Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

We like being able to actually see how long it actually took. You can look at the back end, and you know how long the server thinks it took, but you really don't know how long to render. We've caught a lot of problems with ads, third-party content and other things, where we were serving up the page in a normal amount of time, but it wasn't rendering right and it was broken for our users. Now we have insight into that. We can raise the alarm, and try to fix it.

We've had a lot of issues with third-party ads. We were able to get them to clean up their act after we could show them the data that it was broken.

Instead of guessing, we have real data. That's really improved. Instead of saying, "Hey, everybody fire up your browser and see if we can reproduce this issue," we can just look. That's really been helpful.

Things mostly work well. I would think maybe more integration; pull things together more; integrate this analytics with this dashboard, with that analytics; and so on. Just kind of tie everything in one spot.

I have not encountered any stability or scalability issues. I'm not sure how many page views we're doing at this point, but we haven't had any issues with it, and it's a lot. It's a lot of page views. I know it is.

We use technical support from time to time; nothing serious, just some questions; things like that. They've always been really responsive; definitely quick in getting you the answer in a timely manner.

I think they also looked at Dynatrace. I guess I know how that went, because here we are, with AppDynamics.

In general, when I’m selecting a vendor to work with, the most important thing I look for is the ability to get the job done and actually perform.

We also use AppDynamics APM, and we use the database monitoring a little bit. We’re definitely happy with them.

The main thing is that you can use the tool to visually see the transactions happening; figure out the bottlenecks quickly; and the ability to drill down from a high level and go down to the details and figure out where bottlenecks are.

Our architecture is very complicated. We're an e-commerce company, so we have a lot of integrations, a lot of server types, all kinds of server types. What AppDynamics lets you do is see all of it at a high level and then drill down to each node and figure out if we have a real problem.

If you want to complete the picture of monitoring applications, I think AppDynamics should invest more in client-side monitoring. That includes having smart plugins to figure out if you have issues, and JavaScript running, and things like that. For example, companies like Bugsnag complete the picture. If AppDynamics wants to complete their portfolio, I think they should invest in the client side, because client side is growing.

We use Bugsnag as a complementary tool. It has features that I'd like to see implemented in AppDynamics.

The tool is a little complicated. I think the UI should be more friendly. It should have a simple version and a customized version; an advanced mode and simple mode. Simple mode should guide you more, should have more straightforward flows for newcomers. Then, as you move along and become more of an expert with the tool, you should have an advanced mode and change the view to something with more details. Right now, you go in and it's overwhelming.

One of the biggest problems is when you connect it to database monitoring or other nodes, it also has some impact on the system. You have to figure out the right things to monitor; for us, we have to pick our battles.

It can be slow at times. I'm guessing that maybe it's mainly because we have a lot of information that it has to process. Other than that, I think it's fine.

The first thing is you need to identify where the main issue is: do you need end-user monitoring or do you need more of an infrastructure monitoring tool. Then figure out where to place it and how to connect it to everything.

In general, when I’m looking to work with a vendor, the most important criteria are fast response, and having the right attention to details when we have an issue.

We also use AppDynamics Database Monitoring. We tried a few other tools, like the End User Monitoring. We tried a lot of tools. We have been using a lot of AppDyanmics portfolio tools. In general, we're happy with them.

It's real time; you get data back as quick as the tool can process it. It's a very good tool for real time getting to things quick and fixing them.

Our mean time to resolution has been reduced drastically, I think, within the last year. I've only been there like six months, but I've heard since they got this application, that things have really gotten a lot better.

We have hundreds of services and multiple shared health rules for alerting for each of them, AppD has no easy way to pull up all the health rules for a particular service to send off the each app owner to validate alerting thresholds.

AppD can currently extract all the health rules into one XML file but dissecting that into something easy for an app owner to review would be very time intensive.

I think we've had a few blips but it’s been fairly stable.

It has scaled well. We're growing really, really big time this year. It's managing the new inputs.

Set up your processes first and make sure everybody knows what they're doing. I recommend basic training of what it looks like.

I think the big thing is, if you're alerting on something, you want somebody to fix it right away. If you don't have a plan in place there, then everything else is kind of meaningless; for example, if you only see it an hour later.

It's the best thing out there. Something can always be better; nothing's perfect.

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.