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Extensive use cases, dozens of primary and secondary use cases ranging from core application monitoring at the global level to micro level performance analysis at the transaction level. AppD provides the ability to also manage total interactions at the web/mobile browser level, the database and core infrastructure including server level and L4 network.

We are a services organization, so we use AppDynamics with our customers. It has allowed us to expand our footprint in the application management business with virtually all of our major accounts. We were able to expand and go into other applications that we weren't in or offering previously. We have a new value proposition for our customers- enhanced visibility, enhanced stability, and we can reduce our costs to them because our cost structure is reduced by using AppDynamics. We have other examples like this as well where AppDynamics has improved the way we function and operate. As of date of this article, our company has in excess of 30,000 AppDynamics agents deployed globally and we are monitoring billions of annual page views for major customers.

Furthermore, AppDynamics is a key toolset and drives tremendous value and efficiency in our remote performance management center which supports over 10,000 retail locations on behalf of our retail customers.

I have been using this solution for more than five years.

We didn't have any issues with stability. Highly stable with extremely light impact- negligible.

We didn't have any issues with scalability. Unbelievably scalable - we selected this solution for its ability to aggregate thousands and thousand of end point monitoring.

Customer Service:

AppDynamics redefines customer services, especially in post sales support- maybe one of the most responsive service desk teams in the industry.

Technical Support:

They have done a superb job of getting some obscenely bright software people with a passion for customer services and unleashed them in the market. Some of the finest technical support in the industry.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward- we can have an enterprise deployment with several dozen end points being monitored in less than 3 hours.

Our first few implementations we did ourselves and then for our first major customer implementation we got AppDynamics to assist. We currently support all of our internal and external deployments.

We're regularly looking at various options. Even before we made the decision to standardize on AppDynamics, we already had experience with BMC Appsight. We also had experience using Dynatrace, CA and Gomez at some of our customer's environments. We also heard our customers talking about their experiences with these other products.

You can't over-speak importance of deployment, configuration and infrastructure footprint because what happens is that people get excited when they see the output of various products (such as Dynatrace or CA Wiley). They say, "wow, it's very powerful, we've never had visibility, we're going to implement at all costs." Then they buy the solution and they realize they need 5X the amount of servers, a lot of storage, experts to manage it, etc.

Our main use case for Datadog is that we heavily rely on it for our infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring, including some of the browser-based application monitoring, which is RUM.

A specific example of how we use Datadog for monitoring is that we monitor our infrastructure CPU and memory utilization. Sometimes we see slowness and figure out CPU utilization was near the threshold, around 90-95%, which helped us to resolve the issue, underlying SQL problem, and that helped us to troubleshoot the issue.

In addition to our main use case, we also use RUM monitoring and synthetic monitoring, which really help us to look at our end-user sessions and proactively solve any slowness or errors spiking up.

The best feature that Datadog offers is infrastructure monitoring, where it can look at the CPU utilization, different process utilization, all the processes which are running, and alert us in advance if things are going beyond normal threshold.

I think everything about the features of Datadog is amazing. Datadog provides details up to the transactions. We can look at the transaction log too for the application, which is really helpful.

Datadog has impacted our organization positively since we were previously using AppDynamics and then we switched to Datadog. It has improved a lot in our alerting and monitoring in the infrastructure space and application space. We can monitor business transactions and take proactive action. It is really great to take actions on the issues before an end user reports it, which is a great advantage for us.

The world is moving toward artificial intelligence, so maybe we can have an inbuilt AI agent within Datadog, or maybe it exists and I have not used it.

The AI aspect would be great where we would not need to go and look at different transactions or different modules of Datadog, as AI can actually provide the data to us on Datadog UI. If we need more details, it could have a link to go to that specific module to look at more details for the application and infrastructure monitoring and alerts.

I have been using Datadog for three years now.

Datadog is stable for our organization, and we have not seen any downtime or issues so far.

Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs. As per our need, we are able to utilize different modules and there was never any need where we needed to scale anything else. We have limited our transition recording to 45 days, which helps. That is what our need is. It is really helpful and nothing additional is needed.

We reached out to Datadog only once to find out our AMI images, which we needed for our infrastructure as a code component, and it was a great experience. We got the required information and that helped us.

Neutral

Before Datadog, we previously used OpsRamp and also AppDynamics, and both of the tools we retired and moved to Datadog due to our enterprise approach to consolidate overall monitoring to Datadog.

I gave Datadog a nine out of ten because it is amazing. All the features and functionalities are amazing. The ease of implementation was a bit difficult for us for the database servers where we have different kinds of databases. We needed different kinds of agents to be installed, and that was a bit tricky for us. I think it is not on Datadog but it is about our complex infrastructure where we have a different set of infrastructure in place, so that created a bit of trouble during the implementation.

Since using Datadog, we have seen a return on investment with a lot of savings around infrastructure monitoring, and also on the people needed to monitor overall application and infrastructure on both sides. Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five. That is a huge saving.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing Datadog, we went with Datadog directly.

My advice for others looking into using Datadog is to keep exploring the tool and utilize the different modules and the different functionalities of features Datadog offers. There are multiple features and functionalities available with the Datadog agents which are really helpful and powerful to troubleshoot, alert, and monitor both applications and infrastructure.

So far, all the features I have used in Datadog are amazing. It captures all the logging information which I have, and I can include the links of Datadog transactions on my Splunk logs. It is integrated with Splunk and other platforms, which is great.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Datadog a nine.