Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

It provides great tools for monitoring and managing all the different environments of Dev, QA, and Prod with different needs but from a common interface.

It's very light and monitoring overhead is minimal.

And because it's also a SaaS-based application, it can be accessed by all team members from anywhere at any time.

Now application monitoring has become much easier.

Transaction identification and locking it for monitoring is much easier now, with lots of flexibility to change things on the run.

AppDynamics can identify and segregate unique transactions based on parameters, URL, data value, etc., which makes things very easy and organized.

The tool also has a nice feature for monitoring end-user experience. This provides us with browser-rendering and client-side info (OS, browser, network time, etc.). Getting all this information on a common platform has been of great value and use to us.

It could be integrated with more performance-testing tools for more intensive use.

6 months +

There is nothing very complex in the deployment, but we may face some connectivity and configuring issues. However, it all depends on the environment in which we install the tool (security policy, certificates required, etc). But all the issues have been one-time occurrences, and maintaining and upgrading it is quite simple once the certificates and the network requirements were identified.

No

No

Customer Service:

The customer service is quite good and prompt.

Technical Support:

9

The initial setup is very simple and not complex. It is quite straightforward, but we faced some initial issues with certificates, network, and firewall. The support team, however, is always available for setup and troubleshooting.

But for small and simple environments, it's quite simple. Just 3-4 steps.

This solution is worth the price, which is based on the number of servers you want to monitor. So if you want a good and complete monitoring solution, the cost is worth it.

Site Scope, Introscope, CEM and a few more. But AppDynamics met our dynamic and varied requirements.

Application Flow Map, Operational Dashboards, Transaction Scorecards, Exception details (stacktrace, sql queries, etc), it provides all the information required to engage the issue, Metric browser, Information Points, Correlation Analysis.

We can evaluate the performance of an application by doing a few clicks and find bottlenecks very easily. Automatic alerts on resource exhaustion for DB connection pools, HTTP app thread pools, discovering unexpected performance difference between identical applications instances. We have become more proactive rather than reactive.

Charting is cumbersome; inability to do decimal fraction arithmetic in expressions (for alerts), so everything has to be done in % rather than as natural fractions. Can’t get response time by host for an given host group without laboriously setting it up in the chart widget.

For seven months. We started with the controller hosted at AppDynamics servers, then we put the controller in an in-house virtualized environment and finally in a physical server in-house.

I didn't encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability.

Customer Service:

It’s good, they have really fast response times.

Technical Support:

Excellent in terms of commitment, response times and technical knowledge.

We haven't used any other solutions in past, this is the first APM solution we use for our Java based applications.

It was pretty much straightforward, we didn’t face any big problems when setting up AppDynamics.

We implemented through an In-house team.

Yes, I evaluated OPNET as well.

Scale the product properly within your system’s architecture to get better results in order to analyze your app's performance properly.

We've used AppDynamics to easily identify application slowdowns and rectify them on several occasions. It has also helped in our QA environment to analyze new releases and ensure they are not harming performance.

Stack trace of PHP calls through the application and timings of those calls.

One to three years.

None.

Just that we've run out of agents in our license :P :(

Customer Service: 10 out of 10, all our questions and issues have been addressed and resolved quickly.Technical Support: 10 out of 10, as above, all questions and issues have been addressed and resolved quickly.

No, AppDynamics was our first.

Very simple- install controller, install agents, configure agents, done.

In-house

Quicker turnaround on finding/resolving issues or improving performance, which leads to improved client experiences.

We investigated several other APM solutions prior to going with AppDynamics, specifically New Relic and dynaTrace.

Read up on documentation, and play around with the config settings, there is a vast wealth of information that can be retrieved if you know how to look for it.

Viewing JVM performance and the business transactions for latency and SLA.

It helps us to quickly pinpoint specific application problems related to memory and slow queries.

Yes, the custom dashboard. Making custom dashboards is really tedious. I wish there was just a drag and drop to slap things together quickly.

1 year

No. I've had some bugs where machines stop behaving correctly with the agents but a lot of it had to do with the fact that I had them joined under one product name and then I had changed the machine or put in a different one. A lot of these issues were probably self inflicted and not due to AppDynamics. Deployment has been pretty smooth.

None at all.

For what I'm doing it's been perfectly scalable to what I need.

Customer Service: Good. Initially with the sales engineer, we spoke about training but what ended up happened was that I needed to negotiate the price (which was fine) but what I missed was some of the hands on training. It's a complex product, and I could benefit from an online video, etc. because I didn't going through the formal training to learn the app. Some scenario driven walk thru's would be very helpful.Technical Support: It's been good. What I've needed to do is send them a whole pile of logs. It can be a pain digging them up but I understand why they need them to troubleshoot. You can't troubleshoot without them. I gather the logs, send them all on the ticket and I haven't had a problem with their response.

We weren't previously using another APM solution. We were only using a very basic Java profiler beforehand.

I was on my own, but it was fine. AppDynamics walked me through a few things because I had the free version installed on a different system and then we upgraded. They walked me through to make sure I had it set up correctly the first time. Deployment was easy.

With AppDynamics I'm really barely scratching surface with what it can do. I don't have any SLA metric configured or alerting. What I'm trying to do with AppDynamics is use it in such as way that it's a pulse on my app.

AppDynamics was the only product I evaluated in a production setting. All my previous APM use was in a development environment.

AppDynamics does exactly what it says it can do. It's well readable and easy to navigate. Configuration and changing things around is easy enough.

The fact that we can track all steps from a transaction and find the relation with the OS. With the metrics AppDynamics provides us with, we have a complete picture to draw conclusions.

We have already found memory leaks in some systems. And also some SQL calls to the DB that cause issues.

We miss more information for tweaks at the OS level and resource usage. Also making the integration with AppDynamics easier would be a good improvement.

7 months

No, we didn't encounter any issues with deployment.

Sometimes the dashboard and some screens flick and run with information.

No, at the moment we have in all systems and we are not finding any trouble or bottle-necking.

Customer Service: Their response times are really good and they're knowledge about the product.Technical Support: Excellent!

No, we always look for the simplest ways. We run the implementation without any issues.

We implemented in-house.

What I can say is that we didn't have any surprises with regards to cost. Everything was clear from the beginning.

We looked into several different products but never integrated any of them. We mainly looked at Hyperic and New Relic.

Sizing of the product in term of the server to run it or architecture is the secret to success.

By far the most valuable/important feature for us is the ability to correlate the performance of individual business transactions across multiple nodes and applications in our environment.

Usually when a performance issue occurs there is a lot of finger pointing and spin that happens as a result. AppDynamics makes it very clear when/where the issue is occurring and it makes us quickly find and solve the root of the problem. It has also helped us foster more trust in our teams and the applications those teams build because everyone is being monitored by the same application.

The alerts and pro-active monitoring need work. I have found it very cumbersome to setup meaningful rules. This has led us to use the tool as a reactive tool instead of a proactive tool. Also, it would be great if this could be an iPad app (or at least not flash) so we could have easier access when working remotely. Lastly, this app needs better support with LDAP authentication (see below for more details regarding this topic).

We have been using this solution for a little over 6 months in total.

Yes, we still don't have AppDynamics properly working with LDAP. The actual LDAP integration was not hard. However, we have a large organization and something about pulling up our LDAP user list causes the UI to completely freeze. This has essentially made it to where we cannot provide everyone we want access without a lot of hassle.

Nothing conclusive, however there have been times where we don't see full business transactions. I believe this is because of our use of MongoDB which doesn't seem to be completely supported for which we configured custom exits for.

Not yet.

No, another part of our company used New Relic though. We could not use that solution because it is cloud based and the specific data our group interacts with cannot be externally hosted.

I believe our setup was fairly straightforward, however it was difficult to get the MongoDB interactions to work correctly (still think we have some issues even now with this).

IT is fairly hard to quantify exactly, but I believe the ROI was very high. I believe this product saved us countless hours/time and really has allowed us to focus on building/maintaining software instead of digging through logs while doing more rudimentary application monitoring.

Yes, as stated above we considered New Relic but could not use it because it was a hosted solution.

I would say the best thing people could do is to monitor as much as possible. By this I mean don't just monitor the app your team/group is building, but also everything it interacts with. I found the most use out of this tool when we could see the whole picture not just our small slice.

JVM memory monitoring, hardware monitoring, response time monitoring and proactive alerting.

AppDynamics has allowed us to find critical memory flaws in our application. We were able to find a root cause to a JVM permgen issue by using AppDynamics’ memory monitoring tools.

Remove all Flash from the product. Also make drilling down in the response time call stacks easier.

1 year

None.

Customer Service: 8 out of 10. They have answered everything I have asked.Technical Support: 7 out of 10. Sometimes not as specific as I would like but overall I am happy with them.

Our previous solution only allowed us to see hardware and response time latency, we were unable to drill into call stacks to find the root cause.

Pretty straight forward. Followed the setup guide and was in business within an hour or so.

In-house

Setup cost was about 2-3 days of a developers time to install / configure. Day to day cost is we have an extra server that needs to be on to run AppDynamics.

AppDynamics has a lot of information it can give you. Be sure to take the time and understand all the data. There may be critical information that can help improve your application performance.

I think the ability to quickly correlate and introspect into what's going on inside a Java container is the most valuable feature for us. We haven't fully leveraged it yet for monitoring and altering which was one of the main reason we wanted AppDynamics. These features are hooked up but we haven't seen a lot of action in production yet. We currently use it more for the pre-production performance troubleshooting and debugging. So far its been the majority of our usage.

In production we haven't had any serious issues which caused us to lean on it heavily but in pre-production we had a few big performance degradation problems. AppDynamics was crucial for us pinpointing root cause and fixing it. We probably wouldn't have been able to go live as swiftly as we did without AppDynamics.

I think the only feedback from my team has been that it's not an HTML based UI right now, so it's limited on mobile devices. An HTML 4 or 5 based interface would be great.

Part of why we chose AppDynamics was because we felt that they were above all other products. We have been using it in trial mode or pre-production mode for quite a while - almost a year now, and we've been using it heavily since January. We've been using it in production since the end of April.

Deployment was fairly easy. Our team learned how to use AppDynamics fairly quick. We're now proficient in it.

We haven't seen AppDynamics crash or have any problems so far.

We're currently running relatively low numbers, under 40 DBMS in production and pre-production and we haven't really scaled yet. So far AppDynamics has been great with what we have.

Customer Service: Customer service has been good. We've actually been less capable of keeping up with them then they have been with us. They've been great about reaching out and following up.Technical Support: Technical support has been just as great as their customer service. We've been able to get what we need when we need it.

This was our departments first jump in with an APM solution. Some of us have some experience with New Relic (from when we were in other departments which have 100's or 1000's of licenses). We started from scratch with an RFP and met everybody- we met many vendors and finally evaluated AppDynamics, dynaTrace and New Relic.

We didn't have any issues with the initial setup. The first time when we did our POC, AppDynamics came in and sat with us for a day and set it all up. This gave us a lot of experience with it. They came back later to help us set up the final version but at that point we were already trained.

We haven't quantitatively measured it yet. Qualitatively, for the helpful times that we've used it, we like it.

Day to day costs- vm's we pay for to run it and license costs. A little bit of administrative overhead but once it gets set up it's good to go.

The model that we used to do the POC and prototype to test it out first helped to get us familiar with the tool, familiar with it and trained on it. AppDynamics suggested it and said they could come in and help - we accepted!