Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

Part of it is the ease of adoption. We were a big CA house beforehand. We had a massive implementation of CA APM, but nobody uses it. We ditched CA in favor of AppDynamics. We compared New Relic and AppDynamics. AppDynamics is, in my opinion, far superior.

The ease of adoption has already picked up in my company. Bear in mind, we're probably about nine months into the project; it's probably more widely used than CA was after three years. So, that is, for me, the prime benefit. We are actually getting people to use the tool and get value out of it; it's not just shelf ware.

As any APM tool should, it provides root cause analysis. It enables you to reduce your mean time to resolution. It enables you to identify performance bottlenecks, even in pre-production environments. It generally helps provide better applications, better code, to customers; things we weren't really getting out of CA. The 2 or 3 teams who were using it got some of that value, but the rest of the organization just didn't. Now, we've got teams who had never picked up an APM product already getting value out of it, literally in a matter of days after installation.

I think it's because of the ease of use. It provides useful information straight away, quite deliberately so. It's much easier to navigate, it's much easier to understand the data that's being returned to you, and I think that really helped teams and individuals not be afraid of it.

Part of it is support for more modern languages. Node is lagging behind. And I think clarity on exactly where they intend to go, as well, because the relationship with other vendors like Splunk is a little bit grey at the moment. I'm curious as to where they're going with that and whether they intend to work as partners with them, or actually impose on their space.

To get a higher rating, they'd have to fix the Node issues, they'd have to fix some framework issues; it doesn’t work very well with Vertex 3, for instance. Tweaks like that. In any case, nothing's ever perfect.

We haven’t really had any stability or scalability issues. We're using the SaaS offering rather than on-premise, which obviously takes away a lot of that headache. The SaaS operations team are pretty good. The SaaS Operations team isn't somebody you directly interact with, but through the account management team and through the support teams.

I’m very happy with the technical support. There have been a couple of incidents – there are always a couple of incidents – but actually they've been very responsive, they've been very easy to work with, and happy to take feedback, both positive and negative.

I did the original CA APM installation four years ago; and then was involved in the RFP process, the initial commercial negotiations with AppD, and therefore the initial set up, as well, for the first few applications.

AppDynamics initial setup was very easy. There are some niggles. Some of the modern languages are less easy to use. Node is a bit of a sticking point with us at the moment, but installing it on a JVM, for instance, is absolutely a piece of cake.

As I’ve mentioned, we've looked at New Relic. Previously, a few years ago, we looked at Dynatrace. We've had a relationship with CA for 10 years, something like that.

We definitely wanted to move away from the CA legacy. Of the three main tools that are modern and out there for APM, you’ve got New Relic, Dynatrace and AppDynamics. Dynatrace isn't really in the same space, in my opinion; that's much more pre-production, code-level stuff. Between New Relic and AppDynamics, it was quite close. There are still teams in my organization who prefer New Relic, but as a whole solution, as a whole suite, I think AppDynamics gives you more flexibility, more in-depth visibility, and I think it has a brighter future.

Think about what it is you're doing beforehand. Plan it a little bit. One of the slightly strange problems that some of the early teams ran into was fundamentally misunderstanding the application tier and node hierarchy in AppDynamics. You ended up with some very strangely named applications. Read that one paragraph on each of those. Work out what it is you're doing, and then it all springs to life. Also, talk to other teams who've done it.

We also use AppDynamics database monitoring. We use the machine agents. I think that's pretty much everything we've got. I’m generally happy with them. Every tool has its limitations and you want more.

The application interrogation and business transaction mapping are the most valuable features.

It allows us to quickly get to a mean time to repair by identifying the problem a lot faster.

I would like to see better dashboarding and an easier way to redefine transaction names.

Stability’s fine; it’s pretty stable.

It definitely is scalable over many different applications.

AppDynamics technical support is top notch.

We were not previously using any solution. We knew that we needed to find some way to do some application interrogation.

I'm not sure what my current company looked at before they brought it in.

At previous companies, I've looked at AppDynamics competitors including New Relic, Dynatrace and BMC APM.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is functionality and ease of implementation.

Do your homework and make sure that AppDynamics is right for you. I'm pretty sure it would be.

It works really well. It does its job, as far as digging into the Java and finding out what the problems are when they occur in real time.

We are not using APM with other AppDynamics products.

The most valuable feature is the ability for developers to do performance analysis functions by functions, be able to understand response time, and be able to improve code when they need to.

I can’t really discuss organizational improvements, yet. We're still at the early adoption stage with AppDynamics.

The big feature that I would love to see is the ability to extract all the data automatically into some type of a data repository, big data lake, or something where we can do even deeper analysis of the data that AppDynamics gives us.

So far, stability and scalability have been really good. We haven't had any scalability or stability problems.

We have opened very, very few tickets; low numbers. We've been satisfied with technical support.

Initial setup has been pretty straightforward.

Get your developers trained as soon as possible. They're going to be the ones who need to utilize it.

It gives us good insight into our end-to-end business transactions. In the past, we've had to rely on customers calling us and telling us things were having problems. We can now not only do real-time monitoring, but also trending analysis, which allows us to reduce those calls.

We can utilize AppDynamics not just from a monitoring standpoint, but our capacity teams, our service health teams. It allows not just one group to utilize the data and utilize the metrics, but across our other teams. Other operational and even our business units can utilize the data, for trending purposes or whatever they need.

Nothing’s perfect. With any application, there's room for improvement. Based on what they were discussing at a recent AppDynamics conference, I do see some excellent new opportunities that they're going to be releasing soon. We're looking forward to those. For example, the Business iQ was one that I saw that I thought was very, very interesting. I could definitely see our company utilizing that. That would be an improvement; absolutely, no question.

We're not currently using any of the analytics part of AppD, but I'd like to see our company utilize some of the other capabilities of the tool.

I can't think of any specific additional features I’d like to see or improvements to the APM, what we're currently using.

I think we've been using AppDynamics for about three years.

As far as I’m aware and from what I’ve seen so far, we have not had any stability or scalability issues. I think we've been using AppDynamics for about three years now and I'm relatively new to the company. If there were issues, they were early on during the initial deployment. Any upgrades we've done, anything from the specific app level, has been seamless.

I have not used technical support. We can troubleshoot a high percentage of issues – I don’t know the exact percentage – in house, with either our internal monitoring group specifically or other groups.

If you asked me about it, I would provide our experiences, what we're seeing and that would be it. I would say, “Here are some of the things we were having problems with. Here are some of the things that AppDynamics was the solution, where we have seen improvements.” I would probably steer towards that and then have them talk to a rep, who would be able to tell them, for their business, what they could do to help them.

In general, when I’m looking at vendors to work with, I look for a company that's willing to partner up with us, and not only through the sale of an application, but through installation and then ongoing development; really partner with them to say, "Here are the issues we're having. Talk to us about your roadmap. In three months, six months, one year, where are you going to be in that time? What can we do to help you improve the tool?" That's very important.

So far, I've been happy with the vendor itself, with AppDynamics, with the developers that are constantly asking what can they do to help us and looking for feedback of what are the things that we'd like to see. They're doing that very well.

We do not use any other AppDynamics solutions; just this one.

The most valuable feature is the ability to pinpoint problems in our applications. We can find the problem quickly and fix it.

It definitely helps us speed up our troubleshooting. We are able to use it even during development and our beta testing to see the performance of our application and go back into development if we had issues. We can know when we need to start putting our beta customers in it. When our application starts slowing down, we can go back to developers immediately and tell them there is a problem, instead of having to hear it from the customers. It's actually helped me look better at my job. And so when I look good, I can make AppDynamics look good. And when I look good, I make my boss and his boss look good. Everybody's happier in the end.

Well they're adding in the Business iQ functionality and I will be really excited when that happens. But so far, it really has all the features that I need at this point. I mean there's always going to be more and more you can add to an application, but at this point, they've covered a lot of the ins and outs of what I need when I'm going through my application to figure out what's wrong.

So far I haven't had any problems with stability. It's been a 100% up time for us. We monitor it with a separate solution as well, just to make sure that it's up and running and we've never had a problem with it.

We initially installed it as a medium installation. When we determined that we were going to use the product more and more, we were able to just modify a couple of settings inside the configuration, enhance our hardware, and it scaled perfectly without the need to reinstall or anything.

We had a gentleman from technical support who came on site for about a week to do training with us. In that one week, I was able to learn almost all the functionality and the admin abilities that I had in the back end. And really I think I know the product in and out.

We had monitors, but when something goes down, we lose productivity and our business loses money. The question is, would you rather spend a little money up front to be able to have something that will have you save money down the road.

I was the primary person to install the software on the servers. It was a straightforward installation. We installed it in a Windows platform. The installer has a wizard that we just followed, put in our perimeters, and then it just basically plugged and played from there.

I'm not the business person, but we've seen an immediate ROI from purchasing AppDynamics.

The only other vendor we were looking at the time was New Relic. Unfortunately, New Relic just seemed pretty, but it lacked functionality. When it comes to telling me what's wrong with my application, I want facts, numbers, and graphs. I just can't just settle for “pretty”. I have to have concrete information. When selecting a product, the features were definitely the number one factor. The support and training seems topnotch and they were always willing to jump on board and help me if I had any problems, even though it was just our POC, when we were going through that process. Overall, we were looking for support and then the functionality. It's pretty cut and dry. I'm pretty good at what I do, so I want to make sure that they can support me and I've got the stuff I need.

My overall advice is, if you don’t have it yet, then get it.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it can instrument without the developers having to do anything special or significant. You can just install it on the same machine that it runs on with the application and it works.

We're using it to give an overall picture of health for certain applications. It gives a little higher-level view of our application health.

I don’t know about room for improvement. I think it's pretty good at what it's designed for. I think it does a great job at what it's designed to do, which is Java, JVM, instrumentation.

See my answer regarding scalability.

It's stable. It's pretty good. The stability's good. It's got redundancy, failover, recovery of databases if one node goes down. It's pretty good. It's pretty solid.

Scalability-wise, I think it's a little limited on an enterprise-wide scale. It's like a medium-class scale. As far as load and distributed load, I think it could use some work.

Their technical support is great.

We were guided towards it from an architectural standpoint. Another person guided us to use it, so we set it up and we installed it.

Initial setup was both straightforward and complex in that most of the instructions worked fine, but then we had a specific situation where we had to go in and actually modify some files. That was the complex part.

It looks very powerful, and it looks like you really need to spend some time with it to get to know it, so don't just expect results right out of the box. Spend some time with it and get to know how to use it.

I believe we are using APM with AppDynamics reporting service.
My rating reflects the fact that I'm kind of a tough sell, I guess.

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.