Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

Is to gain full visibility and performance insights across our infrastructure and applications.

We use it to monitor system health, analyze logs, and detect anomalies in real time, ensuring proactive incident management and minimal downtime.

The environment consists of hybrid infrastructure — on-premises servers, cloud workloads (Azure), and multiple business-critical applications.

We gained real-time insights into application and infrastructure logs, allowing faster incident detection, root cause analysis, and compliance reporting. AppDynamics complemented this by providing deep application performance monitoring, enabling us to identify bottlenecks, optimize transaction flows, and enhance user experience.

I am satisfied with the product. The most beneficial features are the ones that give us full visibility for the API integration. The real-time analytics is good. It enhances our operational decision-making. Before using the tool, we had issues between the network and application teams. The solution saves time and cost.

The infrastructure is not as good as other solutions. AppDynamics is designed for application performance. Some solutions also cover infrastructure and server performance. AppDynamics specializes only in application performance. The product is not easy to use.

I have been using the solution for eight months.

It works perfectly, and we haven’t faced any issues.

It works perfectly, and we haven’t faced any issues.

The technical support is amazing.

Yes, we have worked with various products, including Microsoft SCOM and other open-source solutions. However, we transitioned away from them due to limited capabilities in SCOM and the lack of adequate support for open-source tools.

The tool is not easy to deploy. It needs some experience. It is not difficult, but it is not easy. The time taken for deployment depends on the applications and the size of the environment.

It was through our team 

It takes one year to get a return on investment.

The product is a bit expensive compared to other tools.

AppDynamics has the needed features, but it is not as good as NETSCOUT.

I am a partner and reseller. I will recommend the tool to other businesses that manage complex applications. It aids a little bit in AI-driven initiatives. Overall, I rate the product an eight and a half out of ten.

Our customers typically leverage Browser Real-User Monitoring for a variety of purposes. Primarily, they seek to gain insight into end-to-end user experiences. This entails tracking user interactions comprehensively, from frontend actions to backend system responses. They desire seamless correlation between user-triggered actions and the subsequent journey through various backend components such as servers, databases, and APIs. Additionally, they aim to contextualize this data within the broader environment, encompassing infrastructure status, network health, and application performance. Ultimately, they prioritize the ability to view these interactions as cohesive transactions, facilitating efficient troubleshooting and optimization efforts.

Our customers often rely on browser real-user monitoring primarily for troubleshooting slow web application performance. This process is streamlined, often dubbed as 'three clicks to your root cause'. Initially, they identify slow transactions or those exhibiting dependency issues. Subsequently, they employ a drill-down approach to pinpoint problematic areas. This can be executed from either the user's perspective, known as the Browser perspective, or from a session viewpoint. Moreover, they have the flexibility to delve into backend processes, identifying slow or stalled processes. This comprehensive approach enables them to correlate performance issues across all layers, spanning from business processes to infrastructure, network, database, and even security considerations.

Monitoring AJAX requests and understanding user interactions are crucial components of web application performance management. While AJAX requests may seem like standard requests, their monitoring is essential for gaining insights into how users interact with the application in real time. This functionality is a fundamental aspect of modern web development and is vital for ensuring optimal user experience and application performance.

The most valuable feature is the capability to automatically detect and identify encounter rates and problematic sections within transactions. This encompasses all systems, code, APIs, analyses, metrics, and baselines. While this feature remains unchanged, envisioning the ability to effortlessly identify slow transactions and potential causes stands out as an invaluable option. Essentially, it streamlines the management of end-to-end transactions, facilitating seamless troubleshooting and optimization.

The standout feature for real-time performance monitoring in this tool is its ability to seamlessly correlate frontend and backend functions. It provides a comprehensive view across all layers and systems, enabling users to swiftly identify the root cause of any issues. This primary function is particularly valuable, offering precise insights into problem areas and bottlenecks. Additionally, the tool facilitates the identification of peak times and other performance patterns.

The page load time traffic analysis feature has been instrumental in assisting our customers with optimizing the web experience for their users. It enables the identification of slow sessions and offers insights into the factors influencing page load times.

One noteworthy feature is user journey analysis, which enables tracking user interactions and conversion paths on a website. This capability provides insights into where users encounter obstacles or drop off, allowing for targeted optimization efforts. For instance, in an e-commerce setting, it's possible to pinpoint precisely where users abandon their purchases or encounter difficulties, facilitating improvements in those specific areas of the user journey.

I have been working with it for four years.

The stability of the system is exceptionally robust, with no reported downtime. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Scalability is a straightforward process that involves simply adding more licenses to the existing setup. There are no additional tasks or complex actions required; it's a simple and seamless adjustment. Our customer base consists of enterprises. I would rate it nine out of ten.

The technical support provided is highly professional, swift, and knowledgeable. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. I would rate it nine out of ten.

The deployment approach varies depending on client preferences. Some clients prefer a conservative approach and opt for on-premises deployment, while others are more open to cloud-based solutions. Regardless of the chosen deployment method, the process is relatively simple and straightforward. Typically, it can be completed within a short timeframe, such as half a day to a full day.

The pricing falls within the mid-range category. I would rate it between three to five because considering the features provided, it offers value for money. If utilized effectively, the investment is justified. However, for certain businesses, the price may be perceived as slightly high.

I would recommend it, especially if you have critical web applications or internal systems, particularly in finance or the public sector. In today's environment, troubleshooting without such a solution can be extremely challenging. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

The use case involves evaluating a mobile application's performance and user experience. We seek insights into peak usage hours, the application's status, and that of secondary services, such as databases and APIs, to gauge the mobile user experience.

We also want to identify potential bottlenecks and mobile degradation. We aim to ensure that mobile user monitoring is effective, similar to other forms of user monitoring. Although mobile devices present a different medium, they aim to detect errors, service degradations, slowdowns, and other issues. 

In the case of a mobile banking application, AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring successfully reduced the response time from eight seconds to just one second. In another example, the tool identified an issue within the mobile app, causing lost transactions in the billing system.

The product offers end-to-end visibility. This means seeing a user's actions, such as which mobile version they're using, their operating system, location, and the specific services they're accessing. This visibility allows for effective troubleshooting of their session. Additionally, end-to-end visibility provides insights into how the application performs across different layers, such as the backend infrastructure, including application servers, integrations, and databases.

The tool offers many entry points to observe issues from the backend, for example, through dashboards or tracking business transactions for degradation. You can then drill down to specific user sessions to identify slow ones and trace them back to the backend to understand the issue. That's the product's most useful technical feature. 

The user session tracking feature is embedded in the infrastructure and correlates all lines, including API and database calls. It also correlates with other metrics from the infrastructure and database.

The only improvement I see is intercepting calls in a mobile application without injecting additional code. Currently, when instrumenting or monitoring a mobile application, it's necessary to release updates, prompt users to upgrade, and inject code into the backend. It would be beneficial if there were a method to intercept these calls without requiring users to download and upgrade the application. However, I'm unsure about the feasibility of such an approach. 

Additionally, there's potential for enhancing the pricing structure, particularly as scaling up can become expensive. Given the continual growth of the mobile landscape, revisiting the pricing model could be beneficial. 

I have been working with the product for four years. 

I rate AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring's stability as nine out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability a nine out of ten. 

AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring's support tickets are tricky. We are a major partner, and we get instant support. 

Positive

I rate the tool's deployment a nine out of ten. It is easy. The deployment time for this solution is typically quite fast. Most typical technologies, such as Java or .NET applications, can take days. However, for more complex scenarios, it might take a few weeks. Overall, the deployment process is generally swift.

The usual deployment process starts with a technical assessment. Following this, the appropriate technology is acquired. Next, access to the client's systems is obtained, enabling the deployment of the agent onto their systems.

I rate AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring's pricing as seven out of ten. Mobile monitoring is paid based on the number of instances utilizing the mobile monitoring service, which increases as the scale grows. Consequently, your mobile user count can proportionally surpass all other applications.

Our customers for AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring are enterprises. If they have a critical mobile application, I think it's necessary to consider a monitoring tool. When your business relies on it, you need visibility into what's happening—peak hours, virtual access, performance, user experience, drop-off rates, conversion rate, and other relevant metrics.

Integrating AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring with existing mobile application infrastructure is generally straightforward, although there's room for improvement to make it even easier. I would rate it at nine out of ten in terms of ease of integration. However, sometimes, clients hesitate to interfere with their CI/CD pipelines. 

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

We use the product to monitor some of our critical systems. We started using the solution for application performance monitoring.

The product has the ability to drill down to the errors whenever we have issues.

The solution has performance issues after we deploy the agent.

I have been using the solution for about three years.

The product is stable.

The initial setup was easy.

The tool is expensive.

I recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

The solution offers a real-time view of the things happening in a database. 

You have a live view of what happens when something goes wrong on the production or support side. You don't have to scramble and do guesswork. We can identify the query that creates the bottleneck or slows the performance of the database system. It can give you points on how to debug and fix the system. 

The solution needs to support IBM products. 

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years. 

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is stable. 

The solution's deployment is easy. 

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is expensive. I rate it a seven to eight out of ten. 

I rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring a nine out of ten. 

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 the product to optimize application performance by monitoring database transactions and extracting insights for troubleshooting issues.

AppDynamics significantly reduced our organization's Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), enhancing team productivity.

They could align the product strategy to evolve as a complete solution similar to Cisco Observability.

We have been using AppDynamics Database Monitoring for seven years.

The product's stability needs improvement. They could stabilize the authentication platform. Additionally, they need to improve microservices monitoring and log analytics.

I rate the stability a seven out of ten.

We work with around 100 AppDynamics Database Monitoring customers.

The technical support service team could be more knowledgeable.

The initial setup process is straightforward. We need to deploy the agent on the box and connect it to the controller. There are various deployment options available.

We take assistance from managed service providers for implementation.

We buy the platform's yearly subscription. I rate its pricing a six out of ten.

In one of the scenarios, a retail company encountered transaction failure issues. The problem was not with the card or payment system but the database operations. By utilizing AppDynamics, the team traced end-to-end transactions and identified a database latency problem.

Monitoring the entire end-to-end system allows us to pinpoint performance issues in the database. Tracking the user journey helped us identify the issues between the middleware and the database.

The topology view feature helps in effective monitoring. However, this feature was developed six years ago and still needs to be updated. The application needs broader improvements and reshaping for this particular area.

Database scaling or migration projects play a supportive role throughout the development, monitoring, and troubleshooting phases. During development, it integrates seamlessly with the SDLC. It detects and resolves performance issues, ensuring database availability and minimizing downtime.

I rate it an eight 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.

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.

The solution is used for observability, AIOps, monitoring microservices, SAP monitoring, and application performance monitoring.

AppDynamics is predominantly marketed and sold as an APM solution. Customers use it for both database and application monitoring. I have not seen a customer buying AppDynamics only for database monitoring. The product is good at database monitoring, availability and performance monitoring. I have always used it as a holistic product.

The product requires high maintenance. We need a dedicated resource to manage it because the solution manages a complex environment.

I’ve been using the solution as a system integrator for eight years.

The tool is stable, but our clients are not using its features to the fullest due to a lack of knowledge of APM. The customers are not very clear on what features an APM product offers. Customers have a limited understanding of APM and its use cases.

The tool’s scalability is good. Our customers are enterprise-level businesses such as large hospitals, manufacturers, and banks.

Technical support is good. Support must provide faster responses for production-related issues.

Positive

We have used ManageEngine before. AppDynamics is better than the other products we have used. The tool provides a pretty good user experience. The dashboards are very well-defined. Business-related data is very well projected on the dashboards. The technical team also gets good information on their dashboards.

AppDynamics monitors pretty much all the applications, though the applications are built on various technologies. ManageEngine has a limitation. It cannot monitor various technologies. The most important factor is security. Security is very well defined in AppDynamics, whereas ManageEngine's security is not up to the mark.

The initial setup is neither easy nor very difficult. It requires specific knowledge of the infrastructure. When installing the product, we must be aware of how it will be configured at the database, application, and infrastructure levels. Earlier, the tool was deployed on-premises. Nowadays, customers are willing to deploy it on the cloud.

Typically, to install the product, we take help from infrastructure experts. We need to be aware of the infrastructure before installing the product. The deployment takes seven to ten days. We need one architect and two engineers to deploy the product. The number of resources required to maintain the solution depends on the environment. We need two resources for medium-sized environments, but we may need four to five resources for larger environments.

One of the main downsides to the solution is its cost. We pay a yearly licensing fee for the product. AppDynamics and Dynatrace have almost the same pricing. Compared to ManageEngine, AppDynamics is relatively higher in cost. For cloud-based solutions, users only pay for licenses if they opt for a subscription. However, for on-premises solutions, they must buy support separately.

The application layer in AppDynamics performs fairly well. However, network monitoring is not at an advanced level. It is mediocre.

People wanting to use the solution must not use it only for database monitoring. It should be used for end-to-end application performance monitoring. If someone has requirements involving applications, observability, and AIOps, they must consider the product. If they need only database monitoring, several other tools are available in the market that are lower in cost and offer a lot of capabilities.

When it comes to end-to-end monitoring, network monitoring also plays a crucial role. It is an area of improvement for AppDynamics. Network monitoring could be better. AppDynamics has acquired a product called ThousandEyes. How well the product grows in the network monitoring space is yet to be seen.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.