Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AppDynamics is primarily used in our enterprise system management for application monitoring. We extensively use it to monitor end-user experience, including mobile applications. We want to ensure that our users have a seamless experience on our website and mobile app. We use AppDynamics to monitor all applications end to end, and it has been a valuable tool in our environment for identifying and resolving issues quickly.

The best features of AppDynamics would be the code application monitoring capabilities. There are no limitations to any specific application, and their support extends to all levels, including mainframe and custom applications. AppDynamics can also be used as a SaaS model, which is a key advantage.

One area for improvement is the MST model. It would be more helpful if it could be offered as a managed service provider model with more multi-tenancy and features.

The focus is still limited to application monitoring. However, in the next release, I want to see if it could be integrated with any other infrastructure monitoring tool or provide better deliverables in terms of absorbency layers; that would be a great option. I'm not sure how AppDynamics delivers that, and it's an approval delay. That use case will integrate with any monitoring tool to provide the absorbent layer; that is the better option, which I look forward to.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

I would rate stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate scalability an eight out of ten.

We used Dynatrace, which is also a performance monitoring solution. Dynatrace is similar to AppDynamics in terms of its capabilities. But Dynatrace is an expensive affair as compared to AppDynamics.

The initial setup is not complex. I would rate it a nine out of ten. The deployment depends on the use case. For example, taking one application will take hardly a week to cover the end to end.

The pricing of AppDynamics is a nine, with one being low and ten being high. It is high.

I would recommend using AppDynamics integrated with an infrastructure monitoring tool, and it will provide a better benefit.

Overall, I would rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten. From an overall product standpoint, AppDynamics has better sustainability in the market with continued support. They also have a roadmap for upcoming releases that aligns with all the monthly activities.

We use AppDynamics to monitor application performance.

I like how the AppDynamics dashboard portrays the information flows. When a task is executed, various flows between different applications and databases happen in the background. The dashboard is intuitive and helps visualize the connections, the directions of the flow, and the information related to these specific sessions. 

AppDynamics is agent-based, so some customers are reluctant to install the agents in all their production environments. It would be helpful if they had an agentless version. It covers applications on the server, but the solution is weak on the network side. The agent is not deployed on the network components, so it cannot provide complete information about issues on the network layer.

I have used AppDynamics for about a year.

I rate AppDynamics six out of 10 for stability. The agent sometimes stops working when users perform upgrades on the application side. We have to restart it. 

I rate AppDynamics seven out of 10 for scalability. I haven't had any difficulty receiving information on the main controller and propagating it on the dashboard. It also has a high-availability option. 

I rate AppDynamics support nine out of 10. 

Positive

SolarWinds monitors the applications, but it only provides information within the system and does not tell you about information flows. 

We can roll it out in a week if everything goes smoothly. However, we sometimes have compatibility issues with the agent. If the agent is not working correctly and providing the information, we might need to develop a customized agent or get one from the user community. 

The customers are happy, and we hear positive feedback from the users. It helps the application team and the developers by providing an excellent tool for troubleshooting performance problems. 

I rate AppDynamics seven out of 10 for affordability. AppDynamics is an expensive solution. The price depends on the size of your environment. It's about $500,000 for a large enterprise. 

I rate AppDynamics eight out of 10. It's on the high end of the Gartner quadrant, but it's lacking some features. 

On-premises

What I found valuable in AppDynamics Database Monitoring is good technical support. I also like that it's scalable and stable.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring would be a better product if it could support new technology, such as cloud technology. Even Dynatrace lacks support for newer technologies.

I've been working with AppDynamics Database Monitoring for four to five years for my customers.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is a stable product.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is a scalable product.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring has good technical support.

The initial setup for AppDynamics Database Monitoring is not that complex, though it has specific prerequisites you'd need to fulfill. You'd need to collect some database credentials, so setting up AppDynamics Database Monitoring isn't complex and isn't as straightforward.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring requires a license for database monitoring and other features, while Dynatrace provides monitoring and other features out of the box without additional costs. Sometimes this makes it more challenging to pitch AppDynamics Database Monitoring to customers, especially because you need to buy a separate license.

As an implementer, I have yet to learn about the pricing for AppDynamics Database Monitoring. Pricing is taken care of by the sales team.

I've evaluated Dynatrace and have been working with it for ten years. Compared to other APM solutions, Dynatrace is far better, even in database monitoring. The database monitoring functionality is an out-of-the-box offering of Dynatrace, while in AppDynamics Database Monitoring, you have to pay a licensing fee. Dynatrace also has plug-ins that help you monitor databases.

I'm working in an APM implementation company delivering APM solutions from Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, etc.

I'm mainly working with AppDynamics and Dynatrace tools, and my company has an APM tool still under development. I'm working with AppDynamics Database Monitoring.

My company has a mix of customers on AppDynamics Database Monitoring, small, medium, and large enterprises.

Compared to AppDynamics Database Monitoring, I'd go for Dynatrace because it has out-of-the-box features that don't require a separate license. Dynatrace also has a better interface and dashboard than AppDynamics Database Monitoring.

I'd advise anyone who wants to implement AppDynamics Database Monitoring to follow the documentation. It's a straightforward product to use.

My rating for AppDynamics Database Monitoring is seven out of ten.

My company is a partner of AppDynamics Database Monitoring.

The transaction snapshots are probably by far the most used feature because it gives a lot of details. It adds a lot of value. You can really get to the details really, really quick. You can drill down very, very quick. When you show it to somebody who's a stakeholder, they typically get it right away. You don't have to explain. You don't have to “translate.” That really helps with the communication. That really gets people focused on the task at hand, rather than trying to pass the buck around. That really helps quite a bit.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere about correlation, it's really helpful because I don't have to spend time with multiple teams. A lot of times, what might have happened in the past was where, if there was a problem, we would call like six, seven, or eight different SMEs from different domains: network, storage, compute; not on all problems, but at least some of the ones that we suspected. Application; if you have multiple applications, sometimes you have a different person who owns each of the different applications; maybe the database guy. You can really start adding more people in there. If you think about it from a productivity point of view, it's a waste of a lot of time, if you have to keep doing that for every single problem day in and day out.

Whereas, when you have AppDynamics, it's actually tracing the call. So, if three out of four services are functioning fine, for the most part, I don't even have to worry about them. It is common to call the networking guy because nobody really knows where the problem is. Now, he's or she’s out of the picture. I'm sure he's or she’s a lot happier about it, too. Same with the storage and compute: You start leaving these people out of the conversation that don't need to be there, which is a good thing for the company, and us. We don’t also have to spend that time explaining and hearing what they have to say. That’s not to say they don't have value to add, but if there's really nothing there, we're wasting their time, as well. So, it's really helpful.

AppDynamics helps me not just rule in the areas, but rule out where I don't have to talk. More often than not, the rule-out gets hidden away, but it's a really good add-on because I'm only focusing on the problems.

I can think of 2-3 complex problems that probably would be helpful to most customers. Heap analysis is one; memory leaks. That's already there, so maybe that does not count at this point. The second one I would probably call out is connection leaks. So, heap analysis and connection leaks; those would be very helpful.

I think they've already started working on the next version of license management. That should be pretty helpful.

Stability’s very good. Once in a while, we've had some hiccups around the UI being slow, but that typically gets resolved pretty quickly. A lot of times, we don't even have to talk about it. Once in a while, we've had to raise a couple of tickets. I think one time it was us using the environment a little more aggressively than maybe we should have been, and we could have been, for that matter. Most of the time, stability’s not an issue. Once in a while, you do get the spinning circles. I've experienced worse. This is nowhere near that bad. It's very good for the most part.

We're a fairly large install. It scaled well, but then again, it's a SaaS solution. They've got their magic sauce working, of course, really well for us.

We use technical support quite a bit. We've got a team of engineers and there are at least five or six of them that have the capability to open up tickets. We typically get really good responses. Every time I've opened a ticket, I usually get a response in good time. Not just a response; it's usually a good response; it's a meaningful response; it's something that helps you solve the problem that you have.

Once in a while, as you can imagine with any product, they get dragged out because maybe it needs a longer-term solution. I don't think I've seen anything that would cause concern.

We were using a tool prior to this that was not doing any of the stitching; the correlation. We tried another one that was doing some of it, but we found AppDynamics was doing it better.

We went through the PoC because we had our fingers twisted the wrong way a few times with our old tools. It was using up a lot of our time. Of course, when we heard that they could do it, we really wanted to see what they had to offer. The PoC was very helpful. We actually used it on live projects – testing projects not production – to figure out if it would be able to help. We were able to do a lot of it, without much overhead. It was a game changer right out the door.

I was involved in the PoC, as well as the initial setup. The initial engagement is a little complex, but when you look back – hindsight, they say, is 20/20 – but in this case, it really made good sense on how it's structured. Initially, it felt a little limited but then, as you see it over and over and over again, you realize that there's good thought process that's gone into it. It was pretty smooth sailing for the most part.

There were hiccups that we had with an arrival tool that tool's vendor was not able to resolve. This was during the PoC stage. With AppDynamics, we went through the technical support team. They really had the right answers in the right places. They knew how to solve it.

We did a PoC with New Relic for about eight months, in 2014. We haven't really gone back since then to look at New Relic, to really be able to compare in a meaningful manner, but we looked at them at that time.

There were other areas where New Relic wasn't planning on supporting; some of our legacy footprint, such as WebSphere 6 and Oracle E-Business Suite. AppDynamics was doing that, as well. It was another add-on that really mattered a lot because that was a very large footprint of our agents.

In general, ease of use was definitely one of the most important criteria when we selected the vendor; ability to correlate in an automated matter; and be able to gather diagnostic data or just even transaction data. We'd already seen how transaction data is helpful with Dynatrace, for which we just had a limited on-prem set of licenses. We were really happy with the PurePath and so on, but we didn't want to take Dynatrace into production for a variety of reasons. A prime one was that they capture all the snapshots, which we know would've added a lot of overhead. That's probably another really good criteria: added overhead. Then, of course, breadth of coverage, when it comes to different technologies because, if you have to buy a different license or a different tool for everyone, you’re kind of setting yourself up for other problems down the line. Those are some of the key points.

Give it a shot. If you want to do a PoC, definitely do it. You should definitely have AppDynamics in there. I have no qualms about recommending the tool outright, but I think for your use case, you should probably PoC it on your own because you will really see the value add. If you don't, of course, then it is what it is, but I think most people will see the value add very, very quickly. They have a very competent team. They have the right people in the right places. Once they decide to commit to something, they actually do it and do it well. That's definitely a good plus.

I have not given it a perfect rating because I would like to see the heap analysis and the connection leak. There are some hiccups, I feel. I probably have to keep visiting the new feature sets that are coming with the leak analysis. Those minor things, those problems, the heap analysis and the connection leaks, are pretty time consuming, but in the grand scheme of things, the rest of the feature set is really, really great.

I haven’t even mentioned elsewhere the vast set of metrics that we have available to us, which is very helpful. I can create my own metrics if I want, if I choose to.
It definitely ticks a lot of checkboxes and there are a lot plus marks.

We also use AppDynamics End User Monitoring a little bit; not as much as APM. APM is used by a lot more of our internal clients. End User Monitoring is used and that's also helpful. There's a feature where you can actually see the traffic going from the End User snapshot down to the APM snapshot. That correlation is very, very helpful because then I don't have to do it manually. If you have to do it manually, a lot of it is a bit of guessing game, unless you have other ways of doing the manual correlation, which is a lot tougher, especially when it comes to production, where you want to really get things moving faster rather than slower. That can be very helpful.

It reduces the time to resolve issues and requires less manpower. When issues happen, we have the whole triage going on and we used to have like 30 people on the call trying to figure out what's going on. AppDynamics cuts that down; you don't need that many people. You need two or three key people going into the console to see what's going on and pinpoint the root cause, as opposed to people trying to figure it out from all different sources. That takes forever, and that's very inefficient.

Being able to monitor transactions end-to-end, throughout all the layers, basically, is very valuable; the ability to pin-point issues irrespective of the layer in which they happened. That's really helpful and very valuable.

The network diagnostics that they are adding will be really useful. They could add more detail into what is going on in the network. Right now, that is one area where we have to use other tools. That would be very, very useful. I think that should give us a better view of the entire system.

It's pretty stable. We haven’t had any major issues, anywhere we implemented it. It's pretty stable and it's very light as well.

Scalability is good for our systems; we have 7+ million lines of code. It works with that big of a system, so it does scale.

We have used technical support sometimes, when we had some questions and issues or whatever. They're pretty knowledgeable. They know their stuff and they provide solutions pretty quickly, as well. They have very quick turnover time.

We had IDCAMS from IBM. That was not really useful. They're pretty heavy on the actual JVMs. They don’t help that much with resolving issues or finding issues. We had this challenge where we actually had to use a new system that was built to replace the legacy mainframe system, and it was not scaling at all. With 100,000 users, it was barely working. We had to scale it from 100,000 to 10 million members. That's when I looked around for different solutions, what is out there, and found AppDynamics, and that's what we brought in. It really helped us a lot with scale it.

Initial setup for most of the regular pieces are straightforward but we have a complex system, so we needed to do some tweaks. AppDynamics helped to detect some endpoints and so on. We have custom batch jobs and so on, which usually have a different way of having endpoints. AppDynamics guided us with how to configure those. It took a little time because it's not like a regular web application. It's a very complex healthcare system.

Price can get really expensive sometimes, depending on the type of setup you have. Sometimes you have smaller JVMs instead of larger ones, for some reasons, such as architectural reasons. Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools.

It gets a little pricey.

I looked at New Relic as well. We just evaluated it quickly. Because of our system’s complexity, it can't actually track everything in our system. We did not try other things such as Wiley. We knew what that is capable of. We knew the shortcomings, too. We didn't try that, but these two we tried, New Relic and AppDynamics.

When selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, the most important criteria is that the product has to be great. It has to be useful. That's the first criteria. Then, when we need support, we need knowledgeable resources who can help us get through. AppDynamics do a really good job with it.

I definitely recommend it. It's a pretty robust tool. For monitoring APM, all the DevOps and whatever they want to use it for, it's a pretty robust tool. It has all of the features; whatever is needed. I recommend it without thinking twice.

We do have licenses for AppDynamics EUM, but we cannot implement it yet because our system is a little more complex and it's a little older technology, the UI part of it. We'll roll it out at some point, when we get the chance.

We use AppDynamics mainly to monitor the application performance.

The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is its ability to track the transactions between different applications.

AppDynamics should improve its ability to track all the transactions.

We have been using AppDynamics for approximately three years.

AppDynamics is a stable product. We rarely had any issues with the solution.

I rate AppDynamics ten out of ten for scalability.

Getting a response from the solution's technical support team is harder and takes longer. Since the solution has a structural support model, it requires some layers of escalation to get the correct response.

Neutral

The solution's initial setup is easy. However, it is harder than Checkmk because it needs to install the agent.

The solution's initial deployment takes about three to four months. However, it's a work in progress because new applications are added every time.

AppDynamics is an expensive solution.

AppDynamics is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

All the features are useful. When it comes to application monitoring, AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring provides smooth connectivity to different applications. There is an EEM module that is highly visible and ensures a good user experience when customers access their applications on the cloud for a long time. In general, the features are a good fit for our operations.

In user monitoring, AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring should provide a better user experience. It needs to offer an end-to-end experience, including the internet layer and third-party elements that come into play on websites. Instead of focusing solely on the performance of the application web layer, it should have the inclusion of other domains like the internet, DNS, third parties, and caches that affect the user experience.

There should be more options for more options for customizations to third-party visibilities.

Another area of improvement is faster support. The response time could be faster. 

I've been using AppDynamics for five years. However, we do not use the very latest version.

Even in terms of stability, AppDynamics have fine-tuned features. They provide frequent updates, twice a year. So the product is pretty stable. 

I would say the stability of AppDynamics is an eight out of ten. 

You can easily scale it. So I would say the scalability of AppDynamics is an eight out of ten. 

AppDynamics is quite a mature product. You can even increase the scalability without affecting your environment.

Customer service and support are pretty good. The aligned support and customer support experience is quite good. If you raise an issue or a request, they will get back to you within the estimated time and resolve it for us. 

Neutral

I have explored other options. There are other solutions in the market, like CatchPoint. But the problem is we wanted an end-to-end solution that integrates well with our existing systems, and AppDynamics fits that requirement.

The initial setup depends on the environment. For example, if a customer wants a secure setup, I would say it's moderate, not overly complex. 

If a customer doesn't prioritize security policies based on the security architecture and they don't care much about it, then it's an efficient tool. 

I would rate the initial setup a five out of ten for the average user, where one being difficult and ten being easy. Five is the highest rating I would give. It's more towards excellent, I would say.

We have it on-premises because that's where we can slice and dice and offer to the customer. That's what I suggest. If it's ISPs or CSPs, it should be on-premises. If the customers want, they can go with SaaS.

The deployment time varies from company to company. If it's fast, it probably takes a week to get it up and running. But if it's on-premises, it takes around four weeks.

Just two people are required for the deployment. If it's not an existing timeline, then it may require more people. If it's an existing timeline, then it may require more people.

The implementation does matter based on how many applications you want to monitor and how complex those applications are. If it's an on-premises setup you want to pursue, or if it's a SaaS version you want to pursue. All these factors contribute to the overall resourcing. So, how do you want to add into it? If we take a simple scenario, like a single application with two tiers, I would say two resources are more than enough. But if it's on-premises and you have twenty-five applications and a timeline to achieve it within three months, then more resources are required. That's how it works.

AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is costly. If I have to rate the pricing, I would say seven because it's really expensive, with one being low and ten being high.

The pricing needs to come down. Many customers find it expensive, so that's why I'm rating it a seven.

If you want to have end-to-end visibility into your applications, from users to endpoints, I would recommend using AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring. It's also a good choice if you want visibility into customer conversations.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.