Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

For business purposes, the analytics side is a very unique part of the APM solution. There are lots of different APM products in this ecosystem, but other than AppDynamics, there is no business insight or very limited capacity. Other APM solutions on the business side are limited. Most of our bank customers and fintech customers use the Analytics side with very high priority.

From the C-level perspective, they mostly do not care about the operational metrics, for example, response time, CPU memory, or different kinds of technical metrics. They focus on the business side. The business impact of their application: Is it good? Is it healthy? Is their revenue increasing or not? Or stable? With the business analytics side, we provide a hundred percent of this business info. Before their end-to-end process, we provide real-time business metrics. 

For example, one of our banking customers uses business analytics to measure real-time ATM transactions, how much their customers withdraw or deposit from the ATM machine, or maybe POS machine, or in Europe, SEPA and SWIFT transactions. Customers manage their transactions from another site. We also measure real-time money transfers.

From each level, for example, ATM side, Internet banking side, mobile banking side. The business analytics side is the further version of an APM product for all APM products.

When you use the full AppDynamics product, for example, analytics and the performance measuring site, when you gather all this information correctly and fully, you can easily talk the same language between business and technical teams.

Most of the issue is not only the exact application problem or response time problem. Mostly, we face the issue of telling this problem or understanding the problem from the business side to the technical or operational team side. We cannot use the transition between this level. So AppDynamics gives us a good approach, good visibility, and a good language for both teams. 

For example, business, operational, software, and database teams use the same language to understand each other very easily. It decreases the meantime to resolution and TTR metrics, for example.

It’s a very centralized solution from the analytics perspective. So, when users expand their licenses, they can expand their visibility. For example, they measure the license count from the analytics perspective, daily transactions. They measure daily transactions, for example. One transaction analytics license gives visibility to one million transactions per day.

So if users want to expand the visibility, if users want to expand their usage of the Analytics site, they need to expand the license also, based on your transactions per day. So it’s easy.

The premise has its own AI capabilities, both on the SaaS and the on-prem side. So, if users want to use this AI feature, other than the other APM product, for example, Dynatrace, users can easily use it as a disconnected on-prem application. This means there is no need to communicate with the Internet connection or product owners, only the communication between the data center and the Internet site. So users can easily use it as a disconnected on-prem, which is the only solution in the APM ecosystem. For example, the big competitor in this area is Dynatrace. Dynatrace has its own daily static analytics features, which need a source connection. 

So, even if users use an on-prem solution, if they want to use the AI options, they need to communicate with their analytics units via an Internet connection. This is important from a technical perspective. 

Another thing is it’s totally free when users own this product with different kinds of agents. Users can also own these AI features. For example, when someone looks at the Dynatrace site, they need to pay for daily data units.  So it’s cost-based. It’s a transaction-based cost with another product, but in AppDynamics, there is no additional cost. So this is one of the advantages.

AppDynamics and the other APM products are really, really much further than other products. So, with this perspective, there are some minor enhancements that can be made, but for the major sites, there is no negative impact or any alternative application. 

For example, some cosmetic enhancements. We live in Turkey, so we have our currency, we have some number formats, or something like that. Sometimes, we can face issues getting the business metric and using or calculating it because of this format or some locality issue. So, I’m specifically talking about this kind of enhancement to enhance its localization capabilities.

I have been using it for more than 12 years now. I have been using it since the beginning. I use it both on cloud and on-premises. 

More than as an application performance management [APM] site other than AppDynamics, I have used APM products for more than twenty years.

It has been super stable. I can easily rate it a ten out of ten because there is no overhead or something like that. There’s no code application, and no code declaration is needed here, so it’s very superior.

From an analytics perspective, when users expand their visibility, there’s no need to expand the license level other than, for example, there’s no additional code application, no additional technical improvement, or something like that. Users only need to expand the license based on their daily transactions. So it’s super easy.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It has been stable, scalable and manageable. 

In Turkey, we are working with more than 75 different companies. We are also responsible for the EMEA region, including Qatar and Austria. So, these are medium to larger organizations.

This is a global company, so there are lots of different support teams all over.

Positive

I used to work with lots of different APM products in my personal career. More than maybe six different products, for example, Dynatrace, CUI, HP Diagnostic (now Micro Focus APM solutions), and other free APM solutions, open-source APM services I used to work with.

We are an APM company. So we make PoCs with lots of different APM vendors throughout the years. For example, last year, I made maybe three different PoCs with other APM vendors. 

But now, for the last nine years, my personal technical perspective and the customer needs in Turkey really align with AppDynamics because it’s a very unified platform. It’s very easy to understand, easy to use. So because of that, I’ve been working with AppDynamics for the last nine years.

We can divide it into two sections. One of them is the agent-based installation, and the other one is the platform-based.

This is a server-side application, so it has lots of different components. Based on my experience, it is easier than other APM solutions as a platform and data warehouse. But the agent side is very different because there are lots of different applications. 

The agent side includes .NET agent, Java agent, Linux agent, Windows agents. There are different types of products on the agent side. It depends on the agent types you need. But from a general point of view, I used many different kinds of APM products, for example, NetTrace, Riverbed, Eternity, and HP Diagnostics. I have a license here too.

So, the initial setup has been simple for me.

AppDynamics delivered financial benefits to our clients. For instance, we are monitoring the money transfer services’ performance metrics, such as response time, how many calls per minute are in a specific time range, and how many other transactions are per minute in a specific time range. These are the technical metrics, the performance metrics specifically. But we are also measuring their business metrics inside the method parameters for HTTP data collectors. 

So we can get this business metric data easily without any code application. This is a very important part. We don’t need any code declaration or development on the development side. We can measure parameters like the amount of money, the success of their transactions, and other business success metrics from these method parameters without any code declaration.

Another example is a loan team in a bank that measures their loan services from their clients. They track how many applications are processed within a specific time range, the success rate, and the correlation of their performance metrics, such as slowness or error rates, with their business outcomes.

For example, yesterday, they released a new application update to address performance issues. Today, we are monitoring their application performance. After this release, their performance went down, response time increased, and success rate decreased. By measuring these performance metrics, their C-level executives and business teams can correlate these performance issues with business impact.

Normally, there’s a baseline, for example, on Wednesday from 10 AM to 11 AM, where they process ten loan applications per minute. If this release negatively affects the business, they can see that response time is increasing, error rate is increasing, and it is impacting their loan applications. So, instead of processing ten applications per minute, they might only process five or three. They can easily measure this impact on their business.

The pricing is very competitive because the prices depend on the customer and customer priority. Based on my knowledge, if I can correlate the business effect and business opportunity to their price, I would rate it a nine out of ten, with one being not cost-effective and ten being very cost-effective.

I would recommend it to other users. Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use it to monitor the end-user responses of Oracle and Microsoft SQL. We still use OEM for deep dives.

The product provides visibility to the end-users who didn’t have visibility before.

Visibility to the end-users is a valuable feature.

The solution must improve security and setup. It runs off its own box now. The metrics could be standardized. It should add more databases.

I have been using the solution since 2016.

I rate the tool’s stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a six out of ten. We run quite a few servers.

I have used a lot of database monitoring products like OEM and SolarWinds SQL Sentry. We chose AppDynamics Database Monitoring because we bought APM.

The tool is deployed on the cloud, but we put an agent on-premise. The initial setup is straightforward. There are some complexities if we want additional features like automatic password rotation. We needed five people to deploy the product. It requires maintenance. There's not a great way to know when it's not reporting. We have to figure it out. It does not have a good alarm system to notify us when it stops.

We have seen a return on investment.

The price is okay.

We’re planning to replace the solution. It is a good tool. Overall, I rate the solution a six 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.

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.

We are using this solution because sometimes there is a technical requirement for a correlation between server assets and application assets. The end users are happy to use the solution for some applications related to .NET to get correct information.

We use the solution for business-critical applications as an application and server monitoring agent. The users use the solution to correct their application’s performance and clear hurdles in their applications.

The product provides a nice end-user experience. The users are happy to use the product for .NET applications. The users are happy with the real-time use cases.

I would like to see more information about utilization. The tool should provide information like the number of connections and processes utilized in real time.

I have been using this solution for the last four to five years.

The solution is perfectly stable. I rate the stability a ten out of ten. There is no need to do anything after the installation or configuration.

The product scales perfectly. I would rate the product’s stability a ten out of ten. We have four to five very critical applications related to revenue transactions used by more than 50 to 70 employees, including line management, domain leads, SMEs, L1, L2, and L3 employees. We use the solution once a month, depending on the requirement.

I have not found any issues in the last four to five years. It's a very smooth and easy setup. I have never got any errors or issues from the end user.

Positive

We have multiple solutions related to server monitoring. We have HPE and other tools as well. Compared to other tools, AppDynamics gives correct and good information related to the server. We switched to AppDynamics because we required a correlation between applications. That's why we use the same tool for the application and the server.

The product is very easy to set up. I rate the ease of setup a ten out of ten. The installation and configuration are very easy to learn.

It would take hardly half an hour to deploy the solution. It's a process that revolves around end-user requirements. First, I validate the details of the requirements shared by the end user. Then, I validate and deploy the solution according to their requirements. The deployment is done in-house. One person can handle the deployment.

We have also deployed SCOM. We decided to use AppDynamics because we required a real-time output during peak hours. We used Appdynamics to share the information with the users.

We have a very limited use case related to server monitoring. There is no need to refer to further addition. Every piece of information related to server monitoring is very concrete and crystal clear. We do not get any requests in any division from the end user related to the product. I do not have any issues with the configuration.

I would recommend the product because it provides real-time information. Other tools only provide information when there is a server issue. If the CPU reaches 80% while the threshold is set at 70%, they receive an alert. However, Appdynamics offers real-time monitoring and allows users to check their server utilization instantly. Other tools do not provide a consolidated UI to the end users.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten 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.

I use the solution in my company for application performance monitoring.

The most valuable features of the solution are diagnostic sessions and alerts. The diagnostic features and ability to create custom dashboards are the key features of the tool.

The integration ability of AppDynamics with other performance testing tools is an area with shortcomings where improvements are required.

I have been using AppDynamics for two to three years.

It is a stable solution.

My company has purchased a scalable version of the product.

I have experience with the solution's technical support. The solution's technical support is fine and responsive. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase was difficult. There is a need for those involved in the setup process to go through the proper documentation and training available from AppDynamics.

I rate the product's initial setup phase a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is the difficult setup process, and ten is the easy setup phase.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The product's deployment phase is taken care of by our company's DevOps team.

The tool is expensive.

My company chose AppDynamics over other products in the market since we found it to be the most compatible tool with the products we used in our organization.

The product's installation process is a bit difficult. Users need to thoroughly understand the documentation and take care of the setup phase to be able to use certain features offered by the tool, which, technically, is something that users should be able to use. Generating heap dump for Java usage and Java application monitoring are areas that can be pretty difficult with the product.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring has multiple use cases, including long queries, database performance, and database query details, which we have shared with the operations team.

There are multiple uses related to performance. The first is the DB connection tool, in which we have shared the details related to application performance and DB performance enhancement. In most cases, they have checked their connection, sizing and acted accordingly. For the long query details, they have performed their queries, reduced the time, and enhanced their performance.

The features related to the application performance in AppDynamics Database Monitoring are the most valuable. AppDynamics Database Monitoring has corrected its application-level code and enhanced its application performance.

The application end of AppDynamics Database Monitoring needs to improve by checking which applications consume licenses. We are not getting any details from the AppDynamics Database Monitoring portal. AppDynamics Database Monitoring's agent details must be enhanced, so each agent needs to show what kind of technology is being used. I would like to have agent details from AppDynamics Database Monitoring.

We are not getting related information and agent details from AppDynamics Database Monitoring. For example, if we have one hundred APM licenses and have onboarded multiple applications, there are no details about which technology uses which kind of agent.

Other solutions have one agent that gathers information on all kinds of server components. However, with AppDynamics Database Monitoring, we don't have any universal solution related to application instrumentation, server performance, stats, server component stats, and service stats. We would like to have better server components.

I have been using AppDynamics Database Monitoring for more than seven years.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring has high stability. I rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring a ten out of ten for stability.

I rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring a ten out of ten for scalability. More than 1,500 people are using the solution in our organization.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring provides high-quality technical support.

Positive

Before AppDynamics Database Monitoring, we used a different solution. We switched to AppDynamics Database Monitoring for multiple reasons related to end user experience.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring’s initial setup needs to be made easier. I rate the solution’s initial setup a five out of ten.

We implemented AppDynamics Database Monitoring through an in-house team of three members. AppDynamics Database Monitoring’s deployment takes around five to six hours. We get the information from the end user related to their application architecture, and according to that information, we plan and perform the implementation.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring does not require any maintenance. I highly recommend others to use AppDynamics Database Monitoring.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring's end-user experience is very good. The solution's tool navigation is very simple and clear-cut. Also, the error and exception detail AppDynamics Database Monitoring shared are crystal clear.

Overall, I rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring a ten out of ten.