AppDynamics Reviews

The ability to alert, respond and monitor standard deviation: If it’s not broken, don’t go fix it!

• Root cause analysis of issues in real time when they happen, alerted upon within moments of identification.

Enhancements for Docker would be great (log aggregator for Docker logdriver, etc.). No competitors are doing this well today, either.

I have used AppDynamics for two years.

We have not had stability issues for end-users, but for admins specifically, the UI can be slow, since they can see all applications/nodes/etc.

We have not had scalability issues so far, although there is not a strong federated aggregate model for on-premise controllers.

Technical support is excellent (5/5). They are very responsive and technically intelligent.

We didn’t switch.

Initial setup was straightforward/simple.

If you can go SaaS, that might be your best option. I was not able to do so in my environment.

Architecture of the platform and license management need improvement. They’re working on both per my understanding. We have many lines of business and licensing for on-premise has been difficult to meet our needs (segregation of costs), but we’ve could work through it.

We evaluated many simultaneously. We use many of them still.

• Dynatrace
• New Relic
• BlueStripe
• Pinpoint APM (free and pretty awesome honestly). It is open source, and we may eventually contribute back to it as time permits.

It is an up-and-coming company that operates like a startup. They’re fast to find ways to implement changes for their customers.

I think the most important thing is the end-to-end view that you get of all of your servers when you set it up. You can see where problems are without having to actually experience them or tell they're experiencing the problems. You can be preemptive.

I think it allows you to go down and get real data about what's wrong, instead of having to email around screenshots. It let's you actually get the depth that you need, even the code level and code lines and that kind of thing.

I think a little more control over which transactions get that depth attached to them would be good. Right now, it seems like there's certain thresholds that you can set, but it would be nice if there was a more dynamic way to archive transactions, or keep around certain transaction types.

Stability and scalability look pretty good, from what I can tell; especially the cloud SaaS APM solution.

We have not needed technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We are currently moving from a monolithic application to a more service-oriented model where we're going to do micro-services. Spring Boot was the choice for that, because it has actuator support which provides some of the same features. We're looking at that, and weighing this because we already have it. We want to see if we can use of both, or maybe just use AppDynamics going forward.

I think price and scalability are important when choosing an APM vendor. If it's a third party solution, is it going to be able to keep up with the solution you're using? How is the technical support, and how cutting edge is the solution. Are they keeping up with their competitors? So far, we have found all these things in AppDynamics.

From a reporting and dashboarding perspective, their API, which is what I deal with the most, is unmatched by any company that I've come across.

We're able to get a single view into applications and their performance; the way they run, errors, and trends. We're able to turn that around back to the developers and help them tweak their code and applications.

Coordinating upgrades across systems would absolutely be a huge benefit. I don't deal with a lot of the upgrades. I just get the emails saying that there have been upgrades. We're on the SaaS platform, so I don't see the platform upgrades, either. Nonetheless, that would actually be a huge benefit.

I haven't seen any downtime myself.

I haven't seen a whole lot of limitations from an input perspective. It’s been pretty good so far. The performance actually blows the competition away, from what I've seen.

When I open a ticket, it is resolved quickly. They are very responsive; very fast to get back to us and very thorough with their answers. I’m happy with the resolution.

I was involved in the setup of the single sign-on integration for our company, as well as getting the users set up and trying to get permissions set up. That required a little finessing and conversations with AppDynamics, but for the most part, it was pretty simple.

Reach out anytime you have questions, because they're very responsive to answer.

We are using this solution for performance testing and transaction tracing.

The most valuable feature is the flow map.

It's easy to use, and the instrumentation is also good.

The alerting mechanism is very good.

I am a monitoring administrator and one of the biggest issues is that it doesn't have a large environment for support. We work in a large environment with nine to ten separate controllers in different processes.

We can configure but it cannot synchronize the data, so it has to be done manually.

I felt that it's a bit complicated on the administration side.

I would like to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning brought in to monitor the statement and payment sum issues we have. That would be very helpful.

I have been working with AppDynamics for approximately two years.

There are limitations in the metrics collection. It is filling up the disk space.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We completed the installation ourselves.

Pricing is handled by another team.

Definitely, I would recommend this solution for others who are interested in using it for the alerting mechanism. Also, if they wanted to have more clarity regarding the application and the transactions that are stored, this product works well.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for service level monitoring.

Currently, we use AWS. Recently, we started using Serverless AWS as we use communities for all our other services. For containers, we use Serverless AWS, and we use databases, like Cassandra Aurora. The product integrates well with all of them.

We previously had an operations team continuously monitoring applications. Now, they just have set things up and our developers can monitor, view, and act on them, accordingly. Also, we set up alerts recently so we can fix any issues more quickly in production.

It shows inter-service activities very easily. We were having issues with this primarily, so this was one of the most important areas for us. 

We have been using Cassandra. So, it has agents specific for each middleware, helping us check this application.

They are using Flash for their website, which is very slow. We had hoped the website would be much faster to use, and that is definitely what we want to see. 

Their agents sometimes claim to be very lightweight, especially with databases, but they are very heavy. They can take up more compute than the actual work that we need to do. I do hope that they can improve on this.

There is no issue with stability. However, most of the time, it is just slow.

Currently, scalability is not that great. We are a B2B company, so we have currently enabled it for about ten customers. We would like to proceed and have it more customer environments as well. However, we see with just ten customers that the dashboard is very slow. We would like them to improve on this.

We have had many AppDynamics engineers come to our office and explain us how to use it and set it up. They have come onsite many times and explained to the developers different topics.

The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment was not trivial. We needed experts to come onboard and explain it to us. With their help, it was easy.

We have partially seen ROI.

We checked out Datadog, but we just wanted a monitoring solution. We already had a logging solution and other relevant solutions, so we narrowed it down to AppDynamics.

It was easy to jump onto AppDynamics's limited licensing plan, so we easily could evaluate it. Later, we received good customer support and could interact with them easily. That is how we finally decided.

Depending on your use case, this is only a monitoring solution. If you don't have an in-house logging solution, or if your primary use case is to debug, you should consider choosing other alternatives. If only you want monitoring, AppDynamics will do.

We are only using the AWS version.

Now, my team is not that close to the APM information. Using AppDynamics, it was possible to delegate how to read information on the client side because of how easy that is.

The most valuable features are:

• Error analysis in the troubleshooting sections go straight to the point.
• Autodiscovery of transactions.

If you are analyzing real time dashboard or metrics, AppDynamics will give you a refresh each minute, no matter what number you are watching.

This is a real situation when you are facing the screen during a load test or a the "hot" midnight of cybermonday for instance. When you have high stress of visits I do not know if you are more stress because of the amount of visits or because you have to wait eternal 60 seconds to find out it things are going well or you already have mess. And is even worse when you see suddenly a worse number but you do not know if this is a an spike or meanwhile your system is already "down", You just think in other tools with high "resolution" like CA (every 15 seconds.

Once you reach the limit of sizing in resources, the application becomes unstable.

We did not really encounter any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is 3/10.

Technical Support:

Technical support is 6/10.

We previously used Introscope, which was difficult to use and not intuitive at all

Initial setup was easy going with a wizard.

A local vendor with a very good level of expertise implemented it for us.

I have never calculated ROI, but I need to do that.

It is not a cheap tool, but you also save in manpower to setup because it is easy and fast. At the end of the day, I think the revenue is much better.

BUT, they have an awful co-term mode of licensing.

Two years ago, we evaluated Dynatrace and New Relic.

I primarily use AppDynamics for my servers.

AppDynamics' best feature is automation - for example, when I add a note, it can understand the data automatically.

AppDynamics' modules and hardware resources are very high.

I've been using AppDynamics for a year.

AppDynamics is stable and reliable.

AppDynamics' scalability is good.

I didn't have a good experience with AppDynamics' technical support. Its knowledge base is locked up and unavailable.

I also work with Zabbix, which has better education and hardware specification, though AppDynamics is more user-friendly.

The initial setup was complex because we had to configure every agent and module, use a specific server for every module, and manage every visual and virtual machine.

I used an outsourced company.

AppDynamics is really pricey as it requires licenses for every feature.

AppDynamics forces you to depend on the company to do what you want, which may be a negative if you prefer to work independently. I would rate AppDynamics as seven out of ten.

AppDynamics can be used for understanding where the bottlenecks are in your environment, and where your applications are struggling. For example, when you have major data collections, you can easily see in AppDynamics, when you have slow responses.

The most valuable feature in AppDynamics is the identifying of the slow responses. Additionally, it is easy to use.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately six years.

AppDynamics is a stable solution.

The scalable of this solution is relative. I have an issue with the fact that when having a hundred servers, for instance, that's a hundred licenses. Sometimes, from a cost perspective, you might need to decide which 50 do you want to monitor, and not monitor.

We have approximately 5,000 using the solution.

The technical support is great. After you have spent a certain amount with AppDynamics they provide you with dedicated support for your company.

The installation was simple, and it took approximately one hour.

The application owner can install it on their own if they follow the documentation.

There is an annual cost to use this solution. The licensing model could be improved by making it more cost-effective.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.