Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

I use AppDynamics since all of our company's servers, applications, and services are configured with AppDynamics. In case of unavailability or when the servers go down, we log into AppDynamics in our company to check our CPU memory and file system utilization. AppDynamics helps our company understand the availability status of the servers and figure out when the server went down or came up while trying to find any HTTP errors.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the fact that it is very easy to use, making it easy to implement while configuring it with any server. The product also offers a role-based login, providing role-based access, including operator- or admin-level access. It is very easy to assign roles in AppDynamics.

The integration part in AppDynamics with other systems is an area with a little difficulty, especially when it comes to the configuration area. The integration of AppDynamics with other products takes a lot of time. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement.

AppDynamics needs to focus on its integration capabilities with cloud-based solutions. Some new features are being introduced in AppDynamics, including some DevOps tools, allowing a person to integrate AppDynamics with DevOps tools, like Docker Kubernetes and other cloud-based tools.

I have been using AppDynamics for three years. My company is a customer of the solution.

It is a very stable solution.

Currently, we are using AppDynamics on VMs and not on the cloud, so scalability is a bit tough because there will be a need for licenses, and we will have to get into the installation phase again in our company. The agents must be installed in all the servers for the product's installation, making it a bit complex.

AppDynamics has around 1,000 users in my company.

The solution's technical support is good. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

In my company, I have worked with Datadog. AppDynamics is better than the other solutions I have worked with in the past since AppDynamics can be easily installed, configurations are easy, scalability is easy, and most users use it very smoothly owing to its stability. The only area where AppDynamics lacks is its ability to integrate with other tools.

The installation phase of AppDynamics is very easy.

The installation of AppDynamics took a week.

A team of 20 people is required to manage the deployment phase of AppDynamics.

Price-wise, AppDynamics is a cheap product compared to other tools in the market, like Splunk and Datadog.

Yearly payments have to be made toward the licensing costs of the solution. The solution has no additional costs apart from the licensing costs.

The maintenance of AppDynamics is very easy since you can easily implement the patches and upgrade the solution. Around 20 people in my company are involved in the maintenance of AppDynamics.

AppDynamics is an excellent tool for any data center operations or services to monitor while providing good features like alerting capabilities. I recommend the solution to those planning to use it.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

The tool provides more insights, but maybe if in the recommendation section, we can use some AI tool for the optimization of the database, then it would be helpful.

With AI, it would be good if the tool could help us with the database optimization part. If my company can get product support, it would be great since the tool has the ability to make predictions based on the database performance that something may be going wrong and notify us of the precautions to be taken.

I have been using AppDynamics Database Monitoring for two years.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The tool is used by four to five people.

Whenever my company interacted with the solution's technical support or engineers, we had a better experience compared to the ones we had with other tools. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase is easy since a separate machine is required, and it is not directly installed on a database as it is a type of proxy. We collect the logs, which is a model that is pretty easy to handle.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in a day or two.

Cost saving in terms of not an HR-based perspective, but I know that some performance improvements are there. The tool helps in overall cost optimization. Maybe we are not making decisions to increase the database and its resources. Once we know that there are some performance issues, then we can fine-tune the tool and save on the costs. The costs for my company have been reduced by 15 to 20 percent using the solution.

The tool is expensive. If one is expensive and ten is low price, I rate the product price as seven out of ten.

I know about two products. AppDynamics Transaction Analytics was already a part of AppDynamics solution when my company bought it with an enterprise-level licensing, so it provides some business analytics dashboards. The other product I use is not related to analytics, so I didn't use it much.

In terms of optimizing our company's data operations, the tool provides insights on whether there are any challenges in databases or if there is something related to queries, which is helpful. One can monitor the performance and see if there are any delays that occur in the databases when we are dealing with the queries, and it helps to find out what the issues are.

I don't know what the features of the tool are for performance analysis, but when any application generates codes to extract particular information from a database, it sometimes gets stuck on some queries. At the query level, monitoring and providing more insights are beneficial.

A scenario where the real-time monitoring aspect of AppDynamics was crucial for our team was when we were adding a new application and testing it with our production environment or in the UAT; the tool was helpful because we could fine-tune the application and optimize it. If there are certain issues, we can easily identify such issues with the tool, especially when adding a new application since the product helps a lot.

Speaking about how the alerting system in AppDynamics helps in preventing potential database issues, I can say that from my observation, if there is some problem at a certain point in time, we get alerts, but I am not sure if prevention to help us identify issues is available or not in the tool. It would be good if we can identify the issues before it affects our company. There are some slow performance areas that need to be identified.

My company often takes care of the maintenance of the tool. One engineer can maintain the tool.

I recommend the tool to others.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use AppDynamics Database Monitoring to identify high spikes in critical data, which helps us better understand when applications stop responding or are not responding well.

The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

Data monitoring is the most valuable feature.

The price of the solution has room for improvement.

I would like the solution to be more customizable to meet our client's requirements.

I have been using AppDynamics Database Monitoring for two years.

I give the stability of AppDynamics Database Monitoring an eight out of ten.

I give the scalability of AppDynamics Database Monitoring a nine out of ten.

The technical support is excellent.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes two weeks and requires one architect and one developer.

We implement the solution for our clients.

The pricing is average. I give the price a five out of ten.

The license is paid on an annual basis.

I give AppDynamics Database Monitoring a ten out of ten.

We require five people to maintain the solution.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring only requires users to have a basic understanding of databases.

We use the solution to monitor transactions and to keep track of, like, data analytics.

I like that AppDynamics allows every organization to have what they want to see, like for my organization, we're able to customize the dashboard to show us details of what we want to see in our transactions. So, it shows us the transactions that are coming in, outgoing transactions, and field transactions. So, we had the freedom to customize, and I think that was priceless.

Regarding Search Guard functionality, there is room for improvement. Also, I think it was pretty good for the area I used.

I have experience with AppDynamics.

I rate the solution's stability as a ten out of ten because it is a very stable platform.

It was scalable on other platforms where we needed to buy licenses because we simply had to customize it again to accommodate whatever we were adding. We didn't use it much since many users weren't using it. It was just for the IT and executive personnel who wanted to view the dashboard. Yeah. So, it was quite easy. Up to 200 users were using the solution.

The initial setup was quite easy because we were given an option or leverage to ask AppDynamics to send staff members over for training. After that training, they were able to come back and deploy the solution for us. So, the process was quite easy, and they were also offering support. For deployment, we prefer to deploy it on-premises. So, we have it in our DR and production environment. The deployment process didn't take long since it was done by AppDynamics' team, which is quite a big institution.

We did the implementation ourselves, but we had their support virtually.

I have experienced an ROI using the solution. So, AppDynamics provides us with details to have a live view of our transactions, especially whenever we're having failures, during which we have a live view of it provided by the monitoring guys. We link it to our MySQL so we can query what transactions are failing or what error they are getting. So we know what the customers are facing from the comfort of our offices. The solution was worth the money.

There were no added costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Since it is an excellent application, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. I would suggest others use the products and just make sure that they get in touch with the administrator of AppDynamics so that they can devote their time and energy to learning about it so that they can at least administer the platform properly.

AppDynamics has been decommissioned over time for the newer cloud-native apps, and we have been using more apps. We primarily use a Google native holistic monitoring tool for tracing, capturing, log aggregation, annual infrastructure, and server monitoring. As our applications get modernized over time, we reassess our need to have various monitoring tools. To some extent, cloud-native tools solve a lot of these problems. When we are on-premises, we solve these problems with AppDynamics but things are being done differently in the industry now, and many of these problems are being solved with cloud databases.

We have been using this solution for five to six years. We have a hybrid model, and in the past, we tried to take these tools to cloud, but it was not well suited for our use cases. We were slowly and gradually trying to eliminate legacy items used on-premises.

It is a stable solution, but nothing is a hundred percent perfect, and there is always room for improvement.

We have a hosted application set up concerning the AppDynamics controller, and we don't have any scalability issues. We never even moved to the SAS-based model for AppDynamics, and we have our own hosted environment.

Setting up the monitoring agents was straightforward, and there was no hassle. I don't believe it requires a lot of maintenance.

I am not privy to details around the software product pricing, but if I compare AppDynamics Server Monitoring with JVM-based applications, it is a pretty good tool. Even compared to legacy apps such as .NET and ASP.net, AppDynamics is the right choice.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. However, we currently lack distributed tracing, and we want to implement it going forward.

We use it for performance and transaction trace monitoring. We use it for .Net and the JVM-related work. We look at all the heat maps and the Garbage Collection to see if there are any failures. 

It gives me the ability to trace logs between transactions, for example, a DB transaction or JVM transaction from one hub to the other. I can easily find out where the problem is or where the bottleneck of the issues lies. 

The overall performance of this solution could be improved. The hot-hot infrastructure features could also be improved. If one goes down, the other should pick up automatically. When we patch one data center, the other primary or secondary center needs to be manually started. We need to do a manual sync between the database and the AppDynamics applications.

I have been using this solution for four years. 

This is a stable solution. The only drawback is that it is not a cluster environment and it doesn't have hot-hot features.

This is a scalable solution but we would like more options to hold more licenses. Right now we have 30,000 agents using this solution.

The technical support for this solution is good.

Positive

Before AppDynamics we used a product called BlueStripe that was acquired by Microsoft. 

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. The deployment is also straightforward because we used some of the provisioning tools to package the software and distribute it. Creating dashboards and fine-tuning JVMs took some time. 

This solution has really helped us to improve some of the performance of the JVMs at an early point in coding.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

Because AppDynamics sells this as end-to-end visibility, there are no use cases in the databases. Use case applied to AppDynamics Brower Real-User Monitoring can be applied here as well. If the user experiences latency on its request, it's most likely because the database is effectively queuing the request. The same scenarios can apply.

The performance of AppDynamics Database Monitoring is good, I have not had any complaints.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is straightforward, there is not a lot to it, it either monitors or it doesn't.

One of the key features that are missing is the ability to manage users centrally, which is a real pain when it does not happen. That is a feature that their main competitor has had for quite some time. I'm surprised they don't have it already.

I believe they need to increase their level of visibility in the infrastructure, particularly in the infrastructure monitoring section, which currently lacks visibility.

The license model is a bit complex. They should make it a little bit easier, which I believe they will do in the next quarter, or in the next two quarters. I also dislike it because it is based on CPU, which will increase the cost of deployment and licensing. They currently have a complex model and charge on a per-node basis. They plan to change this in the future to make it less complicated, but it will be more expensive because it will be done on a CPU basis rather than a node basis. And this is not good. I deducted one point for that.

We have been providing AppDynamics Database Monitoring for six years.

It is deployed both on the cloud, and on-premises.

The stability of AppDynamics Database Monitoring is fine.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The time it takes to deploy an agent varies depending on the customer and the application, but it can take up to 15 minutes.

The licensing scheme is very complex. They need to make it easier.

AppDynamics is a good tool that offers excellent out-of-the-box dashboards and application topology. Even for their competitors, their current technology is unrivaled in these two areas. 

I would rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring an eight out of ten.

When compared to its major competitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics stands out by providing dynamic learning capabilities for infrastructure and server metrics. Unlike Dynatrace, AppDynamics enables dynamic baselining for all server metrics, such as CPU and memory. This allows customers to establish patterns, like CPU trends every Wednesday from 9 to 11 AM, and set dynamic baselines accordingly. With this feature, alerts can be triggered based on deviations from the dynamic baseline rules. This capability is distinctive, as other APM solutions and monitoring tools lack dynamic baselining options for infrastructure visibility.    

If we consider the implementation of alternative solutions, such as Dynatrace, there is a notable difference in the approach to agent-based service monitoring. For instance, Dynatrace employs a single-agent solution, which can pose security concerns. When installing Dynatrace, granting the agent ld pro payload rights is a requirement. In contrast, our solution ensures a more secure approach by not requiring root and administration access. While we currently utilize an agent-based solution, there may be a shift in the next one or two years, possibly with the adoption of Open Telemetry. It's anticipated that many APM vendors, including Dynatrace, may alter their structure or strategy for implementation. However, as of now, the trend is towards an increasing number of implementations daily.

I have been using AppDynamics Server Monitoring recently.

It is very stable and I would rate it 9 out of 10. 

It is very scalable and I would rate it 10 out of 10.

It's very easy.It takes couple of minutes only.

It's true; it's not an inexpensive solution. Dynatrace and AppDynamics are consistently on the pricier side. However, when comparing with other solutions like Datadog or New Relic, it becomes apparent that they are significantly more affordable. The pricing may seem high at the list or discounted level, but what truly matters is the business value assessment. After completing this assessment, customers often recognize the value proposition and find the cost justified.

In all honesty, APM solutions, including AppDynamics, tend to be expensive, and they may have fewer features compared to other legacy monitoring solutions. I typically advise against using AppDynamics or similar APM solutions solely for server monitoring due to their cost and potential limitations. To maximize usefulness, it's crucial to complement these solutions with other monitoring tools and features.

I would rate it 9 out of 10.