AppDynamics Reviews

The most valuable feature is the ease of just putting it in right out of the box and its being able to traverse our environment and bring those problem areas to light. That's basically it.

One of the applications that we use was having some very bad slowdowns. We were able to throw AppDynamics in there. We were able to identify the root cause within probably 45 minutes, which took our process time from 33 days down to 18 days. Then, eventually, a few more efficiencies were actually found a few hours later, which brought it down to three days. It was pretty awesome.

Because we didn't have anything before, this is like the Taj Mahal, compared to what we didn’t have.

The only thing is that maybe it collects too much right away. There's a lot of noise. You need to have those people that know the application very well in order to tune it down. Maybe that would be an area with room for improvement.

Beyond that, I don't know yet. Give me some more time in it and let me figure it out a little more but I can't think of anything else.

Stability is excellent; no worries at all with that.

Scalability is excellent; no worries at all.

We haven’t used technical support because we are still in the PoV. Our sales guy is beside us. He's been awesome with everything.

We weren't using something like this before. We were using an NPM, network performance monitoring, tool called Truview. It wasn't giving us our application insight. It did everything for the network but not the application itself. We've had a lot of slowdowns on our website and things like that. Through our homegrown tools, we couldn’t figure out what those slowdowns were until we threw AppDynamics in and those kind of started floating to the top.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It was basically just downloading an agent, recycling, and you're up and running. That was how easy it was.

New Relic as well as CA were also on the shortlist at the time. New Relic couldn't actually give me the breadth of what we wanted, as AppDynamics could. CA was kind of very intrusive to our network and we wanted something that didn't have a whole lot of resource dependencies out there.

My rating is because of the top three that we looked at. I also had our developers look into it, as well as our release management and our systems engineers. All of us came together and we were able to put the pros and cons together on what AppDynamics gave us or didn't give us over the other ones. AppDynamics just came in head over heels above everybody else. Unfortunately for the others, it was just the writing on the paper, as well as the proof in the trial period and what we saw in our environment.

Be patient. They do things very procedurally. Usually, I'm used to downloading an application and trying it on my own. If I would have done that on my own, I probably would have thought, I can't do this; there's too much there. But, they kept coming back, saying, “No, we want to show you. We want to make sure you're doing this right.” Even though I wanted to say, “No. Just leave us alone and let us do it”, I'm glad I did take their advice and bring them in, so they could teach us a little more about it.

We're doing APM but we also are right now evaluating the Analytics side of it. That's been pretty awesome but we haven't really gotten very deep into that one. We’re basically just using APM.

One of the most valuable features has been the ease of use that really fuels adoption in our organization. Other solutions that we have used for APM were not as user friendly, and frankly it was just really difficult to get people to use the tools.

The dashboards have been straightforward; easy to set up, really, for the most part.

It's made it easier to collaborate across teams; be able to have the same data immediately in front of you just by sharing a URL.

It could be a little more flexible in configuration on the back end. The design is geared towards specific goals, and they've done a great job with those. A lot of times when I'll ask a question, "Can we make it do this? Can we make it do that?", the answer is just, "No. Sorry, we don't support that at this time." And I get it, that's a good model for them to have, but I always have a wish list of things as I'm working with the tool.

I come across little things all the time, and I just file a ticket with AppDynamics to raise a feature request. So, I don't keep track of them, I just document it, and fire and forget.

I’ve been impressed with the features that they're adding and the direction that they've been working, a lot of which I wasn't aware of. License management, for example; being able to just give a certain number of licenses to an arm of the organization and say, "Here. Here's your licenses, do whatever you want with them." That really pushes the ultimate administration of the product out without having to "micromanage", if you will, and worry about giving them the key to the server. We are not currently using that. As far as I know, it's not released yet, but I was excited to see that. That was one that I brought up with support along the way.

I am impressed that they continue to develop and improve, and it's not a stagnant product by any means.

We have a controller that's pretty overloaded. We haven't run into any issues, though, with the AppDynamics.

Their technical support's been very responsive. They don't always have the answers that I want, but they're responsive, and help us find solutions where they can.

We didn't know that we needed a new solution. We had a solution. Another department wanted to look at AppDynamics. We looked at it and said, "We're already doing that, but if you want to bring it in and test their claims of greatness against what we have, go for it". We brought them in, and we said, "Let's buy that.”

Initial setup was very straight forward. We didn't even use technical services for our implementation.

It could be cheaper. It's a little cost prohibitive. There are so many features that also show a lot of value, but it’s not always easy to justify the cost.

We did not look at any other vendors. We weren't shopping, really.

In general, when I look at solutions, first of all, the product has to be top shelf. It has to be number one. That really drives us: "What is the product going to do for us?" In the vendor, we look for a vendor that's going to be around for a while; that we feel is going to be stable enough to support us into the foreseeable future. And then the support model, technical support; the ability to get into the technical details with us when we have questions. All of those things.

Having implemented without the help of professional services, we were capable of doing that; it went very smoothly. Involve, even indulge, AppDynamics in being a part of the implementation process, and having the planning and discussion around it. We wanted to go more rapidly than that would allow. Therefore, we kind of short-circuited that process, and jumped right in, which was good, but I think that there's value in having folks who have done it a lot look at where you're going with it, and give you some pointers. We've had to "course correct" a little bit on a few points as we went, and they might have been smoother along the way, had we just gone through the enablement and initial process.

It’s a great product. We're happy with it.

Nothing is perfect, so a perfect rating would be unattainable, but they’re pretty close to that. They're really great.

Auto-integration with applications and how easy it is to identify errors/issues are the most valuable features for this product.

Along with APM, we use End User Monitoring; I personally use it. We have a unique business model where at the end of the month there is a peak in usage. This product helps us to monitor that usage and makes sure that we target issues even before they occur.

We were using the New Relic solution before AppDynamics and had a lot of issues for configuring it and making it suitable for our use. However, AppDynamics was very easy to configure. We were able to deploy it within a month and get real benefits from this product just within a 6 week to 2 month span of time. So that was the main reason we went for AppDynamics.

For example if I remember correctly, the end of every month is like a war zone for us. Since we have implemented this solution, it is going smooth and we are getting positive feedback from customers, consultants and everybody else. It has changed our life.

Further integrations with other monitoring systems would be very helpful. I want to see it interacting more with the infrastructure, to get more statistics and details from our infrastructure environment and not only applications.

It's fairly stable. I don't think I have seen any issues occur since we have implemented this product.

However, my team needs more training and familiarization with how to setup custom features.

Now we are using the Auto Scaling functionality with AWS. It was very easy to install again. We are not using it for all our applications and AWS but we are in the process of applying it.

We haven't used any technical support yet; we use a partner who helps us to deploy and stabilize the system. We haven't used this tool for a long time to need actual technical support.

We are all part of the community where we post questions, get answers and have access to a lot of resources there so support would be great.

I wasn't part of the selection of this tool but as soon as I came to know that this is the solution our organization had picked, I supported this decision a hundred percent.

I was managing the team that deploys it. I wasn't involved in the selection of the solution but as soon as I came to know that this is the tool we are selecting, I supported it.

We implemented it and had no issues since we have a vendor that supports us in the initial deployment efforts.

AppDynamics is a unique system. It depends on the environment that you are in. It is probably applicable to any kind of company but if you don't know how to configure it correctly or how to use it and get all the details that you want from it, it may not be your best solution. You might go with a much smaller scale solution but for any enterprise organization, this is the best solution you can implement.

We still haven’t implemented this APM tool completely in all our applications.

Integrated and aggregated performance analytics traces transactions across multiple tiers in which web services deployed in separate data centers call each other. It tracks the time spent from the beginning to the end across multiple layers (web, servlet, JMS, EJB) and forked threads. It tells the full story about a transaction in addition to resource utilization. It tells you if one of many servers ran a major GC (garbage collection) in the last five minutes, or if one of the transactions took more than 10 seconds. It also drills down to its components.

It provides full visibility of what’s happening in complex transactions which involve services running in our NJ, AR, and CO data centers. It provides data beyond standard monitoring, including method invocation-level insights.

It could understand more invocation protocols. Some custom-built web service processors are not recognized. As a result, the requests are identified as plain servlet calls. For example, it does not recognize Pega’s customized web service calls. I hope the vendor will accumulate experiences and exceptions, and provide guidance to customers on how to handle them.

I have been using AppDynamics for four years.

It was involved in resource utilization issue in one of many of applications that is based on Oracle Fusion.

I did not have any scalability issues. It is well designed for good scalability. Even with 1000s of servers, it is easy to identify a few that are suspicious by sorting the metrics by latency, CPU utilization, garbage collection time, and so on.

Technical support was excellent. They are very responsive. I usually get responses the same day.

We used HP Diagnostics. It could only analyze resource utilization without correlating this to transactions.

As far as the customer is concerned, it was easy. But the vendor needs to do the bulk of the work setting up the SaaS.

Get bulk pricing. The volume will be higher than you think.

We looked at most competitive products on the market, including Dynatrace and HP lines.

Don’t treat it as a monitoring tool. Use it as a troubleshooting tool. It helps you understand how the apps run in much more detail than good or bad. You can see where you need to improve.

My clients use AppDynamics for monitoring the performance and behavior of applications, as well as detecting any signs of potential overload. It also allows them to identify when certain applications are not functioning as expected. Essentially, its primary purpose is to monitor and evaluate the behavior and performance of applications.

AppDynamics is aiding us with achieving full stack availability, which entails obtaining a comprehensive or holistic overview of the application's performance, sales, and behavior. In essence, the purpose of full stack availability is to provide a complete picture of what is happening with the application.

The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is Proactive Monitoring and Alerting.

The price of the solution could improve.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately six years.

The solution is stable.

I rate the stability of AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

The scalability of AppDynamics is good.

I rate the scalability of AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

The support from the vendor is good.

I rate the support of AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

Positive

AppDynamics is what I would consider an enterprise-level solution. This means that it's a solution that is intended for use by larger organizations, while small or medium-sized businesses may find it difficult to afford. The number of agents required will also impact the pricing, and smaller companies may only be able to afford a limited number of agents. Essentially, the cost of the solution is not within the reach of every organization, and only some may be able to afford it.

My advice to others is this solution is fantastic if your business can afford it. It will help boost your business and IT.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

From the perspective of the customer experience, the solution has been quite helpful for our company. Positive comments have been given, and no clients have opted out of our services for any reason. This has given us the option to think about including more agents in the remedy. Also, the capability that alerts users in advance of potential problems has improved the effectiveness of our IT employees. Despite hiring more employees, we haven't had any client abandonment, which proves that the solution is of the highest caliber and performing remarkably well. Also, it has helped us monitor apps more efficiently and fix any problems before they have an impact on end users.

I mainly use AppDynamics to detect issues and bugs and monitor our enterprise database module.

AppDynamics' most valuable features are the response time of the business transaction modules, the ability to monitor multiple services, and testing and developing environments.

AppDynamics's agent management could be improved. They could also manage their licenses by host count rather than CPU core counts and on independent container count instead of for five containers. In the next release, AppDynamics should include AI modules in the on-prem environment.

I've been using AppDynamics for five years.

AppDynamics is stable.

Generally, the initial setup is easy, but it's harder for Java applications because you have to do some manual customization in agent configuration. Deployment took around a month.

We used a partner team.

AppDynamics' licensing scheme is confusing because all of its domains require different licenses. AppDynamics is priced on the higher side. 

I would recommend AppDynamics to other users and would rate it eight out of ten.

AppDynamics is used for performance management. It monitors the application's performance on a monthly basis.

I assist in the configuration of AppDynamics, which is used to measure the performance of the application.

AppDynamics will assist the company in managing its overall systems, capabilities, and performance. It will also assist the company in projecting the system's capacity.

Capacity planning is, in my opinion, the most useful.

While it is scalable, it could be better.

AppDynamics has been in place for a couple of years, but we only started using it this year.

AppDynamics is stable in terms of product features, but the core is a major concern.

AppDynamics is a scalable product.

I have not contacted technical support.

The initial setup is easier for the client.

In our environment, we already have the standard procedure in place to set up AppDynamics, to make it simpler.

I was not involved with the procurement of AppDynamic, but I believe it's expensive.

There are no minimum or maximum sizes; you can use AppDymaics regardless of your company's size. It is appropriate for small, medium, and large enterprises.

I would rate AppDynamics an 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.