We performed a comparison between AppDynamics and Prometheus based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Prometheus is praised for its flexibility, integration capabilities, and affordability as an open-source solution. AppDynamics, on the other hand, is considered expensive, has a high learning curve, and poor end-user experience. Although it offers valuable features, its complex infrastructure is a drawback. Prometheus, however, is reliable, has a fast data storage system, and is highly valued for its flexibility and integration capabilities, making it thew preferred solution.
"End-user monitoring (web and mobile)"
"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."
"Provides monitoring more around business processes versus just servers, applications, etc. E.g., with complex systems, where a business process passes across multiple applications, the business needs us to monitor the heath of the process, not just a segment of the application."
"It is used to test customer behavior on a website."
"It gives me the ability to trace logs between transactions, for example, a DB transaction or JVM transaction from one hub to the other. I can easily find out where the problem is or where the bottleneck of the issues lies."
"Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic."
"It provides everything into one view, so we can track information from one place to another."
"The best feature of AppDynamics is the analytics, which gives us the business insights of the application."
"Prometheus provides a flexible and adjustable querying and describing time, allowing for more responsive monitoring."
"It is highly valuable as it serves as the foundation for our infrastructure monitoring tools."
"The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics."
"The feature I found most valuable is the number of integrations. It is the industry standard for metrics."
"It is a stable solution...Based on the feedback I have received from my colleagues in our company's IT department, the setup phase of the solution is relatively easy."
"The product is easy to maintain."
"The dashboard is very valuable."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot. In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring. When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software."
"Rolling out version upgrades is a difficult job at times."
"The documentation and training material have room for improvement."
"Installation and configuration can be very tough. An average user without specialized knowledge can't do this. You need to have DevOps and QA teams handle it. During installation, a lot of customers get stuck trying to track the database or the API part, and they have to contact customer support."
"AppDynamics' modules and hardware resources are very high."
"The solution could be more user-friendly for diagnostic purposes. Anyone who is using the solution should be able to infer what that error is about, they should be able to troubleshoot it better."
"The QA and test environment need improvement."
"The product must improve its documentation."
"Setting up the rules in Prometheus can be confusing, making it an area where improvements are required."
"There is a need for a more comprehensive overview of exporters, especially when dealing with many of them."
"Prometheus can be initially difficult for users since it has its query language, PromQL. The minimalistic interface is complicated to understand. They need to improve their interface so that users who don't know PromQL can also use it. You can only leverage the tool when you know PromQL."
"One potential area for improvement would be fixing the occasional glitches and bugs."
"I would like to see improvement in the analysis tools and customization features."
"They could provide efficient logs in terms of clarity and ease of access similar to Datadog’s paid version."
"Prometheus has a learning curve when setting it up. It definitely requires a little bit more hands-on than other solutions. It is an open source solution which means you do need to go through and read the literature that they have online for setting it up. The setup could be made easier."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 155 reviews while Prometheus is ranked 9th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 32 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while Prometheus is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prometheus writes "A very flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and New Relic, whereas Prometheus is most compared with Azure Monitor, New Relic, Dynatrace, Sentry and Apache SkyWalking. See our AppDynamics vs. Prometheus report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
