AppDynamics Reviews

We use the product heavily in our ecosystem. The prime focus for our consumption is for Telkom - a telco and also the mother company. Telkom bought Business Connexion, the company that I fall into. The IT company, BCX, belongs to Telkom. The current real estate that we're responsible for, in Telkom, that we support and maintain on their behalf, is using AppDynamics. We use it for application performance monitoring alongside Foglight, which we would like to replace. 

Everything that AppDynamics yields we use in some way. 

We are a rather big user of AppDynamics. We use synthetic monitoring. 

From an application perspective, all the elements that come stock standard with the product, we are heavily invested in. We built a long list of dashboards and auto-alerts that goes through our call center to resolution groups, to fix issues, as and when they occur. 

The SAP monitoring element is very helpful. Historically, three or four years ago, AppDynamics couldn't tool an SAP instance. Now, there's a specific agent that you can deploy to SAP. We've invested in that element. There seems to be a market requirement for that element. Fairly recently, however, Dynatrace also added that to the inherent product capabilities, in order to monitor SAP ecosystems.

From an AppDynamics point of view, and possibly based on the fact that it's now part of Cisco, is that Cisco may fundamentally have a different view of the world. If you compare AppDynamics with Foglight, as an example, Foglight's got the ability (even the old versions of the product that we currently work with) to offer visibility within the inherent infrastructure which is certainly lacking on the AppDynamics side. I know that there're other products on the Cisco side that can do similar things as Foglight. If it would be able to give you more infrastructure visibility in this solution, it would certainly make the product stronger.

The cost element is an issue. I can't expect the company to change its way of work. However, given the fact that we earn and do all our business in South African Rand, I would prefer to buy in Rand as opposed to the American dollar or British pound. In our case, dollars are preferable. The exchange rate between our currency and the international currency makes planning much more difficult, and socio-economic changes heavily impact our commercial planning and budgets. From my perspective, that would be a step in the right direction. 

Quite often we are asked to do a POC or POV, proof of value, or show that the technology works, and we are given licenses to do that. However, the current commercial model with AppDynamics is that you buy a year or three years. There's nothing more and nothing less available. Some of our customers would prefer a five-year engagement. Some of our other customers would prefer a shorter duration. I would propose, and we actually asked AppDynamics, a dispensation where you have the licenses available in a set timeframe and you can use it as and when you require. The concept of a true-up at the end of some period, may make our lives easier with reference to having to scale up and down our ecosystem. Basically, they need to offer just a bit more flexibility on the commercial model.

If it's possible to buy in Rand, or at least keep the price points for a year the same, or even over three years, that would help with currency fluctuations. We've recently sold to one of the big banks, a sizable chunk of AppDynamics. We can give them the dollar quote now for year one, certainly. That's no problem, as we know what the current exchange rate is, however, neither us nor the bank has any idea of what the exchange rate will be next year. It becomes a bit of a moving target. What do you plan for? It becomes a bit of a crystal ball exercise with reference to what the exchange rate is going to do, and therefore, what you need to do from a planning point of view, budget-wise. There must be a more elegant way to handle this challenge, although it's certainly not in our domain to do something about it. That's the OEM's prerogative.

I've been using the solution for many years.

The product is quite stable. We don't have a problem with the stability of the product. Now that we are in the cloud, it is even better. Historically, the underlying infrastructure and database that support everything was under our own personal management, inside our data centers. Now that it's in the cloud, it's even better, from that perspective. I don't have a problem with the stability. We certainly haven't experienced challenges that can be attributed to AppDynamics with reference to stability. It's a quite stable product.

Based on the rate or price for this, I would argue, certainly from a South African point of view, very seldom would a small company be able to afford the price. Based on the ecosystem that the customer starts off with, they may have different price points or different scales in order to make it more compelling for smaller and medium-sized business. Certainly, our experience is that the smaller companies, although they love the product and can certainly benefit from the product, find it a bit expensive for them. And this is where the Dynatrace model, possibly, becomes more appealing to them.

Aside from the cost, scalability is quite easy. We regularly add, edit, and delete elements off of our real estate. Scalability isn't much of a challenge. It takes a bit of time to implement and then add additional dashboards and relate the different elements to each other. Once you've done that, it's not that big a challenge.

I'm not technically responsible for technical support. Historically, we would ping the OEM, and ask them to assist us on something. There's always a scenario where you would want bigger or quicker turnaround or a quicker response to these things. That said, it's not a major challenge, though. Like any other company, if they can improve on their turnaround time on technical queries, it may assist all of us, all of their respective customers. However, that said, it's certainly not a major challenge. We do get feedback in a reasonable time. You always want it to be quicker. It's reasonable and I don't think you can necessarily expect quicker turnaround.

They do not have, for example, the concept of following the sun, where you have people on standby 24/7, to really support clients. 

In terms of the setup, you need experienced people with strong skill sets to handle it. If you try and Google your way through it, it's not going to cut it. You will not get the return on investment if you try and do it yourself. It's important to use capable, experienced people to do it. Unfortunately, that comes at a cost as well. 

It depends on how you deploy it and what do you need to do, however. We have a smallish team with the capabilities to implement. We have quite strong skills, and yet, not a big team. That said, the stock standard implementation is not that difficult. When it becomes integrated into a bigger landscape, it will get more complex. You will need to apply your mind seriously to what you display from a dashboard point of view, to effectively translate what happens from a monitoring point of view. Integration into things like a CMDB, as an example, will need to be addressed. 

For example, in our case, we need to have an HP server that needs to read as a CMDB and display it in a stock standard visible dashboard. 

The cost for AppDynamics is becoming a challenge, as well as the apparent AppDynamics move from a Magic Quadrant point of view. We're looking at Dynatrace, which we need to understand. The product is cheaper, however, we are trying to determine if the functionality is the same.

We are heavily invested in AppDynamics, however, in the latest Gartner report, it looks as if Dynatrace did quite well. I believe the Dynatrace product in ESER is slightly cheaper than the AppDynamics one. 

We were looking at potentially diversifying our offer to market through inclusion. We are not proposing dropping AppDynamics. We have a strong relationship with AppDynamics and Cisco, however, it is certainly clear, from a South African point of view, the markets seem to be requiring Dynatrace as opposed to AppDynamics.

In order for us to make an informed decision, I would want to understand the difference between the two products. I haven't worked personally with Dynatrace, historically, and we haven't invested in that product, although they're certainly relevant in the South African market. We need to understand what's the difference between the two, what's the ups and downs. I know AppDynamics quite well and have very little information on Dynatrace. I'd like to attempt at trying to gain some more information in order for us to make a decision on it.

We are an IT company. We are selling this to the market as well. We have a strong relationship with AppDynamics through Cisco. We're a reseller of the product. We have a stronger relationship with AppDynamics, both currently and over the years, to the exclusion of all alternatives. We're using AppDynamics from an application performance monitoring point of view.

I'm not sure if we are currently on the latest version of the solution, however, it's my understanding that we're either are or will be moving to the latest version of the solution.

We bought the Dynamics cloud instance. It's likely based around Europe. I'm not entirely sure. Certainly, from our perspective, I believe it's in Europe in terms of where the controllers sit. We've been on there for the last two years or so. 

The controllers would be in the cloud, yet, certainly, from a historical point of view, we have migrated to the cloud recently. I'm not a hundred percent sure if we're done with that process. We may have some on-premises instances still. As a service that we sell to external customers, there are on-prem instances as well.

In general, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

There are things that they can do to improve the product. We are working with them on that front. We are talking to them on an almost daily basis. Certainly, my team is talking to them daily. Obviously, pricing is a concern - certainly from out geographical point of view. Working the exchange rate differences between the different currencies makes local consumption seriously expensive. 

Dynatrace seems to be gaining momentum in the local market. If you look at Gartner's latest report that I saw fairly recently, Dynatrace is, even from a technical capability point of view, doing more, or better, than AppDynamics. I'm not entirely sure what they use as a basis to plot an application on those quadrants from a Gartner point of view, however, Dynatrace certainly looked as if it went past AppDynamics fairly recently.

I need to better understand the alternative products. It's a question of time until our current anchor customers start asking this very question. Why should we not consider going Dynatrace as opposed to AppDynamics? I don't yet have the ability to have an informed discussion on it.

We're a bank. We do use the predictive tools for the different products of the bank and the application which the bank utilizes.

AppD improves the productivity of Application Engineers, development teams, and other integrated items. Slowness or leak issue is a nut for the team now. Also, the team resolves or understands the network and query path every easy and resolves efficiently.

Our application uptime, increased by 10%, and overall productivity up by 30%.

Ticket or issue down by 12% over five years of use and experience.

Open to be applied and test any area and suite.

The tracing is the most important aspect of the solution. The way it traces the information within the particular application or within the particular infrastructure is great. That actually helps. Apart from that, all of the data that's in the production APM is good.  

Technical support is helpful.

The solution scales well.

The stability is good. 

We do have a combination of areas that need improvement. We do have the integration, such as end-user integration and experience that could be better. It is not just from the response point of view; it is more from the error and error detection point of view. This is due to the fact that these are all the banking applications as used by the banking staff, not by the end-user directly. Based on the banking staff feedback, based on the staff security or maybe dealing with the capital market, there needs to be some improvement.

They do provide the input growth on a daily basis in terms of what is coming in and how we receive the applications and how many we have. We've now started looking for a particular product that can make sure that it should connect with files and statements inside the product. 

The IO ratio, which we are looking for in terms of a report, is one of the concerns. We do monitor those details from AppDynamics, however, reporting and monitoring could be better.

There needs to be more analytics. That is what we are missing from the tool point of view. We need more information geared more towards helping us in making better decisions. When you do the coding that's for a banking situation or maybe in the incidents or capital market, it becomes very important that how much time I'm investing inside the transaction. A transaction which needs to be carried out for either confirming the payments or maybe either releasing the payments - these kinds of things. What I have seen with the use, as of now, is a bit of a lag when we are running on the global cloud or the public clouds, like Azure or the Google platform. 

Right now, we are fighting between three different stakeholders. With the networks, we have a different chat, with the vendors we have a different chat, and with the application team, we have a different chat. This approach doesn't provide a holistic view. Everyone has their own excuses and everyone has their own reasoning and conditions. 

If it can be able to intelligently provide all the things we need to look at, from a data point of view, that would be very useful.

I would say that I have between seven and eight years of experience, hands-on. However, later on in the time frame, over the last four or five years, I have not has as much hands-on experience with the tool. I'm more involved in various solution discussions and strategy building with the platform on top of the tool.

I would say it's very steady and for now, it's very reliable as well. It's stable. We don't have issues with bugs or crashes. 

The solution is very scalable so far in any testing scenario. It performs very well and gives us the expected output which we are looking to improve. 

We are using the solution for more than 600 small and big applications. We have around 78,000 people, including the back-end staff and the development team, that use the solution.

Overall, technical support has been very good. We're very satisfied with their level of support. So far, it's been very good for the bank.

Positive

We have used HPE BSM (now called MF APM). 

Due to these factors, we switch:

1. Costly

2. Implementation complexity

3. Multiple products and Integration

4. Not end-user friendly. 

I was not involved in the initial implementation. Nowadays, the way we approach the teams, sometimes it's very easy when it's an application with a known language like Python or maybe with Ruby or a kind of Java application. In terms of gateways inside the product, sometimes it is very tough, and sometimes it is very easy to get deployed. We're not using any out-of-the-box security. 

We have used model Train for the trainers and enforced all employees with operational training.

We achieve a great number, in terms of applications user availability increase by 30%. In treading, and agents, needs a smooth performance before the market starts. AppD provide a depth to measure any performances challenges, leak issue or even a chain linked issue story.

The pricing is a mixed bag. In some areas they are reasonably priced, however, in others, it's a bit expensive. 

We look for ease of implementation, diagnostics information shared, and controls to the team for working.

We're just an end-user of the product.

We're using the latest version of the solution. 

The deployment model depends on the solution or the size of the product which we are using, as the banks do have private and public clouds. In public clouds, we don't have much of the production instances. It's mainly the development. The free cloud and the cloud environment are completely on a private or in-house, on-premises solution with different ecosystems.

If a proper study has been done, and the solution makes sense for the company, I would recommend the solution. 

I would like to rate the solution at a seven out of ten. That consideration is mainly due to the fact that it covers a large portfolio of the product. It does have support for many other ERP tools. A lot of open customization is available and the product support team can help to customize the product. I've found this tool very useful and helpful on that.

We use this product for the public sector and for really big data centers and infrastructure.

We implemented it for a big bank in Morocco and it monitors all the web interface interfaces. It also monitors solutions like Salesforce, SAP, these kinds of solutions, and it describes the problem really from the root.

You can use one module for each server, for each application, and for each API.

It can monitor the income and the outcome. For example, when you have a website that has online payments, if there are bugs in the online payment for the provider, it will check it, see the problem, and send you an alert.

If the development team makes a mistake with this tool, it points really the mistake and sends it to the manager and it provides also a solution too, as it monitors the code. It provides solutions to make the code more effective.

The initial setup is simple. 

With the solution you can put add-ons on it and it's very customizable. You can customize it easily. If you want something that the tool doesn't have, you can add it easily.

It is stable.

The solution can scale. 

Compared to Dynatrace, which is the biggest competitor to AppDynamics, Dynatrace is a one-agent tool. You don't have to put an agent in every single server or app. However, the monitoring is less effective in Dynatrace. If AppDynamics could do a one-agent function with their actual monitoring effectiveness, it will be the greatest tool.

I've been dealing with the solution for two years now. 

The solution is stable. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product is scalable. 30% of our team uses the solution. They are IT experts and they are DevOps. You have to know how to code and you have to know how to deal with infrastructure servers, et cetera, and you have to know how to put KPIs and everything that the client needs into place.

I'm not sure if clients have any plans to increase usage at this time. 

Technical support is very, very good. 

I'm also familiar with Dynatrace.

The implementation is straightforward. There may be a bit of complexity here and there. You just have to buy the license with the number of agents that you want to install. It's more complex than the Dynatrace setup. It's complex in terms of the fact that you have to know the tool and you have to know how to code. If you want to customize it, you have to know development also, those parts can be very complex, or more complex than Dynatrace, for example.

The deployment takes from one to six months. 

The implementation strategy is, first, we take notice of the entire IT infrastructure, the entire digital environment. When the audit is complete, then we proceed to the tool installation.

We have ten people that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. 

Most of the implementation was handled in-house. We have a delivery center in Tunisia that can handle the setup. We provide assistance to our clients. 

Clients have seen an ROI. For example, we had a client who had to troubleshoot a website and its banking application, and it was buggy all the time. It was not working. I was a client of this bank. Since we implemented this solution, it's been one of the best banking apps in Morocco.

They had great ROI in terms of client satisfaction. For the user, the banking administration processes are easier. You do everything on the app, which now works well.

The return on investment is huge.

The licensing is paid yearly. It depends on the size of the environment, and the number of apps or IT infrastructure that is monitored. It can cost from $30,000 to $500,000. Larger companies, like, for example, Facebook or Amazon, would likely one million dollars. It really depends on the size of the company.

There are some add-ons to put back robots that make tests on the website on something, to see if there is some risk, bugs, or whatever could damage the website.

We didn't evaluate other options.

We're resellers. 

We deal with various versions of the product. The on-premises deployment we had we stopped using a few months ago. Now, we only deal with SaaS deployments. 

In this digital era, this tool is not nice to have, it's a must have. If a company works 100% on digital and they have websites to make SaaS solutions, everything which is on internet can be hacked, can have bugs, et cetera. This tool is really the tool that you must have to prevent this type of risk.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for effective application monitoring. 

It helps us to find out where the bottlenecks are. Once you know, you can go and try to fix that issue. One of the challenges, when you use an ERP system, is the performance and the experience. Whenever we had issues, it was an opportunity for us to find out where the problem is and try to figure it out. It's been helpful in terms of improving system response, in terms of trying to look at that. When there's a problem, we can always go and try to find out. AppDynamics gives synopsis information so we're able to at least find out where exactly the problem is. So that's been very, very helpful on that.

Even though we do not have an end-user experience or database agent, at least on the application side, we still are able to get the information. Otherwise, finding it, trying to find this information, or having a manual process could take some time. It's a time-saving solution for us for sure.

The dashboards of the solution are excellent. They can be customized very easily.

The stability is good.

The solution helps us save a lot of time on certain tasks.

I have not been able to really spend time on the product itself. Developers are more likely to discuss if there are any shortcomings. My usage is quite limited. It would be unfair for me to comment on missing features. I don't spend enough time with the solution, exploring its capabilities. 

Nothing comes to mind in terms of lack of features. I haven't witnessed any aspect that I felt was lacking.

The cost is an area of concern to me on that one. The cloud licensing needs to be improved. It's quite pricey. There are cheaper options other there - including open-source options. 

I've been using the solution for about four years or so. It's been a while. 

The stability of the solution is good. I haven't witnessed any issues that would make me worry about its capabilities. It doesn't crash or freeze and there are no bugs or glitches. The performance has been reliable.

We have two users on the solution currently.

I can't speak to how scalable the solution would be as I've never tried to scale the solution myself. I have no knowledge of how easy or hard it would be to scale.

I haven't worked on other tools personally.

I can't speak to the implementation process. I did not help set anything up. Therefore, I don't have any experience.

The initial setup was done by our application service provider, an ERP application service provider. They configured it, and therefore we never ran into any kind of setup issues in that respect. 

They were fine. We had a good experience with them overall.

There are other options that are open source that wouldn't cost the company any money.

There are many other open-source tools available. When it comes to price comparison, maybe it falls into different categories. It seems to be an expensive product overall, and with other cheaper options on the market, such as DataDog, companies may prefer to pay less or nothing at all.

At some point, we had decided to look for an alternate. Unfortunately, our hands were full and continue to be. We have so many other projects on that, we don't have time to do anything as time-consuming as switching to something else. If I had three months of free time, I would probably go and pick up an alternate, an open-source solution, and maybe implement that due to the fact that the AppDynamics cost is very, very high.

From time to time I do look at some other things, New Relic and some of the other things out there. However, I haven't properly evaluated anything per se. 

We are customers and end-users.

We're always using the latest version of the solution. It's SaaS-based and therefore it is consistently updated immediately as new versions are ready for release. We don't need to manually handle the process. We use AppDynamics' own cloud. We don't use a third-party cloud.

The one area of concern for me is the cost. There are other options - including open-source options.

Overall, I'd rate the solution at a serve out of ten. I'd rate it higher if the solution's price was better.

We have an application that we have made which is the core of our business. In many cases, new code comes out or there is older code that gets mixed with newer code and you will see slowdowns or problems that can happen. This solution gatherings all this different pertinent information about how long a particular piece of code sits in what stack of the application. When you have a slowdown or an issue is happening, you can look through the application processes step by step. You can find out where the application was lagging behind.

Most recently, we had a problem with some SQL queries that were not optimized in our application. It was taking approximately 30 seconds for the code to get a return. We were able to narrow down where the problem was by using this solution to find out what was taking a long time on that particular query, it turned out to be the DVAs. The DVAs were able to be fine-tuned to make the query a little bit more efficient because we were returning much more data than what was actually needed for that part. We were able to simplify it and it went from 30 seconds down half a second.

I have found the main feature of the solution to be its ability to analyze an application's code to see where there are issues. Additionally, it is easy to use and configure.

There are too many installers available for this solution. There is a separate installer for many things, for example, .net. There should be one installer for each operating system, such as Windows and Linux. They then can let you choose what options that you want for that particular operating system because trying to find all the different pieces separately is more complicated than it needs to be.

In an upcoming release, there could be better integration with the infrastructure. Currently, the solution is able to tell you where the problem is but it is not narrow enough. For example, it can show that the issue is in the data server and it took a certain time to process, but that does not necessarily narrow it down to the query where it actually was. You just know that the problem is within the database server. Sometimes it is very obvious it was the query, but other times it could be just that the server is light on resources. It would be beneficial if it could integrate more with some of the infrastructures to have the ability to correlate between the two to see whether the problem is actually with the code or it is a problem with the underlying infrastructure.

I have been using the solution for approximately one year.

The solution is stable.

The scalability of this solution is fantastic. We have approximately 50 developers and six infrastructure engineers using this solution and our parent company has over 400 employees. I have found it to be a very good enterprise solution. 

If we hire more staff I think there could be in increase usage of this solution.

The customer support is good. We have not had many big problems, the application just works. The solution has never taken down any of our servers. Other than calling support to figure out where a particular installer is and how to configure it properly, I have not needed to call them.

The installation was straightforward. There were initial issues with licenses and we had to move some licenses around to give more to their lower environment systems to allow us to put all our information into one place. This took a while, they did not make this part very easy.

Our parent company set up all the backend for this solution and I did all the client configurations on the actual servers. 

You save time by using this solution allowing you to utilize that saved time towards developing new features for your customers versus trying to troubleshoot the ones that are not working properly. The return on investment is instant.

There is a license required for each system that we use the solution on.

This solution is not the cheapest but it works well. You will end up doing more work with a cheaper solution than if you just spent the extra money on a better solution like this one. 

I would advise others wanting to purchase this solution it is well worth the money. If you look at the quantity of time it takes you to track down a problem versus doing it the old-fashioned way, the amount of time saved by using a solution like this helps you move forward more quickly. 

I rate AppDynamics a ten out of ten.

The big problem we've always had is connecting the dots, so to speak. We've never been able to say that the application is having an issue before somebody calls us and tells us, and that's extremely embarrassing. Plus we're a little late to the table. With AppDynamics, you can be able to tell whether they're having errors or whether they're having a slow response time. 

We're able to detect issues now before the customer calls us. Another thing that this helps us with is the fact that there are some conditions we see in the database, for instance, locking and blocking and high CPU, that we've always had been trying to correlate this high CPU and high blocking. We were always wondering: is that necessarily bad or is it just kind of a warning sign or what is that? With this product, we're able to correlate everything with what the application is saying and saying, "we've got blocking, we've got high errors, we've got high response time, therefore it's probably a database and therefore it's probably an issue." Before we had this product, we weren't able to do that.

This solution is great at alerting us to issues and letting us know if anything is correlated.

The release management capabilities are great. If you do a new release, you have to ask: how's will it perform? Is it going to have problems? Before it was hard to actually measure. Now we're able to precisely measure the performance and also the error rate. That's very helpful.

It's also helpful with building dashboards. You can build dashboards for different parts of the company, for the operations, for the application, for the infrastructure, all the above.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The stability has been good.

At first, I thought it had a high learning curve. However, it's not so much. It's just different. It's different from all the other tools and it's just not as intuitive as it could be. I'm not sure how you fix that. For instance, the training on the dashboards that is provided could be a little bit better, as could the use cases. They should have some good examples out there. As it is right now, I had to scour YouTube to find some stuff.

I've been using the solution for a few years. I started using it around 2015.

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable.

I'm relatively new at this company, and we're doing a POC on it right now. We have it on about 75 machines. In terms of scalability, my guess is the architecture will allow it, is t's in the cloud. It should scale. However, I really don't know here in the company where I use it. I know other companies have scaled thousands. I personally haven't experienced that myself, however.

As it is going well, we're likely to expand it. That said, we're still just in the POC phase.

The initial setup is pretty simple. It's not overly complex. Implementing it shouldn't be a problem.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, the team is pretty much my team. It's a site reliability engineering team, and it's pretty small. The people who'll actually be maintaining it will not only be implementing, so to speak, but utilizing it and customizing it. That will ultimately also include a lot of other teams, like your operation, application, and infrastructure teams.

I can't speak to the exact cost of the solution. It's not a part of the product I handle.

I would advise those considering the solution to be patient and stick with it. A lot of these tools are pretty simple, however, they're simply used. For instance, they measure CPU and network and memory and stuff like that. The graphics may be pretty flashy, however, it doesn't provide the hardcore data that AppDynamics does. That's why you need to kind of just relax and stay with it a bit and you'll be successful. If you're just looking for something flashy to give you back immediate results that you can use today or tomorrow, it's probably not the right fit.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I work with a global bank that operates across Asia, the United States, and Europe. It's a few thousand people. We primarily use AppDynamics for Kubernetes, web applications, middleware APIs, Java, etc. In terms of technology, it's either Java Spring Boot or some of the API calls, and some of the use cases include continuously checking API availability. 

Some use cases are related to front-end tuning or the user experience across the globe. The applications are used across America, Europe, and some parts of Asia. It's a global system, and user experience is what we wanted to measure. AppDynamics is SaaS. I've never used an on-prem version. The controllers are mostly on AWS, while the agents are deployed on-premises.

Transition tracing is the most valuable is pretty easy and useful, but the user experience piece is also good. 

The Kubernetes cluster agent has not yet matured. That's one area that requires a lot of improvement. You have two options for implementing the Kubernetes agent. One is deployed in DocCloud, but you can't download those images from DocCloud for security reasons at most organizations, so this option isn't that useful.

The installation for the second option isn't that user-friendly. Transition tracing for the Kubernetes application is challenging. You have to navigate to a new set of user interfaces in AppDynamics, so that's the pain point. There is an icon you need to click on to get a newer user interface.

I've been using AppDynamics for almost five years. 

AppDynamics scaled well up to around 3,000 agents. The performance deteriorated after that, while Dynatrace could support more than 10,000 agents. We were surprised that AppDynamics' scalability is not so good.

I had a good experience with tech support. When we raised a ticket with AppDynamics, we usually got a response within a few hours. If we set up a call, their engineers will get on the phone with us. That was also reasonably good. 

Setting up AppDynamics is relatively straightforward except for the Kubernetes part. It was all easy for the Kubernetes cluster agent part. We implemented thousands of agents using Ansible, so it was automated. It was about 15 to 20 minutes in terms of pipeline and restarting because a lot of the scripting and automation were already done. 

The AppDynamics license is divided. It isn't one all-inclusive license. Dynatrace has one agent, but AppDynamics has different sets of licenses. You need to define your use case and what you want to monitor. That is something you need to be clear about. Once you know your use case clearly, take time to figure out your target state metric, and go for AppDynamics. 

I rate AppDynamics seven out of 10. In the modern world, Dynatrace is moving toward helping the companies in the current landscape, but AppDynamics is a second-generation company. It needs to adopt more of a lifecycle perspective rather than limiting itself to triage, tracing, etc.

I use AppDynamics when there's a performance issue with an application, but if it's a network-related performance issue, I use Accedian Skylight.

What I like best about AppDynamics is that it's functional, particularly in APM in Java and .NET.

What needs improvement in AppDynamics is installation. The installation process needs to be more straightforward. Deploying the product is also tricky, so this is an area for improvement.

Pricing is another area for improvement in AppDynamics because its current pricing model is no longer suited to containers and technologies.

The product used to be the best in the market ten years ago, but it now needs to regain its position as the leading product in its niche.

I've been using AppDynamics for ten years. I started my job ten years ago and remained in this area.

In terms of stability, AppDynamics is a four out of ten.

Scalability is the product's performance when you scale, and because the company is a SaaS company, it's not a very big deal. However, AppDynamics uses a MySQL database behind the engine, which is not the best for keeping metrics.

The solution could be more scalable and dynamic in terms of installation and configuration. Scalability-wise, AppDynamics is a four out of ten.

The support for AppDynamics used to be very good, and now it could be better. The support team could be more knowledgeable.

The technical support for AppDynamics is a four out of ten for me.

Neutral

I'm using AppDynamics, Datadog, and Dynatrace simultaneously.

Setting up and configuring AppDynamics is challenging because you need to give specific names to every container and server you deploy. Each name has to be unique, so it isn't easy to think of names in terms of dynamic environments. This means that when you move to microservices, AppDynamics has a very complex setup.

I'd rate the setup for the product as two out of ten.

The pricing model for AppDynamics isn't good. You have to subscribe to a yearly or a three-year licensing, which isn't very handy.

You buy a license for five hundred containers for a very large application, and you only need the containers for a limited time in that domain. For example, you only need five hundred containers once in that specific year, but you must buy five hundred licenses.

The current AppDynamics pricing model isn't fair. It's one out of ten pricing-wise. The solution is one of the most expensive in the market today.

I've switched to solutions such as Dynatrace, Datadog, and AppDynamics.

My rating for AppDynamics is four out of ten because it has a lot of room for improvement.