AppDynamics Reviews

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.

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 use it to solve issues that my clients encounter, such as application slowness. It helps me identify whether the issue is related to the database, server, or CPU memory management.

Moreover, I use it to find solutions and provide recommendations to my colleagues.

This solution not only provides answers but also provides sensor data. This allows us to quickly resolve issues that developers may take a long time to solve. In essence, it helps us address problems at an early stage. Moreover, it is especially useful in production servers where real users encounter numerous issues.

There are numerous issues that arise during peak times, and AppDynamics makes it easy for us to identify the problem areas and determine the appropriate resolutions. This is how it helps us find solutions effectively.

Regarding improvements, I believe the dashboard could be more optimized. Although it claims to be optimized, I think it should be even more convenient, especially for advanced users. 

Additionally, the documentation can be a bit challenging. It would be beneficial if the documentation provided clear solutions for every problem. In my opinion, the documentation could be improved.

I worked with AppDynamics for around three to four months. I have been working directly with it for the past year.

I use the latest version. 

It is stable, but the only downside is the licensing part. Other than that, it's a reliable product with no major issues.

It is highly scalable. There are no additional limitations in terms of scalability.

In my company, we have around 50 to 100 clients using this tool. Although it can be a bit expensive, it is still being used extensively to solve various problems.

It's straightforward, not too complex. However, it requires proper learning to effectively use it.

The deployment process typically takes around one to two hours, depending on the system. Once the setup is complete, we can proceed with the implementation process.

First, there's a need for basic knowledge of OS, especially for Windows and .NET. Additionally, understanding concepts like Dynatrace and AppDynamics, their functioning, and architecture is crucial. These are the key methods involved in the deployment process. If it's a cloud solution, then AWS or Azure are the recommended options. If it's on-premises, then using either Linux or Windows is ideal.

For deployment, we need to focus on event configuration, which involves learning about network events and configuration. Once we understand this, we can proceed with the deployment setup. There is no frequent deployment. In case the deployment is not satisfactory, we may need to learn about Linux and Windows concepts.

I have seen some ROI. 

It is an expensive solution. It's on a yearly basis. We need to pay for it annually.

I have used Dynatrace. The main difference between the two is that AppDynamics utilizes different data mechanisms, while Dynatrace uses a unified agent approach. This simplifies the complexity of Dynatrace, providing more visibility and root cause analysis. In terms of benefits, AppDynamics is more scalable than analytics.

Overall, I would rate it 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.

AppDynamics is an APM tool. We use it for application performance monitoring for a financial company. It is an end-to-end monitoring solution for any application and works with different technologies, such as Java and .NET.

The company was able to monitor their transactions with the financial institution to determine where the problems were in a particular brand. The company was satisfied with the performance of the solution.

This solution has reduced our customer's time to resolve issues.

The most valuable features of AppDynamics is the scalability and monitoring.

AppDynamics is new to the cloud and could improve its cloud services, they are following a monolithic monitoring approach.

It's an agent-based software that must be deployed multiple times whereas competitors have one agent that can deploy everywhere.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately six years.

AppDynamics is a stable solution, but sometimes the analytics goes down and does not work or customers' addresses do not get collected. However, overall it is stable.

All of the IT and business staff are using the solution.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The support could improve.

I used Dynatrace prior to AppDynamics. The switch was a business decision.

The process of implementing AppDynamics is straightforward, but it ultimately depends on your specific use case. You can easily implement an agent if you have a simple use case.

There is an agent that needs to be copied into the project and actioned to start.

Using it can be somewhat complex as it requires manual configuration, such as when creating a dashboard. If you have a more complex use case, the manual configuration can take a considerable amount of time. Additionally, there is a learning curve associated with this tool, and it takes time to gain expertise. It is not something that anyone can easily configure without investing the necessary time and effort.

It takes three to four months to become an expert in the tool to be able to use it effectively.

To complete the implementation of the solution the staff that have access to production are involved. There are a few people that are needed.

There is a license needed to use the solution and it is expensive. The licensing model needs to improve.

There are other solutions that are better at APM than AppDynamics.

AppDynamics is primarily an APM tool, and if you're looking for end-to-end monitoring and AI ops capabilities, it may not be the best fit. For instance, if you want to analyze transitions, pinpoint failures, and view logs all in the same tool, AppDynamics may not provide a complete solution.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to monitor transactions and to keep track of, like, data analytics.

I like that AppDynamics allows every organization to have what they want to see, like for my organization, we're able to customize the dashboard to show us details of what we want to see in our transactions. So, it shows us the transactions that are coming in, outgoing transactions, and field transactions. So, we had the freedom to customize, and I think that was priceless.

Regarding Search Guard functionality, there is room for improvement. Also, I think it was pretty good for the area I used.

I have experience with AppDynamics.

I rate the solution's stability as a ten out of ten because it is a very stable platform.

It was scalable on other platforms where we needed to buy licenses because we simply had to customize it again to accommodate whatever we were adding. We didn't use it much since many users weren't using it. It was just for the IT and executive personnel who wanted to view the dashboard. Yeah. So, it was quite easy. Up to 200 users were using the solution.

The initial setup was quite easy because we were given an option or leverage to ask AppDynamics to send staff members over for training. After that training, they were able to come back and deploy the solution for us. So, the process was quite easy, and they were also offering support. For deployment, we prefer to deploy it on-premises. So, we have it in our DR and production environment. The deployment process didn't take long since it was done by AppDynamics' team, which is quite a big institution.

We did the implementation ourselves, but we had their support virtually.

I have experienced an ROI using the solution. So, AppDynamics provides us with details to have a live view of our transactions, especially whenever we're having failures, during which we have a live view of it provided by the monitoring guys. We link it to our MySQL so we can query what transactions are failing or what error they are getting. So we know what the customers are facing from the comfort of our offices. The solution was worth the money.

There were no added costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Since it is an excellent application, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. I would suggest others use the products and just make sure that they get in touch with the administrator of AppDynamics so that they can devote their time and energy to learning about it so that they can at least administer the platform properly.