Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

We were using an ID integration, and we were monitoring and using the EPM, et cetera. AppDynamics is able to provide us with in-depth insight into the bottlenecks in the system.

It allows us to understand what is causing latency in the system. Using AppDynamics, we can drill down to the code on which the bottleneck is seen, and the developers can fix the issues, increasing the overall application's performance.

The tag and follow aspects are very good. Basically, how the transaction is moving through various servers. We can see everything via a dashboard, a visual dashboard, that can showcase transactions.

It's pretty stable.

We can scale the solution as needed. 

We'd like to see features that could support IBM's Integration Bus. AppDynamics is unable to provide the details for all the flows in the system transaction flow. That component needs work.

The initial setup is a bit complex.

It was quite expensive.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

We only really run into issues during the upgrade process. Other than that, it is stable and reliable. the performance is good, and there are no bugs or glitches. 

It's a scalable product. If a company wants to expand, it can do so. 

We have between 150 and 200 users right now. We do not have plans to increase usage. 

Technical support has been helpful in general. 

Positive

We were using DynaRisk. However, it did not meet the needs of our use cases. 

We found the initial setup to be a bit difficult. It's not perfectly straightforward. 

There are two or three people on hand that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks.

We handled the setup ourselves in-house. We did not need any outside assistance.

We have not really noted any ROI.

It's a very expensive product. Each of the licenses after this month for one server is around $9,000 or $10,000. Therefore, monitoring one server concerning analytics or server monitoring is pretty expensive.

Before beginning, a new user should take time to understand the product. They need to analyze a few options and see which best fits their use case and go with that. There are many on the market to look at, including DynaRisk and DataDog.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

The most valuable feature is the one that enables you to have visibility into the end-users journey.

I also like the session monitoring feature. 

After 4.4 to 4.5, there were huge improvements in the interface.

AppD is really cool and a unified solution for both APM and APM centric Analytics side. We can show almost all business data within the APM context from the end-user perspetive. But this process is a little bit manual. If they catch and map business journeys based on customer interaction on the browser automatically, it should be really fine.

I have been using it for five years. 

It's very stable. I have used AppyDyanics for around five years and I installed it for around 100 customers and I never had any issues. It's very stable. 

One of the biggest finance companies in Turkey has around 4.5 million end-users. There are around 100,000 users who use their mobile application and there's no negative effect on the controller and customer app side. 

I have contacted technical support, level three. We also contacted their development team.

The main difference between this solution and Dynatrace is that Dynatrace uses web server agents. AppDyanmics we don't need to install any agents to collect browser metrics.

Some customers would say that it's hard to deploy the AppyDynamics site but AppDynamics is more flexible and configurable. Most of customer browser apps can crash or facing issue with Automatic injection method which is provided by DT web server agents 

We work with around 20 different banks. We deploy the browser solution with manual injection but for some well-known products, we use an automatic injection. We use three different methodologies for the deployment injection because we have big customers.

The initial setup is very easy, not complex. 

We currently only count the pages. We measured around 10 million pages in a year which is equal to one agent, one license. But nowadays a single page application is very popular. So AppDynamics has some kind of iframe where we counted 50 million pages which we can say equals one agent, one license.

It could be a disadvantage between this and Dynatrace because it has session-based counting. It gives the customers an advantage.

You should focus on the simplicity. Products should be simple and flexible. AppDyanamics is flexible to configure a user's monitoring site. If you want it to be plug and play, then you should go with Dynatrace or New Relic but if you want a flexible solution with good configuration options with "Business IQ" then go with AppDynamics. You can measure the business data at the beginning of the end-user transaction.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. No solution is perfect. It has room for improvement. Every product needs to improve 

It helps us find the root cause quicker, so it's helped us with MTTI and MTTR. In fact, just last week, we had an issue. They used our other tools to try to find the solution, and they said, “This is the root cause.” Then, we were analyzing it in AppDynamics, and we said, “You know what? We're seeing something different.” They doubled back and realized that what AppDynamics had shown was actually the root cause, not what they were initially thinking was the root cause.

AppDynamics is very easy to use, and easy to deploy in our environment, especially because we're a central organization that helps other application teams with their APM solution. For me, that flow map makes all the difference for the customers. You show them the flow map. You tell them, “OK, green is good, yellow is a problem, and red is warning. Where do you see your problem?” They're like, “Right there.” That makes life a lot easier, compared to all the other tools that I've used in the past.

That visual representation’s been really good, also the overhead that AppDynamics creates is quite small. We've tried Dynatrace in the past. Some of the applications didn't work as well with Dynatrace. Those are two of the things that makes AppDynamics different.

Get me Blitz; basically, their next generation architecture, which they're actually running in their SaaS environment. Instead of having just one, big controller with a gigantic database behind it, they're moving towards a more distributed storage, which would be horizontally scalable. We've been looking for it for almost a year now.

I would be willing to pilot it in my non-prod environment, just to see how it works, because ultimately that's going to give us the same visibility that we're getting right now, but we can just keep scaling; just keep pumping more and more applications. As the controller gets bogged down, we just add more hardware. That's going to be key for us.

We've had some growing pains with AppDynamics but overall, the products been very stable. Their support’s awesome, so whenever we have issues, we open a support ticket. They jump on and they come up with a solution to help us. Even with the few minor hiccups that we've had, I would say overall, it’s very stable.

Scalability is excellent. In the last year, we've gone from a few hundred metrics to close to 10,000 metrics per minute injestion.

I haven't seen any other vendor even come close to AppDynamics’ support. I've been raving about them. I have told the guy that runs their support organization, how great he's doing the job.

The thing that sets them apart is, if I have an issue, I open a ticket with them. Within 2-4 hours, I have the solution. I don't get an email saying, "We're looking into it.", and then not hear from them for two days or for a week, which I've had with other APM providers.

With AppDynamics, they're on it. If they can't find a solution, they're going to get on a GoToMeeting to duplicate the problem. They'll get their engineers involved. We've had multiple times when they got the developers involved on the GoToMeeting because the support guy couldn't get beyond that. He just got the developer for that product involved to come up with a solution.

It’s a funny story. The PoV was done before I joined the company. I was a Dynatrace user, Intrascope, New Relic. I've done pretty much all the major APM providers in my career. At my previous job, I was using Dynatrace and my entire interview was, “Why are you guys using AppDynamics instead of Dynatrace?” I'd done a PoC of AppDynamics about five years ago. At that time, the product was in its infancy and it didn't really provide what we were looking for. There were a lot of issues; they were at version 2 or something like that at that time. When I joined the company, it had already been decided that AppDynamics was what we were going to use, so I didn't have a say in that.

Very quickly, my impression of the product changed. As I used it, I was like, "Whoa!" Between version whatever that I PoV'd with in the past compared to version 4, there was a night-and-day difference. Very quickly, I became a proponent of AppDynamics.

Our setup was quite complex. Our leadership decided that we were going to use one controller for everything, and we've got thousands of applications. Now, they're reaching the point where they’re realizing that it's not feasible to have just one controller for our huge infrastructure.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, until we started pushing some really heavy applications, and then we started seeing problems. We got involved with some of their tuning experts. They're basically getting every ounce of power out of the machine that they can. It's been an excellent journey.

Dynatrace was on the short list. My predecessor did a comparison between the two tools. One of the issues that we saw with Dynatrace was scalability. Dynatrace itself pushes so much information. It's capturing every single transaction, compared to AppDynamics, which captures a subset of the transactions. For Dynatrace, you just need massive hardware and you have to have multiple servers because you run out of space very quickly. That was one of the issues with Dynatrace.

The other issue was it didn't play nicely with some of our applications. We actually saw problems with one of our critical business applications that we were doing a PoV with. When we put AppDynamics on that same application, we didn't see any issues. Dynatrace was creating quite a large memory overhead; AppDynamics, under 1%.

When I'm looking for a vendor, before, the most important criteria used to be, what does the tool provide, but after working with AppDynamics, it's support. It doesn't matter how great the tool is; if the support isn't that good, you can't get the most out of the tool.

Do a PoV of AppDynamics on a critical application. Get that initial win, and use that win to drive adoption throughout the organization.

I haven’t rated it higher because of the comparison between AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Dynatrace does give you more, richer information, but it's not scalable. There are certain things that I kind of miss with AppDynamics but it's not something that I'm going to cry about because of the other overall value that it provides, and the ease of use of it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we're also using RUM and Mobile UM.

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.

We're using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for the IT infrastructure and server of the customers.

What I like most about AppDynamics Server Monitoring is that it's easy to manipulate and easy to implement. All solutions have the same features, but what sets AppDynamics Server Monitoring apart is that it's really quick to implement.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring has a great interface. As a developer, it doesn't matter whether it's SolarWinds, Dynatrace, or any APM you're using, but it would matter to the customer. A product must be easy to manipulate or use, for example, AppDynamics Server Monitoring, for the customer, but for developers like my team, there's no pressure, even if a solution requires coding.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring has room for improvement in terms of pricing. If the price could be cheaper, it would be great for both the customer and the integrator.

What I'd like to see in the next release of AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a better dashboard for the customer. The dashboard should be more interactive.

I've been using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for three years now.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a stable solution. Its stability is good.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring can be scaled up and down according to your needs, so it's a scalable solution.

I find the technical support for AppDynamics Server Monitoring interactive and quick. You can get support WebEx sessions, and if I would rate support from one to five, I'd give a five.

My company works with a lot of solutions as it's an integration provider. For example, I work with AppDynamics Server Monitoring, and a colleague works with SolarWinds. Another colleague works with Kubernetes. The team works with different monitoring solutions, including Nagios.

Setting up AppDynamics Server Monitoring is easy. It's not hard to implement. It's straightforward and quick, and even the architecture isn't that complex. The solution is easy to implement.

I'm rating the setup for AppDynamics Server Monitoring five out of five because it's very easy. Sometimes, you might find some difficulty, but the support team can help resolve that quickly.

The pricing for AppDynamics Server Monitoring in Africa and the Middle East is too expensive, so it's very hard to sell it to customers. If there could be different pricing or package for the region, that would be great.

My company pays for the license of AppDynamics Server Monitoring on a per-agent, per-server basis. It's $700 to $1000 per server, and it's paid annually. My company is on a subscription model for the solution.

On a scale of one to five, where one is expensive and five is cheap, my rating for the price of AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a two.

I'm using the monitoring solution AppDynamics Server Monitoring.

My rating for AppDynamics Server Monitoring is nine out of ten.

My company is a reseller/integrator of AppDynamics Server Monitoring.

Monitor 1000's of .NET, Java, Node.js, and Go applications using an auto-discovering agent-based tool.

We have cut our MTTR by half just by deploying agents. It significantly reduced the amount of time that we spend building synthetic monitors. To the point, we rarely have to build any monitors unless it is a vendor app or appliance we can't access to install an agent on.  

• Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic
• Baselining of every single metric that you throw at it.
• Easy to use API
• Customizable extensions
• Facilitates business, dev and ops communication
• Agents have low CPU overhead compared to other agent-based products we have tried.

The GUI can be overwhelming at first to a novice Dev or Ops support person, and the possible root causes of an issue do not bubble up to the first screen you see.  We usually walk everyone through a few simple steps: 

1. Click here to see errors and exceptions.
2. Click here to see what is causing response time problems.
3. Click here to view the timeframe of a past issue.
4. Click here to drill down into the root cause at the method level snapshot.   

Very rarely. Solid performance on our controllers.

None. The SaaS team worked with us on our rollout and expansion, making sure our controller is tuned for the metric and event loads.

• Great SaaS support, performance and uptime
• Responsive support team
• Responsive extension Dev team

The previous tool was:

• Clunky
• Had difficulty in configuring alerting.
• Did not use baselines.
• Required hard thresholds for each metric.
• Had a Java-based GUI, performed poorly.
• Nobody wanted to use it.

There is currently no automated agent management/upgrades for every agent type (currently the Universal Agent supports Java, expanding to .NET and machine agents in the future). So, if you do not have a solid automation tool already in use, deploying agents can be time consuming.   

We had an in-house team of two people, and a vendor team assisting. The team was a mix of beginner to expert, and it worked out great.

Dynatrace and HPE Diagnostics.

RUM, synthetics, mobile, network, and browser analytics make this a well-rounded tool.

The benefits are less man hours, less downtime, and faster resolutions. In the past, it was, "Oh no. The application isn't working. Let's fix it." It might get fixed within 24 hours because we did not have any idea what the issue was. It always came down to, “Well, reboot the servers. That usually works.” It worked, but we never knew what the root cause was.

Once we got AppDynamics, we could see that this part of the application is where the issue is. When they're trying to process these certain files, something's wrong in this sector. We may still have to reboot the servers to get the customers up and running immediately, but then we can circle back around that day and address the actual issue.

The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application: Are all of our transactions going smoothly? Are we having a bottleneck somewhere? Identifying problems before they impact the users. The live reporting and dashboard(s) allow us, at a quick glance, to see the overall health of our nationwide (US) application. We can see the health of our individual office locations (cities) and the individual users (PCs). At any given time we can tell which specific city and\or user is experiencing poor application performance. It even helps us determine if the issue is application, network, or user specific. Before we had AppDynamics APM, we were reactive. We’d wait for a phone call or email to tell us there was a problem and then go looking for it, find it, and resolve it. Now, after installing AppDynamics APM, we’re proactive. We can see the problems developing in real time. We can identify a problem and be half way to resolving it before we’ve even received a phone call or email. We’ve even discovered and resolved problems without the end users or management even realizing there was a problem.

A year earlier, if someone had asked me about room for improvement, I would've said end-user monitoring, which they have now. Analytics was great. I didn't even think that we would need that.

I think I would like to see a better way to deploy and upgrade the machine agents that we use. Currently, we have to use SCCM, and that might just be our environment with the customer. Personally, I am not the best with Linux commands; I'm learning. I'm a GUI person. Give me a button to click on with a mouse pointer, and that's just me.

I personally don't have anything I think they need to add. They're the great minds. They're the leaders of technology, so they'll think of what I need before I do.

I’ve never had a stability problem with it. It's always working; it's always operational. I’ve never had a glitch; never had the server just stop working. It's spot on.

I can't address scalability because we haven't been able to scale yet. As I’ve mentioned, the way the customer works, it's just one little group that wanted it, and everybody wants it now. Again, we have to go through the process of approval and funding. We haven't been able to touch on the scalability yet.

We have it on 400 servers and machines.

We use technical support all the time. They were great when we finally acquired it. They came in and they helped set it up in our environment; made sure everything was discovered, reporting was working; explained the transactions, reports, the dashboard, all of that to us. We had some more questions at the 2015 AppSphere, and it is great because you can see the guys. We got in touch with someone else and they helped us with licensing issues. There was a couple of extensions we were trying to get working that we couldn't. They got all that squared away.

Recently, we had some consultant hours we needed to use. One of their guys spent three days with us on WebEx, fully customizing even more on the dashboards and the reporting center; and explained baselines to us better.
Technical support is excellent.

We did previously did not use an APM at all. It was just, applications would stop working; there would be bottlenecks; they'd be real slow; and complaints. You'd have the network guys saying, "No, everything's good on our end." You’d have the middle-tier guys saying, "Nope, my servers are online and running." You have the devs for the application saying, "No, no, no, no, it's not my code." It was just, point the finger, pass the buck.

With AppDynamics, we're able to say, "No, it is the network. Something's going on in this city.”, or “No, it is the middle-tier servers because of this." We can tell where the issue is and what the issue is.

I do know that they tested with CA. There was a third one because with our customer, we have to have three competitors. We have to have three products and say, "This is why we're picking AppDynamics. This is why these two will not fit the bill." I don't remember who the third person was.

I think they ended up going with AppDynamics because of the personality of the marketing reps and the engineers that we talked to. It was pricing. It was the capabilities of AppDynamics versus CA and the third company. AppDynamics just brought more to the table.

Personality is quite big when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics. If you come in, and you're snotty, and high and mighty, you go down the list. That's just what it is; that's business.

Pricing: We don't want the cheapest; we don't want the most expensive; we want somewhere in the middle, like when you're buying a TV; you don't want something that's going to break in six months.

The historic background of the company: If you've only been around for six months, it's a bit of a gamble. If you've been around for six years, you're not going to have IBM, HPE, or Xerox buy you. We've had problems with that before. You are your company; you're not going anywhere. In five years, you'll still be there to support us.

Ongoing support: Can we give you a call on a Tuesday at 3:00 PM and get an answer? Or, do we have to submit a ticket, wait a week, maybe get a phone call back and then get a guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about, doesn't want to be at work that day?

It's the overall package.

Give them a call. Check out the field. I know that AppDynamics was more than willing to give us temporary licenses; come in and help us set it up in a dev environment; and show us how it works in our environment, not just the canned demo: “Here's the little website we made and this is how it works.” Of course, it works perfectly because we've made it work perfectly.

They will do a demo in your environment, on your servers, so you can see, “Yes, this is our data. This is what we will see. This is how it will help us.”

The only reason I did not give it a perfect rating is because I don't think anything is 100% perfect. Nothing is the best ever. There's always room for improvement. There's always room to grow. This is the highest I can give because I don't believe in giving that perfect rating.

We’re not yet using any other AppDynamics products. Due to our customer, we can't just buy the newest and greatest, and implement it. There is a long process for testing, approval, and funding; and then more testing and implementation. We're usually about a year and a half behind the latest and greatest.