Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

The flow map is very valuable to us. Before we installed APM, we had no idea how our application looked. If the developer who designed it decided to leave the company, we would be in dead waters. We had no idea what the application looked like. To understand the architecture, we would have to literally go back to the developers and ask them if they can at least put some blocks on paper. That was like, "okay, help me out, please. Let's go for dinner, let's go for lunch. You have to do something."

After installation of APM, we realized the value within five or ten minutes. We could see what our application looked like and this created value for upper management. They better understood that our single point of failure is a database connected to 10 or 15 servers. This is the only single point of failure. AppDynamics became our risk management tool. Now the senior management comes in, has a look, and says, "If you have a single point of failure, who is looking into this? Do we have a plan to make another database, a standby?" This is the key value that I see in this tool, and for which everyone is loving the company.

I would like to see more of a unified platform. They're very, very new on the server side, machine agents. I want them to be more mature in this area. The approach I understand they're taking is that we connect between an application and the server, but that's it.

That's the point where, if you have to describe the value of this tool in front of a super–techie Windows administrator, he will not appreciate the tool, because he's not getting the metrics that he wants to see. He wants to see message queue size. He wants to see how his virtual memory looks. He wants to see packets incoming, outgoing, what's the packet drop rate. He wants to see many, many technical details, which is not what we want.

Since I want to keep happy both sides of the board, I cannot live with just one application side being happy in the company.

We have used APM for about a year.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not reached a stage where we can talk about scalability, so I'm not the right one who can answer.

I have used technical support. They jump on right in. If the individual is not able to understand my question, or if he thinks that he is not the right technical fit for this case, he will not hesitate to say so. Whereas I've worked with so many vendors and nobody says that they don't know something. They all say that they’re the best. So, support is good. It's a very stable application, no issues so far.

We have other monitoring tools, so I can easily compare them.

We were not using anything previously. They were relying on custom scripts and manual actions.

Unfortunately I was not involved in the initial setup, but I'm expanding AppDynamics to a larger audience now. I am implementing it in other parts of our office.

The implementation is very straightforward. They have done a good job understanding the difficult areas of installation and configuration. They have just one agent that you have to just use as a start option for a program. So when you start an application, you have to tell the application that when you start, use this agent. You don't have to make any changes in your application. You don't have to make any changes on the server. You don't have to make any changes on your web server. So they've done an intelligent job in not putting pressure on the application team to redesign. It's very simple, straightforward.

They have to look into the money aspect. It becomes difficult on the people who are advocating for the tool in their organization. I have to go and literally convince my upper management to give me more funds because it's beyond my budget capacity. It becomes so difficult for me and my upper management to get convinced that, yes, this is the right tool.

As a technical person, and as an application development team, they all understand that this is the right tool for us. But when it comes to budget and financial matters, it takes days and weeks to convince upper management to buy this tool. So they should do something more on licensing costs.

When choosing a vendor to work with, I want to know how truthful is he with me when he's talking. I don't want him to be a sales guy coming up and trying to sell me something. He should be honest in his opinion. He should be truthful when he says that, "yes this tool will solve your problem". I don't want a person who comes and says that AppDynamics is the gold and he will solve world hunger and poverty. I don't want to hear that. Tell me the benefits, tell me the drawbacks, and leave it up to me to decide whether these drawbacks are something that I can live with or not.

That's one. Second, I would like my partner to understand that he should understand our environment first. He should not come on day one and say, "here I am, I have 20 years of experience, I will solve your problem". 20 years, yes you do have, but you have an [outer world experience, not with my company. So come sit here for seven days and look into the environment. I will get you the meetings that you need, but first understand us and then give me a pitch. So I want him to be careful with what he wants to say; don't jump the gun.

Third, help with the technical aspects. I've faced a lot of problems with other tools. Everyone says that, "yes, I am the champion, I can solve the problem", and I don't want to hear that. Tell me how much you know, as simple as that. I'm learning, you are learning, everyone keeps on learning everyday. So just put how much you know on the table. I need that honest opinion, honest answer, from my vendor or my partner. If you keep bluffing me, or you keep making me a fool, that will last for a week, a month, or a year, but not more than that.

With the limited features that we have used so far, I would rate APM an 8/10. The reason I don't want to rate them a 10 is that I've not used the tool to full capacity. So far, I have no issues. It has all the features that I need. But, there are some areas that they are lacking. If I have to get into technical details, I would say more on the JBoss, web server side, they are lacking some functionality.

I will definitely recommend AppDynamics. Look into APM and see if it fits in your environment. We know there are many APM software competitors. Go for it and at least give a try. Set it up to use in your environment. If you don't have a server, AppDynamics has a SaaS portal, and they can immediately install one controller for you. I would recommend that you understand the difficult areas you have in your environment. Just because it's a fancy tool, don't go for it.

Understand the difficult areas. Where are the areas that you get the most hit from the customers? It can be customer service complaining that your websites are slow. But that's a very subjective statement. What does the slow mean? So try to understand those areas. If you have more clarity, you can talk more intelligently to the AppDynamics team. But give it a try.

I think the most important thing is the end-to-end view that you get of all of your servers when you set it up. You can see where problems are without having to actually experience them or tell they're experiencing the problems. You can be preemptive.

I think it allows you to go down and get real data about what's wrong, instead of having to email around screenshots. It let's you actually get the depth that you need, even the code level and code lines and that kind of thing.

I think a little more control over which transactions get that depth attached to them would be good. Right now, it seems like there's certain thresholds that you can set, but it would be nice if there was a more dynamic way to archive transactions, or keep around certain transaction types.

Stability and scalability look pretty good, from what I can tell; especially the cloud SaaS APM solution.

We have not needed technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We are currently moving from a monolithic application to a more service-oriented model where we're going to do micro-services. Spring Boot was the choice for that, because it has actuator support which provides some of the same features. We're looking at that, and weighing this because we already have it. We want to see if we can use of both, or maybe just use AppDynamics going forward.

I think price and scalability are important when choosing an APM vendor. If it's a third party solution, is it going to be able to keep up with the solution you're using? How is the technical support, and how cutting edge is the solution. Are they keeping up with their competitors? So far, we have found all these things in AppDynamics.

The easiest thing to do is to find all the transactions that you don't necessarily know about, what they are to discovery. A lot of times it shows you things that you had no idea was going on like performance problems you didn't know existed. It ties everything together and makes it easier to relate one transaction to all the different bits and pieces.

For example, one of our guys found that another system was hitting his system every hour, which was causing a lot more traffic than it should have. It wasn't affecting any other parts of the system and wasn't impacting the users, but was just causing way too much undue load on the system. They were able to track down why it was doing that and get the problem resolved in a week.

APM gives us easier troubleshooting and notification of issues. We can report off of that data to show application performance improvements over time. For example, we know that in this release, our baselines were X, Y, Z. The next release, we can then say, this was 20 percent faster or this was 10 percent slower. And then be able to figure out what we need to take off or what's just humming along fine.

We also use AppDynamics Infrastructure monitoring and End-User Monitoring.

Increasing the 200 business transaction limit would be great. The ability to compare releases a little bit more and with a little bit more accuracy. Right now, it'll show you the previous release and the next release. And it shows you all the numbers, but it doesn't you any relative change between them. You have to do all that on your own.

Overall, stability is very good. We've never had much of an issue with any of the agents. They install quickly and install easily. We have had a couple of glitches in the UI, but support's been very, very on the ball, both responding and handling issues.

Scalability seems to be going pretty okay. The 200 business transaction limit, while I entirely understanding the reasoning behind it, it's just irritating. There's a lot of times I want to monitor more than it will allow and I have to make sacrifices in some things for performance.

I look for responsiveness in a vendor. Whether they're willing to work around our schedule, our needs. Just having knowledgeable people on the front line is great. I mean, just all the initial support. Level one helped us and they've been able to answer most of my questions right off the bat. And they generally seeming to care about the product and care about their clients.

We didn't have anything at all. So, it was obvious that we needed something and AppDynamics was just really easy to get going and gave us more than enough information.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward, just to get it up and running. It takes an hour to do the install and the initial configuration. But once you're able to see everything that it can give you, that's when the complexity really comes in. You don't know what issues it will find until it finds them. From that, you can then branch out and build on different types of monitoring. But just getting it going, you run the installer and pick what you want and done.

I wasn't involved with choosing a solution, so I don't know.

Do it right from the beginning. Do a lot of planning. Everything flows from getting it setup correctly originally. And in a lot of ways, if you go and change something, if you need to kind of go back and re-do some things, you're going lose all your data historically. So do it right from the beginning.

I give APM an 8/10 because nothing's perfect. There are times where we had a couple of outages over the past couple of weeks. Just an hour or two where it was not available. We had to increase memory twice on the database monitoring agent. And when that dies, it doesn't respond. It doesn't report and it doesn't notify. So we go in a week later, look at our database information, and just don't have a week's worth of data. And that's an artifact of Java taking way too much memory. It's just little things. Nothing major.

Auto-integration with applications and how easy it is to identify errors/issues are the most valuable features for this product.

Along with APM, we use End User Monitoring; I personally use it. We have a unique business model where at the end of the month there is a peak in usage. This product helps us to monitor that usage and makes sure that we target issues even before they occur.

We were using the New Relic solution before AppDynamics and had a lot of issues for configuring it and making it suitable for our use. However, AppDynamics was very easy to configure. We were able to deploy it within a month and get real benefits from this product just within a 6 week to 2 month span of time. So that was the main reason we went for AppDynamics.

For example if I remember correctly, the end of every month is like a war zone for us. Since we have implemented this solution, it is going smooth and we are getting positive feedback from customers, consultants and everybody else. It has changed our life.

Further integrations with other monitoring systems would be very helpful. I want to see it interacting more with the infrastructure, to get more statistics and details from our infrastructure environment and not only applications.

It's fairly stable. I don't think I have seen any issues occur since we have implemented this product.

However, my team needs more training and familiarization with how to setup custom features.

Now we are using the Auto Scaling functionality with AWS. It was very easy to install again. We are not using it for all our applications and AWS but we are in the process of applying it.

We haven't used any technical support yet; we use a partner who helps us to deploy and stabilize the system. We haven't used this tool for a long time to need actual technical support.

We are all part of the community where we post questions, get answers and have access to a lot of resources there so support would be great.

I wasn't part of the selection of this tool but as soon as I came to know that this is the solution our organization had picked, I supported this decision a hundred percent.

I was managing the team that deploys it. I wasn't involved in the selection of the solution but as soon as I came to know that this is the tool we are selecting, I supported it.

We implemented it and had no issues since we have a vendor that supports us in the initial deployment efforts.

AppDynamics is a unique system. It depends on the environment that you are in. It is probably applicable to any kind of company but if you don't know how to configure it correctly or how to use it and get all the details that you want from it, it may not be your best solution. You might go with a much smaller scale solution but for any enterprise organization, this is the best solution you can implement.

We still haven’t implemented this APM tool completely in all our applications.

The valuable features of this product are being able to monitor the network traffic and know where my calls are generated from and where they are going to. This makes it easier for me to triage and diagnose, if there have been any problems.

We've been able to triage and diagnose problems sooner and proactively tell the teams involved if there have been lags in their performances, so they could look into them before there are any errors in production.

I would like to see some more work done for custom extensions. I don't think that there is enough support in that aspect.

We primarily have Java applications and that could be expanded as well.

It's been decent so far, at least since I've been working with it.

We did expand our licenses recently. It has been fine with the large number of servers that we have been monitoring.

We have used technical support. They have been proactive in answering all our queries.

Our company was using other applications and tools previously. However, they wanted a consolidated solution, so AppDynamics did offer a lot in regards to what they were looking for.

I'm not sure of all the tools that they were using but I know that they were using Nagios and GigaStor. I may be missing a few names but there were quite a few. Now we have narrowed it down to AppDynamics.

I was not involved with the initial setup.

I would recommend others who are looking out for a similar solution to try this product. However, it does depend on each business individually and what suits its needs; so I won’t be able to get into any specifics.

I personally don’t use any other solution besides APM but there are people on my team using End User Monitoring.

There's always room for improvement in this product.

AppDynamics shows different tiers of our application from front-end to back-end, so it's really easy for us to toggle down to each tier and find the bottleneck.

Last year, I worked on the load and performance test for our service. AppDynamics allows us to know how long requests to our service take. From that, we can know whether there is a database delay or some other reason. It really helps us to find underlying problems, some of which are not so evident and are waiting like a bomb inside our system. This is one of the benefits AppDynamics brings us.

Actually, it still takes some time when I want to find some requests in time ranges. It's a little slow. I think maybe they could improve there.

I like to check real time requests and whenever I select a time range in APM, I feel it responds quickly. And the data looks very correct. So I think it has good stability.

APM checks a lot of our loads and we have lots of similar environments. Our system requires a lot of scalability.

I have not used technical support.

I feel AppDynamics is really unique, because I really want to check our loss. We have lots of similar products to choose from like Elastic, Kibana, and Datadog but for the server stuff, we only have AppDynamics. So I feel it does a really good job and is really unique in the industry, and I don't think other products have all the features that AppDynamics can provide.

I was not involved in the initial set up. I just use APM.

No, we didn’t have any other vendors for server monitoring solutions; only AppDynamics.

My advice is just to play with it. It has so many dashboards and it's very intuitive and easy to understand. The visualization is also very good.

Regarding choosing a vendor, I think the most important thing is that they keep updating and improving the product. They also need to have great customer support. We want to have very precise data regarding real time data on the server.

From our side, I like that I can monitor the site performance in real-time. We have had the same issues in the past where users complained about slowness. There are many times where I go to the APM dashboard and I can see that there are some hung users or the JVM is doing garbage collection. APM helps us identify which server is getting hit the most. You look in the server logs or you see that the necessary resources are being depleted. AppDynamics is helping us identifying those issues.

It's mostly our business users who are constantly on the site. They are trying to experience what the end user experiences, and once they have seen the issue, that the site is slow, it's a big deal for us. End users might have seen the same thing.

At a recent conference, several questions came up regarding the memory heap utilization. AppDynamics is an APM tool that reduces heap utilization to 90-95%, even though it doesn't give you a heap dump. But you have other tools for that.

I have never seen the project crash on us. But again, we are a small company and we have limited JBMs and it has scaled to our needs. I'm not sure how the big companies that have hundreds of JBMs are doing.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. I think I'll be honest here. Setting up one of machine agents was kind of a challenge. But other than that it was good.

We were looking at other vendors as well. But the APM dashboard is simple. It was very easy to configure, it was all SaaS based, and support was really good. We got very prompt replies to our questions and they were quite willing to work with us. I was new to the tool, so I needed some hand holding initially. So, yeah, it was good.

Start digging and do it. There are a lot of things that initially we didn't know. So once I started digging into it, I found out more about it. They have good webcast sessions on the site, so go to the sessions and reach out to them. It's as simple as that. Their support response is very good. So they will let you know right of the end.

I like the real-time alerts. Basically, whenever the server goes down due to resource limits, such as JDBC connection pool resource limits, you get to a critical warning as a real-time alert. That's really good. Whenever an absolute restart happens on JVM, it sends a real-time alert, lights, mains, SMSs, and everything.

Also, for the dashboards and reports service, we’ve configured custom transactions. Based on that, we can see which particular transactions are getting more errors and slower performance, which gives us a chance to fix them.

It has really helped us in troubleshooting. It's like you're taking proactive action, so before it happens, you come to know, "Okay, there's something going wrong." We can minimize the effects of failures by taking proactive action.

The main improvement I would like to see is in reporting. If you set it to send daily reports, it just takes a snapshot of the report and sends it to us. For example, we want to see all the events that happened, including exceptions according to the timeline. It just gives you the first page. If you want to go to the second page, you need to get into the AppDynamics console and then go scroll down, replace, scroll down.

Stability is pretty good.

Scalability also is good. It's little glitchy, but otherwise it scales and it really gives a lot of information.

Technical support is slow. Basically, we mail, we wait, we mail. But I think depending on the priority they take immediate action, because if it is a production server getting affected, they come immediately. So it's really good. If it's development related or research or configuration, they come a little later, but it does not cause problems.

There was nothing before basically. We have this in-house application, and if we saw some exceptions, we sent out email. That was how we used to do it before installing AppDynamics. But that was only at the application level. At the server level and JVM level, we did not have anything.

We also have a third-party application called Splunk.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I am the application side, so the configuration admin side is a different group. Once they install everything, that's where I get to pitch in and configure everything on the application side.

We looked at Dynatrace, but AppDynamics had much better features. I was on vacation at the time, so I was not there. I was not involved, but I was told that Dynatrace did not have many features. AppDynamics is a lot better. Industry-wide, it's a leader, so they went with that.

In choosing a vendor, one issue is the business impact should be minimized. Because of AppDynamics, we came to know where the bottlenecks are in the infrastructure by using the system agent, as well as the JVM agent. We code mostly with Java. That really helped us to know where to concentrate, and where to troubleshoot, and where to take action to minimize the impact on business.

I would go with the AppDynamics, because they have new analytics and new features coming, which will really helpful. Log analytics allow you see the performance metrics and at the same time, what is happening. The data is in the logs. It really helps and minimizes troubleshooting and the release cycle is minimized.