AppDynamics Reviews

When you have a lot of AWS products running (and integrations connected to them) the only way you can monitor them is to have a system or automatic reporting. Cisco AppDynamics gives lots of "extensions" that collect metrics and feed them back to an AD controller so you can get a picture of health, usage, rules, and reporting.

It also works across environments from cloud to traditional, which means you don’t need something for AWS and then something for in-house products.

AWS was a new environment for a client and they used a series of extensions to show how the installation was performing and how changes impacted their setup, down the line. With sprawling cloud processes, it can be hard to see how your changes impact integrations, but AD really helps out with this.

Specifically, with the use of Cisco AD extensions, we were able to prove that a move from MySQL to Amazon Aurora sped up data retrieval. This meant a trial of Aurora was proven to be a success and led to a gradual phasing out of MySQL DBs.

The most valuable feature is the ability to take a report, and in particular, a visual, and link it to actual application performance and then the consequences. This means you can show how an incident or action has an effect on the business. This is invaluable for executive meetings, where it can sometimes be hard to link an event to an outcome, a month down the line. The bottom line is that it helps protect your bottom line.

The extensions can be edited in a simple config file so you can sculpt what you are getting.

It could do with more than one data centre/multiple AWS accounts in a pane of glass. Also, improved scalability to large environments would be helpful.

For me, it’s always support and training that need improvement, as both of these are crucial to using a product effectively. When there are so many features it would seem to be a benefit, but in reality that can be daunting.

We chose to procure this solution via the AWS Marketplace because you don’t need to buy physical hardware to use it.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten because you can edit the config files easily and make the reports your own. Also, it supports loads of AWS products: S3, Elastic MapReduce, EC2, DynamoDB, ELB, RDS, Route 53, etc.

The primary use case is to monitor our applications and get a handle on any issues ahead of time, such as memory leaks, complete utilization of CPU, and the need to spin up a new server. Being able to know all of these things ahead of time and act on them is a primary requirement. And once an application is placed on top of that, we would also like to monitor what's happening with the application

The solution is doing great.

The key benefits it offers us are that it helps us know the infrastructure and performance issues, as well as if a customer is experiencing latency issues. It helps us know about them ahead of time so we can act on them, proactively, and improve the customer experience. That's important for us as we transform ourselves and call ourselves a digital company.

Being able to install it on-prem and monitor our on-prem infrastructure is important for us. We are in the process of migrating to cloud, but most of our infrastructure is on-prem. We have highly scalable systems and AppDynamics will help us monitor our load on-prem. Our systems range from simple to the most complex and it gives us the visibility across transactions, in one dashboard.

I would like to be able to monitor both cloud an on-prem infrastructures, displayed in one dashboard.

I would also like more flexible pricing: A pay-per-use model, rather than just a fixed-price model.

I'm not aware of any stability issues. We have deployed it in MEA, a few countries in Asia, and in the US. I haven't heard negative comments. People are happy.

We do use their technical support and they are very responsive.

In terms of advice, I would ask you to have criteria. Most of the time there will be some general aspects that are pretty common, that are covered by the various third-parties that provide industry ratings. But within that, you have to have customization of the features to match to your own infrastructure, the technical stack you have: mainframes, ICDs, modern platforms, cloud, etc. You need to compare the tools that work with your technical stack.

The most important criteria, for me, when selecting a vendor are 

• flexible pricing
• full coverage of monitoring of our technical stack, both on-cloud and on-prem
• customer service.

I would rate this solution at eight out of 10. I took away the two points for the two reasons I mentioned: being able to monitor both cloud and on-prem with a single dashboard and flexible pricing.

The most valuable features are transaction correlation, application flow map, business transactions, and the key metrics that are displayed on the dashboard.

It gives a complete, end-to-end visualization of an environment. That's where it is a little easier to analyze any issue in production compared to the other APM tools. That's the key difference between the other tools and AppDynamics.

The first thing is that they are going in the right direction. That's the great thing because they're linking IT with business. That's why we mostly like it because the other APM tools are just talking about your IT. They're not linking that context to the business. You have your monitoring; your instrumenting; you're doing a byte-code instrumentation; you're doing a threat analysis. You have enough information. All you need to do is just play around with the data and give the visualization of business. What other APM tools are not giving, AppDynamics is great on that point.

As far as the features that we're expecting, the main thing is the universal agent that I’ve mentioned. They're not clear on what month or what year. I think next year, but they're not clear on the release date. That's one killer that we're really expecting. Because that will save a lot of time for an enterprise like us to go for a massive deployment. That's one of the key features I can say that we're looking forward to.

Stability is good so far. We haven't experienced any issues. But after a recent controller upgrade, we experienced a couple of downtimes of the controller, which is not good. On the agent side, not much. We do not see agents stop all of the sudden. We haven't experienced any such things. But in the APM space, the agent is a little tricky, so we have to be a little careful with the agent. With the previous experience around the Dynatrace agent we had, that killed the entire box. The box was completely down.

With this tool, we are taking a few more precautions; meaning, we're not going to production with the agent as of right now. We're putting enough load, enough applications, enough boxes and testing it for 2-3 months. Once we get confident, only then are we planning to go for the production.

Apart from the stability side – as I mentioned, the controller was down a couple of times recently, and the agent is working fine – the agent overhead is not good. It's taking a minimum of 200-300 MB per JVM or per CLR, which is the case with any of the APM tools in the current market. But we expect the overhead to come down. Then, it'll benefit us a lot. For an enterprise like us, we have a lot of shared environments. A box has 50-60 JVMs. A box has 300, 400, 500 virtual machines. In that case, if the overhead is 2-3 personned, we end up killing the box because we have the VM environments.

How we look at scalability is in the controller's scalability. I think AppDynamics is not really there yet. The scalability should be very easy. I think that's what our expectation is. I think it's not even there yet. Controllers won't talk to each other. In a keynote session at a recent NetApp conference, someone was talking about or mentioned controller-to-controller communication. Once that is there, as long as controllers talk to each other, the scalability will become a little easier. That's on the controller side.

On the agent side, the scalability is the main focus area for us now, because we have 100,000 boxes, and we can't really deploy agents app-by-app, machine-by-machine, or manually. We can't really do that. Our approach is automated deployment. But with AppDynamics, the really tricky part is, they expect the application to be modeled in a certain way. They want us to define the app name, tier name, and node name, which is a little tricky.

I can just do mass deployment of agents, but then I have to do configuration also. That is where I think we're a little lagging, so we're working closely with them. We end up developing our own automation scripts to achieve that stage. Again, at that keynote session, people were talking about a universal agent. I think that might really solve the problems from both the deployment and licensing angles.

With their support, if you raise a ticket, the response is very good. But the concern is the consulting days. I think they're offering some consulting days. In the first year of a contract, they offer a certain number of consulting days. After that, the consulting days are free. But to book a consultant, I think we need to book the consultant at least one or two weeks in advance. We can't really do that in the enterprise. A lot of things will happen. All of a sudden, we need support. That's a little tricky. We shared the feedback with AppDynamics. One or two days is what we can spend, but one or two weeks is really a problem.

For us, a large enterprise, the audits and the compliance issues; these things are serious concerns. We have 6,000 applications. We have 100,000-plus boxes. If management asks us, "Hey. Can you tell me what happened with a certain number of the boxes? Why did they go down?” Or “Why did certain applications go down? Can you please pull up the reason? Or can you tell me all of the applications a X person has accessed? Which boxes did he touch? Which routers did he touch?" We have no clue in a large enterprise like us. That's where instrumentation is key for us.

Our model is, we're shifting towards platform. Once we shift towards the platform, we want to offer instrumentation as a built-in stack in it. For that, there are two key things. One is explicit instrumentation, and the other is implicit instrumentation. For the explicit instrumentation, we already developed a solution last year. We’re now planning the implicit instrumentation. That's where we did a lot of market research. Our technology labs did a lot of market research. That's when we also went to the Gartner Report. Then, we finally chose AppDynamics.

Initial setup was straightforward. There are two angles to it. The controller setup is pretty straightforward. The agent setup is also straightforward, but only if you are a simple tech startup or you have only one e-commerce application. For those kinds of companies, I think it makes sense. All they need to do is spend 2-3 days to set up everything. But in our case, we have 6,000 applications. I think AppDynamics is expecting the application to be modeled in certain way. I think we were asking them about this as well. I was expecting to get an update at that conference that they are moving away from that application modeling to something else. Once they move to that, I think that is also going to speed up the initial setup process.

There weren’t really any other vendors on our shortlist at the time. We are using Introscope extensively in production and we are using Dynatrace extensively in the lower-end environments. If this tool works out well, we're probably going to replace the other two.

As far as the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, we have different stakeholders. Each stakeholder has their own use cases. The development team expects certain use cases. The support team expects certain use cases. The SWAT team expects certain use cases. Engineering expects certain things. TA expects certain things. We evaluated the tools from all the angles. On top of that, the future is cloud. The future is platform as a service. So, we want a tool that supports that era. That's where AppDynamics is the winner.

The main point is every company is a software company. Invariably, you talk about it. Every button click is important. What if a customer shares feedback with his colleagues, friends or family? Every button click is important. Having said that, you should know what is happening out in your environment, out on your machines, out on your applications. So, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and end-user monitoring are definitely very important.

We have our own use cases. According to those use cases, we chose AppDynamics. But whatever the product, don't get married to any product; whether it is CA APM, Dynatrace or AppDynamics. Even now, we're not married to any tool. We will always go with a tool which is going to fit in to our model. That's our message to anybody who's researching this case.

One important thing to note is that my rating doesn't mean AppDynamics is not great. AppDynamics is great. It is going in the right direction. At the conference, the CEO or somebody mentioned that they can't shove this product and develop everything that people are expecting for release by 2020. It's being done in a phased manner, in iterations. So far, whatever they have release to us, that's what the rating is for. That will probably be higher in the coming years. With the features that it has and with the expectations that we have, that's the rating we can say. And on top of that, AppDynamics gets the highest rating of any vendor in the APM space. If I rated the other tools, I'd rate them lower.

The features we find most valuable are real-time monitoring, seeing transactions, being proactive and easy to focus on the real problem.

I remember a case that would have taken maybe four or five days to find the cause. Now, we find it in two or three hours. APM has really made it more efficient. It really helps.

Well, it's not really about APM, but the network monitoring I'm really interested by that.

We're basically starting so we're not yet very good at it. Again, we still have a good support to help us.

We have not had any stability problems.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have used technical support a few times and we found it to be very good. Response time is good and their tips are good; very helpful.

We did not have any previous solutions.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup.

We compared AppDynamics with the IBM Tivoli IT. They failed so that's why we went to AppDynamics.

APM probably applied more to us than others perhaps. This is an application monitoring tool so you need to really understand it and implement it properly. The application team needs to know about its features and capabilities to get the most out of it. We're new at this, so it's a new paradigm that we have to bring in our company. Being on the event team, I'm not looking at the application for the app team. Sometimes we're looking at the dashboard and we see something wrong. We feel that they're not really taking action. Sometimes we just call them, "Hey, by the way, can you have a look at it?" So, integration with the actual application team could be an improvement.

I think a vendor should be available, have deep product knowledge, and be helpful.

The performance issue identifying feature with the transaction snapshots is the best feature I see.

Before it goes to production, it's easy to identify the performance issues. It's one of the good performance engineering tools with minimal overhead. I know there are other APM tools on the market but I like the features it provides and the way it pulls metrics. It doesn't pull all the data; it just takes some of the data, whatever it needs. That helps to reduce overhead in performance.

In the transaction naming features, for business transactions, we are not always able to tie a business transaction to a real user transaction. Even though we have some options to do that, it's not done 100%. If a user submits a transaction and it in turn triggers 4-5 different URLs, tying all of them together to a single user transaction doesn't happen well.

It's very stable.

We have used it for very high volume applications and it works fine.

Technical support is the best thing with AppD. I'm very happy with the tech support they do. They're very quick in responding to the request.

Initial setup was straightforward. I'm doing administration for AppD today. It is straightforward.

AppDynamics provided all the features we were looking for in an APM tool. We had a list of things that we wanted to have in-house; it did provide the pricing; and especially the overhead was minimal because it doesn't capture all the data. The other tools on the market, unless we tell it to reduce the amount of data to capture, it does capture all of the data by default.

Try using the trial version which AppD provides. Their customer support is very good. If you have questions specific to your applications, you can reach out to customer support. They'll come on site and help you with all the questions and they can do the set up.

We also use AppDynamics Real User Monitoring, where we get end user performance. We also use AppDynamics Database Monitoring, so we can tidy up if there is a DB issue; what is causing the database issue. They're all integrated with each other.

The most valuable feature is the ability to pinpoint problems in our applications. We can find the problem quickly and fix it.

It definitely helps us speed up our troubleshooting. We are able to use it even during development and our beta testing to see the performance of our application and go back into development if we had issues. We can know when we need to start putting our beta customers in it. When our application starts slowing down, we can go back to developers immediately and tell them there is a problem, instead of having to hear it from the customers. It's actually helped me look better at my job. And so when I look good, I can make AppDynamics look good. And when I look good, I make my boss and his boss look good. Everybody's happier in the end.

Well they're adding in the Business iQ functionality and I will be really excited when that happens. But so far, it really has all the features that I need at this point. I mean there's always going to be more and more you can add to an application, but at this point, they've covered a lot of the ins and outs of what I need when I'm going through my application to figure out what's wrong.

So far I haven't had any problems with stability. It's been a 100% up time for us. We monitor it with a separate solution as well, just to make sure that it's up and running and we've never had a problem with it.

We initially installed it as a medium installation. When we determined that we were going to use the product more and more, we were able to just modify a couple of settings inside the configuration, enhance our hardware, and it scaled perfectly without the need to reinstall or anything.

We had a gentleman from technical support who came on site for about a week to do training with us. In that one week, I was able to learn almost all the functionality and the admin abilities that I had in the back end. And really I think I know the product in and out.

We had monitors, but when something goes down, we lose productivity and our business loses money. The question is, would you rather spend a little money up front to be able to have something that will have you save money down the road.

I was the primary person to install the software on the servers. It was a straightforward installation. We installed it in a Windows platform. The installer has a wizard that we just followed, put in our perimeters, and then it just basically plugged and played from there.

I'm not the business person, but we've seen an immediate ROI from purchasing AppDynamics.

The only other vendor we were looking at the time was New Relic. Unfortunately, New Relic just seemed pretty, but it lacked functionality. When it comes to telling me what's wrong with my application, I want facts, numbers, and graphs. I just can't just settle for “pretty”. I have to have concrete information. When selecting a product, the features were definitely the number one factor. The support and training seems topnotch and they were always willing to jump on board and help me if I had any problems, even though it was just our POC, when we were going through that process. Overall, we were looking for support and then the functionality. It's pretty cut and dry. I'm pretty good at what I do, so I want to make sure that they can support me and I've got the stuff I need.

My overall advice is, if you don’t have it yet, then get it.

The most valuable feature is giving end-to-end, about the business transactions, specifically, which is an area everybody struggles with. What they are looking for, basically, is how customers are viewing the transaction, from the end-user perspective, which is useful for the business people. They can streamline where they want improvement, but it also gives you the details down to the nitty-gritty that the developer teams are responsible for. Along the way, it's also showing you the overall performance for the infrastructure that you have for the application.

A benefit is ease of use, compared to other products that we have seen before, such as Wily. You get to the information a lot quicker, instead of spending an hour trying to get to the point that you're looking for, especially with the workflow maps that they have. It's really very easy and intuitive also. Looking at snapshots, you can quickly pinpoint where you want to look at.

Specific to what our experience is, because we're using Cloud Foundry, we're using an extension to monitor the infrastructure for that; that's probably the weakest point for it, because it basically collects JMX metrics. One of the things that we see missing when compared to Wily Introscope is the concept of calculators. You get a group of metrics and you make calculations based on it. That's something I've seen people require. It's something they want to see on their dashboard. They have the metric browser; it's not capable of doing such a thing. That's one thing that people would like to see.

Dashboards, at least the basic ones that we have, because we are not licensed for Analytics, as of yet; it seems basic and not the best area of the product. The dashboards could use some improvement.

So far, it is pretty stable; no downtime. Our implementation is high availability also, so it's a clustered environment. So far, we haven’t had any issues that I am aware of.

So far, we haven’t had any no scalability problems; we size it properly, as far as hardware. Maybe we even oversize it sometimes. So far, we haven’t had any issues.

So far, personally, I opened three tickets so far and I got what I wanted to get. I was pleased with the resolution.

The only complication with initial setup was the PCF, the Cloud Foundry monitoring. I guess it wasn’t something AppDynamics had planned for before. I don't know. It's a new area to everybody. They rolled it out because it's microservices; there were a lot of teams involved, just to get the tiers and nodes in check. That took a lot of work. Also, we have multiple data centers that are sharing the same application, so we needed to take steps to distinguish the data centers from each other as well.

Take the training; take the time to learn it; explore it. That's my advice.

It provides great tools for monitoring and managing all the different environments of Dev, QA, and Prod with different needs but from a common interface.

It's very light and monitoring overhead is minimal.

And because it's also a SaaS-based application, it can be accessed by all team members from anywhere at any time.

Now application monitoring has become much easier.

Transaction identification and locking it for monitoring is much easier now, with lots of flexibility to change things on the run.

AppDynamics can identify and segregate unique transactions based on parameters, URL, data value, etc., which makes things very easy and organized.

The tool also has a nice feature for monitoring end-user experience. This provides us with browser-rendering and client-side info (OS, browser, network time, etc.). Getting all this information on a common platform has been of great value and use to us.

It could be integrated with more performance-testing tools for more intensive use.

6 months +

There is nothing very complex in the deployment, but we may face some connectivity and configuring issues. However, it all depends on the environment in which we install the tool (security policy, certificates required, etc). But all the issues have been one-time occurrences, and maintaining and upgrading it is quite simple once the certificates and the network requirements were identified.

No

No

The customer service is quite good and prompt.

9

The initial setup is very simple and not complex. It is quite straightforward, but we faced some initial issues with certificates, network, and firewall. The support team, however, is always available for setup and troubleshooting.

But for small and simple environments, it's quite simple. Just 3-4 steps.

This solution is worth the price, which is based on the number of servers you want to monitor. So if you want a good and complete monitoring solution, the cost is worth it.

Site Scope, Introscope, CEM and a few more. But AppDynamics met our dynamic and varied requirements.