AppDynamics Server Monitoring Reviews

I have a B2B eCommerce website and we have some business transactions. For that, we have configured the business transactions in AppDynamics. Apart from that, we have a list of servers that we have configured in AppDynamics, to send us some sort of alert if there's something bad or the servers are in disguise or something.  

First, we use it to handle the business transactions alerting, and then the servers alerting. And second, we use it to create the dashboard so that we can get real-time updates on how the system is performing at around runtime.

I like Business iQ the most, so far. It has great analytics configurations and I can get real-time updates. We have eCommerce releases every week. So the one use case that I use Business iQ is to compare before and after release performance using AppDynamics.

In terms of improvement, we have experienced bugs. I think the AppDynamics team is already aware of that and we follow up with them. They said that in the next release, they're going to cater to all those bugs.

I have been using AppDynamics for two years. 

I find it pretty comfortable and pretty stable. Obviously, there are always some sort of bugs that any product needs to handle, but otherwise, it is quite stable.

We have ten to fifteen employees who manage this solution.

Since we are an eCommerce B2B website and we do need the scalability at times, to scale down or scale up, AppDynamics really does not create trouble for us in such scalability possibilities. It's not that difficult in terms of scalability.

We use it daily. Since we are on eCommerce products and support roles, we need to check the performance of the website on a daily basis, even on an hourly basis.

I am quite satisfied with their support. Things are in shape. Things are good.

We use AppDynamics and Pingdom but then we are using both of the software to cater to different purposes. I really don't want to compare those two products, because those are serving different functionalities for us. They are both NPM, network performance monitoring systems, but then they are totally different from each other, and they serve different purposes.

It is easy to set up. We got help from AppDynamics, they initially helped us set up the configuration, and then we took it forward from there.

The entire setup has been completed for my website in a week.

I would advise that instead of generic metric business usage of this, instead, use a generic metric business transaction configuration, and go for the Business iQ part of AppDynamics. It's really powerful and it is in real-time. It gives output on real-time things.

I would recommend AppDynamics. It's a very powerful tool for any organization to implement.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. The one thing that I find it difficult in using AppDynamics is, for any new user, it's not easy for him or her to configure the transactions in AppDynamics because the UI is pretty complex. The configuration is pretty complex for a new, fresh user. They can make the UI simpler, that'll be very helpful for anyone to configure their website in AppDynamics.

It's real time; you get data back as quick as the tool can process it. It's a very good tool for real time getting to things quick and fixing them.

Our mean time to resolution has been reduced drastically, I think, within the last year. I've only been there like six months, but I've heard since they got this application, that things have really gotten a lot better.

We have hundreds of services and multiple shared health rules for alerting for each of them, AppD has no easy way to pull up all the health rules for a particular service to send off the each app owner to validate alerting thresholds.

AppD can currently extract all the health rules into one XML file but dissecting that into something easy for an app owner to review would be very time intensive.

I think we've had a few blips but it’s been fairly stable.

It has scaled well. We're growing really, really big time this year. It's managing the new inputs.

Set up your processes first and make sure everybody knows what they're doing. I recommend basic training of what it looks like.

I think the big thing is, if you're alerting on something, you want somebody to fix it right away. If you don't have a plan in place there, then everything else is kind of meaningless; for example, if you only see it an hour later.

It's the best thing out there. Something can always be better; nothing's perfect.

Performance is the most valuable feature, especially the tag and follow, which has to do with multiple JVMs and diaries. Also, getting to know when you hop into different segments and trying to figure out where this is actually happening, and then that too, if it is happening to the backend. That is the key and that helps.

Server Monitoring has saved us time. We have issues that previously took days to solve, become resolved quickly. Once you know what's your normal, you know your anomaly. That's the key.

We have our own challenges because the amount of JVMs we are dealing with. But still, this is really helpful in trying to analyze a lot of our issues with certain types of JVMs. Not necessarily out-of-memory errors, but a few memory leaks, and a few applications that had third party JVMs that got leaked. Had I not known this, it would have taken a long time to solve these issues. There are ways to find them, but it takes more time.

One area that needs improvement is application integration. They do have it now, but that has to be improved. What happens is, right now, we cannot deep-dive into it. Four years back, I requested application integration. It took four years get it. At least it is there. The thing is that it has to improve. That's it.

Stability is good. I mean, we had issues. I have been using APM for four years, so I know where it was, and now where I am I know, so I'm so happy with it. It's much improved.

Scalability, it's good. It has challenges too, because I'm dealing with a very large setup. Scalability is definitely there, but now with the new features that are coming out, with a backend, it definitely will be better.

I am happy with technical support.

There were initial setup issues on both sides. I don't want to complain and it's not fair to do that, but now, if you look at it, it's reasonably stable, but every upgrade is a challenge. I mean, software is like that. Especially with the amount of changes they are making. The only thing about AppDynamics is they release quickly. Hopefully, they know you cannot keep up with this pace. A big enterprise, cannot handle that many releases like that. It requires a lot of coordination to upgrade to a new release.

And the biggest thing I wanted them to do, is to not require agent upgrades. That means every agent must be recycled. Someday they will push the agent from the controller with automatic upgrades. Something has to happen like that. Hopefully that will happen. That is my next ticket.

Use it, and when you use it, use it regularly. If not, don't use it at all. You won't get the benefit unless you use it properly on a regular basis, so you know what normal looks like. You need to know how this thing looks, so that you know your anomalies and can resolve issues quicker.

It’s great that APM monitors in real-time. When we have an issue, we find out fairly quickly if there's a problem with our hardware.

For example, we were in crisis calls all last week. So, that's the first tool we look at to see what's going on and where the problem is. Then we start to troubleshoot from that point on.

One of the big things was the license management. It was just something I've been asking for over a long time, because we have several groups that use it so it get very clustered. The new feature with license management coming out, I've been waiting for it. That's going to be great for us. Should help us with a lot of problems.

We have had some stability issues for a few sites. I'm on the supply chain side so there have been a few. At distribution centers, we've had a few issues, but not as a whole. Only for a few pieces here and there we do.

We solve these by just looking at our code, see if the hardware is kind of lined up to see if it's a hardware issue or if it's networking. We look at the bigger picture basically.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have used technical support a few times. They have been great. Last time we had to actually have them join our crisis call and they were able to join within the next 5 minutes, which was great.

We had several tools, but we never used them properly. Mainly because we had five different tools and were working five different things. We were trying to bring everything together, is basically where I think everybody came together with that balance.

Initial setup was very straightforward. The documentation is very clear. It's a matter of reading through it, but it's very straightforward.

I don't have the names on top of my head, but we looked at several other companies. I wasn't the one who made the decision, but again, mainly because the multiple pieces that you can look at with AppDynamics, that's what helped us the most.

When looking at a vendor, first of course is money and the features to see how valuable it's going to be. Our main requirement is, is it going to actually get us some revenue? The value of it versus the cost. That's the main thing.

I would give AppDynamics an 8/10. I guess we're not using it fully to what it's capable of and that's mainly on us. We're working with AppDynamics support to take it to the next step; actually properly fully using all aspects of it. That includes the server, utility, the infrastructure presets coming out, and basically using it for what it's supposed to be and not parts of it. Our rating is mainly because of us.

I would advise others to automate early on. Streamline a lot of it before getting started. That's going to save you a lot of time later on if you have thousands of JVMs running.