Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature is real-time performance monitoring of my production applications; being able to determine within just a couple of minutes, whether or not my applications are having a problem; and being able to correlate that with issues that my customers report on.

We use it pretty widely across the company. In my particular group, where we've been able to get it situated for all of our .NET and related applications, we've been able to really improve our time to resolution on incidents. We've been able to better institute root-cause analysis for these incidents that we've been having. Whereas before, we were essentially a black box. Customers could say that they were having issues and we would not be able to independently correlate those reports with actual production problems. Now, we have much greater visibility from top to bottom, in terms of the web page and the server level.

We have the database monitoring component, as well. We can take a look and see whether we were having blocking on our database at the time, without needing to engage our database administrator. That also improves our time to resolution.

One of the things that I would like to see is a little bit more ease of use with regards to the analytics component. I know that's new. At a recent conference, there was a session for hands on with analytics that I signed up for. I planned to look at that a little bit. Otherwise, it's been a little bit of a black box to try and get started with our existing infrastructure.

I know that they're moving towards a lot of the things that I would like to see. For example, slightly deeper integration of the database monitoring that's already in place and being able to, a little bit more easily, correlate that to the calls that my web service is making. My applications, in particular, are very, very, very database heavy. Being able to see that more closely linked would be nice. The latest version of the controller has already started moving in that direction.

Being able to use analytics in the way that it's advertised; there's still a gap for me personally, in terms of where we are now and what the capabilities of analytics are. I would really like to see that made a little bit more transparent.

These are small, quality-of-life issues.

The stability of the product, generally speaking, is good. The worst problem that we have with it has to do with firewall rules and making sure that our agents can reach out to our SaaS controller. Once we get that taken care of, we have that data within just a couple of minutes. The stability incidents that we have on the controller level are very rare; it's available most all of the time.

Scalability is pretty good. We're able to on-board new applications and make sure that we get those correlated up very, very quickly. We are actually moving to a full CI/CD stack, which will be integrating our ability to install and upgrade AppDynamics agents seamlessly, without us having to do it manually, like we do right now.

I use technical support all the time. Usually it's user error, stupid user tricks; I'm pretty good at those. There are definitely a couple of times where we've discovered that there's a bug in the agent or the controller.

We also have bi-weekly calls with our technical contacts, as well as our sales contacts. If we're having a problem, that can be escalated up, very quickly as well.

We were not previously using a different solution. It was actually one of my manager’s directives. I actually was with a separate team at Expedia called The Global Customer Operations Center. They had it set up for all of the call centers. If you call 1-800-Expedia, you'll get routed to one of our call centers and they use a set of applications that is supported by this team. It was a situation where users would call up and say that they were having problems, and we weren't able to repro it. They got AppDynamics set up and there was actually a session at that conference that they gave about all of the ways that they're using AppDynamics.

My manager moved to this rather old team at Expedia and one of the things she brought with her was AppDynamics. She was already in the process of getting that set up for that team when I followed her to this other team.

I was not involved of the initial setup of the controller, but we do have several applications that we're on-boarding at this time. Essentially, that is part of our go-live for any of our applications now: “We have this new component coming up. Do we have AppDynamics? Is it reporting?” We refuse to go live on any application until we know that we're reporting that data up through AppDynamics. That is a critical component of our ability to go live on any of our applications.

There weren’t any other vendors on the shortlist at the time. We were pretty much sold on AppDynamics. My manager, Diana, is a very, very big fan of AppDynamics. I feel like it really fits well into that niche of real-time, usable, easy-to-learn application performance monitoring. When I got started in GCO to begin with, it was already there and I knew I couldn't screw it up by going in and poking around. So, I went in, poked around and learned a lot about the application we were supporting; where the problems were; and what we could do about it very, very quickly, within a couple of weeks of my coming onto the team. Things like that all add up into us being pretty dedicated AppDynamics customers. They've got a really good relationship with Expedia, in general. We're very happy with them overall.

In general, the most important criterial when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is ease of use, both with regards to setup and expansion; for example, on-boarding new applications. For me, personally, that low barrier to entry, in terms of becoming familiarized with the product, understanding how it works, seeing where the benefits are for us and our use-case; I think it was extremely compelling.

One of our sister organizations has a WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus instance. They were using the good old stare-and-compare method of making sure that their services were up. They would start their Java application and go stare at the log file. That was how they knew it was running. They didn't have any visibility into how much traffic it was taking, whether that was normal, what their normal call profile looked like. As part of our own evaluation of WSO2 and their Enterprise Service Bus, we asked this team to install AppDynamics on their servers. They came back and said, "How do we get our own?"

Basically, my advice – to people who are looking at better visibility for their applications; better knowledge of how their customers are using their product; knowing whether your application is up or down is one thing but knowing how it gets used can be something else entirely – is, "See if you can get yourself a trial of the controller and some help installing your agents the first time, and then you'll wonder where you've been your whole life without it."

As a general rule, though, AppDynamics is something that we really can't operate without; even in the case of when we had a pretty big network outage earlier this year, where we weren't able to see the controller from our desks. That was sort of like operating with a big, black blindfold on. It's amazing how much we have come to rely on that instant, up-to-the-minute visibility that we have for our applications.

We have other tools like Splunk to help us dig through the logs, but even that doesn't provide the same level of detail that AppDynamics does. I don't really know if there is another product that does. For me, it's a pretty easy win to say that AppDynamics is certainly one of the most important components for us in supporting production environments.

We are not currently using any other AppDynamics products. We're researching how to implement that. Unfortunately, a lot of our applications are legacy. We've got some classic ASP that we haven't moved to .NET. There's a little bit of upgrade hurdle cost with regards to getting the EUM integrated with these classic ASP and related applications. As we start moving towards upgrading and replacing these products, that's something that we're looking at; making sure that we integrate the EUM with it. It's not something we've done yet.

It focuses on a much better idea of the end-user experience, of what they’re doing. We're not using end-user monitoring per se, but it gives a much better idea of what it's feeling like for them. We have all these hundreds of different URLs and web pages they can end up going on; be able to track all those individually and separately, and have it all be automated. We don't need to go through and say, "Hey, track these ten pages." It just loads it up, all on its own. It picks up new transactions that come through, new pages. When they release new code, we don't need to go through and manually assign what needs to be monitored.

AppDynamics allows us to quickly determine where a problem may lie. If a customer complains about slowness there may be hundreds of different servers that could be responsible for the slowdown. AppDynamics allows us to quickly determine where the choke point is. For example, is it a slow database call, a slow webservice call, or maybe a slow method that needs to be re-written by our engineering group? It can take less than a minute to determine where the fault lies. This means we spend less time trying to determine what the issue is, and more time fixing actually it.
The depth of monitoring that AppDynamics offers also means that we are aware of issues very quickly. It is very rare for our customer support to alert us of issues before AppDynamics already has. Most things are fixed before a customer even has a chance to call into our support center.

I’d like the mobile app to scale out a little bit better. There have been things that are missing from the mobile app that show up in the desktops. Also, there are some usability things in terms of, how quickly can I get down to active alerts? How can I filter off of those, especially when we have a lot of applications, a lot of tiers, a lot of business transactions? The mobile app gets the job done but it's missing a lot. I often times feel it is easier and faster to just pull out the laptop, boot that up and go through there instead of the mobile app.

The mobile app needs a little bit of work, making sure that the feature set that is available on the desktop, that we can copy it over and do the same thing on the mobile app.

Stability’s been good. We are using the hosted environment and sometimes it's a little bit slow, but most of the time, it works pretty good.

Scalability is kind of mixed. One of the problems that we come from is how they do the pricing. It's always per node or per module, but a lot of companies, including mine, know that often times you'd rather have a lot of smaller server instances instead of a few bigger ones. However, because we get charged per instance, all of a sudden that gets much, much more expensive as opposed to doing fewer large server instances.

I did open up one incident and it was resolved. I didn't really like the answer that came back, but it worked.

We weren’t really using any solution at all, and that was our problem. We had high-end server monitoring tools and log management, but we never had a true APM in the past. So, we looked around a bit, and this is the one we chose.

There weren’t any other vendors on the shortlist, as far as I know. I came in after most of those decisions were made. I wasn't involved with that initial discovery phase.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics are uptime, usability, and making sure it has the features and meets the needs that we have.

It works great, especially if you don't have anything that's currently doing that type of monitoring. It works great for doing what you need, when you want to track response times and error rates; and especially being able to dig down to individual transactions and see the actual call methods. That's amazing when you’re trying to debug issues and figure out what's causing slowness. So, we love it. It works well.

We’re not using any other AppDynamics products; just the APM right now. We've looked into a few of the other products, but the way our environment is laid out, it doesn't really make financial sense for the time being.

The most valuable features are basically the customer experience that it provides, and the deep dive that it gives; the overall dashboards, and then the strength of the dashboards, so you get a single pane and can see across the platforms.

It's much easier to set up and manage than the previous products we've had. It is basically a lot cleaner. It's just simpler to set up, simpler to manage, and gives a much better picture of anything else we've had.

The biggest thing that we need is on-prem synthetic monitoring. That is probably near the top of our list of things that we want, and actually need to have put in place. A lot of our business comes through intranet only, so a SaaS product can't provide that. We really need an on-prem synthetic monitoring solution.

I haven’t rated the product higher basically because of the synthetic monitoring piece. We started discussions with AppDynamics probably about two years ago now. Even at that time, they were saying on-prem synthetic monitoring was going to be coming. We had our hopes up really high for that, and it seems like there's been some feet dragging there. From our side, we're a little bit impatient about it. That's probably the only reason why I haven’t rated it any higher.

It is very stable. We haven't had any problems with it going down, crashing, getting upgraded or anything like that. It's been very stable.

Right now, we're using it for a very small piece of our environment; running it in a pilot right now. We've had it for probably about six months in production, so it’s relatively new. From a scalability perspective, we do plan on expanding it out, and it seems like it would be easy to do, we're just not mature enough at that point.

It's been very good. I personally haven't been the one opening the tickets, but whenever the people that work for me have opened up tickets, they've gotten quick responses. It's been very easy to get things answered and any fixes put in.

We currently, and actually still have, the APM product by CA, and it has been kind of a headache to manage from day one. Any sort of maintenance on it, any sort of upgrades on it were always a pain to get done. That, in combination with the strengths of what AppDynamics provides from a dashboarding perspective, a metrics perspective, business transactions perspective, it's a lot stronger than what we're getting out of CA. The strengths combined with CA's maintenance and headaches, it was kind of a no brainer for us to want to switch.

With initial setup, everything was actually relatively simple. It went pretty smooth. There is somewhat of a learning curve from our side of things, but overall it was simpler than other things we've had to deal with.

We didn’t really consider any other solutions. We did some pretty extensive research when we went with CA, which was basically only four years ago. Once we saw AppDynamics out there, a little bit more mature than when we were first looking at products, and we saw there was a front runner and leader in the industry, it was kind of a no brainer. We didn't really shortlist anything else when we wanted to go away from CA.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is the strength of the company and the strength of the product. Is it at the top of the charts for Gartner? A clear leader: It seemed like they were a vision leader in the industry, so that was one of the driving forces.

I really don't have any negative things to mention about it. It's been all positive. Depending on how the environment is, it can be a bit pricier than other products. The benefits that you get out of it seem to outweigh the costs, from what we've seen so far.

We've also got AppDynamics’ End User Monitoring piece, and we're evaluating the database agents.

The most valuable feature is being able to trace and follow transactions through a complex environment.

It improves production troubleshooting, it improves pre-production performance testing and it improves our development quality, because they can find and troubleshoot performance and quality issues prior to testing.

I would like to see cross-tier, transaction tracing across applications.

It's been fairly stable. It has been fairly solid.

Scalability is an issue. We are pushing the product to its limits on our current hardware allocation, so it's hard to fault the product for that.

We constantly use technical support. It’s pretty good, depending on the nature of the challenge we're having. Sometimes it can be a little difficult getting answers but I think they're still doing a very good job.

We were previously using another, competing product and we re-evaluate all the products on the market regularly.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. At a large scale, it is incredibly complex but not because of the product itself. The product itself is relatively straightforward.

We evaluated Riverbed, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic; that was pretty much it.

We chose AppDynamics because of ease of use for the end users, as well as a relatively compact footprint, as far as the required infrastructure to host it.

We don't select a vendor; we select a product. The vendor needs to meet certain minimum requirements, of course, but ultimately the product speaks for itself.

As always, do your homework. Know everything about the industry that you’re playing in. Know who all of your options are and pick the solution that's best for you.

It's providing massive value for a relatively massive investment, as well, but it is proving itself to be easier to use and therefore more widely adopted than previous solutions. That has been a huge relief to all of us who have been doing APM for years and have wanted to spread that around the company wider than just a small set of analysts.

We are using a little bit of AppDynamics EUM and Analytics.

One of the most valuable features has been the ease of use that really fuels adoption in our organization. Other solutions that we have used for APM were not as user friendly, and frankly it was just really difficult to get people to use the tools.

The dashboards have been straightforward; easy to set up, really, for the most part.

It's made it easier to collaborate across teams; be able to have the same data immediately in front of you just by sharing a URL.

It could be a little more flexible in configuration on the back end. The design is geared towards specific goals, and they've done a great job with those. A lot of times when I'll ask a question, "Can we make it do this? Can we make it do that?", the answer is just, "No. Sorry, we don't support that at this time." And I get it, that's a good model for them to have, but I always have a wish list of things as I'm working with the tool.

I come across little things all the time, and I just file a ticket with AppDynamics to raise a feature request. So, I don't keep track of them, I just document it, and fire and forget.

I’ve been impressed with the features that they're adding and the direction that they've been working, a lot of which I wasn't aware of. License management, for example; being able to just give a certain number of licenses to an arm of the organization and say, "Here. Here's your licenses, do whatever you want with them." That really pushes the ultimate administration of the product out without having to "micromanage", if you will, and worry about giving them the key to the server. We are not currently using that. As far as I know, it's not released yet, but I was excited to see that. That was one that I brought up with support along the way.

I am impressed that they continue to develop and improve, and it's not a stagnant product by any means.

We have a controller that's pretty overloaded. We haven't run into any issues, though, with the AppDynamics.

Their technical support's been very responsive. They don't always have the answers that I want, but they're responsive, and help us find solutions where they can.

We didn't know that we needed a new solution. We had a solution. Another department wanted to look at AppDynamics. We looked at it and said, "We're already doing that, but if you want to bring it in and test their claims of greatness against what we have, go for it". We brought them in, and we said, "Let's buy that.”

Initial setup was very straight forward. We didn't even use technical services for our implementation.

It could be cheaper. It's a little cost prohibitive. There are so many features that also show a lot of value, but it’s not always easy to justify the cost.

We did not look at any other vendors. We weren't shopping, really.

In general, when I look at solutions, first of all, the product has to be top shelf. It has to be number one. That really drives us: "What is the product going to do for us?" In the vendor, we look for a vendor that's going to be around for a while; that we feel is going to be stable enough to support us into the foreseeable future. And then the support model, technical support; the ability to get into the technical details with us when we have questions. All of those things.

Having implemented without the help of professional services, we were capable of doing that; it went very smoothly. Involve, even indulge, AppDynamics in being a part of the implementation process, and having the planning and discussion around it. We wanted to go more rapidly than that would allow. Therefore, we kind of short-circuited that process, and jumped right in, which was good, but I think that there's value in having folks who have done it a lot look at where you're going with it, and give you some pointers. We've had to "course correct" a little bit on a few points as we went, and they might have been smoother along the way, had we just gone through the enablement and initial process.

It’s a great product. We're happy with it.

Nothing is perfect, so a perfect rating would be unattainable, but they’re pretty close to that. They're really great.