Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

Line-level tracing: This helped massively with identifying and eliminating performance bottlenecks. We had a significant slowdown in our app that we were struggling to identify. Using AppDynamics to trace hosted code to bottlenecks proved invaluable. This however only got us so far. When we reached the limit with AppDynamics, we sought advice from their technical team. After all, we were using a very expensive product that didn’t get us all the way. Under NDA, AppDynamics took a working branch of our code and investigated the bottleneck internally. They did this using other tools besides AppDynamics. This was beneficial to them to identify things that could not be achieved with AppDynamics. Later, they were able to discover a way to make this easier within AppDynamics.

AppDynamics has become the go-to tool for issue identification. The DevOps team was able to take more ownership for defect detection to improve discovery time and reduce risk of issues becoming known to end users. It also reduced the involvement of third-line support in issue detection.

The UI is clumsy and slow. The AppDynamics portal had an Adobe Flash UI, a bit dated for a modern SaaS. It had an old feel to it; unusual for a company with advanced technology. It would often take a while for the portal (controller) to load, making it a little tedious to use at times. I’m not sure why it took so long, maybe it was doing real-time processing of data, which, if so, I’m more forgiving.

I used it for three years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Techccial support is 10/10. See a case study from my previous company here: https://www.appdynamics.com/case-study/the-test-factory/.

We previously used New Relic. We switched because AppDynamics offered a broader and deeper range of functionality.

Initial setup was straightforward for Azure virtual machines, but not so easy for cloud services. The installable was difficult to get running in cloud services, but the AppDynamics technical team were supportive.

AppDynamics is a premium tool. You’ll soon realise this expense would’ve been greater without AppDynamics.

Before choosing this product, I personally did not evaluate other options.

AppDynamics has over six products and most of them install pretty easily, with the application agent installation and configuration being the easiest.

AppDynamics includes a service application map of the call load, response, environment health index, and transactions that are dynamically rated on one easy-to-use page. Each page has visual clues that make debugging easy.

AppDynamics automatically creates a dynamic baseline for the apps performance that varies over time. For example, the definition of a slow transaction might vary under low and high loads on the system.

We are currently rolling the tool out to the whole organization, so more to come here....

Support is off-shore and somewhat slow. The EULA does not contain strong language for support. That being said, the support has not been a problem to date.

The licensing model is difficult to use and can be expensive. Our technology landscape is very broad, so understanding the pricing model by agent can only be done after a deep dive into matching agents to types of technologies. That being said, AppDynamics has worked closely with us to understand our needs and license appropriately.

As stated, deployment was easy as a SaaS solution.

No stability issues.

The SaaS solution scales well.

Excellent sales support!

Technical support is off-shore and often questions have at least one day of turnaround.

In a few clicks, we are able to identify the root cause of performance issues, without any prior knowledge of the application structure nor its components. And this was true for both Java and .NET.

• Flowmap
• Snapshots
• End-user monitoring (web and mobile)

• Analytics
• SQL statement monitoring

I have not encountered any stability issues so far.

I have not encountered any scalability issues so far.

Technical support is excellent.

We used to use CA APM. We found AppDynamics much more user friendly, easy to spot performance issues, and great unified end-to-end monitoring capabilities.

Initial setup was easy and straightforward.

The product’s licencing policy is competitive. However, properly identify and size your needs to get the best rate.

We also evaluated CA APM, Dynatrace and New Relic.

Properly identify your needs, and allocate the required resources. Otherwise, you might face some scalability issues.

My favorite part of the application is that it auto-baselines the application that you instrument with it. I work with other monitoring tools such as SCOM and Splunk. These tools are great, but the automatic baselining offered by AppDynamics is like an easy button.

Products like SCOM and Splunk require you to have to know exactly what you want to alert on. From a Splunk perspective, that is generally a very specific log entry such as an error. SCOM deals with hard thresholds and there is work to tune those to be meaningful for an organization. What make sense for organization A might be completely different for organization B. For example, when to alert on a drive filling up. Does 80% make sense and give enough proactive warning to get the issue resolved?

With AppDynamics, the product keeps track of how your application is performing and rolls that into an aggregated value that is compared against how the application is performing right now. It then lets you alert on a deviation away from what is considered normal. This creates immediate value in the alerts it provides without any real interaction from a tuning standpoint.

With its automatic flow maps, as well as its ability to automatically baseline key metrics out of the box, it allows support individuals to quickly focus in on the exact location of the application problem reducing MTTR. It also has enabled us to be more devops focused, creating stable releases in a faster, more efficient manner.

As an administrator, I would love to be able to manage the update of agents from the controller itself. This would allow for enhanced version control, as well as eliminate the need to target various applications and their corresponding servers individually due to their unique configurations.

I would also like to see better license management from an auditing standpoint. Knowing how many licenses are being consumed by an application would be a great feature. Being a large organization, it would assist with understanding total cost of ownership, as well as growth predictions on a per-application basis.

We have been using the product for the last three years for numerous applications.

While I wouldn’t consider this an issue, when the business originally brought AppDynamics in, a centralized support structure had not been identified. We ended up with a controller for each application, which is not the ideal enterprise solution. When I took on support of the product with my team, we consolidated to an on-premise enterprise controller. That process was extremely easy to perform so, for us, it was really more of a bad design problem that my team had to fix.

Technical support and customer service have been amazing. I have been able to get support both through the portal, and from our sales support extremely fast. They have a great customer service focus. This is one of the reasons that deployment of the product is also so easy.

AppDynamics setup is very easy from an installation process. The best part is, when you decide to go with the product, they work directly with you to assist in the initial implementation to ensure you get the most of the product.

AppDynamics helped with the initial implementation. That was very focused with the support teams of the applications. I would absolutely recommend getting your development teams involved ASAP, so they begin to use the tool and see its immediate value to them.

We also evaluated New Relic. In the end, the features, ease of use, and customer service provided by AppDynamics was what tipped the scale towards them.

They offer a free trial. If you are struggling with finding the root cause of a reoccurring issue, then give it a shot. We got immediate, actionable results.

My rating reflects its ease of use as well as the scope of solutions that it can monitor, including MongoDB.

Deep dive monitoring: It automatically instruments slow performing code components. It facilitates deep-dive component monitoring through deep on-demand diagnostics.

Creation of dashboards and reports: It provides creation of reports by adding standard graph and widgets. It stores all metrics into a database that can be used to drive analytics.

Business transaction tracing: It is very good in usability and tool navigation. The navigation is oriented towards business transactions which makes it extreme user friendly. The end user can navigate from business transactions and quickly navigate to the performance issues in those transactions.

Simple architecture: Agents and a centralised console.

It helps client in finding the detailed errors and exactly which user is facing the same.

It does not support network monitoring, which should be included.

I have used it for six months.

It requires a huge amount of disk memory because of which I was unable to install it earlier on the machine.

Technical support is 5/10.

I have used CA Wily and Dynatrace. Both are good, but this is better in providing solutions.

I have implemented it through a vendor team.

It takes far less time to implement than any other APM tools. The ease of using the tool further reduces the overall implementation time.

It is an excellent product for application performance monitoring.

No visibility from application code-level failures: It used to take a lot of effort, but after we implemented this solution, we can easily determine the root cause of issues.

Code-level deep dive analysis and automated application flow service models: Companies maintaining strict compliance such as PCI, etc., can easily use AppDynamics without any restrictions, because it has a completely web-based interface and there is no client.

Use of BCI (Byte Code Instrumentation) is also a key feature that helps AppDynamics to fetch maximum information via Java agents without consuming a lot resources on the application servers.

In the current version of AppDynamics, there is a correlated section, where we can see all servers’ performance along with application performance, but network performance is missing. Including network monitoring would provide an end-to-end correlated view of all factors in a single console view.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

Our Customers previously used APM solutions like DynaTrace, TMART, New Relic, etc.

Initial setup was straightforward. Just install the agent; it will discover all of the relationships and communicate with each and every component of the running application.

We evaluated almost all other similar products, as per the Gartner report. AppDynamics is the best fit as an Application Performance Management solution.

Just go for it.

• Business Transaction Tracking
• HTTP Header values
• Introspecting slow and error transaction at different tier levels
• Analytics helps to group business calls based on vendor by using HTTP values

• Finds the bugs in dev and test environments before they escape into staging/prod
• Helps to pinpoint where the issue is by application tier
• Identify performance bottlenecks
• Group business calls (API) by vendor
• The above key points mentioned have helped the DevOps team work more effectively and reduce the turnaround time between releases
• Reduced the debug time

The primary feature we are looking for is tracking async calls because most of our API are async calls. We cannot view HTTP data.

We require a seamless way to upgrade the controller and .NET agents.

The plugins available are tedious to use and not robust, e.g. URL monitoring.

The application(controller) is very heavy on hardware. This increases our cloud cost.

It should be more intuitive and provide better metrics when drilling down in the UI.

1. Instrumenting Async method calls:
   For example, let's say we have Async Rest API call written in C#.net with this method - public async long Multiply (int x, inty). Now this call may take 5-15 seconds for REST Response. In AppDynamcis we have an option to instruement a specific method by providing the method definition and its parameters passed and returned values. We can define as variable data collectors to do this, and this is available with the drill down of the call stack. The data collector or variables should show the value which doesn't, and we also tried the diagnostic mode where we can introduce a delay. Though AppDynamics say there are settings to enable tracking of Async calls, but I think it's more inclined and friendly for POJO(Java) calls than POCO(dotnet) calls.
   
2. HTTP Data Collector for Async calls:
   In the above example, if we like to see the HTTP data collectors then there is an option to view the HTTP header variables and custom variables. However, there is no way to see the JSON request and Response data in AppDynamics. I can view this in IE or Chrome using developer tools on the client but not within AppDynamics. I'm not sure if this feature is available in EUM which we haven't procured yet. Also, I don't rule out possibility I might have over looked something and missed it, but I really tried to get this working. Also, the AppDynamics team failed to assist to get this working.
   
3. Plug-in's tried:(SQL monitoring and URL monitoring)
   There was a requirement where we wanted to query our database directly and display certain values (integer) in the AppDynamics UI for monitoring, say, a number of active sessions or database locks etc. Though AppDynamics doesn't provide an out of the box solution, the plug-in's available on Git-Hub which are claimed to be stable aren't working either. Ultimately, we succeed in writing custom VBS files which leverages database machine agent service provided by the tool. With this tool we dump the data to metrics file and manage to integrate. This was very good experience to get our hands around and customize few things which not found in the community of AppDynamics.

This also goes with URL monitoring script provided by community in Git-Hub and also Plug-In repositories on the AppDynamics site. This plug-in is a little tedious to configure because of the YAML file, and only supports HTTP 200 is alive i.e ping request to PORT 80. There's no script for login automation. Again we managed to write custom scripts here for logging using VBS.

There seems to be a certain disconnect between the AppDynamics development and support teams. Maybe because this is a developer intensive engineering tool and support guys need to understand the framework of .NET or a Java ecosystem and applications that cut across various design architectures. This could be a gap which AppDynamics needs to bridge.

I have used this solution for one year.

The controller slows down with Windows platforms.

Sometimes the MySQL process of the AppDynamics controller takes lot of memory and the controller hangs, despite configuring it as per requirement.

Since the application is agent driven (client side), if we need to upgrade the .NET agents on 100 servers, then we need to visit 100 servers to upgrade or deploy them.

The technical capabilities of people sitting in technical support is questionable. The reason being this is an engineering tool for application instrumentation both for .NET and Java. We have asked queries and also raised some issues. For most of the issues, especially regarding tracking async for .NET API, we never received a solution. Also, some configuration issues where primitive in nature but not resolved immediately.

The technical documentation contradicts technical support.

We started using version 3.8 of the tool, and since then, I don't see many changes on the support side.

No, we didn’t use anything in the past for application monitoring. This was the best out there in the market as per evaluation by market research. The tool was a good fit when we did a POC.

Initial setup was complex.

Setting up configuration to track the metrics is little tedious.

Understanding the metrics numbers is little confusing as they contradict, e.g. The number of API calls displayed on the main screen is different than on the analytics screen.

A normal user would find it difficult to understand and read the metrics, because too much drill down is necessary, and the numbers are difficult to interpret and relate to the problem.

Implementation was done in house. The tool is configuration intensive. A good development and operations team need to know the application dynamics to configure this application.

Since it’s high on budget, it’s recommended to buy a developer license and play around with this tool in a dev environment and then procure for production.

I don't think premium vendor support is required for setup and configuration.

We haven’t reached the stage where we calculate ROI, as we are in the early stages of onboarding customers. We can probably gauge this once we have a sizable number of customers on board, which will take time. Measuring ROI will be calculated by using the API call tracking by customer and also the turnaround time (time saving) in the early stages of development cycle.

The pricing is way too high, especially with the analytics feature and end-user monitoring.

They have separate licensing offerings for development and production.

The best option is to get into an engagement for a few months before procuring this tool.

This is purely an application instrumentation and monitoring tool with good features for business analytics.

It is probably more integrated and works well with Java application, as some features for .NET don't work.

Host the AppDynamics controller on a Linux machine with a medium or high profile. A Windows server machine would show symptoms of disliking it within 2 to 3 weeks of setup.

It is not comparable with infrastructure tools. The plug-in available to track infrastructure-related activities are not stable and not robust.

We like the ability to drill down into the method level to identify where the real issue is, as other tools just show the slowness at the transaction level only. We also like its database monitoring which gives almost everything to us for identifying any performance issues with the database. It is certainly not a legacy monitoring tool to monitor the database, it should be looked at as a database performance monitoring tool.

We are still in the POC phase and are trying to implement it by adopting some of the best practices. I am sure if and when it is fully implemented, developers will love this tool as their life will be easier.

AppDynamics should add more features to identify in case if there is some thread waiting for something. We are keenly looking for this feature. We would like to see the traffic on F5 load balancers in the flow map which make the entry points in an application, Currently only custom exit points can be created for non-instrumented nodes. Also if AppDynamics are trying to be only a monitoring tool, then they really need to add lot of stuff to the infrastructure monitoring and heavy correlation features are required to identify the real issues within and outside of business app. We can't blame the code for slowness of the overall application every time, as the network and servers are all equally important. Other tools like HP BSM provide great features to map everything in a service map.

This tool is very easy to implement and setup when compared to other tools. Agent installations and instrumentation are also extremely easy.

It's very easy to scale when compared to other tools.

We have compared this product to Bluestripe APM. We like its mapping of the business application mapping which shows how each tier of the application talk to another ones and also to the backend-like database, MQ, external interfaces, etc. It’s a very easy to understand tool which could be easily understood by a newbie also.

One piece of advice I would like to give others is that you need to first identify how you want to map your business application in the AppDynamics flow map. If there are multiple pieces in an application talking to each other, then best practice is to put everything together in one business application to see how those pieces talk to each other. Secondly, you need to identify the most important business transactions that you would like to monitor. Just include those and exclude everything else, as this way you can reduce the traffic and the amount of noise. Troubleshooting is easy when only key transactions are being monitored and not everything.