AppDynamics Reviews

My favorite part of the application is that it auto-baselines the application that you instrument with it. I work with other monitoring tools such as SCOM and Splunk. These tools are great, but the automatic baselining offered by AppDynamics is like an easy button.

Products like SCOM and Splunk require you to have to know exactly what you want to alert on. From a Splunk perspective, that is generally a very specific log entry such as an error. SCOM deals with hard thresholds and there is work to tune those to be meaningful for an organization. What make sense for organization A might be completely different for organization B. For example, when to alert on a drive filling up. Does 80% make sense and give enough proactive warning to get the issue resolved?

With AppDynamics, the product keeps track of how your application is performing and rolls that into an aggregated value that is compared against how the application is performing right now. It then lets you alert on a deviation away from what is considered normal. This creates immediate value in the alerts it provides without any real interaction from a tuning standpoint.

With its automatic flow maps, as well as its ability to automatically baseline key metrics out of the box, it allows support individuals to quickly focus in on the exact location of the application problem reducing MTTR. It also has enabled us to be more devops focused, creating stable releases in a faster, more efficient manner.

As an administrator, I would love to be able to manage the update of agents from the controller itself. This would allow for enhanced version control, as well as eliminate the need to target various applications and their corresponding servers individually due to their unique configurations.

I would also like to see better license management from an auditing standpoint. Knowing how many licenses are being consumed by an application would be a great feature. Being a large organization, it would assist with understanding total cost of ownership, as well as growth predictions on a per-application basis.

We have been using the product for the last three years for numerous applications.

While I wouldn’t consider this an issue, when the business originally brought AppDynamics in, a centralized support structure had not been identified. We ended up with a controller for each application, which is not the ideal enterprise solution. When I took on support of the product with my team, we consolidated to an on-premise enterprise controller. That process was extremely easy to perform so, for us, it was really more of a bad design problem that my team had to fix.

Technical support and customer service have been amazing. I have been able to get support both through the portal, and from our sales support extremely fast. They have a great customer service focus. This is one of the reasons that deployment of the product is also so easy.

AppDynamics setup is very easy from an installation process. The best part is, when you decide to go with the product, they work directly with you to assist in the initial implementation to ensure you get the most of the product.

AppDynamics helped with the initial implementation. That was very focused with the support teams of the applications. I would absolutely recommend getting your development teams involved ASAP, so they begin to use the tool and see its immediate value to them.

We also evaluated New Relic. In the end, the features, ease of use, and customer service provided by AppDynamics was what tipped the scale towards them.

They offer a free trial. If you are struggling with finding the root cause of a reoccurring issue, then give it a shot. We got immediate, actionable results.

My rating reflects its ease of use as well as the scope of solutions that it can monitor, including MongoDB.

Transactional awareness. The team really enjoyed being able to track a transaction from start to finish. Not really a feature but I find the interface easy to use.

Gave us a tool to track down slow transactions quickly.

LDAP integration.

1 year

Just LDAP integration.

We haven't seen any stability issues.

We haven't seen any scalability issues.

Customer Service: 8 out of 10 - I felt that the AppDynamics team was very engaged and more than willing to help but we never really got to a reasonable solution within the timeframe I had.Technical Support: 7 out of 10 - same reasoning as above.

AppDynamics setup was straightforward.

In-house

Our use case for AppDynamics is helping customers with performance problems and applications.

What I found is that there is a lot of room to develop things in it and to connect to other tools like IBM.

An area that has room for improvement on the CR and ERP would be the addition of monitoring of the internal solution. For example, you can monitor the day-to-day and everything in the transactions with AppDynamics, but there's also a lot going on in the kernel itself that you cannot monitor. The automation needs to improve as well. As it stands, a lot of customization needs to happen before you can use AppDynamics.

We have been using AppDynamics for four years. 

AppDynamics is scalable for medium-sized companies, but it is more difficult for enterprise companies.

The AppDyniamics technical support is good. We haven't had any problems with them. They answer very quickly.

The initial setup was not really straightforward, but it was also not complex.

We handled the implementation in-house. The installation is not really an issue. You can install AppDynamics in an hour, but the configuration takes a long time before you have everything configured.

Return on investment for most tools takes a long time. Even then, I don't know if it's really the tools giving you a return on investment. Tools point to a problem, but they don't point to a solution. Your engineer needs to come up with a solution.

When deciding whether or not to go with AppDynamics, first take a look at what you need to monitor and what the value of the monitoring is. There are a lot of things that an organization may need to monitor, like, for example, if I have the power system on, I may need to monitor the microcode and the window system. However, AppDynanics doesn't monitor these kinds of things. There still need to be a lot of patches implemented in order to improve performance. Also, these tools give a false positive that the performance is wrong, but then only adjust one parameter in the microcode.

Yes, IBM APM, and Dynatrace

On-premises

If we have an issue, it is useful for finding the root cause of incidences. So, we use it for troubleshooting.

When we have a large issue, we bring our teams together, working with AppDynamics. This has allowed us to reduce the time to recover applications (for example).

• Performance monitoring
• The real user monitoring: It helps us evaluate our customers' real experiences, which is valuable as an eCommerce company. We can look into their detail, one by one. It is helpful because it is deterministic.  
  

I would like them to change their business model for scalability to accommodate growing companies. The business model should be more flexible.

Three to five years.

I am okay with the stability. 

The scalability is good. However, the issue is you need to know in advance how many agents that you will use. With companies similar to ours (in growth mode), this is difficult to forecast. 

They have a very good customer service team that checks in with customers, asking about our experiences.

It took about two weeks to complete the entire implementation and integration of the product. It was easy.

With some training, we were able to implement and configure AWS with a little help.

It is expensive. However, our time to recover has been reduced, and this product has helped recuperate costs and provided us with ROI.

We did not originally evaluate any other solutions.

It is an interesting application. We have tried others: New Relic and Dynatrace. Finally, we decided to stay with AppDynamics because its graphical configuration is very intuitive for our teams to work on.

AppDynamics is doing a very good job.

We used it on-premise, then moved to AWS. On-premise is very similar to using AWS.

We have a complex application. We do payments which are highly transactional in nature. With different kinds of workloads that you see in the production environment, how do you really track down specific issues which your lab testing environment can't really reproduce? Your production environment gives you certain workloads, which basically enable you to look at your application more closely. No lab test could really simulate that sort of a load. APM really helps us in getting down to the bottom of these sorts of workloads; how code responds to these sorts of workloads and how we can make our application deliver better latency and a better end-user experience.

Given an extremely transactional, highly complex workload, you just cannot use your testing lab to stress all of your code parts. First of all, it has made us very agile. What happens is, now, you can actually take any one of your deployments or releases, roll it out into production into a very limited set of servers, look at how the APM works, and it gives you insights onto the how the code that you just pushed out is performing.

If everything is fine over a period of a few minutes or a few hours, you can actually roll your deployment out very quickly. You don't have to have an extremely complicated test harness in your preproduction environment. You don't have to go through extensive testing cycles before releasing something into production. It really makes us agile in terms of releasing to market quicker.

For me, the single largest area with room for improvement that I've been requesting the AppDynamics team to deliver for us is APM support for Ruby on Rails and for HHPM. These are the two language environments that we use quite heavily in production. That's something that I'd like to see support for.

Stability depends on the configuration. We work very closely with our solution architects, with AppDynamics, because there's always this question in the minds of consumers: A tool which can do so much as AppDynamics, how do you ensure that it runs with minimal overhead? You've really got to work with the AppDynamics team to size out your environments; that makes it stable for you. That's been our experience.

I can't comment on scalability because our infra is fairly small. We have a total of around 150 nodes that we could probably end up instrumenting. Right now, we do far less than that, so I can't really comment.

Technical support has been pretty good. In our case, we use a few programming languages which are still not supported by AppDynamics, so we've reached out to them to help us with road map information. They've been pretty transparent about when support could get rolled out to these sorts of languages that we use.

For the more run-of-the-mill sort of tickets, where we have issues with the configuration or using the product, it's been pretty good. We've liked our experience with the tech support team.

We had been using a mix of proprietary tools that we developed in house, along with third-party solutions. We were able to get the job done, no doubt about that, but the problem is never having an integrated view of how your application performs. We have uptime alerting running differently; we have business KPI monitoring being done differently; and we have end-user behavior being tracked differently. It was very hard to find a correlated view across all of these four. To debug specific sessions or to debug specific instances, I think that's where AppDynamics really comes in. The integrated view that it gives of your application.

I was not directly involved in the initial setup but my team was. It's pretty straightforward. I think it's really important that whoever is setting up the application first fundamentally understands what the application does. I think that's critical. The tool is fairly complex and powerful. The setup needs to be handled by someone who, on this side, really knows what the application being monitored can do. If you put a rookie on the job, it's going to be really tough.

We did consider other vendors. We were looking at New Relic. As a developer and as someone who builds and has a team who builds stuff, I feel New Relic is actually a very powerful option. However, as I mentioned, we wanted something that could work on-premise.

We went with AppDynamics because we are in the payments industry and from a compliance perspective, we needed an on-premise solution and AppDynamics was, I think, the best solution that also worked on-premise.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics for us is, first of all, from the product perspective. As I mentioned, we had a mix of various proprietary and third-party solutions that we were using earlier. We needed a product that could provide end-to-end visibility into the infrastructure and the application. That was a high priority for us. Beyond that, what we really needed was a global presence with enough strong local support. That was something that AppDynamics brought to the table.

Make use of all of the training material and the university. There's some really useful information in there. Also, the two other things that I’ve mentioned elsewhere:

• Ensure the person who is deploying AppDynamics in your environment is among the top-most performers of your team, someone who knows your application in and out.
• Combine that with good, strong consultation by the AppDynamics team. Get these two in place and you've got a winner on your hands.

The reason why I have not rated it higher is the lack of support for HHPM and Ruby; bring them both and I would rate it higher.

The main benefit we get from that is it's a quicker time to know what's wrong. It does help us to have a better mean time to resolution, but the cool thing is, it lets us get to the root cause faster.

My favorite part of the solution is the ability to drill into the transaction snapshots. The transaction snapshots let you find out where the application broke; it pinpoints where in the call stack, and then how long it took to resolve. If there is a known error code there, it gives you some great information about what happened to the transaction. We can see what the hot spots were, not just the core error that was found. You can also see how long you're spending in the different modules, how long you're spending in your longest running database files, and so on.

We have a lot of mainframe technology in our business. They're just barely getting into Java-based z/OS agents. They have just started to appear inside AppDynamics now. We would love to see support for more types of agents in the mainframe world. We're a very heavy financial transaction company. A lot of our largest platforms still have a significant number of mainframes, and it's not just one type. We've got Tandem, Stratus, HP; we run the whole gamut for both what we have or what some of our clients might be running.

We are only having trouble with one aspect of the solution. The rest of the solution has actually been quite solid. We're actually quite pleased with it.

We’re having difficulty with the Apache web agent. It seems to be consuming too many resources of AppDynamics. One of their core philosophies is that they don't want to cause any harm in the application that they are monitoring. In this case, this is their only agent that does misbehave, and consumes a little more resources than you would like.

Luckily, we haven't had to add more resources to it. Before we went into our AppDynamics installation, we brought in AppDynamics consulting, their professional services group. We looked at the number of transactions we were going to be doing. When they sized our environment, they guided us to the right amount.

Technical support is better than in most of my experiences with most companies. They don't solve tickets as fast as we would like, but hey, who does? They are responsive; they will work with you; they make you feel like they are paying attention to the problem. Our sales engineers, especially; our local sales teams, they're fantastic for the support we get from them. They are definitely above par from what I have experienced from other vendors.

We previously used a competitor's product. The company was OpTier, which was going bankrupt at the time. When they announced their bankruptcy, we started an RFP. We brought in, actually, 14 different companies who responded to our initial proposal. There were four finalists that came in and did demos, and then we whittled that down to just two companies that we put into a head-to-head competition. Then we had different people from different product teams throughout the company score the process along the whole way. We had people from the support side, app devs, database guys, system admins, system devs. Everybody gave their scores and when it came down to it, the two companies and their scores were nearly neck and neck.

What pulled us in, what won it for AppD, was pricing, at that point.

Initial setup wasn't complex. We were involved from the start on it. Our team is still on track for how we first architected the product versus how it's been deployed today. It's the same folks. For getting the controllers up and running, getting the product up and running, there weren’t any technical challenges that were unexpected, whatsoever.

It's definitely worth using. The overall impact the tool has had in our environment has been very positive. Some of the best success stories we have got from the product have actually come from VPs over those different product areas, when they find out how AppDynamics scored a critical win. My advice to the other teams would be to involve all the other product teams, everybody who's going to be involved with it. Get them involved early on into the adoption, on what it can do. You don't want to have management overseeing it and not know what the product is.

You want that buy-in early on in the process, especially with a high number of applications. We have over 2,000 applications on our radar that we're going to instrument into it. Getting buy-in for cooperation, not only to schedule and prioritize, but which ones are getting in, on whose orders, and who's getting disrupted on it. The competition among senior management for who was going to get it first became quite intense later on.

We’re pretty happy, except for the web agent. That's the only part where we have some angst over the product. We've had discussions about that with AppDynamics.

Line-level tracing: This helped massively with identifying and eliminating performance bottlenecks. We had a significant slowdown in our app that we were struggling to identify. Using AppDynamics to trace hosted code to bottlenecks proved invaluable. This however only got us so far. When we reached the limit with AppDynamics, we sought advice from their technical team. After all, we were using a very expensive product that didn’t get us all the way. Under NDA, AppDynamics took a working branch of our code and investigated the bottleneck internally. They did this using other tools besides AppDynamics. This was beneficial to them to identify things that could not be achieved with AppDynamics. Later, they were able to discover a way to make this easier within AppDynamics.

AppDynamics has become the go-to tool for issue identification. The DevOps team was able to take more ownership for defect detection to improve discovery time and reduce risk of issues becoming known to end users. It also reduced the involvement of third-line support in issue detection.

The UI is clumsy and slow. The AppDynamics portal had an Adobe Flash UI, a bit dated for a modern SaaS. It had an old feel to it; unusual for a company with advanced technology. It would often take a while for the portal (controller) to load, making it a little tedious to use at times. I’m not sure why it took so long, maybe it was doing real-time processing of data, which, if so, I’m more forgiving.

I used it for three years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Techccial support is 10/10. See a case study from my previous company here: https://www.appdynamics.com/case-study/the-test-factory/.

We previously used New Relic. We switched because AppDynamics offered a broader and deeper range of functionality.

Initial setup was straightforward for Azure virtual machines, but not so easy for cloud services. The installable was difficult to get running in cloud services, but the AppDynamics technical team were supportive.

AppDynamics is a premium tool. You’ll soon realise this expense would’ve been greater without AppDynamics.

Before choosing this product, I personally did not evaluate other options.

Java application instrumentation across a microservices architecture build.

When adopting / implementing a micro services application stack, you have to get all of the services to move / upgrade at the same time. This has led to a disjointed implementation of AppD. Disjointed implementations of tools do not lead to home run capabilities to build / run / operate.

Insights outside of the code we write. We find some of our adopted libraries perform sub-optimally. Sub-optimal performance leads to a search for alternate libraries to help us scale.

Transactions are not collected across the board. Your application needs to fail before AppD starts collecting deep metrics.

Three to five years.