AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring Reviews

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 me monitor how well the front end of our application is working.

I think it has improved the way my organization functions, because for me, I think this application is more like the front end application where the user is the agent. The user is more like a real user. I think it does make an impact, because, right now, we already have that monitor in production. Actually, since I'm an engineer, they already have it deployed in production for that particular application, to see how the end user behaves in that production environment.

Stability might be something a system engineer might know more; they use it every day in production.

I just use it. For me, I think there is still room for improvement. I want to track it when I run it. I use LoadRunner to generate traffic to the environment. A lot of times, I know it's slow, but I need to know how it maps with the tracking I use with LoadRunner on the AppDynamics.

There is a workaround for that, and I did implement that. Based on documentation, the AppDynamics team recommended we just put a header in there and we use it. Whatever tracking we have in LoadRunner, it will show the name exactly in AppDynamics. So, there is a workaround, but it's not really official implementation. That's extra work that I have to do, and I don't really like that. I just wish we could just run it so whatever we see in LoadRunner, we can also see in the AppDyanamics EUM module.

Right now, it's just one application. I'm not sure how it will grow in the future. I don't have the roadmap to see how it will scale in the future. I do not know.

I have not used technical support. The system engineer is the guy who's in touch with technical support, but I heard it is not good. They do not provide a quick response. That is only what I heard. Do not take my word for it. We had a meeting where they said something like, “That is something we need to setup, something we need to get out.” Then they said, “Oh it's there, but it's not resolved yet.’" That's just what I overheard in the meeting.

I got invited to a meeting. There were people from AppDynamics that came to my company and talked about a new version upgrade. They talked about, "OK, these are the benefits the upgrade." I happened to be there. Before I came to the meeting, I tried to do research on my own about what AppDynamics is about.

One of the things I think I achieved this year is the mapping and matching the LoadRunner tracking with AppDynamic, the workaround and then the EUM. That's the thing that really helped me a lot with this year’s projects.

Normally, for me, I only look at free stuff. That's why I use Google Chrome. It just happened that they already bought it and the license was there. I just used the license without paying for it.

At a recent conference, I saw Business iQ, which I think is very interesting. We talk a lot about the transaction level for IT, but for business people, this is something that makes sense. We’re not just for IT, but we talk for the business group, too. This is what it is about. There's a mapping between business and how well the system behaves. So, we would normally only look at the back end. Everything is about the back end, but not really about the end user. However, the end user really makes the difference.

Right now, for me, if I go into an application and it is slow, I get frustrated and I don't want to use it. So, this product shifts the direction; it should streamline, maybe get more meaningful information to business. I think it's going in the right direction.

My rating of the product is because I haven't gotten a chance to try all the different devices. I haven't gotten the opportunity. I just ran a test with LoadRunner, but I haven't run tests with real devices; how a iOS device, how an Android device, how a Windows Phone device will send traffic to see how well they capture the information. I haven't gotten a chance, so I cannot give it a perfect rating.

Unless, after I do all of that, I can say, "Oh really, it does capture what I'm looking for." Then, I would maybe give it a perfect rating, but I have rated it based on what I need right now. I just haven't gotten a chance to explore to different areas.

What we are looking at is the real-time user experience. We are a retail business and the customer walks in, he places an order for the material. We would like that to be efficient, the order to be processed, and it should immediately get delivered. The performance is a key factor for us. We are a franchising business and the application is deployed in the cloud. Most of the time, the users complain about the slow performance. For us, it's very important to track down where exactly the problem is; for example, in which geographical region is there a problem. Then, we nail it down and find out what session is causing a problem there. That's the whole idea. That's where we're seeing that AppDynamics is able to help us.

We have been able to identify the application issues or the user experience issues. We are able to address that. If the user has been complaining that they are experiencing a problem, we get to know that proactively. We are able to find out which geographic region, what store is having an issue with it so that we can monitor it; it comes as an alert, we try to diagnose it, and try to fix the issue.

We've not been able to get one answer to all of our problems; for example, if there is anything else happening on the networking side. I'm pretty excited to learn about the infrastructure monitoring.

One thing that is missing is the desktop monitoring. The desktop monitoring is not there. A lot of times, the problems are created or caused by some other applications, which is blocking or causing an issue with the application.

These kinds of things I still see as missing pieces in AppDynamics, and that’s the reason for my rating.

I just started using the database side. I haven't gone through that. At a recent conference, I was looking forward to participating in one of the sessions so that I could learn more about the product. I started to see some valuable things. I was especially excited to see Business iQ. I need to learn about that. I see there is potential for being more productive and helpful to the business. But, it's too early for me to comment on that.

We haven't used AppDynamics very extensively. If I had to rate its stability, I would say that AppDynamics is about 8/10. There is a little room for improvement. Sometimes, we do have performance issues on AppDynamics. The metrics take a long time to load. I raised this point when I was in one of the sessions at the conference.

It is scalable. The good part is that we can add as many nodes as needed. We can do that. We can add as many clients as we need; we can do that. I don't see an issue with scalability. That seems to be good.

They have been pretty good with technical support. In fact, one of the technical support persons helped me in terms of doing the proof of concept. I've been able to get that support. They're very good. In fact, the day before I provided this review I pointed out a problem and I see some communication going on there; they're pretty good. They're very good.

The ERP system that we have used has partnered with AppDynamics. They suggested this. We weren’t really looking for evaluating solutions; it just came along with that. Then, as we started to use that ERP application more and more, we encountered performance issues. The need arose to find one tool that can help us and that could give us end-to-end monitoring.

There are many tools available, but they cover only one segment of that. The good part with AppDynamics is that you get all three layers, even though there still are some missing links. Looking at the vision and listening to them at the conference, I'm very positive and optimistic that AppDynamics is going to come forward with new ideas and new solutions that can help us.

We had some initial setup challenges because our application is different than regular web-based applications. I had to engage with our application vendor to have that issue resolved. After some initial hiccups, everything went smooth. The support has been very active. Whenever I needed it, I want to have a call, a joint session, it was there. That was support.

There are some other monitoring tools, such as SolarWinds, ExtraHop, and so on, but they are for different verticals. There are also open-source database monitoring tools out there. There are many tools out there. It becomes really hard to focus.

We already had the AppDynamics license, which we got when we acquired the ERP system. We got a license with that because AppDynamics was partnered with our ERP system. That basically gave us an advantage, and it's a good tool. I did some reviews on it, and found that they're doing very well.

As I started looking into other products, such as end-user monitoring, AppDynamics was really good with that and the database side. If there is an application available which basically gives you end-to-end visibility, why not go with that one?

Performance is a real challenge for any application. It's very hard to get a single solution that gives us complete visibility. I would certainly recommend looking at AppDynamics, that kind of a tool, that basically provides complete visibility.

I use Browser Real-User Monitoring with AppDynamics’ Database Monitoring and Java Application Monitoring products.

It is very useful to monitor user behavior and see the user experience.

It has helped us to address issues well. For example, if the application is being used worldwide, it's possible that the application is performing well when accessed from the US but that it has issues when accessed from other countries, such as China. So, AppDynamics can clearly show you which users are having issues when accessing your application, and this helps you address it.

It is a stable solution. I have found the features that help me see the user experience to be valuable. For example, it will tell you all the visual screens on the mobile application that a user has been visiting. It will also show you how long they have been visiting this particular screen and all the actions the user has taken on the browser.

We can view the end-user experience and end-user response time. For example, if your application is performing well but the users are still complaining, then you will be able to investigate whether it is a network issue or a connection issue. 

AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring will give you these types of details. It will tell you from which part of the world your application is being accessed, it will give you the page rendering time, how the page is behaving, and when it is being accessed from different parts of the world.

If you have a single URL and all the operations are coming in as part of the header, you will not be able to segregate them for different actions. I think this could be improved.

There are different things which can be achieved using Core Change, but it cannot be easily done using the configuration change on the controller.

Also, functionality could be increased on the End-User Monitoring side.

I have been using this solution for the last five years.

It is stable.

I think that it is scalable.

Their technical support is good, but there's room for improvement. The way the technical support staff handle the user could be improved.

Also, technical support staff could be faster and more knowledgeable. They need staff who are more technical. Most often, they ask a standard set of questions, even if they are not relevant to the particular case that has been raised. This could be changed.

The installation is pretty simple. It is a Core Change. For example, if you have to implement End-User Monitoring for a particular browser application, then you will need to inject the JavaScript Agent on the code. This usually takes about one or two hours.

We implemented it ourselves.

AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring does have licensing cost associated with it. We currently have a yearly license.

There are very few products which use End-User Monitoring, and I would rate AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring at seven on a scale from one to ten.

We like being able to actually see how long it actually took. You can look at the back end, and you know how long the server thinks it took, but you really don't know how long to render. We've caught a lot of problems with ads, third-party content and other things, where we were serving up the page in a normal amount of time, but it wasn't rendering right and it was broken for our users. Now we have insight into that. We can raise the alarm, and try to fix it.

We've had a lot of issues with third-party ads. We were able to get them to clean up their act after we could show them the data that it was broken.

Instead of guessing, we have real data. That's really improved. Instead of saying, "Hey, everybody fire up your browser and see if we can reproduce this issue," we can just look. That's really been helpful.

Things mostly work well. I would think maybe more integration; pull things together more; integrate this analytics with this dashboard, with that analytics; and so on. Just kind of tie everything in one spot.

I have not encountered any stability or scalability issues. I'm not sure how many page views we're doing at this point, but we haven't had any issues with it, and it's a lot. It's a lot of page views. I know it is.

We use technical support from time to time; nothing serious, just some questions; things like that. They've always been really responsive; definitely quick in getting you the answer in a timely manner.

I think they also looked at Dynatrace. I guess I know how that went, because here we are, with AppDynamics.

In general, when I’m selecting a vendor to work with, the most important thing I look for is the ability to get the job done and actually perform.

We also use AppDynamics APM, and we use the database monitoring a little bit. We’re definitely happy with them.

We are a reseller and AppDynamics is one of the products that we sell to our customers.

Our customers use it to gain insight into performance.

The most valuable feature is the end-user monitoring.

I would like to see support for mobile testing and mobile monitoring.

The cost is something that can be improved.

We have been working with AppDynamics for almost 10 years.

We have not had any issues with stability.

Scalability has not been a problem.

We provide in-house technical support for our clients. We have found that AppDynamics is pretty selective when it comes to providing technical support.

The initial setup is not very straightforward, so it takes some time to complete.

Implementing this solution will require some help.

This price of this product is expensive.

Some of our customers are making the transition to cloud-based deployment, which is something that we are helping them with.

Overall, this is a good product and it is one of our top recommendations.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.