Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature of this product is figuring out problems before the customers find out.

This APM tool has helped our organization to find problems before customers find them.

We are able to see how our application scales under load. We are able to simulate that in the load environment and then prepare for the expected volume.

Specific to our environment here, we use .NET and they have more features for the Java platform. So I would like to see all the features that are currently in Java translated to .NET.

The stability of this product is very good. We have experienced no issues with downtime.

This product has scaled well.

Everything was carried out in a timely manner with technical support.

Our sales manager has constantly been in touch with us and given us the resources we need. Even when we do not follow up on certain issues, their engineers get us on the right track and they are really helpful.

We started off with a Microsoft product. We looked at a product called Microsoft Azure Application Insights.

Since our parent company has partnered with AppDynamics, they referred this product to us. Once we found about it, we installed and tested it and realized it performs all the features of the other competitive product we looked at; it may even have more features. Thus, the selection process was quite straightforward.

I was involved in the initial setup along with our team of engineers. It was mostly straightforward. We experienced some hurdles here and there in regards to the mission level monitoring agents. However, we were able to contact support and get that figured out; the mission agents are really straightforward.

In my opinion, training definitely helps if you are looking to choose a similar solution. You should start off with some initial training.

There are a lot of nuances and you have to know how to use this product in a manner where it is going to be most useful to you and this is where the training will help. After that, everything is straightforward.

The performance issue identifying feature with the transaction snapshots is the best feature I see.

Before it goes to production, it's easy to identify the performance issues. It's one of the good performance engineering tools with minimal overhead. I know there are other APM tools on the market but I like the features it provides and the way it pulls metrics. It doesn't pull all the data; it just takes some of the data, whatever it needs. That helps to reduce overhead in performance.

In the transaction naming features, for business transactions, we are not always able to tie a business transaction to a real user transaction. Even though we have some options to do that, it's not done 100%. If a user submits a transaction and it in turn triggers 4-5 different URLs, tying all of them together to a single user transaction doesn't happen well.

It's very stable.

We have used it for very high volume applications and it works fine.

Technical support is the best thing with AppD. I'm very happy with the tech support they do. They're very quick in responding to the request.

Initial setup was straightforward. I'm doing administration for AppD today. It is straightforward.

AppDynamics provided all the features we were looking for in an APM tool. We had a list of things that we wanted to have in-house; it did provide the pricing; and especially the overhead was minimal because it doesn't capture all the data. The other tools on the market, unless we tell it to reduce the amount of data to capture, it does capture all of the data by default.

Try using the trial version which AppD provides. Their customer support is very good. If you have questions specific to your applications, you can reach out to customer support. They'll come on site and help you with all the questions and they can do the set up.

We also use AppDynamics Real User Monitoring, where we get end user performance. We also use AppDynamics Database Monitoring, so we can tidy up if there is a DB issue; what is causing the database issue. They're all integrated with each other.