AppDynamics Room for Improvement

Venus Yaker Dalton - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Specialist at 3M

As for areas of improvement, AppDynamics could benefit from greater integration with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. This would allow the tool to automatically analyze and correlate application performance and behavior data to detect patterns and anomalies not evident to users. 

Additionally, the ability to track performance in multi-cloud environments would be valuable as many organizations are adopting hybrid cloud or multi-cloud strategies. In terms of additional features, it would be beneficial to include a capacity management module that allows operations teams to proactively plan and adjust capacity, avoiding performance issues related to lack of resources.

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PM
Senior consultant specialist-ITID at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The integration part in AppDynamics with other systems is an area with a little difficulty, especially when it comes to the configuration area. The integration of AppDynamics with other products takes a lot of time. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement.

AppDynamics needs to focus on its integration capabilities with cloud-based solutions. Some new features are being introduced in AppDynamics, including some DevOps tools, allowing a person to integrate AppDynamics with DevOps tools, like Docker Kubernetes and other cloud-based tools.

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AJ
Officer IT data processing at Stanbic Bank Ghana, Ltd.

Regarding Search Guard functionality, there is room for improvement. Also, I think it was pretty good for the area I used.

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Buyer's Guide
AppDynamics
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about AppDynamics. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Siva Jp - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle Architecture at LTIMINDTREE

One area for improvement is the MST model. It would be more helpful if it could be offered as a managed service provider model with more multi-tenancy and features.

The focus is still limited to application monitoring. However, in the next release, I want to see if it could be integrated with any other infrastructure monitoring tool or provide better deliverables in terms of absorbency layers; that would be a great option. I'm not sure how AppDynamics delivers that, and it's an approval delay. That use case will integrate with any monitoring tool to provide the absorbent layer; that is the better option, which I look forward to.

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Mahesh Deshpande - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technology Architect at Infosys

The Kubernetes cluster agent has not yet matured. That's one area that requires a lot of improvement. You have two options for implementing the Kubernetes agent. One is deployed in DocCloud, but you can't download those images from DocCloud for security reasons at most organizations, so this option isn't that useful.

The installation for the second option isn't that user-friendly. Transition tracing for the Kubernetes application is challenging. You have to navigate to a new set of user interfaces in AppDynamics, so that's the pain point. There is an icon you need to click on to get a newer user interface.

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OA
Operation Manager at Totalplay

There could be some improvement in the constructions of the diagrams, it is too difficult currently.

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Yacin  HATTAB - PeerSpot reviewer
Responsable Commercial at Zen Networks

Compared to Dynatrace, which is the biggest competitor to AppDynamics, Dynatrace is a one-agent tool. You don't have to put an agent in every single server or app. However, the monitoring is less effective in Dynatrace. If AppDynamics could do a one-agent function with their actual monitoring effectiveness, it will be the greatest tool.

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Sylvain Germe - PeerSpot reviewer
Application and Network Performance Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

What needs improvement in AppDynamics is installation. The installation process needs to be more straightforward. Deploying the product is also tricky, so this is an area for improvement.

Pricing is another area for improvement in AppDynamics because its current pricing model is no longer suited to containers and technologies.

The product used to be the best in the market ten years ago, but it now needs to regain its position as the leading product in its niche.

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CB
Engineer at United Airlines

The GUI can be overwhelming at first to a novice Dev or Ops support person, and the possible root causes of an issue do not bubble up to the first screen you see.  We usually walk everyone through a few simple steps: 

  1. Click here to see errors and exceptions.
  2. Click here to see what is causing response time problems.
  3. Click here to view the timeframe of a past issue.
  4. Click here to drill down into the root cause at the method level snapshot.   
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JP
Sr. Production Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

There is room for improvement in the customer support team because finding a solution consumes a lot of time. When there's any issue, we need to reach out to the AppDynamic support team to get some idea of what the issue is. If anything is out of scope, we need to escalate the availability. It can be more dynamic because we need to go to the support portal to raise an incident, and it's time-consuming. Also, the resolution time takes longer than expected. If there were live support from AppDynamic's point of view, it would be really helpful.

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MM
Senior Performance Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

AppDynamics is new to the cloud and could improve its cloud services, they are following a monolithic monitoring approach.

It's an agent-based software that must be deployed multiple times whereas competitors have one agent that can deploy everywhere.

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CK
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We do have a combination of areas that need improvement. We do have the integration, such as end-user integration and experience that could be better. It is not just from the response point of view; it is more from the error and error detection point of view. This is due to the fact that these are all the banking applications as used by the banking staff, not by the end-user directly. Based on the banking staff feedback, based on the staff security or maybe dealing with the capital market, there needs to be some improvement.

They do provide the input growth on a daily basis in terms of what is coming in and how we receive the applications and how many we have. We've now started looking for a particular product that can make sure that it should connect with files and statements inside the product. 

The IO ratio, which we are looking for in terms of a report, is one of the concerns. We do monitor those details from AppDynamics, however, reporting and monitoring could be better.

There needs to be more analytics. That is what we are missing from the tool point of view. We need more information geared more towards helping us in making better decisions. When you do the coding that's for a banking situation or maybe in the incidents or capital market, it becomes very important that how much time I'm investing inside the transaction. A transaction which needs to be carried out for either confirming the payments or maybe either releasing the payments - these kinds of things. What I have seen with the use, as of now, is a bit of a lag when we are running on the global cloud or the public clouds, like Azure or the Google platform. 

Right now, we are fighting between three different stakeholders. With the networks, we have a different chat, with the vendors we have a different chat, and with the application team, we have a different chat. This approach doesn't provide a holistic view. Everyone has their own excuses and everyone has their own reasoning and conditions. 

If it can be able to intelligently provide all the things we need to look at, from a data point of view, that would be very useful.

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Muhammad Zeeshan Siddiqui - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Technology and Services at Arwen Technologies

AppDynamics is agent-based, so some customers are reluctant to install the agents in all their production environments. It would be helpful if they had an agentless version. It covers applications on the server, but the solution is weak on the network side. The agent is not deployed on the network components, so it cannot provide complete information about issues on the network layer.

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SK
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The overall performance of this solution could be improved. The hot-hot infrastructure features could also be improved. If one goes down, the other should pick up automatically. When we patch one data center, the other primary or secondary center needs to be manually started. We need to do a manual sync between the database and the AppDynamics applications.

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DG
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

There are too many installers available for this solution. There is a separate installer for many things, for example, .net. There should be one installer for each operating system, such as Windows and Linux. They then can let you choose what options that you want for that particular operating system because trying to find all the different pieces separately is more complicated than it needs to be.

In an upcoming release, there could be better integration with the infrastructure. Currently, the solution is able to tell you where the problem is but it is not narrow enough. For example, it can show that the issue is in the data server and it took a certain time to process, but that does not necessarily narrow it down to the query where it actually was. You just know that the problem is within the database server. Sometimes it is very obvious it was the query, but other times it could be just that the server is light on resources. It would be beneficial if it could integrate more with some of the infrastructures to have the ability to correlate between the two to see whether the problem is actually with the code or it is a problem with the underlying infrastructure.

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it_user858033 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manger Sr, IT Program Mgmt. at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

It needs strengthening in the database tiers.

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SK
IT Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

I can think of 2-3 complex problems that probably would be helpful to most customers. Heap analysis is one; memory leaks. That's already there, so maybe that does not count at this point. The second one I would probably call out is connection leaks. So, heap analysis and connection leaks; those would be very helpful.

I think they've already started working on the next version of license management. That should be pretty helpful.

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Paolo Sala - PeerSpot reviewer
Application performance and System monitoring at Agos

AppDynamics should improve its ability to track all the transactions.

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Kachi Nnamdi - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Converge G. C. T.

The price of the solution could improve.

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SR
Consultant at a financial services firm with self employed

AppDynamics not so great with cloud technology. AppDynamics works very well with the on-premise technologies, but it is behind the curve in the emerging cloud features. 

The cloud is one area where I think AppD is not that great.

Basic monitoring is the main thing, but nowadays, everybody talks about observability. I'm not sure how well AppD fits into the so-called observability trend. The track-and-trace mechanism works very well with on-premises technologies but not so great with the cloud.

Cloud monitoring is becoming more critical. Competitors can pose a big challenge. AppDynamics is a top product, but they need to maintain the same trend in the cloud area, where it's not that great.

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JG
Senior Director : Database Infrastructure and Site Reliability at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

At first, I thought it had a high learning curve. However, it's not so much. It's just different. It's different from all the other tools and it's just not as intuitive as it could be. I'm not sure how you fix that. For instance, the training on the dashboards that is provided could be a little bit better, as could the use cases. They should have some good examples out there. As it is right now, I had to scour YouTube to find some stuff.

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KV
Systems Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Its resiliency can be improved. We're told that the best we can do with an on-prem solution is to have a hot standby that requires a manual switchover. So, it is a do-it-yourself Ikea model of maintaining data consistency between two servers, without having low balance or failover considerations for an on-prem solution.

There are a lot of capabilities and features that I need on a day-to-day basis that just are not included in the product. I have seen these capabilities and features in multiple other solutions. For number one, it has to be FedRAMP certified. We've been working around that with security and everything else. So, we need a solution that is fully supported in a secure federal environment.

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it_user560460 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability Development Manager - Monitoring at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Part of it is support for more modern languages. Node is lagging behind. And I think clarity on exactly where they intend to go, as well, because the relationship with other vendors like Splunk is a little bit grey at the moment. I'm curious as to where they're going with that and whether they intend to work as partners with them, or actually impose on their space.

To get a higher rating, they'd have to fix the Node issues, they'd have to fix some framework issues; it doesn’t work very well with Vertex 3, for instance. Tweaks like that. In any case, nothing's ever perfect.

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it_user118995 - PeerSpot reviewer
User Experience Solution Director at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I think the only feedback from my team has been that it's not an HTML based UI right now, so it's limited on mobile devices. An HTML 4 or 5 based interface would be great. View full review »
Indu Sri Jasti - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
There could log management features included in the product. View full review »
CD
Software Engineer at Apmosys Technology Pvt. Ltd.

Regarding improvements, I believe the dashboard could be more optimized. Although it claims to be optimized, I think it should be even more convenient, especially for advanced users. 

Additionally, the documentation can be a bit challenging. It would be beneficial if the documentation provided clear solutions for every problem. In my opinion, the documentation could be improved.

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SS
Monitoring Specialist at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

The documentation and training material have room for improvement. Some of our people struggle with the onboarding process because there is a lack of documentation or videos.

I would like AppDynamics to become one unified monitoring solution that does not focus primarily on performance monitoring.

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MM
Senior Performance Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The end-user monitoring needs improvement in this solution. There are many KPIs that are not available in AppDynamics.

The mobile apps also need improvement. The solution should have an option to aggregate the services based on the header values.

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WS
IT Operations Executive at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

From an AppDynamics point of view, and possibly based on the fact that it's now part of Cisco, is that Cisco may fundamentally have a different view of the world. If you compare AppDynamics with Foglight, as an example, Foglight's got the ability (even the old versions of the product that we currently work with) to offer visibility within the inherent infrastructure which is certainly lacking on the AppDynamics side. I know that there're other products on the Cisco side that can do similar things as Foglight. If it would be able to give you more infrastructure visibility in this solution, it would certainly make the product stronger.

The cost element is an issue. I can't expect the company to change its way of work. However, given the fact that we earn and do all our business in South African Rand, I would prefer to buy in Rand as opposed to the American dollar or British pound. In our case, dollars are preferable. The exchange rate between our currency and the international currency makes planning much more difficult, and socio-economic changes heavily impact our commercial planning and budgets. From my perspective, that would be a step in the right direction. 

Quite often we are asked to do a POC or POV, proof of value, or show that the technology works, and we are given licenses to do that. However, the current commercial model with AppDynamics is that you buy a year or three years. There's nothing more and nothing less available. Some of our customers would prefer a five-year engagement. Some of our other customers would prefer a shorter duration. I would propose, and we actually asked AppDynamics, a dispensation where you have the licenses available in a set timeframe and you can use it as and when you require. The concept of a true-up at the end of some period, may make our lives easier with reference to having to scale up and down our ecosystem. Basically, they need to offer just a bit more flexibility on the commercial model.

If it's possible to buy in Rand, or at least keep the price points for a year the same, or even over three years, that would help with currency fluctuations. We've recently sold to one of the big banks, a sizable chunk of AppDynamics. We can give them the dollar quote now for year one, certainly. That's no problem, as we know what the current exchange rate is, however, neither us nor the bank has any idea of what the exchange rate will be next year. It becomes a bit of a moving target. What do you plan for? It becomes a bit of a crystal ball exercise with reference to what the exchange rate is going to do, and therefore, what you need to do from a planning point of view, budget-wise. There must be a more elegant way to handle this challenge, although it's certainly not in our domain to do something about it. That's the OEM's prerogative.

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SR
Vice President - Operations & Client Support at Scicom Infrastructure Services

AppDynamics should try to find some measure of support or functionality in an SAP and Peoplesoft environments- however with the introduction of C++ agents- the PeopleSoft realm will be covered shortly. Additional support for NextGen mobile platforms also needs to be high in the roadmap prioritizations

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CM
Senior Computer Performance Specialist at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

I’d like to see something more towards a merger between the dev and the production. This is where big data comes in; the portion that's in there, moving things from installation and dev, moving them, managing them and transitioning between dev to production for new applications.

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it_user420528 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

AppDynamics should add more features to identify in case if there is some thread waiting for something. We are keenly looking for this feature. We would like to see the traffic on F5 load balancers in the flow map which make the entry points in an application, Currently only custom exit points can be created for non-instrumented nodes. Also if AppDynamics are trying to be only a monitoring tool, then they really need to add lot of stuff to the infrastructure monitoring and heavy correlation features are required to identify the real issues within and outside of business app. We can't blame the code for slowness of the overall application every time, as the network and servers are all equally important. Other tools like HP BSM provide great features to map everything in a service map.

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SM
Performance Test Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

The integration ability of AppDynamics with other performance testing tools is an area with shortcomings where improvements are required.

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Wathek Belhaj Amor - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Perform IT

The Log Analytics feature is a bit complicated. There are also some bugs in the solution that need to be fixed.

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GR
Manager- Projects at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user560529 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. App Analytics DevOps Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user560427 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems & Network Administration Manager at Jack Henry & Associates

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.

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MP
Head of IT Operations at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AS
Associate Director, Application Performance Management Solution Design & Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AJ
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user501966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user560499 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Support Lead at ASRC Federal Data Solutions

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.

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it_user277401 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Operations Manager at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user560487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Enterprise Network Planner at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user560484 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Manager at Arbonne international

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.

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it_user420570 - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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.

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Mehmet Arpa - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Destel Bilişim Çözümleri A.Ş.

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.

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MN
Manager, Enterprise Service at Hang Seng Bank

While it is scalable, it could be better.

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UA
Head Of Information Technology at a mining and metals company with 11-50 employees

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. 

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TS
CEO at Rufusforyou

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.

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it_user72771 - PeerSpot reviewer
Info Sec Consultant at Size 41 Digital

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.

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NS
Global Lead Architect at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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it_user560505 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user560478 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead Gestion des évènements at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user560391 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Performance Test Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user560442 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user560373 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user129477 - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Tester/QA at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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

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OM
Sr. Devops Engineer at a media company with 201-500 employees

We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues.

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DD
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

What I would like to see might exist, but if it does I haven't seen it. I would like to see something that lets me set real dollar figures, not just to outages, but to the solutions as well. It seems like a gimmicky feature, but for anyone who has to justify their budget within a larger area of the company, or to a client, it would be helpful. I don't want to have it in my face constantly, but I want to be able to access it when I'm looking at problems and have found a problem that I know I need to address. I could flag it off and have AppDynamics estimate how long a person would have taken to find that without it. That would give me a lot of leverage for justifying the existence of APM, which I really need.

Also, I know this is a holdout, we saw this ten years ago, where APM products were starting to crosstalk between each other. I would like to see a return to that because we do use multiple products. I understand that some of the information is in silos, but some of it isn't. If some of this exists, I might have missed it, but I would love to have an integration where I'm looking through logs in Elasticsearch and I could click on my AppDynamics link, because they have a little module, type in the credentials and be logged into AppDynamics. And similarly with the AppDynamics interface: "Oh, look. This server is having an issue. Okay. All this is good info, but maybe I want to take a look in Grafana." I would click over and it would take me to that spot in Grafana: the same time frame, the same filters and place to get me to that particular server, or instance, or container, etc. I would like to see that cross-functionality with some of the more common tools.

Most people run Elasticsearch or Kibana or similar things. Most people run a Grafana or something like that. I'm not expecting them to integrate with their competitors - that might be a hairy situation, although a nice one for us, on the consumer side - but if that type of integration was possible with some of the major, open-source, complementary products, that would be nice, and some of the commercial ones too.

We saw that in the APM space ten years ago, a little bit. There were a couple movements towards that, but I haven't seen that since as much.

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it_user560520 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Project Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

If you look at, for example, the two big updates that are coming out, as mentioned in the keynote address at a recent conference, I think those are two really big ones. For example, the ability to automate the deployment of the agents and the updates of the agents.

Licensing, as well, is very key. Again, we have many types of agents across different segments of our corporation; being able to manage those license keys in one central location.

We've encountered the business transaction limit. We didn't even know, but when we encountered that, a lot of business transactions were actually being lost because they couldn't be captured any more. Again, we're making tweaks to the system and constantly learning about it. It's a very complex application, and requires almost a full-time person to be in there working on it all the time.

I think training would probably be a good idea, as well. One thing that I found is that when we purchased the Application Performance Management solution and we purchased the agents, when we finished a sales thing, "Okay, great. Well, good luck." It would have been nice for them to recommended to us, “With this, we're going to provide training for your team. And we're going to also include, let's say, two or three days, or a week, of professional services. We can help not just install it and show you the best practices, we'll also start to tweak it for you so you can start to see what you can do with it. Then, we'll let you go on your own. Then, of course, if you want more help, you can always come back.” Just to give us a little bit of a head start.

These tweaks are the reason why I have not given it a perfect rating. I feel like there's a lot of configuration and a lot of work that needs to go into it. I feel that there is still a lot to learn.

With some of the problems that we've had so far – the business transactions, the deploying of the agents - if they can finish that, as the new versions come out and whatnot, I think that they're going to get there. It's a constantly evolving space, constantly evolving product. They're going to get there.

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it_user560412 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - Application Operations at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The analytics is definitely one good one; the federated services would be great; and hopefully something that will give us a little more integration with some of our log and event management tools, such as Splunk, etc. That would be the big one.

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it_user560361 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Architect at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

An area with room for improvement is the ease of managing the agents within our systems. Right now, for Java agents and things like that, if you want to upgrade the agent, you have to install the new version of it, then you have to shut down and restart your system. In a large enterprise, that means there's a lot of work involved in distributing all those things, and then scheduling the time to restart the system. A more seamless way of managing the agents would be very useful.

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BS
Engineer at Sirius XM Radio Inc.

The UI could use a little help.

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it_user584115 - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability/Dev Ops Strategist Digital Transformation at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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

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it_user560508 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user560385 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst Production Application Support at a leisure / travel company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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SK
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AM
Vice President at Works Applications Co., Ltd.

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.

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it_user201555 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager in web analysis and performace at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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SP
Consultant at Sepas Holding | هلدینگ سپاس

AppDynamics' modules and hardware resources are very high.

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it_user560430 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Engineer at PHE inc

Things I struggled with most were the visual widgets in dashboards. I feel like there could have been more online guidance.

Synthetics would be much easier if we didn’t have to learn Python and could use a GUI tool like Dynatrace.

I would also like to see alerting if our transactions or log transactions daily allowance has been met.

I like the looks of the network feature coming. That looks really cool. As far as the product itself, I've been really happy. Everything I've needed from it has been easy to find. Beyond the items I’ve mentioned, I don't have any big ideas for enhancements. As I’ve mentioned, I've been happy with what we have.

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it_user560493 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Information Systems at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The network diagnostics that they are adding will be really useful. They could add more detail into what is going on in the network. Right now, that is one area where we have to use other tools. That would be very, very useful. I think that should give us a better view of the entire system.

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it_user560538 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Configuration Manager at IHG

Since we have a lot of applications in our company, we are right now looking into analytics and also RUM (real-user monitoring) for the mobile apps. Going forward, we want to be on par with the market.

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it_user560358 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Health Operations Analyst at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees

I don't think we've tapped into everything that AppDynamics can do. I can't really mention something it should do because AppDynamics might already do that and we just haven't implemented that yet.

Nonetheless, I know that a lot of the problems that the people are having is they lost work. It'll be really good if they could retain the data a little bit better.

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it_user560382 - PeerSpot reviewer
Programmer/Analyst at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see cross-tier, transaction tracing across applications.

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it_user509844 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Administrator at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user112188 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
LDAP integration. View full review »
JL
IT Manager at PRIVALIA

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

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it_user560406 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user560355 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer III at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user528264 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

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.

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it_user984684 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Operations Monitoring - Senior Software Engineer at Intuit Inc.

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

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FC
Software Engineer at a tech company with 201-500 employees

Sometimes, it is hard to navigate through and find if something is wrong or figure out where an error stemmed from. I would like AppDynamics to be easier to navigate in.

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it_user560367 - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring Lead at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

There are many features we’d like to see in upcoming releases, which we have already mentioned to the accounts team. They're working on it; we expect to get some kind of releases from them.

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it_user560517 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Core Business Solutions at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The biggest thing that we need is on-prem synthetic monitoring. That is probably near the top of our list of things that we want, and actually need to have put in place. A lot of our business comes through intranet only, so a SaaS product can't provide that. We really need an on-prem synthetic monitoring solution.

I haven’t rated the product higher basically because of the synthetic monitoring piece. We started discussions with AppDynamics probably about two years ago now. Even at that time, they were saying on-prem synthetic monitoring was going to be coming. We had our hopes up really high for that, and it seems like there's been some feet dragging there. From our side, we're a little bit impatient about it. That's probably the only reason why I haven’t rated it any higher.

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it_user560496 - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Test Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

By default, AppDynamics tends to only capture a lot of the high-level stuff, and you can actually go in and manually configure a lot of the lower level stuff manually. But one of the problems that I see, is that since you have to configure lower level functions manually, what you don't know can limit what you can do. Things ca pop up that you never see if you have to configure it manually.

Also, I would like to see a lot more of that stuff get pulled into the forefront so you know what you're actually working with, and you can see some of those issues as they pop up instead of trying to track them down. If you don't know what you're looking for, you don't know what to turn on and it can lengthen the actual time that it takes.

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it_user560379 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Project Lead, Systems Architect at Bodhtree

The main improvement I would like to see is in reporting. If you set it to send daily reports, it just takes a snapshot of the report and sends it to us. For example, we want to see all the events that happened, including exceptions according to the timeline. It just gives you the first page. If you want to go to the second page, you need to get into the AppDynamics console and then go scroll down, replace, scroll down.

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it_user560451 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Operations Engineer at a individual & family service with 10,001+ employees

Nothing’s perfect. With any application, there's room for improvement. Based on what they were discussing at a recent AppDynamics conference, I do see some excellent new opportunities that they're going to be releasing soon. We're looking forward to those. For example, the Business iQ was one that I saw that I thought was very, very interesting. I could definitely see our company utilizing that. That would be an improvement; absolutely, no question.

We're not currently using any of the analytics part of AppD, but I'd like to see our company utilize some of the other capabilities of the tool.

I can't think of any specific additional features I’d like to see or improvements to the APM, what we're currently using.

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it_user121719 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The alerts and pro-active monitoring need work. I have found it very cumbersome to setup meaningful rules. This has led us to use the tool as a reactive tool instead of a proactive tool. Also, it would be great if this could be an iPad app (or at least not flash) so we could have easier access when working remotely. Lastly, this app needs better support with LDAP authentication (see below for more details regarding this topic). View full review »
HI
Senior Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

AppDynamics is a solution that requires extra learning and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, automated reports would helpful similar to have they have in Google Analytics.

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YS
IT Specialist​ at IT Specialist LLC

The end-user experience is not really good because we can't catch all of the transactions. We only can catch the full stack of flow transactions, but I think that this is caused by the technology they use. If they will catch every transaction, it will cause a very big load on the performance of applications. The monitoring of all transactions needs improvement.

View full review »
CY
Service Delivery Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The solution is complex. 

We'd like the solution to offer more AI features.

The initial setup could be easier.

They need to improve the infrastructure and make it less complex. There are too many modules and components. 

It would be helpful if the product had local support in our area. 

View full review »
AF
Test Specialist at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The dashboard can be better. Also, the automated reports could be improved.

The UI in Dynatrace is more user-friendly.

I would like to see more automated reports. 

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it_user522015 - PeerSpot reviewer
DBA at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

It would help to maybe have a more graphical interface and more user-friendly graphics. I don't think that Java is so adaptable since the marketplace has improved a lot. Thus, they have to improve in terms of the GUI.

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it_user560454 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Director Software Development

We're struggling a little bit with the way it auto-configures the various endpoints and how to work it. Some of the endpoints are not quite defined correctly, in its ability to sort of go in and tidy things up after the initial install and configuration. That's a little tough to get in and figure out. It's also made tough by there being very few people that are doing this as a job. It's basically me.

Other than that, I can't really think of anything.

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it_user560418 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Engineer II at Expedia

One of the things that I would like to see is a little bit more ease of use with regards to the analytics component. I know that's new. At a recent conference, there was a session for hands on with analytics that I signed up for. I planned to look at that a little bit. Otherwise, it's been a little bit of a black box to try and get started with our existing infrastructure.

I know that they're moving towards a lot of the things that I would like to see. For example, slightly deeper integration of the database monitoring that's already in place and being able to, a little bit more easily, correlate that to the calls that my web service is making. My applications, in particular, are very, very, very database heavy. Being able to see that more closely linked would be nice. The latest version of the controller has already started moving in that direction.

Being able to use analytics in the way that it's advertised; there's still a gap for me personally, in terms of where we are now and what the capabilities of analytics are. I would really like to see that made a little bit more transparent.

These are small, quality-of-life issues.

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it_user560526 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I’d like the mobile app to scale out a little bit better. There have been things that are missing from the mobile app that show up in the desktops. Also, there are some usability things in terms of, how quickly can I get down to active alerts? How can I filter off of those, especially when we have a lot of applications, a lot of tiers, a lot of business transactions? The mobile app gets the job done but it's missing a lot. I often times feel it is easier and faster to just pull out the laptop, boot that up and go through there instead of the mobile app.

The mobile app needs a little bit of work, making sure that the feature set that is available on the desktop, that we can copy it over and do the same thing on the mobile app.

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it_user560421 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Systems Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

I don’t know about room for improvement. I think it's pretty good at what it's designed for. I think it does a great job at what it's designed to do, which is Java, JVM, instrumentation.

See my answer regarding scalability.

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FP
Services Technology Manager at NCR Corporation

Needs more integration with applications suites, like Oracle Enterprise Server or BMC Remedy.

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it_user560490 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Platform Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see more of a unified platform. They're very, very new on the server side, machine agents. I want them to be more mature in this area. The approach I understand they're taking is that we connect between an application and the server, but that's it.

That's the point where, if you have to describe the value of this tool in front of a super–techie Windows administrator, he will not appreciate the tool, because he's not getting the metrics that he wants to see. He wants to see message queue size. He wants to see how his virtual memory looks. He wants to see packets incoming, outgoing, what's the packet drop rate. He wants to see many, many technical details, which is not what we want.

Since I want to keep happy both sides of the board, I cannot live with just one application side being happy in the company.

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it_user560514 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Applications Sr. Software Developer/Project Leader at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Increasing the 200 business transaction limit would be great. The ability to compare releases a little bit more and with a little bit more accuracy. Right now, it'll show you the previous release and the next release. And it shows you all the numbers, but it doesn't you any relative change between them. You have to do all that on your own.

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it_user560388 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Atg Developer at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees

At a recent conference, several questions came up regarding the memory heap utilization. AppDynamics is an APM tool that reduces heap utilization to 90-95%, even though it doesn't give you a heap dump. But you have other tools for that.

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it_user121725 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Application Support Specialist - ITIL® at AsianLogic

Charting is cumbersome; inability to do decimal fraction arithmetic in expressions (for alerts), so everything has to be done in % rather than as natural fractions. Can’t get response time by host for an given host group without laboriously setting it up in the chart widget.

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MM
Senior Performance Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The agent deployment could be simplified by, for example, adding a GUI.

Correlation should be improved.

End-user monitoring should provide options for data collection, including using a JavaScript file or using a network request in the case of a mobile application.

It should automatically upload the mapping file.

View full review »
AY
Sr Technical Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot.

In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring.

When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software.

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CC
Director at a program development consultancy with 51-200 employees

Adobe Flash Player is a forbidden program in many companies' IT security policies. AppDynamics was using HTML5 to improve its UI and replace Flash Player over the course of the last two years. However, its UI still has some features that require Flash Player as a display interface. They need to update their UI to HTML5 customer can easy to use and optimize UI performance.

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it_user269436 - PeerSpot reviewer
Quality Assurance Expert at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

The graphical display of the monitoring data is very simple and unscientific. Histograms should be plotted as histograms. An easy export of the data of a graph in CSV or Excel format would be helpful for the creation of individual reports.

The advantage of a histogram plot is that you see the measuring intervals (bins) and are not mislead

to believe in a linear increase or decrease, where there was none. As for the export to .csv-files. It is very often necessary to prepare reports for customers or management. For those people the data need to be prepared individually with different kind of plots to emphasize the important point. Therefore a .csv-Export is very helpful.


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it_user560511 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Support Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Server visibility is an area with room for improvement. I use .NET services for one of my applications. When you see the CPU usage or memory for the .NET services, it gives you that data for the server, not for the individual service. I wanted to see them separated, how much each one of them is consuming.

I spoke to the AppDynamics guys about it. I found out that it's already coming in the next release, 4.3. That's something I wanted to see and it's already coming out.
I cannot think of anything other than that.

View full review »
it_user560439 - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Test Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We're definitely looking for adoption of more platforms. We have some legacy z/OS systems that we use, so we're looking to help stitch those in. It's pretty difficult to; things aren't on the open system side. We’re definitely looking for that.

Given the testing we do, we look for ways to save detailed information on tests, such as "point in time". If we have a test we run, and we want to save that granularity and be able to pull it up, like a month later. We've expressed our want for that.

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it_user560394 - PeerSpot reviewer
Web Engineer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

Actually, it still takes some time when I want to find some requests in time ranges. It's a little slow. I think maybe they could improve there.

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it_user521979 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead | Manager,Software Engineering at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The way we execute it, it takes a bit of time, like every tool. If they can improve that; instead of taking 10 seconds, say it takes 5 seconds or 3 seconds, that would be great. Maybe some more CPU power or something like that could be an area to improve.

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it_user560448 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Performance Management Intern at Choice Hotels International

I would like to see some more work done for custom extensions. I don't think that there is enough support in that aspect.

We primarily have Java applications and that could be expanded as well.

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it_user534495 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Performance Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Full-stack network monitoring in terms of m, switches, (Third-party tool integration should be enabled).
  • be m jitter, retransmission, retransmission timeouts, delays, Window size or other network issues.
  • Solution should be enabled to integrate with a storage monitoring platform.
  • SAP applications full-stack monitoring.
View full review »
it_user126369 - PeerSpot reviewer
Gateway Systems Administrator with 51-200 employees
Yes, the custom dashboard. Making custom dashboards is really tedious. I wish there was just a drag and drop to slap things together quickly. View full review »
it_user112605 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer with 51-200 employees
Remove all Flash from the product. Also make drilling down in the response time call stacks easier. View full review »
it_user112179 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Software Developer with 501-1,000 employees
I did not find it easy to understand at first. It just looked like this sea of information, and I couldn’t see the logical breakdown of things, and the names for things didn’t immediately help me figure out what they were really for – what it could help me see and do. View full review »
ES
Regional Director (CEER) at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The solution could improve by covering more technologies. For example, it does support .NET Core applications. However, it could be a bit better. Additionally, there are some outdated technologies which are not covered out of the box with this solution, such as C++ which is old technology. They can be monitored but it takes a bit more effort. They have done a decent job but they could improve.

View full review »
SS
Principal Engineer at Wyndham Hotel Group

The integration with cloud services is still pending with AppDynamics. We would like the product to be serverless. 

View full review »
GS
Technical Director at SoftPro

Its cost: Most of the customers do not have enough budget to deploy the APM agent to their whole applications.

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it_user560535 - PeerSpot reviewer
Programmer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I went through the Power User training, and it was kind of like drinking from a fire hose. As a dev, I would like to see something that is more tailored towards us, instead of having just a general quick Power User session. 

I haven't been able to get the full benefit of AppDynamics yet because I haven't had any time to sit down and actually go through production.

View full review »
it_user560481 - PeerSpot reviewer
DB Admin at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like, for example, to see something similar to a heap dump; exactly which objects are over there. I'm not sure it's possible or not. This is a challenge.

A friend compares it to JavaMelody, which I think gives them some of the features that they still want that application to be active. I think it's mainly about the number of threads, SQL executions and similar items, at a certain point in time when you look at them. That could be something.

Sometimes, it can be a little bit too crowded; all the screens. Once you put your dashboards together and you know exactly what you're looking for, it's OK. But if you're always trying to find new problems that you don't know about, maybe that's a little bit harder.

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it_user17262 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Development Mansger at Garmin

The big feature that I would love to see is the ability to extract all the data automatically into some type of a data repository, big data lake, or something where we can do even deeper analysis of the data that AppDynamics gives us.

View full review »
RS
IT Executive at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Their support should be improved. Clusters and monitoring can also be improved.

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it_user560502 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

One of the things that I've noticed is when you have a massive scale, turning on too much of data logging is not possible. So sometimes what's happening is we would use the snapshot capabilities to a minimum. But then what's happening as a result is we miss certain transactions and we need the snapshot.

I was working on a case and I knew what the problem was. I knew what the root cause was. I was trying to reproduce that case so I can collect the data in APM, which is a lot more user-friendly. Because I knew what the issue was, but if I needed to explain it to someone, I don't want to write an email. So I wanted a diagram view of what the issue was. And I was trying to reproduce it.

It took me a long time to get that snapshot in to the APM, because I think it wasn't taking very frequent snapshots. And it's probably the way we configured APM, because of the volume of data that generates it. They probably deemed it necessary to not just take every snapshot because obviously, it's a very expensive operation and it costs a lot of I/O and performance as well. So, that is something I would probably say that would be useful. To be able to say - I'd like to be able to do a snapshot much more frequently if it's possible in any way.

The monitoring capability could be improved. It's dateless right now. But, at a recent conference, I think one of the CTOs or COs mentioned that they're working with another monitoring solution to integrate it. But at the moment, it does have a monitoring capability, but it's very, very basic. Just to give you an example. Let's say if you get an alert, you don't want another alert in the next five minutes to say that it's down. You need to be able to increase the counter on that alert to say, look, it's still down but I don't want to trigger another alert. And every alert in our space would mean a ticket to our space. So you don't want to flag a hundred alerts for the same type of issue like a hundred times, if you know already what the issue is. So it's those capabilities. The integration, either with the existing monitoring capability, and that smooth transition. In fact, I was just looking at my email today. I have like 15 emails from APM. It's just way too much traffic for me.

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it_user560376 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Specific to our environment here, we use .NET and they have more features for the Java platform. So I would like to see all the features that are currently in Java translated to .NET.

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it_user76911 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Account Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

In the current version of AppDynamics, there is a correlated section, where we can see all servers’ performance along with application performance, but network performance is missing. Including network monitoring would provide an end-to-end correlated view of all factors in a single console view.

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it_user516924 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Operations Systems Admininistrator III at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The product has a pretty diverse metrics browser, but I’d like to see better out-of-the-box visual reporting so that we can roll this up to management. I have no doubt that will be improved in the next release.

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it_user257253 - PeerSpot reviewer
Spanish Language Specialist at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see the following:

  • A better way to export data to reports.
  • A better way of distributing the AppDynamics reports with deep dive details.
  • Better integration with load testing tools such as NeoLoad and JMeter. The current integration is very cumbersome.
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it_user560364 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Support Analyst III/ Enterprise Monitoring at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to see better dashboarding and an easier way to redefine transaction names.

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it_user112596 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Support Engineer with 51-200 employees

The granularity of historic data could be improved.

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PS
Associate Principal Consultant at BRavura

As per my experience, the drill-down feature can be improved at the class level.

It should generate a report similar to what Oracle provides.

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it_user305178 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Consultant at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

One thing that can be improved is the license structure. It is not easy to see which agent is included in the license and which is not.

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GH
Solutions Architect and Community Leader at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

In general, AppDynamics is by far the easiest APM tool to use. The biggest room for improvement is related to maintenance of the solution. A centralized upgrade of agents is sorely missed.

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it_user877233 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT FrontOffice & QA Manager at VENCA
  • IT department
  • Software production
  • Test environment
  • QA testing
  • KPIs of the business
  • Heatmap
  • An APM
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it_user799947 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant with 1,001-5,000 employees

Areas which could be improved:

  • Integrated dashboard for user
  • Application
  • Infrastructure
  • Network layers.

There also needs to be an option to capture all the sessions for all the users, not just samplings.

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it_user532590 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Performance Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This product could be improved by having a cross-application flow that can split the monitored systems into smaller business applications. I would like to see more flexible custom dashboards.

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GP
Sr. Integration Developer at Equifax Inc.

Rolling out version upgrades is a difficult job at times.

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it_user324879 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Architect-Product Development with 5,001-10,000 employees

The primary feature we are looking for is tracking async calls because most of our API are async calls. We cannot view HTTP data.

We require a seamless way to upgrade the controller and .NET agents.

The plugins available are tedious to use and not robust, e.g. URL monitoring.

The application(controller) is very heavy on hardware. This increases our cloud cost.

It should be more intuitive and provide better metrics when drilling down in the UI.

  1. Instrumenting Async method calls:
    For example, let's say we have Async Rest API call written in C#.net with this method - public async long Multiply (int x, inty). Now this call may take 5-15 seconds for REST Response. In AppDynamcis we have an option to instruement a specific method by providing the method definition and its parameters passed and returned values. We can define as variable data collectors to do this, and this is available with the drill down of the call stack. The data collector or variables should show the value which doesn't, and we also tried the diagnostic mode where we can introduce a delay. Though AppDynamics say there are settings to enable tracking of Async calls, but I think it's more inclined and friendly for POJO(Java) calls than POCO(dotnet) calls.
  2. HTTP Data Collector for Async calls:
    In the above example, if we like to see the HTTP data collectors then there is an option to view the HTTP header variables and custom variables. However, there is no way to see the JSON request and Response data in AppDynamics. I can view this in IE or Chrome using developer tools on the client but not within AppDynamics. I'm not sure if this feature is available in EUM which we haven't procured yet. Also, I don't rule out possibility I might have over looked something and missed it, but I really tried to get this working. Also, the AppDynamics team failed to assist to get this working.
  3. Plug-in's tried:(SQL monitoring and URL monitoring)
    There was a requirement where we wanted to query our database directly and display certain values (integer) in the AppDynamics UI for monitoring, say, a number of active sessions or database locks etc. Though AppDynamics doesn't provide an out of the box solution, the plug-in's available on Git-Hub which are claimed to be stable aren't working either. Ultimately, we succeed in writing custom VBS files which leverages database machine agent service provided by the tool. With this tool we dump the data to metrics file and manage to integrate. This was very good experience to get our hands around and customize few things which not found in the community of AppDynamics.

This also goes with URL monitoring script provided by community in Git-Hub and also Plug-In repositories on the AppDynamics site. This plug-in is a little tedious to configure because of the YAML file, and only supports HTTP 200 is alive i.e ping request to PORT 80. There's no script for login automation. Again we managed to write custom scripts here for logging using VBS.

There seems to be a certain disconnect between the AppDynamics development and support teams. Maybe because this is a developer intensive engineering tool and support guys need to understand the framework of .NET or a Java ecosystem and applications that cut across various design architectures. This could be a gap which AppDynamics needs to bridge.

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it_user823356 - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Test / QA Architect at Virtustream

The cost is prohibitive.

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AK
Presales Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

AppDynamics is dealing with a lot of products and technologies, so we need to have clear documentation.

The community support needs to be a little bit better.

In the future, I would like to see the inclusion of better programming language options. This would allow for wider use, and make it more versatile.

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it_user509022 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Performance Engineer Consultant with 501-1,000 employees
  • Analytics
  • SQL statement monitoring
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it_user503214 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Technical Analyst at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It does not support network monitoring, which should be included.

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it_user112602 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer with 51-200 employees
We miss more information for tweaks at the OS level and resource usage. Also making the integration with AppDynamics easier would be a good improvement. View full review »
Buyer's Guide
AppDynamics
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about AppDynamics. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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