Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

The most valuable feature is just the sheer visibility it gives us, especially being on the performance team. It's basically our "eyes" to the application. Without it, we don't know the flow, we don't know where things are being impacted. We just love the visibility it gives us.

We have a lot of legacy systems. We have a lot of engineers, people. Not everybody knows the whole picture, where AppDynamics basically stitches all that together for us. So, you don't have to go to 10 different people, you can go to one screen and see that full view.

It improves the way we work, it improves our efficiency; a whole host of things, actually. It allows us to be more proactive than reactive. It even helps us more in our non-prod environment. We find issues before we ever get to production.

We're definitely looking for adoption of more platforms. We have some legacy z/OS systems that we use, so we're looking to help stitch those in. It's pretty difficult to; things aren't on the open system side. We’re definitely looking for that.

Given the testing we do, we look for ways to save detailed information on tests, such as "point in time". If we have a test we run, and we want to save that granularity and be able to pull it up, like a month later. We've expressed our want for that.

We haven't had any stability issues. Overhead seems to be pretty low. With some existing monitoring solutions we've had, we've always had the concern for overhead. We don't seem to have that concern with the AppDynamics solution.

It seems to be scaling well for us. We have hundreds of nodes, hundreds of agents out there right now. I don't admin the tool too much but from what I've heard, it's scaling pretty well.

We have technical support. We have the technical services. We work with one of their engineers on a monthly basis. It’s great, very responsive, knowledge is really good.

Adoption: It's hard to do with just one person driving it. If you have that adoption, the team doing it, that definitely makes it a lot easier. Start on a couple small things. Work your way up. Don't try to do one "big bang" and get it all in there. At least for us, that's the way it's worked well.

In general, when I’m looking to work with a vendor, the most important criteria are definitely reliability, where they sit in the industry, responsiveness. They have to be responsive. They have to be cutting edge. Those are basically the main points.

As far as using other AppDynamics solutions, we started to get into the database monitoring side, so we can see some query performance, and not have to bug the DBAs; we can look at that ourselves. We’re enjoying that.

The most valuable feature is mainly the graphs that it puts together; the JVM, the heaps, the classes that get called, the number of calls from tiers to tiers.

I think the graphs are mainly used by developers to see what happens in production. We don't know; our workloads. We've been exposed to the internet. We don't know what's coming.

I would like, for example, to see something similar to a heap dump; exactly which objects are over there. I'm not sure it's possible or not. This is a challenge.

A friend compares it to JavaMelody, which I think gives them some of the features that they still want that application to be active. I think it's mainly about the number of threads, SQL executions and similar items, at a certain point in time when you look at them. That could be something.

Sometimes, it can be a little bit too crowded; all the screens. Once you put your dashboards together and you know exactly what you're looking for, it's OK. But if you're always trying to find new problems that you don't know about, maybe that's a little bit harder.

I haven’t had any stability or scalability issues; that's good.

I haven’t had to use technical support.

It kind of came my way from the development team. We used to have Confio Ignite, which was pretty good for me. Then we dropped everything, and then at some point, we needed something new, and we came across AppDynamics.

In general, when I’m considering vendors to work with, I look for the quality of the product and the support. I don't want to be offered professional services every time I call in for an issue, because we are kind of self-reliant. Those are the two things I look for.

Initially, I had the internal controller, which was a little bit more challenging, but then we switched to the cloud ones. It's just easier, I guess.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options.

It's very easy. It's been easy. The dashboard that comes automatically, the mapping with all the services, the externals; those are all pretty good.

I do not use any other AppDynamics solution.

One thing we like about AppDynamics is the fact that you get the end-to-end topology right out the gate. There's not a whole lot of configuration that's needed. Usually, right when you start up a new application it's automatically reporting. You can actually get some of those deeper dives right out of the gate, without having in-depth knowledge of your application or new features that are out. It just automatically makes those connections for you.

Some of the ways it's improved our work is being able to actually get development teams involved. They can look at the same things that we're looking at with their own login credentials and see the specific call and the amount of time it's taking. So we can contact them with more specific information instead of just saying "there's something wrong with functionality as a whole" and they can see what we see.

By default, AppDynamics tends to only capture a lot of the high-level stuff, and you can actually go in and manually configure a lot of the lower level stuff manually. But one of the problems that I see, is that since you have to configure lower level functions manually, what you don't know can limit what you can do. Things ca pop up that you never see if you have to configure it manually.

Also, I would like to see a lot more of that stuff get pulled into the forefront so you know what you're actually working with, and you can see some of those issues as they pop up instead of trying to track them down. If you don't know what you're looking for, you don't know what to turn on and it can lengthen the actual time that it takes.

We haven't had any stability or scalability issues, but our company made a custom implementation of APM, where we created a bunch of PowerShell stuff where they're actually doing a full install off to the side. So it doesn't take very long for us, but it's kind of a custom thing that we created.

We also have Dynatrace, and the way that we actually have it set up is we have multiple servers per node. So we'll have a few of the servers on AppDynamics and a few on Dynatrace, and we tend to do all of our high-level stuff and our basic triage in AppDynamics. Then, once we get covered up to the point where we're having a hard time seeing an issue, then we dive deep into Dynatrace.

From a infrastructure standpoint, AppDynamics is much easier to support and it takes a lot less resources. It is lot easier to roll out, quicker setup, creates a lot of pretty pictures in topologies and flow maps, and it's really good. But on the flip side, Dynatrace is a lot uglier. It's difficult to configure and it takes lots of servers to support it, but it records everything.

It records so much that it takes a lot of infrastructure to hold it all. But when we're having a specific issue we can dive down, because it does record every little nook and cranny. It does have additional overhead as well, which causes some issues, but that's why we have the split environments, so we have the best of both worlds.

When I look for a vendor I want them to deliver on what they say. A lot of times they will say they can do stuff and you bring them in for a proof of concept and they can't do it. But they always guarantee that they will. And they can never actually get it working.

I would advise a colleague to sit down with one of the senior architects and map out what their needs are, and the best way to do it. What you need is based on the individual technologies you have and you might need more of a custom split for what you're actually looking to get out of it.

The features we find most valuable are real-time monitoring, seeing transactions, being proactive and easy to focus on the real problem.

I remember a case that would have taken maybe four or five days to find the cause. Now, we find it in two or three hours. APM has really made it more efficient. It really helps.

Well, it's not really about APM, but the network monitoring I'm really interested by that.

We're basically starting so we're not yet very good at it. Again, we still have a good support to help us.

We have not had any stability problems.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have used technical support a few times and we found it to be very good. Response time is good and their tips are good; very helpful.

We did not have any previous solutions.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup.

We compared AppDynamics with the IBM Tivoli IT. They failed so that's why we went to AppDynamics.

APM probably applied more to us than others perhaps. This is an application monitoring tool so you need to really understand it and implement it properly. The application team needs to know about its features and capabilities to get the most out of it. We're new at this, so it's a new paradigm that we have to bring in our company. Being on the event team, I'm not looking at the application for the app team. Sometimes we're looking at the dashboard and we see something wrong. We feel that they're not really taking action. Sometimes we just call them, "Hey, by the way, can you have a look at it?" So, integration with the actual application team could be an improvement.

I think a vendor should be available, have deep product knowledge, and be helpful.

Performance is the most valuable feature, especially the tag and follow, which has to do with multiple JVMs and diaries. Also, getting to know when you hop into different segments and trying to figure out where this is actually happening, and then that too, if it is happening to the backend. That is the key and that helps.

Server Monitoring has saved us time. We have issues that previously took days to solve, become resolved quickly. Once you know what's your normal, you know your anomaly. That's the key.

We have our own challenges because the amount of JVMs we are dealing with. But still, this is really helpful in trying to analyze a lot of our issues with certain types of JVMs. Not necessarily out-of-memory errors, but a few memory leaks, and a few applications that had third party JVMs that got leaked. Had I not known this, it would have taken a long time to solve these issues. There are ways to find them, but it takes more time.

One area that needs improvement is application integration. They do have it now, but that has to be improved. What happens is, right now, we cannot deep-dive into it. Four years back, I requested application integration. It took four years get it. At least it is there. The thing is that it has to improve. That's it.

Stability is good. I mean, we had issues. I have been using APM for four years, so I know where it was, and now where I am I know, so I'm so happy with it. It's much improved.

Scalability, it's good. It has challenges too, because I'm dealing with a very large setup. Scalability is definitely there, but now with the new features that are coming out, with a backend, it definitely will be better.

I am happy with technical support.

There were initial setup issues on both sides. I don't want to complain and it's not fair to do that, but now, if you look at it, it's reasonably stable, but every upgrade is a challenge. I mean, software is like that. Especially with the amount of changes they are making. The only thing about AppDynamics is they release quickly. Hopefully, they know you cannot keep up with this pace. A big enterprise, cannot handle that many releases like that. It requires a lot of coordination to upgrade to a new release.

And the biggest thing I wanted them to do, is to not require agent upgrades. That means every agent must be recycled. Someday they will push the agent from the controller with automatic upgrades. Something has to happen like that. Hopefully that will happen. That is my next ticket.

Use it, and when you use it, use it regularly. If not, don't use it at all. You won't get the benefit unless you use it properly on a regular basis, so you know what normal looks like. You need to know how this thing looks, so that you know your anomalies and can resolve issues quicker.

Now, my team is not that close to the APM information. Using AppDynamics, it was possible to delegate how to read information on the client side because of how easy that is.

The most valuable features are:

• Error analysis in the troubleshooting sections go straight to the point.
• Autodiscovery of transactions.

If you are analyzing real time dashboard or metrics, AppDynamics will give you a refresh each minute, no matter what number you are watching.

This is a real situation when you are facing the screen during a load test or a the "hot" midnight of cybermonday for instance. When you have high stress of visits I do not know if you are more stress because of the amount of visits or because you have to wait eternal 60 seconds to find out it things are going well or you already have mess. And is even worse when you see suddenly a worse number but you do not know if this is a an spike or meanwhile your system is already "down", You just think in other tools with high "resolution" like CA (every 15 seconds.

Once you reach the limit of sizing in resources, the application becomes unstable.

We did not really encounter any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is 3/10.

Technical Support:

Technical support is 6/10.

We previously used Introscope, which was difficult to use and not intuitive at all

Initial setup was easy going with a wizard.

A local vendor with a very good level of expertise implemented it for us.

I have never calculated ROI, but I need to do that.

It is not a cheap tool, but you also save in manpower to setup because it is easy and fast. At the end of the day, I think the revenue is much better.

BUT, they have an awful co-term mode of licensing.

Two years ago, we evaluated Dynatrace and New Relic.

Features that are valuable to us are the business transaction transparency from one tier to the next and the ability to be able to drill down into the called stack. The ability to identify the stalled and error transactions in real time. And be able to investigate it, pick up the trends. That's one of the useful things. Because we use that as part of our root cause analysis and as a proactive, as well as a reactive way, to look at the incident and see what we can do to fix it.

For example, without getting in to the specifics of the issue, we've had some issues with our application where the capability in which we use tracing functionality to write the logs and stuff like that. And one of them had been enabled and it was writing it to a file instead of writing it to an HW, which was costing a lot of I/O. And unfortunately, at the time, the file share server that was taking all these logs was having an issue with the I/O. But it wasn't apparent because the experience of the customer was that the transaction was taking longer to complete. And we were trying to understand where's the bottleneck because everything looks healthy. But the requests kept stacking up.

But then, when we looked into the AppDynamics it make it very easy for us to identify that it was trying to write it to a log. And that operation, out of the entire chain, was this one step where it was trying to write to a location and that's where it was reporting a huge latency. In a matter of, I'd say about 15-20 minutes, we were able to trace it and be able to basically identify what the issue was and we fixed it. In fact, it drove a chain of reactions, in retrospect. Because obviously, it meant we need to look into these things much more carefully because to avoid these kind of incidents from happening in the future.

AppDynamics lets you find things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to see.
Without APM, you'd be spending a lot more time to try and investigate into all the individual event logs. Our services are massive. It's not a simple application with a front end and a back end. We have a lot of other micro-services that talk to each other. I think one of the trainers at a recent conference mentioned that one single touch starts a chain reaction. And when you have such a topology, it's very difficult manually to go through every single layer and figure out where the bottleneck is. Versus APM giving you an end-to-end workflow and gives you exactly which layer the AppDynamics thinks is having problem. Then it lets you drill down and further down. The zooming capability is brilliant.

I'm not aware that we use any other AppDynmics products along with APM. I've used the reporting and stuff like that. I'm part of an incident response team, so we are the command center for AppDynamics products. So we are more focused on the operation side of things.

One of the things that I've noticed is when you have a massive scale, turning on too much of data logging is not possible. So sometimes what's happening is we would use the snapshot capabilities to a minimum. But then what's happening as a result is we miss certain transactions and we need the snapshot.

I was working on a case and I knew what the problem was. I knew what the root cause was. I was trying to reproduce that case so I can collect the data in APM, which is a lot more user-friendly. Because I knew what the issue was, but if I needed to explain it to someone, I don't want to write an email. So I wanted a diagram view of what the issue was. And I was trying to reproduce it.

It took me a long time to get that snapshot in to the APM, because I think it wasn't taking very frequent snapshots. And it's probably the way we configured APM, because of the volume of data that generates it. They probably deemed it necessary to not just take every snapshot because obviously, it's a very expensive operation and it costs a lot of I/O and performance as well. So, that is something I would probably say that would be useful. To be able to say - I'd like to be able to do a snapshot much more frequently if it's possible in any way.

The monitoring capability could be improved. It's dateless right now. But, at a recent conference, I think one of the CTOs or COs mentioned that they're working with another monitoring solution to integrate it. But at the moment, it does have a monitoring capability, but it's very, very basic. Just to give you an example. Let's say if you get an alert, you don't want another alert in the next five minutes to say that it's down. You need to be able to increase the counter on that alert to say, look, it's still down but I don't want to trigger another alert. And every alert in our space would mean a ticket to our space. So you don't want to flag a hundred alerts for the same type of issue like a hundred times, if you know already what the issue is. So it's those capabilities. The integration, either with the existing monitoring capability, and that smooth transition. In fact, I was just looking at my email today. I have like 15 emails from APM. It's just way too much traffic for me.

Scalability is part of our day to-day jobs. At a recent conference, one of the trainers that mentioned very clearly that none of the databases are not growing. They are growing every day. The users are growing and the expectations are growing. They need faster and faster response times with complex systems. So, scalability is a number one priority for us. Because when the customer gets on-boarded, they are relatively small. But as the time passes by, they grow. But if you provision the capacity based on their initial requirements, eventually you'll hit a problem with the scalability.

So, it's very important to keep those factors in mind. And the best way to look at it is the usage analytics, the response rate. And the best part, and this is something that I took away from recent training is the base-lining. Because you don't want to be too late into identifying that you're hitting scalability issues. By then, customers would start experiencing issues. If you see that a deviation in the performance based on your baseline data, I think that's when you need to start thinking, okay, looks like the usage is going up. How do we scale better? How do we get more capacity, or fine tune if it's in any way possible, or distribute it? So, that's what I do every single day.

We have not really used technical support. I'm not on the side of configuring APM. I'm a user of APM. I just look at the data that it's already providing to me. Although there are a few questions, we usually pass them on to our guys who work with the AppDynamics to get them sorted out. I'm more of a subscriber to that.

I want a vendor to be honest. I've never been involved in those kind of conversations. But I'd expect them to tell me what exactly it does and what it exactly doesn't do. Nobody expects a product to be perfect. Nobody expects the product should have every single bell and whistle. But if you sell it that way, you're going to be disappointed. I'd rather know that upfront. And probably setup a roadmap and say, look, we are getting these features in the pipeline, which is a much more realistic conversation.

My advice is that just before you turn on APM, think about what's important to you. Just don't go ballistic on putting everything under the sun under the AppDynamics. The danger of doing so, the side effect of that is you're looking at way too much information and it gets foggy. Start with a subset that is critical to your business. Understand it from a customer perspective. Don't look at it from an operational perspective. Where do the customers feel the pain the most? Start with that and then start instrumenting those. Try and get as specific as possible because that way, whatever you're looking for in APM is important to you. If I'm an operations person and I'm dealing with hundreds of incidents every day, I'd like to see an incident that I'm absolutely working on. So try and reduce the noise ratio as much as possible. And try and look at the important ones that you should be straight away looking into and action on. I think that's probably the key advice that I would give anybody who wants to implement not just AppDynamics, but any APM into their products.

It’s great that APM monitors in real-time. When we have an issue, we find out fairly quickly if there's a problem with our hardware.

For example, we were in crisis calls all last week. So, that's the first tool we look at to see what's going on and where the problem is. Then we start to troubleshoot from that point on.

One of the big things was the license management. It was just something I've been asking for over a long time, because we have several groups that use it so it get very clustered. The new feature with license management coming out, I've been waiting for it. That's going to be great for us. Should help us with a lot of problems.

We have had some stability issues for a few sites. I'm on the supply chain side so there have been a few. At distribution centers, we've had a few issues, but not as a whole. Only for a few pieces here and there we do.

We solve these by just looking at our code, see if the hardware is kind of lined up to see if it's a hardware issue or if it's networking. We look at the bigger picture basically.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have used technical support a few times. They have been great. Last time we had to actually have them join our crisis call and they were able to join within the next 5 minutes, which was great.

We had several tools, but we never used them properly. Mainly because we had five different tools and were working five different things. We were trying to bring everything together, is basically where I think everybody came together with that balance.

Initial setup was very straightforward. The documentation is very clear. It's a matter of reading through it, but it's very straightforward.

I don't have the names on top of my head, but we looked at several other companies. I wasn't the one who made the decision, but again, mainly because the multiple pieces that you can look at with AppDynamics, that's what helped us the most.

When looking at a vendor, first of course is money and the features to see how valuable it's going to be. Our main requirement is, is it going to actually get us some revenue? The value of it versus the cost. That's the main thing.

I would give AppDynamics an 8/10. I guess we're not using it fully to what it's capable of and that's mainly on us. We're working with AppDynamics support to take it to the next step; actually properly fully using all aspects of it. That includes the server, utility, the infrastructure presets coming out, and basically using it for what it's supposed to be and not parts of it. Our rating is mainly because of us.

I would advise others to automate early on. Streamline a lot of it before getting started. That's going to save you a lot of time later on if you have thousands of JVMs running.