Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

The most valuable feature is giving end-to-end, about the business transactions, specifically, which is an area everybody struggles with. What they are looking for, basically, is how customers are viewing the transaction, from the end-user perspective, which is useful for the business people. They can streamline where they want improvement, but it also gives you the details down to the nitty-gritty that the developer teams are responsible for. Along the way, it's also showing you the overall performance for the infrastructure that you have for the application.

A benefit is ease of use, compared to other products that we have seen before, such as Wily. You get to the information a lot quicker, instead of spending an hour trying to get to the point that you're looking for, especially with the workflow maps that they have. It's really very easy and intuitive also. Looking at snapshots, you can quickly pinpoint where you want to look at.

Specific to what our experience is, because we're using Cloud Foundry, we're using an extension to monitor the infrastructure for that; that's probably the weakest point for it, because it basically collects JMX metrics. One of the things that we see missing when compared to Wily Introscope is the concept of calculators. You get a group of metrics and you make calculations based on it. That's something I've seen people require. It's something they want to see on their dashboard. They have the metric browser; it's not capable of doing such a thing. That's one thing that people would like to see.

Dashboards, at least the basic ones that we have, because we are not licensed for Analytics, as of yet; it seems basic and not the best area of the product. The dashboards could use some improvement.

So far, it is pretty stable; no downtime. Our implementation is high availability also, so it's a clustered environment. So far, we haven’t had any issues that I am aware of.

So far, we haven’t had any no scalability problems; we size it properly, as far as hardware. Maybe we even oversize it sometimes. So far, we haven’t had any issues.

So far, personally, I opened three tickets so far and I got what I wanted to get. I was pleased with the resolution.

The only complication with initial setup was the PCF, the Cloud Foundry monitoring. I guess it wasn’t something AppDynamics had planned for before. I don't know. It's a new area to everybody. They rolled it out because it's microservices; there were a lot of teams involved, just to get the tiers and nodes in check. That took a lot of work. Also, we have multiple data centers that are sharing the same application, so we needed to take steps to distinguish the data centers from each other as well.

Take the training; take the time to learn it; explore it. That's my advice.

The most valuable feature is the ability to understand what's going on inside our application, not just what's going on in the hardware, in the network environment, and those sorts of things. We first started working with AppDynamics because of an operational incident we had with one of our systems, where the system had become unresponsive. Our other monitoring tools that were monitoring the network and so on, indicated that everything was fine – memory's fine, CPU's fine, disk is fine, everything's great – and our customers were complaining. It wasn't until we got a tool like AppDynamics that we could find out what was going on inside our applications.

We're able to have our developers work more closely with our operations support staff. We have a group called the Global Support Center, which is our 24 by 7 ops center. Allowing the developers and these guys to have a common view of what's going on within the system is one of the biggest benefits to it.

An area with room for improvement is the ease of managing the agents within our systems. Right now, for Java agents and things like that, if you want to upgrade the agent, you have to install the new version of it, then you have to shut down and restart your system. In a large enterprise, that means there's a lot of work involved in distributing all those things, and then scheduling the time to restart the system. A more seamless way of managing the agents would be very useful.

Other than occasional glitches that I think are more just growing pains on their part, we've had no problems with it.

It has scaled well for our needs.

Generally, technical support has been very, very quick. It's been refreshing that a company responds quickly to customer inquiries and things like that.

When we first had the system outage, I started looking around for solutions to the problem, did a little bit of Gartner research and found AppDynamics. They had their free 15-day trial, I think it was. I downloaded the little mini-controller, the agent, and dropped the agent onto a version of our app running in a VM that I had running on my laptop. I had it up and running in a couple of hours, was able to access the dashboard, and show it to people; had no problems.

I did look at another company called OPNET. It was one of those things where I literally could not tell what I needed from them. It was something like seven or eight different things, that you had to decide what you needed and downloaded, and things like that. I even had my boss at the time look at it and said, "Can you make heads or tails of this?" and he said, "No." Compared to that, AppDynamics looked pretty good.

We also looked at the HP product offering. It was also, likewise, very difficult to work with.

One of our groups has looked at New Relic also, and we've decided to continue with AppDynamics instead.

As with just about anything else I'd recommend: start small, make sure you understand how the system works, what it's doing, what it's telling you. Then, once you get a level of comfort with it, which shouldn't take too long, then you can spread it out and start looking.

One of the nice things is the auto-discovery feature. You can install an agent in one place and it will show you the things that it's talking to. That way, you can follow it and say, "I recognize this IP address that it's talking to here. That's another critical system. I'm going to put an agent on there." Then, start building up a better, more complete picture as you go.

We're starting to use the real user monitoring components. It's a little limited right now because our web browser application is a single-page app. Single-page apps have some quirks that make managing your view of what's going on inside them a little bit more involved. How to make that work a little better was one of the things that I was hoping to learn at a recent AppDynamics conference.

I'm very happy with it.

The main benefit we get from that is it's a quicker time to know what's wrong. It does help us to have a better mean time to resolution, but the cool thing is, it lets us get to the root cause faster.

My favorite part of the solution is the ability to drill into the transaction snapshots. The transaction snapshots let you find out where the application broke; it pinpoints where in the call stack, and then how long it took to resolve. If there is a known error code there, it gives you some great information about what happened to the transaction. We can see what the hot spots were, not just the core error that was found. You can also see how long you're spending in the different modules, how long you're spending in your longest running database files, and so on.

We have a lot of mainframe technology in our business. They're just barely getting into Java-based z/OS agents. They have just started to appear inside AppDynamics now. We would love to see support for more types of agents in the mainframe world. We're a very heavy financial transaction company. A lot of our largest platforms still have a significant number of mainframes, and it's not just one type. We've got Tandem, Stratus, HP; we run the whole gamut for both what we have or what some of our clients might be running.

We are only having trouble with one aspect of the solution. The rest of the solution has actually been quite solid. We're actually quite pleased with it.

We’re having difficulty with the Apache web agent. It seems to be consuming too many resources of AppDynamics. One of their core philosophies is that they don't want to cause any harm in the application that they are monitoring. In this case, this is their only agent that does misbehave, and consumes a little more resources than you would like.

Luckily, we haven't had to add more resources to it. Before we went into our AppDynamics installation, we brought in AppDynamics consulting, their professional services group. We looked at the number of transactions we were going to be doing. When they sized our environment, they guided us to the right amount.

Technical support is better than in most of my experiences with most companies. They don't solve tickets as fast as we would like, but hey, who does? They are responsive; they will work with you; they make you feel like they are paying attention to the problem. Our sales engineers, especially; our local sales teams, they're fantastic for the support we get from them. They are definitely above par from what I have experienced from other vendors.

We previously used a competitor's product. The company was OpTier, which was going bankrupt at the time. When they announced their bankruptcy, we started an RFP. We brought in, actually, 14 different companies who responded to our initial proposal. There were four finalists that came in and did demos, and then we whittled that down to just two companies that we put into a head-to-head competition. Then we had different people from different product teams throughout the company score the process along the whole way. We had people from the support side, app devs, database guys, system admins, system devs. Everybody gave their scores and when it came down to it, the two companies and their scores were nearly neck and neck.

What pulled us in, what won it for AppD, was pricing, at that point.

Initial setup wasn't complex. We were involved from the start on it. Our team is still on track for how we first architected the product versus how it's been deployed today. It's the same folks. For getting the controllers up and running, getting the product up and running, there weren’t any technical challenges that were unexpected, whatsoever.

It's definitely worth using. The overall impact the tool has had in our environment has been very positive. Some of the best success stories we have got from the product have actually come from VPs over those different product areas, when they find out how AppDynamics scored a critical win. My advice to the other teams would be to involve all the other product teams, everybody who's going to be involved with it. Get them involved early on into the adoption, on what it can do. You don't want to have management overseeing it and not know what the product is.

You want that buy-in early on in the process, especially with a high number of applications. We have over 2,000 applications on our radar that we're going to instrument into it. Getting buy-in for cooperation, not only to schedule and prioritize, but which ones are getting in, on whose orders, and who's getting disrupted on it. The competition among senior management for who was going to get it first became quite intense later on.

We’re pretty happy, except for the web agent. That's the only part where we have some angst over the product. We've had discussions about that with AppDynamics.

From a reporting and dashboarding perspective, their API, which is what I deal with the most, is unmatched by any company that I've come across.

We're able to get a single view into applications and their performance; the way they run, errors, and trends. We're able to turn that around back to the developers and help them tweak their code and applications.

Coordinating upgrades across systems would absolutely be a huge benefit. I don't deal with a lot of the upgrades. I just get the emails saying that there have been upgrades. We're on the SaaS platform, so I don't see the platform upgrades, either. Nonetheless, that would actually be a huge benefit.

I haven't seen any downtime myself.

I haven't seen a whole lot of limitations from an input perspective. It’s been pretty good so far. The performance actually blows the competition away, from what I've seen.

When I open a ticket, it is resolved quickly. They are very responsive; very fast to get back to us and very thorough with their answers. I’m happy with the resolution.

I was involved in the setup of the single sign-on integration for our company, as well as getting the users set up and trying to get permissions set up. That required a little finessing and conversations with AppDynamics, but for the most part, it was pretty simple.

Reach out anytime you have questions, because they're very responsive to answer.

Integrated and aggregated performance analytics traces transactions across multiple tiers in which web services deployed in separate data centers call each other. It tracks the time spent from the beginning to the end across multiple layers (web, servlet, JMS, EJB) and forked threads. It tells the full story about a transaction in addition to resource utilization. It tells you if one of many servers ran a major GC (garbage collection) in the last five minutes, or if one of the transactions took more than 10 seconds. It also drills down to its components.

It provides full visibility of what’s happening in complex transactions which involve services running in our NJ, AR, and CO data centers. It provides data beyond standard monitoring, including method invocation-level insights.

It could understand more invocation protocols. Some custom-built web service processors are not recognized. As a result, the requests are identified as plain servlet calls. For example, it does not recognize Pega’s customized web service calls. I hope the vendor will accumulate experiences and exceptions, and provide guidance to customers on how to handle them.

I have been using AppDynamics for four years.

It was involved in resource utilization issue in one of many of applications that is based on Oracle Fusion.

I did not have any scalability issues. It is well designed for good scalability. Even with 1000s of servers, it is easy to identify a few that are suspicious by sorting the metrics by latency, CPU utilization, garbage collection time, and so on.

Technical support was excellent. They are very responsive. I usually get responses the same day.

We used HP Diagnostics. It could only analyze resource utilization without correlating this to transactions.

As far as the customer is concerned, it was easy. But the vendor needs to do the bulk of the work setting up the SaaS.

Get bulk pricing. The volume will be higher than you think.

We looked at most competitive products on the market, including Dynatrace and HP lines.

Don’t treat it as a monitoring tool. Use it as a troubleshooting tool. It helps you understand how the apps run in much more detail than good or bad. You can see where you need to improve.

The most valuable features are:

• Automatic flow maps to visualize application environment
• Snapshots of method-level execution timing
• Automatic baselines of all metrics
• Native mobile agent

The product has improved our understanding of system performance. It has given us more time to find and fix problems.

This product could be improved by having a cross-application flow that can split the monitored systems into smaller business applications. I would like to see more flexible custom dashboards.

We have used this solution for four years.

The earlier version of the .NET agent had some problems with stability and performance, but I found no stability issues with the current version.

If you design a very big business application, visibility will suffer due to a large number of tiers and transactions.

The technical support was one of the absolute best in the industry. Tickets are promptly processed and escalated. There was no terrible first level support to 'get through' before getting to the right level. I was able to get the level of support I needed right away.
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I had a brief experience with Dynatrace at another company.

It was very simple to install the controller and install some of the agents with default settings.

Get the full scope of the price including analytics, real-user monitoring (RUM) and anything that might be relevant from the start. You might get a worse price when adding licenses in the middle of a licensing period since you are already locked in.

We evaluated Dynatrace before we chose this product.

Take some time to train technicians and development personal who will use the tool. Make sure you design the correct Business Applications and Business Transactions.

• Unified Monitoring
• Application Performance Management
• End User Monitoring
• Infrastructure Visibility
• Application Analytics Business Insights: real-time insights into IT operations, customer experience and business outcome.
• Business to Transform your application performance monitoring into business results.

• Full-stack network monitoring in terms of m, switches, (Third-party tool integration should be enabled).
• be m jitter, retransmission, retransmission timeouts, delays, Window size or other network issues.
• Solution should be enabled to integrate with a storage monitoring platform.
• SAP applications full-stack monitoring.

Did not have any issue with Stability.

Did not have any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is good and prompt.

Technical Support:

Technical support is good.

I have used Dynatrace Ruxit, New Relic APM solutions. We did not switch to Appdynamics, still we are using other Application Performance Management solutions. It depends on the customer requirement and APM fit for the application.

Dynatrace Ruxit-

* One Agent solution to support multiple technology and platforms.

* More technology and platform support

* displays All the problems at one place.

Limitation-

* Dashboard customization is limited and cannot create more executive dashboards. It does not connect the dots between application performance and business outcome.

* Its infrastructure auto discovery is not much more effective compare to AppD.

NewRelic-

Limitation

* Only have SaaS model

* Multi platform or technology support is limited.

* Infrastructure Auto discovery is not effective.

* it does not have any open API's to customize the operation like to integrate JIRA

Agent configuration/deployment is straightforward. We can have enterprise deployments being monitored

We implemented through an In-house team.

Yes, Riverbed, Dynatrace Ruxit, NewRelic

is more effective in terms of business insights- Connect the dots between application performance and business outcomes with custom dashboards.

Get visibility into the business impact of customer experience quality

Breaks the Silos and create the common language IT and the business.

Can see business results in real-time

We have analyzed so many of our APIs and web services. It showed how much data and how many times each and every API and web service is used. We didn’t know how much they cost; we are paying thousands of dollars for our web services. If we can save on those costs and enhance the performance, that's priceless.

I think the performance and interface are the most important features.

The way we execute it, it takes a bit of time, like every tool. If they can improve that; instead of taking 10 seconds, say it takes 5 seconds or 3 seconds, that would be great. Maybe some more CPU power or something like that could be an area to improve.

It's pretty stable; there has been no down time, and it does not hang.

It scales very well for our needs.

The support is awesome, so whenever we get something, we call them. We get 24-hour support, which is great.

Initial setup was straightforward; that's awesome.

We looked at many other products at a few conferences. We saw a couple of more products and then we came back to AppDynamics; we are working with them for the last two years.

We decided to go with AppDynamics based first of all on performance, features, and the benefits we would get; whether the product was being offered per instance, per developer or for the whole team. The price, is it per instance or per year? We decided, based on all of these, that we should go for AppDynamics.

Go through the features it has; it has many of them. If you just buy it and use it for small things, it's not worth it. It has many features and capabilities; it is capable of doing many things. Go through the features in detail, or even go through training to get an idea of what it can do. It's a big product.