APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit

We did a trial of the Dynatrace vs AppDynamics vs New Relic Real User
Monitoring tools and based on this we selected New Relic, mainly because of
their powerful Insights tool that easily allows you to create your own
dashboards / alert using a variant of SQL.

Since we acquired the RUM tool (Browser) we have trialled their APM tool
which we are currently appraising vs our existing CA APM tool (Introscope)
- early signs are encouraging for New Relic.

After 9 months we have found the New Relic tools that we use to be very
useful and they have excellent post implementation support.

Being SAAS only has not been an issue, and for example on Black Friday
their tools did not slowdown at all.

Hello,

Thank you all for the very kind and informative comments.

Some ideas regarding the requirement list.
Looking at a high level, the requirement list will contain:
- This is strategic tool, so go after the big/leading names.
- Easy remote deployment& management.
- Quick learning curve and strong local support.
- Flexible& competitive pricing model.

Technically speaking:
- Client side application level support: Browser based, Mobile Native App., Smart (Fat..) desktop
applications (mainly in Microsoft environment - .Net , C#).
- Client side Operating Systems: Mobile (iOS, Android), Desktop (Win7 and up).
- Server side Operating Systems: Linux, Windows.
- Virtualization: Microsoft, VMware,Citrix.
- Various server side applications (DB,ESB, HDFS....).

-Features:
Easy to set thresholds and automatic "trigger to action" capabilities.
Management console that can show information from a different customers in an easy way.

Another question I struggled with:
How do you deal with Information Security issues of remote connection to the client's production environments (both technical and business agreement aspects) ?

Best,
Avi

Avi,
How are you ?
I am Elad and I am the COO at Correlsense.
HQ in Boston and R&D site in Israel we have a very extensive partnership program that we have signed with companies that have the offering you describe here.
Would be happy to talk : eladk@correlsense.com
I am looking forward to talking to you.
Regards,

Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with its strong local support. AppDynamics is a familiar name and Aternity brings a fresh perspective, although Ruxit might need a closer look for MSP compatibility. Keep in mind the unique needs of your clients and the pricing model that aligns best. Check out this link (https://www.cleveroad.com/mana...) for additional insights into managed IT services that might complement your APM selection process.

Hi Avi,

A lot of technical aspects had been discussed, but in my experience the most valued features include>

Multi Tenancy
Service Level Management Module is mandatory which supports service, calendars, offerings, etc.

Another great feature is the monitoring tool, which must support agent and agentless deployment

The thing is:

Measure -> Manage -> Improve

Hi,

What about Correlsense?

Thier APM product is called Sharepath and they are based in Israel.

Good luck

Hi Avi,

I AM biased working for CA Technologies but have you considered us?
We have recently released some highly innovative updates to our APM suite and work with quite a number of MSPs globally - I think you would be pleasantly surprised if we had a chance to take you through our capabilities.

Kind Regards

Paul Casaneanu
CA Technologies

You aren't going to find a single tool or a complex set of tools for those requirements. Instead of trying to apply APM to everything focus on the key business critical applications, or those which are problematic and can be fixed. It's about monitoring, improvement, diagnostics, and testing.

Hi Avi,

My name is Gil and I've been working with APM solutions since 2005 when it just began. In my experience, it is most important for you to define your requirements from the APM platform, besides its pricing, before starting to evaluate solutions.

Let me give you some examples:
- Do you need to provide useful information for developers when there is an application problem and pin point the problem ?
- Do you need to monitor the full end to end user experience of global customers accessing sites and mobile apps for your customers and also gain some insights about the specific user session ?
- What technologies are required to be monitored ?
- Can you install anything on the client machines (if not - for example Aternity is not on the table) ?
- Do you need some auto discovery capabilities with regards to architectures, data flows, dynamic baselines, etc. ?

So you see, there isn't a simple answer. That being said, from my experience in the past 5 years, I found the Dynatrace platform the be the most complete one, and suited for both small and large companies. Additionally, the fact that it has 750 people in R&D makes me sleep well at night when my customers are using this platform. I don't have a hands on experience with AppD or Atternity, but have seen the customers comparing Dynatrace to them and heard about their reasons for making a choice.

Hope this helps,

Gil

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is another APM vendor you might consider. HPE is an innovator in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and that rating is based upon advanced user experience monitoring capability as well as a wide range of SLA management features – both critical for an MSP.

HPE AppPulse APM excels at User Experience Monitoring. Its capabilities extend beyond just identifying the user action that precedes a problem into mapping out the entire “User Flow”. This enables you to see all of the transaction steps that the user follows to initiate their transaction.

Since there are usually multiple flows that a user can choose from while starting from the same initial action, so that you’re able to determine if any of you user flow paths are more problematic than others. Listing the initiating user action alone, as most of the other products do, isn’t enough to show you which transactions the action has impacted and which are fine.
This creates a 3D view of user interaction versus the more 2D picture that pointing to the user action provided by competitive offerings creates.

Another very strong capability for MSPs that HPE APM provides is SLA management. HPE AppPulse Active provides a range of SLA alerts, notifications, and reports to enable you to continuously monitor SLA compliance for all of the app environments under management.
These SLA management capabilities along with scripting capability based on HPE LoadRunner TruClient and VuGen technologies and allows load test to be run against apps in production using the same protocols used in QA/Test.

HPE Mobile Center, which is part of HPE’s ADM software suite along with LoadRunner and StormRunner, enables you to capture test scripts directly from actual mobile devices and then use them for pre-production load testing as well as within AppPulse Active APM in production.
Overall, this provides the most comprehensive range of performance management and testing tools available to enable you to ensure optimum service for your customers. You can also offer them additional service capabilities to enable them to support “bring your own device”, web apps and enterprise app monitoring.

Most of the HPE APM products are offered as SaaS offerings to make them very affordable for your SMB customers to whom overall cost is critical. They also offer very intuitive point and click web interfaces, which makes them easy for Line of Business users to use.

Best of all, all HPE APM products are developed in Israel. Our team there would be glad to assist you in implementing your MSP programs. We also have numerous reference customers in Israel to whom you could speak to obtain their insights about HPE APM products. That can also enable rapid local support which might be critical for ensuring your business success.

Tom Fisher
HPE APM
tfisher@hpe.com

Avi, we do a lot of work with MSPs at AppDynamics. We have great examples of massive scale deployments that bring additional revenue to those major accounts. We provide monthly billing for those use cases, and complete flexibility in terms of how you grow, scale up, and the discount levels you'll get. Feel free to reach out directly to me or to us for more information. The largest MSPs and hosting companies in the world are using AppDynamics. They use us both for APM use cases and deep database monitoring, which we provide in the same modern UI.

Most MSPs prefer on-premises deployment models, since they are hosting companies. AppDynamics unlike most of these vendors provides both delivery models. We also provide the highest degree of scale with the least amount of hardware if you would like to host yourself. Out solution is also very easy to use with a modern web based UI.

There are a lot of good solutions out there, I would recommend you do a POV and understand the differences between the products and how much work they are to deploy and manage.

You can contact me at jonah.kowall at appdynamics.com or via LinkedIn as well.

Hi,

I have used CA Introscope APM for triaging and troubleshooting of different java applications / application servers for many years. I find this solution very good: stable, scalable, performant, very well usable in production environments, very flexible, relatively easy to implement and to extend. I can recommend to use it to analyze performance of java applications especially under heavy load , with a lot amount of transactions as well.

As to pricing policy I cannot say a lot, I am not an account manager, I am a jee engineer …

Hope, this helps.

Kind regards,
Svetlana

I am myself researching on the APM solutions, not sure about your specific requirements but I would suggest you to look at both Dynatrace and App Dynamics having similar capabilities but fits your requirement. Dynatrace has a range of products, APM being the core module – agent based and performs transaction level monitoring, provides insight into various layers of an application. Ruxit is a new addition to Dynatrace suite of monitoring tools, an integrated solution combining the features of APM, UEM and Synthetics. Dyntrace has been rated #1 by Gartner.

Hi,
It would depend on the portfolios of the customer's infrastructure before
taking call on any of the 4 listed vendors.

Dynatrace- Post its breakup with Compuware, I believe they are doing
significantly well in APM space.
Appdynamics- They are disturbing market with their key innovations and
making their competitors look out for options to survive
Aternity- Well its a nice player in APM but not sure if its doing path
breaking technology innovations to keep pace with market
Ruxit- Havent heard much

My vote would bend towards Appdynamics because of their turn key innovative
solutions. Dynatrace good if you want to go with stable not frequent
release product organization

Hope it helps!

Hi Avi,

I can share my hands-on experience with Dyntrace; i've used the product within several loadtest projects

- Installation is very smooth ; also agent install; i think this is a very important.
- Out of the box ; dynatrace is already able to monitor end -user performance (from user click in browser, application server, webservice, DB calls) no additional config is (almost) needed
- Support is good
- I've used the product in serveral java environments, and found e.g memory leaks; heap config issue's; query issue's and so on; APM "adds for sure value" ; you know in which layer / API the problem exists
- You can use the product , after a base training (2 days); after that you knowlegde can "grow" with the product
- Sometimes in GUI, you need to search for the rigth option, however the happy diagnostics flow can be found intuitive
- Always able to zoom in to a single user session; e.g: User John Dobsen is complaining about performance; so just select this session, in zoom / drill down to the details...

I've no experience with App Dynamics; and iám more technical oriented ; so maybe this answers not fully your question, but maybe a helps to have a view on one part (Dynatrace)

Regards,
Arjan

www.performancetestexpert.nl/

Hello,

As an advice, you should first create a requirement list about what you need.
In our company, we did a POC which took about 1 year to determine which APM tool we should have. It depends on;
-What kind of application/design you have (we have application which runs on Weblogic app server and developed on Jdeveloper)
-If you want network package analyzing or only application performance monitoring
-For application monitoring, what you need; sql performance, bind variables in sqls, end2end transaction monitoring, drill down to transaction, real transaction monitoring or sampling, etc.
-APM tool is user friendly or not
-How much good they are at Support.
-.....

As i described above, you first determine your requirements.
Then you can check Gartner's up to date reports to see leaders in APM area and you can invite them for POC.

We had POC for Appdynamics, DynaTrace and Riverbed OPNET and decided to have Riverbed OPNET according to our requirement list.

If you ask about these tools (Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Aternity and Ruxit ), i only have experience about Dynatrace and AppDynamics; and i can suggest you DynaTrace.

Best Regards,

aLp.

Hi

In my honest opinion, I would suggest AppDynamics which offer both on-premise and cloud option. Do feel free to link up with AppDynamics at your region, get them to do a demo based on your high-level requirements (infrastructure, applications, number of users, challenges and etc) and get a feel of their pricing model.

I felt that their pricing model is quite competitive as compared to Dell Foglight or Dynatrace. Btw, I don't work for AppDynamics, I happens to implemented AppDynamics solution in Singapore.

Cheers
Howe Cheong, Lai ( LinkedIn : www.linkedin.com/in/shclai )

Selection of any vendors for Enterprise System Management space for the Enterprise would need lot of research and the most importantly experience and a introspective Approach. This should have not been shadowed by any of the vendors perception

So let us come to facts and figures. There are few tools which is been marked as leaders in the APM Magic Quadrant and there are other tools which is in APM Market which is veteran.

The selection of APM tools should completely depend on the requirements and what are the key factors which we are trying to solve in the Enterprise.

"Don't buy a product, buy a product which will solve Problem"

There are Pros & Cons on every APM Tool like Dynatrace,AppD,New-Relic.All these vendors are market leaders and capable to deliver most of important features which is required for the Application Performance Monitoring.

So go with concrete approach of your requirements and what you are trying to solve. And you can align with the respective APM tool accordingly.

Dynatrace tends to be resource heavy, so it is a great diagnostic tool in lower/dev environments, but may not be a good choice for endpoint monitoring in an environment with aging devices in production.

Aternity I've worked primarily with in US, and their R&D is located in Israel, which may be a deciding factor. They are good to 100,000 workstations per installation, so you may be able to configure it for multi-tenancy in a SaaS offering, with the agents using a VPN tunnel or other secure protocol for comm. Of course, you could also do an on premise model.

AppDynamics, not too sure about. AppDynamics seems to have a lot of overlapping features from Aternity, but I've used Aternity much more, and can vouch for its capability.

Ruxit might as well be a potatoe for all I know. Never heard or used it.

KGMII

Dynatrace and AppDynamics are in my wheelhouse.

AppDynamics is a great Cloud based and on premise tool. We use for clients,
and it provides great reporting and quick failure analysis. We have learned
the initial setup is not enough. You have to continue labeling the traffic
each month for the tool to become useful, and it is very important to
monitor new services on the network. AppDynamics is not expensive, but the
appliances need modules that can eat in to your budget. Work a deal with
them,

Dynatrace, good product with alot of capabilties geared towards engineers.
If you are concerned with Ops then work with AppDynamics

Hi avi,

You can give an eye to CA APM market's leading APM tools. It have More flexible features and easy going customization to fulfill your specific requirement. It's having good support over the globe.

Please list down your requirements and mail it to us @ pankajsaini08@gssltd.co.in so that we can figure out how your requirements can be fulfilled with CA APM. As it's having many modules to monitor various parts of a application infrastructure.

I think that there isn't a single solution for everyone (www.linkedin.com/pulse/choosing-right-apm-fool-tool-still-cristian-vanti) and the answer strongly depends on your requirements. Please make a list of yours and check how each APM suits. If you aren't confident, ask to a company like mine that works with several vendors and could suggest the best option for you. Please, don't waste your money

Hello, we are also an MSP based in US- servicing Fortune 100 clients around APM.

We performed an extensive evaluation of various APM vendors and AppDynamics is a superior choice for MSP’s based on several criteria including scalability, manageability, ease of deployment; non-intrusive to client environments and competitive pricing model.

Please let me know, I can provide a wealth of background in this area if additional information is needed.

Thanks.

Hi,

What is important is the supported language used to develop your application.
As we develop some application in ROR, the possibility some years ago was very limited and still now some doesn’t provide ROR APM. --> this is a big constraint for the selection of the tool
Also how the tool is installed, does it need an agent, is it complex to install ? is it complex to configure ?

Regards,
Eric

Hi Avi,

Fortunately, there are several APM options for you. If you're looking for support in Israel there is an Israel based company that has created an APM solution called AppPulse, from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (Mercury in Yehud).

It is a SaaS based solution with features that focus on saving time and making it easy to find problems and solve them. You can see the reviews for the mobile part of the suite on IT Central Station and more info on the full suite is on the HPE website: www.itcentralstation.com/products/hpe-apppulse-mobile AND www.youtube.com/watch AND www.HPE.com/Software/AppPulse

There's a free 30 day trial so you can try it out first.

I guess the question I have is about requirements - What are your requirements for an APM solution? As a result of using this solution, my company will be able to...?

Hi Avi,
First- not sure if you are aware, but Ruxit is part of Dynatrace.  
Secondly- Saying you want to provide APM to your customers, is casting a fairly wide net. Do you have some specific capabilities/features/metrics you'd like to offer your customers?   

InfoVista has supported many CSPs and MSPs with our multi-tenant solutions for network and application monitoring and control.
You can find additional information here:
www.infovista.com/products/Application-Performance-Monitoring-and-Management

You may also contact me @ spomichowski@infovista.com.

Thanks.

Hi Avi,

in short I would narrow it down tot he features you are looking for. In short I do know clients who use Dynatrace and also ones using AppDynamics. In fact AppDynamics is pretty „in“ at the moment here, but in order to use these kind of tools you really need to understand the application you are looking at. Also keep in mind that ( at the moment ) not all environments might be supported by each tool.

My suggestion is: If possible do a short PoC with 2 products and look at it deeper and see what suits you more.

Stefan

Given the enterprise customers I expect legacy applications to be in use. AppDynamics is more focussed on newer applications...

My advise would be to go for Dynatrace.
It has the best platform for APM on new and old applications and is also working with several msp's.

Regards
H. J.

I would choose dynatrace. Their support is nice and the apps is the best. The price model … I don’t know about it you would ask them …. But for apps and for resolving problems dynatrace is nice. The others (appdynamics is the only I know) I don’t like too much due to difficult to install. So in my opinion better dynatrace.

Hi,

Dynatrace is more expensive than AppDynamics.

Configuration and RCA is easier on Dynatrace but since cost is a significant factor then AppDynamics would

Give a very competitive deal for both on premise and cloud.

We use CA APM, being the largest MSP in the Benelux and are completely satisfied. Our impression is that CA is investing a lot in developing their APM solution, including the usage of personas.