AppDynamics Reviews

We use AppDynamics mainly for troubleshooting the database side. If there is any issue that is happening, we go through layer by layer from the start of the application, for example, the UI layer. We go all the way to the database layer to show where the exact problems are. Additionally, we use it for other monitoring and alerting purposes.

The solution could be more user-friendly for diagnostic purposes. Anyone who is using the solution should be able to infer what that error is about, they should be able to troubleshoot it better.

I have been using AppDynamics for a year and a half.

AppDynamics has been stable.

I have found AppDynamics to be scalable.

We have 25 users using this solution in my organization.

We have previously used HP OpenView and Dynatrace. The client wanted to move from Dynatrace to AppDynamics and this is why we are using AppDynamics.

AppDynamics is easier to install compared to other solutions.

We have our own IT team that can support the installation. We have partners that can assist with the installation if needed.

There is a license to use this solution. However, the clients pay for the licenses we are the service provider.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

It helps us find the root cause quicker, so it's helped us with MTTI and MTTR. In fact, just last week, we had an issue. They used our other tools to try to find the solution, and they said, “This is the root cause.” Then, we were analyzing it in AppDynamics, and we said, “You know what? We're seeing something different.” They doubled back and realized that what AppDynamics had shown was actually the root cause, not what they were initially thinking was the root cause.

AppDynamics is very easy to use, and easy to deploy in our environment, especially because we're a central organization that helps other application teams with their APM solution. For me, that flow map makes all the difference for the customers. You show them the flow map. You tell them, “OK, green is good, yellow is a problem, and red is warning. Where do you see your problem?” They're like, “Right there.” That makes life a lot easier, compared to all the other tools that I've used in the past.

That visual representation’s been really good, also the overhead that AppDynamics creates is quite small. We've tried Dynatrace in the past. Some of the applications didn't work as well with Dynatrace. Those are two of the things that makes AppDynamics different.

Get me Blitz; basically, their next generation architecture, which they're actually running in their SaaS environment. Instead of having just one, big controller with a gigantic database behind it, they're moving towards a more distributed storage, which would be horizontally scalable. We've been looking for it for almost a year now.

I would be willing to pilot it in my non-prod environment, just to see how it works, because ultimately that's going to give us the same visibility that we're getting right now, but we can just keep scaling; just keep pumping more and more applications. As the controller gets bogged down, we just add more hardware. That's going to be key for us.

We've had some growing pains with AppDynamics but overall, the products been very stable. Their support’s awesome, so whenever we have issues, we open a support ticket. They jump on and they come up with a solution to help us. Even with the few minor hiccups that we've had, I would say overall, it’s very stable.

Scalability is excellent. In the last year, we've gone from a few hundred metrics to close to 10,000 metrics per minute injestion.

I haven't seen any other vendor even come close to AppDynamics’ support. I've been raving about them. I have told the guy that runs their support organization, how great he's doing the job.

The thing that sets them apart is, if I have an issue, I open a ticket with them. Within 2-4 hours, I have the solution. I don't get an email saying, "We're looking into it.", and then not hear from them for two days or for a week, which I've had with other APM providers.

With AppDynamics, they're on it. If they can't find a solution, they're going to get on a GoToMeeting to duplicate the problem. They'll get their engineers involved. We've had multiple times when they got the developers involved on the GoToMeeting because the support guy couldn't get beyond that. He just got the developer for that product involved to come up with a solution.

It’s a funny story. The PoV was done before I joined the company. I was a Dynatrace user, Intrascope, New Relic. I've done pretty much all the major APM providers in my career. At my previous job, I was using Dynatrace and my entire interview was, “Why are you guys using AppDynamics instead of Dynatrace?” I'd done a PoC of AppDynamics about five years ago. At that time, the product was in its infancy and it didn't really provide what we were looking for. There were a lot of issues; they were at version 2 or something like that at that time. When I joined the company, it had already been decided that AppDynamics was what we were going to use, so I didn't have a say in that.

Very quickly, my impression of the product changed. As I used it, I was like, "Whoa!" Between version whatever that I PoV'd with in the past compared to version 4, there was a night-and-day difference. Very quickly, I became a proponent of AppDynamics.

Our setup was quite complex. Our leadership decided that we were going to use one controller for everything, and we've got thousands of applications. Now, they're reaching the point where they’re realizing that it's not feasible to have just one controller for our huge infrastructure.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, until we started pushing some really heavy applications, and then we started seeing problems. We got involved with some of their tuning experts. They're basically getting every ounce of power out of the machine that they can. It's been an excellent journey.

Dynatrace was on the short list. My predecessor did a comparison between the two tools. One of the issues that we saw with Dynatrace was scalability. Dynatrace itself pushes so much information. It's capturing every single transaction, compared to AppDynamics, which captures a subset of the transactions. For Dynatrace, you just need massive hardware and you have to have multiple servers because you run out of space very quickly. That was one of the issues with Dynatrace.

The other issue was it didn't play nicely with some of our applications. We actually saw problems with one of our critical business applications that we were doing a PoV with. When we put AppDynamics on that same application, we didn't see any issues. Dynatrace was creating quite a large memory overhead; AppDynamics, under 1%.

When I'm looking for a vendor, before, the most important criteria used to be, what does the tool provide, but after working with AppDynamics, it's support. It doesn't matter how great the tool is; if the support isn't that good, you can't get the most out of the tool.

Do a PoV of AppDynamics on a critical application. Get that initial win, and use that win to drive adoption throughout the organization.

I haven’t rated it higher because of the comparison between AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Dynatrace does give you more, richer information, but it's not scalable. There are certain things that I kind of miss with AppDynamics but it's not something that I'm going to cry about because of the other overall value that it provides, and the ease of use of it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we're also using RUM and Mobile UM.

The dynamic baselining is a big plus; being able to get rolling baselines for different times of the day, different days of the week, days of the month. Alerting is a big feature; being able to receive alerts when we have things that kind of go out of bounds. Dashboarding is also a pretty big one that we use a lot, along with the API; being able to put in our own data and add that to dashboards related to what AppDynamics itself is finding.

It's led to a very big decrease in MTTR when issues are encountered, as well as helped us to be a lot more proactive to be able to identify issues and customer degradation before customers start complaining about it.

The biggest complaint that we have at this point is the ability to exclude certain time frames from the dynamic baselining. If we have an event or something like that that we know performance goes significantly outside of the baseline, that ends up being part of the dynamic baseline, so you don't have the ability to alert and stuff on that going forward.

Overall, stability is very good.

I haven't had any issues with availability or scalability.

I did not previously use a different solution; no APM kind of tools.

We realized we needed an APM solution mostly because of the growing complexity of the application. It's a lot easier to monitor an application, per se, if you have good control and you know what all the application is doing. I think most people would agree that as applications are growing, and becoming more and more complex, you have less and less people that actually understand what's going on. You need something like AppDynamics that will help bridge that gap between the people's understanding and what the application is actually doing.

The overall setup of the application is extremely straight forward. We had a little added complexity, due to the size of our deployment, but really, it is far more straightforward than all the competitors’ products that we looked at.

We also primarily looked at CA Wily Introscope and Dynatrace.

The biggest reason we chose AppDynamics was their ROI. AppDynamics was by far the quickest and easiest to get good results out of. The other two products required a lot more investment both as far as capital for purchasing systems to handle the load, as well as time to get the systems to really have useful data in them.

The best advice would probably be to make sure that you know what your requirements are and that you're analyzing the tools to your requirements. Look at things such as capital and time to roll out. That makes a big difference in the ROI for a product.

Overall, it's a very strong product. It has most of the features that I think we need. There are a few things that could be improved, like the ability to exclude stuff from the baseline. It's not quite perfect, but other than some usability improvements, I think it's a very great product.

We use AppDynamics APM, as well AppDynamics EUM.

We use this solution to help reduce incidents in our production environment by providing usage and performance metrics, application dependencies like databases, .net services, caching, and much more.

This solution has helped us to reduce the number of incidents in our Production environment and improve the performance of applications.

The uptime of our critical applications went up, and it has enabled us to set new SLA metrics.

This solution makes it fast and easy to diagnose performance issues and exceptions/errors in application coding.

After a major incident, root cause analysis is conducted and, most of the time, we understand what caused the incident and how it can be prevented from happening again.

The Web Dashboards are also very useful and sometimes can really prevent incidents before they happen.

Upgrading application and machine agents on a large scale is a nightmare; we cannot push upgrades through the platform, meaning, manual upgrades each time a new major release is out. Each time we have a new major release, we need to do a Rollout.

The Mobile AppDynamics app is a "Thing of the Past". AppDynamics should evolve the features presented by it; redesign it. Dashboards are impossible to read, and drilling down issues through it is impossible.

The worst part is that the AppDynamics SaaS Environment has a lot of downtimes, and AppDynamics, despite our efforts, does not give us any feedback on these downtimes/incidents.

Update: 04/2021 (4 years using AppD)

We still face outages in out SaaS controller... The feedback we get about each outage is really limited, and especially without sharing any improvement plan.

We have been using this solution for more than two years.

04/2021 Update (four years using AppD)

Poor stability of the SaaS environment.

Scaling this solution is fast and user-friendly.

Support for agent problems is accurate and fast.

Support for SaaS solution stability is very poor.

Setup was fast and straightforward.

We used a vendor partner team for our deployment, and we found them to be very skilled.

We have seen ROI in less than twelve months.

We use AppDynamics in our company. I am the IT product manager, who is responsible for the design of the solution.

We use this solution for application performance monitoring, byte code injection, and user experience monitoring, infrastructure, and database performance monitoring.

In 2014 and 2015, AppDynamics was one of the best products on the market.

The AppDynamtics on-premises platform is immature, and it does not scale.

They need to improve the consolidation of agents for the agent's installation process. 

We would like to see one single agent to be installed and not multiple agents.

We have been using AppDynamics since 2015.

It's stable, but it could be better.

Scalability is poor to medium. It's an area that needs some improvement.

We have 3,000 users in our organization 

Technical support is average and they could be improved.

The initial setup on-premises was rather complex.

For a new release upgrade, it can take up to two months to deploy.

I completed the installation with my team.

We have an engineering team of four people, and a support team of ten people.

We do not have any issues with the price.

I would recommend this solution depending on what the use case is. If you want the latest, state of the art, including cloud-native monitoring and docker containers, I would recommend Kubernetes.

I would rate AppDynamics a six out of ten.

We work in the banking industry and we deal with business transactions, including responses for the users. We capture all of the traffic in our AppDynamics platform. It is a really good application tool.

Application monitoring is the most valuable feature.

More native support for other hardware is needed because having to install various extensions and perform extra setup for different devices is really challenging, and not as easy or straightforward as it is in other products.

We have been working with AppDynamics for almost two and a half years.

This is a stable product and we definitely plan to continue using it in the future.

AppDynamics is really scalable. We have a private server on-premises and we haven't had any trouble with scaling. We have more than 1,000 people who are using it.

We use the support portal whenever we face an issue or any kind of problem, then we create a ticket and they assist us.

I am an IT monitoring specialist and I work with similar tools like Geneos and Splunk.

Geneos is straightforward and has different options for infrastructure monitoring. For example, if you have other hardware or memory, then these things are basic. With AppDynamics, these things require that we use extensions, follow the steps, and do the extra setup. These things are really challenging and it's not that easy to handle, the way it is with Geneos.

The people we know who are using Geneos are really happy with it and they think once or twice before moving to AppDynamics. In our case, we have moved to AppDynamics.

The initial setup is straightforward. We downloaded it from the AppDynamics resources, and they had already mentioned the installation steps. We followed the directions and it was easy to handle. It probably took about 30 minutes.

Although we deployed on-premises, we are planning on migrating to the cloud.

Initially, we had a consultant for the installation. Now, we do all of the upgrades by ourselves. We manage it with a team of four people.

The people who work on it are from my team, as well as from production and from pre-sales.

This is absolutely a product that I would recommend to other users. I can see a lot of people are interested in using AppDynamics.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

• End-to-end business transaction breakdown: clear picture of where the application is taking time
• Easy user interface to work on

In a critical project where, along with the monitoring solution, RUM is also deployed, it gives you complete clarity why my business transaction failed and what is technically causing that to occur. Instead of wasting time mugging up in logs, fighting with server logs, and manually capturing CPU resource statistics, AppDynamics does it a lot easier without a lot of installation effort, in a single dashboard. On top of that, if you also have RUM, life gets easy from the end-user perspective too.

This product still has to evolve with the latest technologies for which support is available. A lot of new technologies are being developed, such as Node.js, Docker, Play framework, Redis/Couchbase. Instead of just exposing the count number, average response time, and errors/sec, AppDynamics should dig deep into the request response of the transaction and offer a deep-sensing option like Dynatrace Ruxit.

Also, in my opinion, sometimes the values that appear in AppDynamics are skewed.

I have been using it for four years.

Nowadays, CI is very much in demand and because of that, Docker compatibility is increasing. However, to install AppDynamics on Docker is still a challenge. I have done it, but only after lot of consultation with AppDynamics support. Also, if the txn DB size increases, AppDynamics gets a bit tired and performance slows down.

Technical support is 7/10. There is still a lot to improve. If you contact them regarding a specific technology, then that person becomes the only person aware of the issue, which should not be the case.

We previously used Dynatrace. The AppDynamics interface was intuitive and more easy to understand. Also, deployment is easy.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Well, if it is a simple application, go with your in-house team for implementation. On the other hand, if there is a complex e-commerce app and you want to exploit every functionality of AppDynamics and integrate all of the interfaces, then go for external consultant implementation.

I cannot discuss ROI in terms of money, but, yes, RCA became easy, which ultimately saves time/cost/efforts and which becomes large with time-critical applications.

Have a look on all three solutions: AppDynamics, Dynatrace and New Relic.

The benefits are less man hours, less downtime, and faster resolutions. In the past, it was, "Oh no. The application isn't working. Let's fix it." It might get fixed within 24 hours because we did not have any idea what the issue was. It always came down to, “Well, reboot the servers. That usually works.” It worked, but we never knew what the root cause was.

Once we got AppDynamics, we could see that this part of the application is where the issue is. When they're trying to process these certain files, something's wrong in this sector. We may still have to reboot the servers to get the customers up and running immediately, but then we can circle back around that day and address the actual issue.

The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application: Are all of our transactions going smoothly? Are we having a bottleneck somewhere? Identifying problems before they impact the users. The live reporting and dashboard(s) allow us, at a quick glance, to see the overall health of our nationwide (US) application. We can see the health of our individual office locations (cities) and the individual users (PCs). At any given time we can tell which specific city and\or user is experiencing poor application performance. It even helps us determine if the issue is application, network, or user specific. Before we had AppDynamics APM, we were reactive. We’d wait for a phone call or email to tell us there was a problem and then go looking for it, find it, and resolve it. Now, after installing AppDynamics APM, we’re proactive. We can see the problems developing in real time. We can identify a problem and be half way to resolving it before we’ve even received a phone call or email. We’ve even discovered and resolved problems without the end users or management even realizing there was a problem.

A year earlier, if someone had asked me about room for improvement, I would've said end-user monitoring, which they have now. Analytics was great. I didn't even think that we would need that.

I think I would like to see a better way to deploy and upgrade the machine agents that we use. Currently, we have to use SCCM, and that might just be our environment with the customer. Personally, I am not the best with Linux commands; I'm learning. I'm a GUI person. Give me a button to click on with a mouse pointer, and that's just me.

I personally don't have anything I think they need to add. They're the great minds. They're the leaders of technology, so they'll think of what I need before I do.

I’ve never had a stability problem with it. It's always working; it's always operational. I’ve never had a glitch; never had the server just stop working. It's spot on.

I can't address scalability because we haven't been able to scale yet. As I’ve mentioned, the way the customer works, it's just one little group that wanted it, and everybody wants it now. Again, we have to go through the process of approval and funding. We haven't been able to touch on the scalability yet.

We have it on 400 servers and machines.

We use technical support all the time. They were great when we finally acquired it. They came in and they helped set it up in our environment; made sure everything was discovered, reporting was working; explained the transactions, reports, the dashboard, all of that to us. We had some more questions at the 2015 AppSphere, and it is great because you can see the guys. We got in touch with someone else and they helped us with licensing issues. There was a couple of extensions we were trying to get working that we couldn't. They got all that squared away.

Recently, we had some consultant hours we needed to use. One of their guys spent three days with us on WebEx, fully customizing even more on the dashboards and the reporting center; and explained baselines to us better.
Technical support is excellent.

We did previously did not use an APM at all. It was just, applications would stop working; there would be bottlenecks; they'd be real slow; and complaints. You'd have the network guys saying, "No, everything's good on our end." You’d have the middle-tier guys saying, "Nope, my servers are online and running." You have the devs for the application saying, "No, no, no, no, it's not my code." It was just, point the finger, pass the buck.

With AppDynamics, we're able to say, "No, it is the network. Something's going on in this city.”, or “No, it is the middle-tier servers because of this." We can tell where the issue is and what the issue is.

I do know that they tested with CA. There was a third one because with our customer, we have to have three competitors. We have to have three products and say, "This is why we're picking AppDynamics. This is why these two will not fit the bill." I don't remember who the third person was.

I think they ended up going with AppDynamics because of the personality of the marketing reps and the engineers that we talked to. It was pricing. It was the capabilities of AppDynamics versus CA and the third company. AppDynamics just brought more to the table.

Personality is quite big when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics. If you come in, and you're snotty, and high and mighty, you go down the list. That's just what it is; that's business.

Pricing: We don't want the cheapest; we don't want the most expensive; we want somewhere in the middle, like when you're buying a TV; you don't want something that's going to break in six months.

The historic background of the company: If you've only been around for six months, it's a bit of a gamble. If you've been around for six years, you're not going to have IBM, HPE, or Xerox buy you. We've had problems with that before. You are your company; you're not going anywhere. In five years, you'll still be there to support us.

Ongoing support: Can we give you a call on a Tuesday at 3:00 PM and get an answer? Or, do we have to submit a ticket, wait a week, maybe get a phone call back and then get a guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about, doesn't want to be at work that day?

It's the overall package.

Give them a call. Check out the field. I know that AppDynamics was more than willing to give us temporary licenses; come in and help us set it up in a dev environment; and show us how it works in our environment, not just the canned demo: “Here's the little website we made and this is how it works.” Of course, it works perfectly because we've made it work perfectly.

They will do a demo in your environment, on your servers, so you can see, “Yes, this is our data. This is what we will see. This is how it will help us.”

The only reason I did not give it a perfect rating is because I don't think anything is 100% perfect. Nothing is the best ever. There's always room for improvement. There's always room to grow. This is the highest I can give because I don't believe in giving that perfect rating.

We’re not yet using any other AppDynamics products. Due to our customer, we can't just buy the newest and greatest, and implement it. There is a long process for testing, approval, and funding; and then more testing and implementation. We're usually about a year and a half behind the latest and greatest.