in time, a certain SQL was causing the issue in a real time basis, and I can alert someone on that basis. I definitely want to see some drill down capabilities at that layer.

I've seen some demos of the upcoming capabilities such as doing monitoring at the network layer. And then the EUM, the end user monitoring; I definitely will be looking forward to using those in the future.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating due to the future capabilities, which are definitely coming.

So far, we have not found any instability caused by AppDynamics APM. We have had instances where, just to eliminate possible causes of issues, we have turned off AppDynamics, but it has never caused us issues with the database being either slow or going down.

We haven't really had the need to scale it. We're in the early part of the journey in our AppDynamics deployment, but we will soon be going there. We still have to get to that point.

We have used technical support a couple of times. When we had the new release, the deployments were not as smooth as we thought. I think we had to engage the AppDynamics engineer, and a couple of times for the configuration that we just did not know. It was probably a training issue more than anything else. Other than that, it's been self-sufficient as far as we can tell.

Tech support were really helpful. We have a good partnership with AppDynamics. That's what we appreciate because they understand how my company works, the culture, the scope and the ecosystem. We really like it, having that partnership.

We run a lot of third-party packages, and we fly blind to what happens inside. We have tons and tons of logs. To go through those whenever we have an issue takes days or weeks. It's a similar story, I think, across the board. For us, though, the applications being so critical, we need to get to a root cause and fix it. Until that point, before we had AppDynamics, it was a constant back and forth with the software vendors. With this tool, since we’ve had it and have been able to pinpoint where the issue is, we can get on to the root cause really quickly.

The initial setup was kind of different and new. I wouldn't describe it as complex. Once we had the person from AppDynamics sitting next to us, we could quickly get to it.

There weren’t really any other companies we looked at before we chose AppDynamics. In our company, we have another tool that they use. I think AppDynamics is quickly picking it up. But we as a group never looked at any other tool.

In general, when I look at working with a vendor, the capabilities in the product is definitely the most important criteria. That's number one. The second thing is, as I’ve mentioned, if you have a good partnership and a good representative from the vendor side who can represent your issues to the product teams and get those features in. I think that's kind of critical for us.

If colleagues looking to implement database monitoring asked me for advice, I would definitely advise them to look at this APM tool, first of all. Then, basically just work with the engineers initially and get self-sufficient with the tool. And spend some time with the tool. If it's a training issue, get some training on the tool itself.

As long as they know their space, they know their infrastructure, they know their database ecosystem, it should be pretty easy.

We use the AppDynamics database monitoring plus the APM on the app side right now.

The most valuable features are monitoring the application, using the metrics of the different applications and looking into various business transactions we do with different customers. That's what we look into more often, the business transactions; where the calls are coming in, whether they are inbound or outbound calls.

We can track the visibility of the calls, how many calls we are getting. Being in the hotel industry, we want to get the feedback of the customers who are going to the various hotels we have under the IHG umbrella. We want to know how many people are calling for reservations and so on, that's what we look at.

Since we have a lot of applications in our company, we are right now looking into analytics and also RUM (real-user monitoring) for the mobile apps. Going forward, we want to be on par with the market.

We have been using it for about three years.

It has pretty much scaled properly for our needs.

We have been using AppDynamics for about three years as of right now, and we are a pretty well-satisfied customer. We continue to strive for new technology, whatever the AppDynamics people are releasing, the new versions or whatever, we keep upgrading.

We have a lot of development teams and they ask a lot of questions. Being the admin for AppDynamics at IHG, I raise a support ticket. They are very good with responding immediately. The response time is very good, as in a couple of hours. We are pretty satisfied. I work with a lot of guys from AppDynamics, and I work with one guy in England. They're pretty good. The support is very good, technically sound.

We weren’t really using something else before. I think my management wanted to get some metrics out of the application.

I do the configuration on the application, setting up the app agent and the machine agent. Being a SaaS controller, I think your ops team would take care of it.
It is not that complex; not at all.

When we were finalizing the deal, I'm not sure about which vendors were on the shortlist.

When selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, we want to get as much out of the tool that we purchase.

There are so many tools in the market, depending upon the criteria and what you want, I would definitely suggest AppDynamics, because of the REST things and all of that. You can deep dive into data and get to the granular level.

We are pretty much a satisfied customer.

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

We are more on end-user monitoring, so it helps us to find out each and every page, do the analytics on the pages, the user experience; correlate that information with the real-time experience of the user. Though, there are some things we just enabled. It gives only the system time, not the actual user time. We have a lot of virtual pages. It's a one-page app, but we have a lot of virtual pages. In those cases, the analytics will come in handy and we'll be able to find out more information, more detail to look into.

We just started using it, so we are just trying to find out where the problems are, and we're trying to fix them, even before the user complains.

We just started using this product in the last six months. We have started implementing more and more applications. We are in the learning phase now, so we haven't implemented the full thing yet. We are just under observation; we'll see how we can use this effectively.

I would like to see improvements with the dashboards. Dashboards and reports is where we see a lot of lag. If that can be improved, it would be good. The expectation from our side is mostly with the dashboards and reports. I'm not sure whether it might be a bug or something. It's all been reported already. They're saying that this will be addressed in the upcoming versions. Hopefully; we are waiting for it.

We have been using it for six months.

We have not had that many stability or scalability issues.

We were previously using a few software tools. We are in process of consolidating the applications into one enterprise tool, inside of having multiple tools doing individual jobs. We want to have one solution for the enterprise. That's why started doing the PoCs and then we ending up getting AppDynamics.

We have used technical support many times. We have created so many tickets. They're really good. The response is really very fast. That's the one thing I like about the tech support: They respond really fast.

We also looked at New Relic Insights.

It wasn’t our decision to choose AppDynamics. We just gave our feedback on the tools to management and they made the decision, whichever was the cost-effective one.

When we look at a vendor to work with, the most important thing is that they have to understand our business. That's what we are looking for. The vendor should understand our business and customize or direct us on what is our need, and just stick to that. Offering a thousand tools, we don't want that. We just need one tool that solves our issues.

Go through the AppDynamics docs first, before you start implementing. The documents are good, and you have good videos. It has step-by-step instructions, and it is straightforward. Go out and do it. For any new user, just go to the documents; anyone can read them and get started.

We also use AppDynamics APMJava monitoring and the .NET agents. We are also using the database monitoring and the server monitoring service availability. We’re happy with them.

Right now, we use a lot of the metric browsers, we use the APIs to then ingest that into Splunk, and then create nice visual graphs that upper management can then digest very easily. We use AppDynamics not only from a troubleshooting point of view, but also for trending, analysis, and capacity.

It's definitely cut down our troubleshooting, from a mean time to restore or repair, and pinpoint the actual problem that we are having; reducing that time.

I don't think we've tapped into everything that AppDynamics can do. I can't really mention something it should do because AppDynamics might already do that and we just haven't implemented that yet.

Nonetheless, I know that a lot of the problems that the people are having is they lost work. It'll be really good if they could retain the data a little bit better.

From my standpoint, it’s pretty stable. I know that when we first set it up, we put everything under one application. Now, we are kind of breaking away from that, and we are losing a bunch of the data. From that standpoint, people are getting upset, but I understand that's the limitation of the app. I think some people just need to move on.
Once we get everything the way we want it, the maps are going to show up the way we want it. I think it will be a lot more beneficial.

Scalability is a lot better now that we can see one application, can see the other application, whereas before, we didn't have that visibility. That's why we put everything under one application. Now, I think we can do as much or as little as we want.

I personally haven't used technical support but the company definitely has. They're on site all the time. I know from talking to our monitoring guys, they love it. They think that the support is always there and always readily available. They are the administrators; I am more of a power user.

We weren't previously using any APM solution. We were flying blind. We knew we had to do something. That's when the monitoring manager got wind of AppDynamics and really pushed hard for us to implement it.

I was involved in the initial setup a little bit but not all too much; just from a 40,000-foot view of, “Hey, this is what's coming down. You might want to play around with it.” I wasn't involved in the installation or anything of that nature.

From what the installation people said, initial setup was pretty easy. All you had to do was put the agent on. I know our development were kind of balking about putting the RUM JavaScript out on all their pieces of code. Now that it’s out there, they're pretty good about adding more and more to it because they are seeing the benefits of doing that. From a standpoint of installation, I think everything has been running pretty smoothly.

I don’t know any of the other vendors that were on the shortlist. I am sure there was but I don't know. I wasn't a part of that conversation.

If you're not getting the support or if you're not getting the answers when they are trying to troubleshoot, then this is a definitely a really good solution and it will save you time in the long run.

With the benefits of pinpointing the issue quickly, we can get either our servers or our application up and running better. We've pinpointed a lot of long transaction times and were able to fix that. Not knowing that, because we fixed that, it also fixed three or four different applications.

It’s also nice to see the mapping. Once you start building all these things and its building on top of each other, AppDynamics does a very good job of showing, “Holy cow, we actually are talking to all these other different servers.”

As I’ve mentioned, we were flying blind and now we are starting to see. It's been a lot better.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we use EUM as well. We are trying to get our company off of Google Analytics and go straight AppDynamics, but it’s a slow boat.

The dynamic baselining is a big plus; being able to get rolling baselines for different times of the day, different days of the week, days of the month. Alerting is a big feature; being able to receive alerts when we have things that kind of go out of bounds. Dashboarding is also a pretty big one that we use a lot, along with the API; being able to put in our own data and add that to dashboards related to what AppDynamics itself is finding.

It's led to a very big decrease in MTTR when issues are encountered, as well as helped us to be a lot more proactive to be able to identify issues and customer degradation before customers start complaining about it.

The biggest complaint that we have at this point is the ability to exclude certain time frames from the dynamic baselining. If we have an event or something like that that we know performance goes significantly outside of the baseline, that ends up being part of the dynamic baseline, so you don't have the ability to alert and stuff on that going forward.

Overall, stability is very good.

I haven't had any issues with availability or scalability.

I did not previously use a different solution; no APM kind of tools.

We realized we needed an APM solution mostly because of the growing complexity of the application. It's a lot easier to monitor an application, per se, if you have good control and you know what all the application is doing. I think most people would agree that as applications are growing, and becoming more and more complex, you have less and less people that actually understand what's going on. You need something like AppDynamics that will help bridge that gap between the people's understanding and what the application is actually doing.

The overall setup of the application is extremely straight forward. We had a little added complexity, due to the size of our deployment, but really, it is far more straightforward than all the competitors’ products that we looked at.

We also primarily looked at CA Wily Introscope and Dynatrace.

The biggest reason we chose AppDynamics was their ROI. AppDynamics was by far the quickest and easiest to get good results out of. The other two products required a lot more investment both as far as capital for purchasing systems to handle the load, as well as time to get the systems to really have useful data in them.

The best advice would probably be to make sure that you know what your requirements are and that you're analyzing the tools to your requirements. Look at things such as capital and time to roll out. That makes a big difference in the ROI for a product.

Overall, it's a very strong product. It has most of the features that I think we need. There are a few things that could be improved, like the ability to exclude stuff from the baseline. It's not quite perfect, but other than some usability improvements, I think it's a very great product.

We use AppDynamics APM, as well AppDynamics EUM.

The business transaction tier of management is the most valuable feature; the fact that we can go into multiple tiers and monitor the transactions from the end-user point of view. That's very important to what we're doing.

It brings everything to the forefront. It helps the application staff plus the executive staff understand what's going on with the end-user performance because, obviously, that's one of the most important issues today.

I’d like to see something more towards a merger between the dev and the production. This is where big data comes in; the portion that's in there, moving things from installation and dev, moving them, managing them and transitioning between dev to production for new applications.

I haven't seen any problems with stability with any of the AppDynamics products that we're utilizing.

Right now, it's scaled for what we have to do in terms of what we have to add. I think we've already allowed it, in the planning, for adequate scaling. Obviously, you have to put these guys on, various agents, but we've allowed for that.

The professional services that we actually use, we did need their assistance in standing up this product. They were very helpful. They're still behind us even after they left the facility. They check in and log in to make sure that we're on track with what we need to do. Any problems that we did face, they addressed.

We were previously using something else and that company didn't stay current with the times.

Before choosing this product, we did evaluate other options.

Take a test drive of the demo.

I’ve given it a high rating because of the initial dashboards that are being built and the way that they can be built. I haven't seen anything like that. Especially with the flow management that's literally there in real time.

For right now, we are not using any other AppDynamics products. We are only using AppDynamics APM, but the new one they introduced at a recent conference, Business iQ, that seems very appealing too.