AppDynamics Reviews

Our main use of this AppDynamics is to monitor customer applications, such as web applications. For example, to monitor the availability of online stores, and to figure out whether we have any problems.

AppDynamics has a very broad range of supported technologies, and it's user-friendly. It looks nice, and it's easy to sell the solution to the stakeholders when we can visualize how the website is working. For example, where we have any problems through visual analytics.

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.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately eight years.

The solution has been stable in my experience. 

The solution is scalable. AppDynamics has been flexible enough for what I use it for.

I have not contacted support. We have only used our local distributors, and they have been good.

I have used an older version of Dynatrace previously.

The solution is easy to deploy if you know what you are doing. It was simple for me.

The price of AppDynamics could be reduced in my region.

My advice to others that want to implement this solution is to have a test environment, and then go to production. Sometimes it requires tuning of the software and restarting services a couple of times,  it's better to make all of these changes on a test environment, and then to move to production.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately eight out of ten.

We use AppDynamics mainly for troubleshooting the database side. If there is any issue that is happening, we go through layer by layer from the start of the application, for example, the UI layer. We go all the way to the database layer to show where the exact problems are. Additionally, we use it for other monitoring and alerting purposes.

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.

I have been using AppDynamics for a year and a half.

AppDynamics has been stable.

I have found AppDynamics to be scalable.

We have 25 users using this solution in my organization.

We have previously used HP OpenView and Dynatrace. The client wanted to move from Dynatrace to AppDynamics and this is why we are using AppDynamics.

AppDynamics is easier to install compared to other solutions.

We have our own IT team that can support the installation. We have partners that can assist with the installation if needed.

There is a license to use this solution. However, the clients pay for the licenses we are the service provider.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

On-premises

It is primarily on-premises. We've been evaluating cloud, and I've got one application that's using a cloud-based solution, but the bulk of it is on-premises.

The business transaction that stands between multiple applications is proving to be most valuable.

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.

I have been using it heavily for about two and a half years.

It was complex. There is nothing simple about this type of instrumentation.

We had professional services from AppDynamics or Cisco for mostly on-prem expertise.

I would advise others to take a higher systems-level approach to understand exactly what is needed in the way of instrumentation and monitoring within your enterprise. You can have a point solution like AppDynamics, and this is the big picture of the entire data flow throughout the system.

I would rate AppDynamics a six out of 10.

On-premises

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

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

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

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

While it is scalable, it could be better.

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

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

AppDynamics is a scalable product.

I have not contacted technical support.

The initial setup is easier for the client.

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

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

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

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

On-premises

AppDynamics is a complete tool for server and usability monitoring.

I've been working with AppDynamics for the past two years.

Once you get past installation, AppDynamics is highly stable and we get good results.

AppDynamics is scalable.

AppDynamics technical support is good.

AppDynamics is easy to use overall, but the installation part is a battle. Installation and configuration can be very tough. An average user without specialized knowledge can't do this. You need to have DevOps and QA teams handle it. During installation, a lot of customers get stuck trying to track the database or the API part, and they have to contact customer support.

AppDynamics is a bit costly for an APM tool. The cheapest is New Relic. 
AppDynamics and Dynatrace are about the same. 

I also use Dynatrace with some of my customers' companies. It's a much better product than AppDynamics in terms of features and ease of installation. 

I rate AppDynamics five out of 10. 

We are using AppDynamics for application management.

It is easy to gain visibility into complex environments with AppDynamics. It has the ability to combine operation information of the environment and business information with strong business IQ support. 

The solution makes it easy to find the root cause of the problems and provided the visualization of data. It is really simple, useful, and intuitive. 

It enables integration with other systems very easily. It can monitor applications of different technologies as well as manage log files. 

It has a lot of capabilities and the solution features function well overall.

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.

I have used AppDynamics for approximately seven years.

It is highly scalable. You can go from a small deployment into tens of thousands of nodes to monitor an application.

We provide support for this solution. We are the biggest AppDynamics partner in Europe, we have approximately 60 experts.

We work closely with research and development. They are quite quick and flexible when it comes to helping and supporting. We are quite satisfied. When we come from the field directly, we do not need months or weeks to fix issues that we have found or to implement new features. They have been excellent.

I am more in the pre-sales department, I am not that technical, but I do understand and know the basics. The installation difficulty depends on a variety of factors. it can be simple. Out of the box, it is already quite simple. However, there are tons of specifics that you need to know, but it is not overly difficult for typical environments. The software can add another layer of difficulty. Overall the difficulty is dependant on the environment.

For those who appreciate the value and had issues with the visibility of the performance of their applications, then the pricing is good. For somebody who does not need it, it can be pricey, but overall, it is worth the money which it costs.

I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

The product is good for the enterprise SAS application performance monitoring. It's good for a larger scale deployment such as what my company is working on.

The solution is scalable.

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. 

We acquired the solution last year after we did a bit of research on its capabilities. We've been using it for a few months so far.

The scalability is good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's a good product for large-scale projects and enterprises. 

We don't have AppDynamics local support in my area. We only have a partner in my region, which is not really AppDynamics. In terms of the whole implementation, the experience, I wonder if the experience is good enough. I suspect a direct connection with AppDynamics might be better. If they had a product team in my region we might be better off.

The initial setup is not easy or straightforward. It's quite complex. You really need to have local support.

We are just a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with AppDynamics. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been happy with its capabilities over the time we have used it. 

I would recommend the solution, even with all of the complexity that it brings. However, I would advise new users or companies considering the product to make sure they have local support.

The big problem we've always had is connecting the dots, so to speak. We've never been able to say that the application is having an issue before somebody calls us and tells us, and that's extremely embarrassing. Plus we're a little late to the table. With AppDynamics, you can be able to tell whether they're having errors or whether they're having a slow response time. 

We're able to detect issues now before the customer calls us. Another thing that this helps us with is the fact that there are some conditions we see in the database, for instance, locking and blocking and high CPU, that we've always had been trying to correlate this high CPU and high blocking. We were always wondering: is that necessarily bad or is it just kind of a warning sign or what is that? With this product, we're able to correlate everything with what the application is saying and saying, "we've got blocking, we've got high errors, we've got high response time, therefore it's probably a database and therefore it's probably an issue." Before we had this product, we weren't able to do that.

This solution is great at alerting us to issues and letting us know if anything is correlated.

The release management capabilities are great. If you do a new release, you have to ask: how's will it perform? Is it going to have problems? Before it was hard to actually measure. Now we're able to precisely measure the performance and also the error rate. That's very helpful.

It's also helpful with building dashboards. You can build dashboards for different parts of the company, for the operations, for the application, for the infrastructure, all the above.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The stability has been good.

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.

I've been using the solution for a few years. I started using it around 2015.

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable.

I'm relatively new at this company, and we're doing a POC on it right now. We have it on about 75 machines. In terms of scalability, my guess is the architecture will allow it, is t's in the cloud. It should scale. However, I really don't know here in the company where I use it. I know other companies have scaled thousands. I personally haven't experienced that myself, however.

As it is going well, we're likely to expand it. That said, we're still just in the POC phase.

The initial setup is pretty simple. It's not overly complex. Implementing it shouldn't be a problem.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, the team is pretty much my team. It's a site reliability engineering team, and it's pretty small. The people who'll actually be maintaining it will not only be implementing, so to speak, but utilizing it and customizing it. That will ultimately also include a lot of other teams, like your operation, application, and infrastructure teams.

I can't speak to the exact cost of the solution. It's not a part of the product I handle.

I would advise those considering the solution to be patient and stick with it. A lot of these tools are pretty simple, however, they're simply used. For instance, they measure CPU and network and memory and stuff like that. The graphics may be pretty flashy, however, it doesn't provide the hardcore data that AppDynamics does. That's why you need to kind of just relax and stay with it a bit and you'll be successful. If you're just looking for something flashy to give you back immediate results that you can use today or tomorrow, it's probably not the right fit.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We use this product for performance monitoring.

The monitoring is similar to Dynatrace.

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. 

We were using AppDynamics from 2017 to 2019.

I have no issues with the stability of this solution. I have not had any problems.

AppDynamics is a scalable solution.

I have not had the need to contact technical support.

With my experience using Dynatrace, I would rate it a ten out of ten. It is more detailed and it offers more technology.

I was not part of the initial setup.

I would recommend Dynatrace, it's better than AppDynamics.

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We have an application that we have made which is the core of our business. In many cases, new code comes out or there is older code that gets mixed with newer code and you will see slowdowns or problems that can happen. This solution gatherings all this different pertinent information about how long a particular piece of code sits in what stack of the application. When you have a slowdown or an issue is happening, you can look through the application processes step by step. You can find out where the application was lagging behind.

Most recently, we had a problem with some SQL queries that were not optimized in our application. It was taking approximately 30 seconds for the code to get a return. We were able to narrow down where the problem was by using this solution to find out what was taking a long time on that particular query, it turned out to be the DVAs. The DVAs were able to be fine-tuned to make the query a little bit more efficient because we were returning much more data than what was actually needed for that part. We were able to simplify it and it went from 30 seconds down half a second.

I have found the main feature of the solution to be its ability to analyze an application's code to see where there are issues. Additionally, it is easy to use and configure.

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.

I have been using the solution for approximately one year.

The solution is stable.

The scalability of this solution is fantastic. We have approximately 50 developers and six infrastructure engineers using this solution and our parent company has over 400 employees. I have found it to be a very good enterprise solution. 

If we hire more staff I think there could be in increase usage of this solution.

The customer support is good. We have not had many big problems, the application just works. The solution has never taken down any of our servers. Other than calling support to figure out where a particular installer is and how to configure it properly, I have not needed to call them.

The installation was straightforward. There were initial issues with licenses and we had to move some licenses around to give more to their lower environment systems to allow us to put all our information into one place. This took a while, they did not make this part very easy.

Our parent company set up all the backend for this solution and I did all the client configurations on the actual servers. 

You save time by using this solution allowing you to utilize that saved time towards developing new features for your customers versus trying to troubleshoot the ones that are not working properly. The return on investment is instant.

There is a license required for each system that we use the solution on.

This solution is not the cheapest but it works well. You will end up doing more work with a cheaper solution than if you just spent the extra money on a better solution like this one. 

I would advise others wanting to purchase this solution it is well worth the money. If you look at the quantity of time it takes you to track down a problem versus doing it the old-fashioned way, the amount of time saved by using a solution like this helps you move forward more quickly. 

I rate AppDynamics a ten out of ten.

On-premises

We use the product heavily in our ecosystem. The prime focus for our consumption is for Telkom - a telco and also the mother company. Telkom bought Business Connexion, the company that I fall into. The IT company, BCX, belongs to Telkom. The current real estate that we're responsible for, in Telkom, that we support and maintain on their behalf, is using AppDynamics. We use it for application performance monitoring alongside Foglight, which we would like to replace. 

Everything that AppDynamics yields we use in some way. 

We are a rather big user of AppDynamics. We use synthetic monitoring. 

From an application perspective, all the elements that come stock standard with the product, we are heavily invested in. We built a long list of dashboards and auto-alerts that goes through our call center to resolution groups, to fix issues, as and when they occur. 

The SAP monitoring element is very helpful. Historically, three or four years ago, AppDynamics couldn't tool an SAP instance. Now, there's a specific agent that you can deploy to SAP. We've invested in that element. There seems to be a market requirement for that element. Fairly recently, however, Dynatrace also added that to the inherent product capabilities, in order to monitor SAP ecosystems.

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.

I've been using the solution for many years.

The product is quite stable. We don't have a problem with the stability of the product. Now that we are in the cloud, it is even better. Historically, the underlying infrastructure and database that support everything was under our own personal management, inside our data centers. Now that it's in the cloud, it's even better, from that perspective. I don't have a problem with the stability. We certainly haven't experienced challenges that can be attributed to AppDynamics with reference to stability. It's a quite stable product.

Based on the rate or price for this, I would argue, certainly from a South African point of view, very seldom would a small company be able to afford the price. Based on the ecosystem that the customer starts off with, they may have different price points or different scales in order to make it more compelling for smaller and medium-sized business. Certainly, our experience is that the smaller companies, although they love the product and can certainly benefit from the product, find it a bit expensive for them. And this is where the Dynatrace model, possibly, becomes more appealing to them.

Aside from the cost, scalability is quite easy. We regularly add, edit, and delete elements off of our real estate. Scalability isn't much of a challenge. It takes a bit of time to implement and then add additional dashboards and relate the different elements to each other. Once you've done that, it's not that big a challenge.

I'm not technically responsible for technical support. Historically, we would ping the OEM, and ask them to assist us on something. There's always a scenario where you would want bigger or quicker turnaround or a quicker response to these things. That said, it's not a major challenge, though. Like any other company, if they can improve on their turnaround time on technical queries, it may assist all of us, all of their respective customers. However, that said, it's certainly not a major challenge. We do get feedback in a reasonable time. You always want it to be quicker. It's reasonable and I don't think you can necessarily expect quicker turnaround.

They do not have, for example, the concept of following the sun, where you have people on standby 24/7, to really support clients. 

In terms of the setup, you need experienced people with strong skill sets to handle it. If you try and Google your way through it, it's not going to cut it. You will not get the return on investment if you try and do it yourself. It's important to use capable, experienced people to do it. Unfortunately, that comes at a cost as well. 

It depends on how you deploy it and what do you need to do, however. We have a smallish team with the capabilities to implement. We have quite strong skills, and yet, not a big team. That said, the stock standard implementation is not that difficult. When it becomes integrated into a bigger landscape, it will get more complex. You will need to apply your mind seriously to what you display from a dashboard point of view, to effectively translate what happens from a monitoring point of view. Integration into things like a CMDB, as an example, will need to be addressed. 

For example, in our case, we need to have an HP server that needs to read as a CMDB and display it in a stock standard visible dashboard. 

The cost for AppDynamics is becoming a challenge, as well as the apparent AppDynamics move from a Magic Quadrant point of view. We're looking at Dynatrace, which we need to understand. The product is cheaper, however, we are trying to determine if the functionality is the same.

We are heavily invested in AppDynamics, however, in the latest Gartner report, it looks as if Dynatrace did quite well. I believe the Dynatrace product in ESER is slightly cheaper than the AppDynamics one. 

We were looking at potentially diversifying our offer to market through inclusion. We are not proposing dropping AppDynamics. We have a strong relationship with AppDynamics and Cisco, however, it is certainly clear, from a South African point of view, the markets seem to be requiring Dynatrace as opposed to AppDynamics.

In order for us to make an informed decision, I would want to understand the difference between the two products. I haven't worked personally with Dynatrace, historically, and we haven't invested in that product, although they're certainly relevant in the South African market. We need to understand what's the difference between the two, what's the ups and downs. I know AppDynamics quite well and have very little information on Dynatrace. I'd like to attempt at trying to gain some more information in order for us to make a decision on it.

We are an IT company. We are selling this to the market as well. We have a strong relationship with AppDynamics through Cisco. We're a reseller of the product. We have a stronger relationship with AppDynamics, both currently and over the years, to the exclusion of all alternatives. We're using AppDynamics from an application performance monitoring point of view.

I'm not sure if we are currently on the latest version of the solution, however, it's my understanding that we're either are or will be moving to the latest version of the solution.

We bought the Dynamics cloud instance. It's likely based around Europe. I'm not entirely sure. Certainly, from our perspective, I believe it's in Europe in terms of where the controllers sit. We've been on there for the last two years or so. 

The controllers would be in the cloud, yet, certainly, from a historical point of view, we have migrated to the cloud recently. I'm not a hundred percent sure if we're done with that process. We may have some on-premises instances still. As a service that we sell to external customers, there are on-prem instances as well.

In general, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

There are things that they can do to improve the product. We are working with them on that front. We are talking to them on an almost daily basis. Certainly, my team is talking to them daily. Obviously, pricing is a concern - certainly from out geographical point of view. Working the exchange rate differences between the different currencies makes local consumption seriously expensive. 

Dynatrace seems to be gaining momentum in the local market. If you look at Gartner's latest report that I saw fairly recently, Dynatrace is, even from a technical capability point of view, doing more, or better, than AppDynamics. I'm not entirely sure what they use as a basis to plot an application on those quadrants from a Gartner point of view, however, Dynatrace certainly looked as if it went past AppDynamics fairly recently.

I need to better understand the alternative products. It's a question of time until our current anchor customers start asking this very question. Why should we not consider going Dynatrace as opposed to AppDynamics? I don't yet have the ability to have an informed discussion on it.

Public Cloud

We primarily use the solution for effective application monitoring. 

It helps us to find out where the bottlenecks are. Once you know, you can go and try to fix that issue. One of the challenges, when you use an ERP system, is the performance and the experience. Whenever we had issues, it was an opportunity for us to find out where the problem is and try to figure it out. It's been helpful in terms of improving system response, in terms of trying to look at that. When there's a problem, we can always go and try to find out. AppDynamics gives synopsis information so we're able to at least find out where exactly the problem is. So that's been very, very helpful on that.

Even though we do not have an end-user experience or database agent, at least on the application side, we still are able to get the information. Otherwise, finding it, trying to find this information, or having a manual process could take some time. It's a time-saving solution for us for sure.

The dashboards of the solution are excellent. They can be customized very easily.

The stability is good.

The solution helps us save a lot of time on certain tasks.

I have not been able to really spend time on the product itself. Developers are more likely to discuss if there are any shortcomings. My usage is quite limited. It would be unfair for me to comment on missing features. I don't spend enough time with the solution, exploring its capabilities. 

Nothing comes to mind in terms of lack of features. I haven't witnessed any aspect that I felt was lacking.

The cost is an area of concern to me on that one. The cloud licensing needs to be improved. It's quite pricey. There are cheaper options other there - including open-source options. 

I've been using the solution for about four years or so. It's been a while. 

The stability of the solution is good. I haven't witnessed any issues that would make me worry about its capabilities. It doesn't crash or freeze and there are no bugs or glitches. The performance has been reliable.

We have two users on the solution currently.

I can't speak to how scalable the solution would be as I've never tried to scale the solution myself. I have no knowledge of how easy or hard it would be to scale.

I haven't worked on other tools personally.

I can't speak to the implementation process. I did not help set anything up. Therefore, I don't have any experience.

The initial setup was done by our application service provider, an ERP application service provider. They configured it, and therefore we never ran into any kind of setup issues in that respect. 

They were fine. We had a good experience with them overall.

There are other options that are open source that wouldn't cost the company any money.

There are many other open-source tools available. When it comes to price comparison, maybe it falls into different categories. It seems to be an expensive product overall, and with other cheaper options on the market, such as DataDog, companies may prefer to pay less or nothing at all.

At some point, we had decided to look for an alternate. Unfortunately, our hands were full and continue to be. We have so many other projects on that, we don't have time to do anything as time-consuming as switching to something else. If I had three months of free time, I would probably go and pick up an alternate, an open-source solution, and maybe implement that due to the fact that the AppDynamics cost is very, very high.

From time to time I do look at some other things, New Relic and some of the other things out there. However, I haven't properly evaluated anything per se. 

We are customers and end-users.

We're always using the latest version of the solution. It's SaaS-based and therefore it is consistently updated immediately as new versions are ready for release. We don't need to manually handle the process. We use AppDynamics' own cloud. We don't use a third-party cloud.

The one area of concern for me is the cost. There are other options - including open-source options.

Overall, I'd rate the solution at a serve out of ten. I'd rate it higher if the solution's price was better.

Public Cloud

Other

We use this solution to help reduce incidents in our production environment by providing usage and performance metrics, application dependencies like databases, .net services, caching, and much more.

This solution has helped us to reduce the number of incidents in our Production environment and improve the performance of applications.

The uptime of our critical applications went up, and it has enabled us to set new SLA metrics.

This solution makes it fast and easy to diagnose performance issues and exceptions/errors in application coding.

After a major incident, root cause analysis is conducted and, most of the time, we understand what caused the incident and how it can be prevented from happening again.

The Web Dashboards are also very useful and sometimes can really prevent incidents before they happen.

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.

We have been using this solution for more than two years.

04/2021 Update (four years using AppD)

Poor stability of the SaaS environment.

Scaling this solution is fast and user-friendly.

Support for agent problems is accurate and fast.

Support for SaaS solution stability is very poor.

Setup was fast and straightforward.

We used a vendor partner team for our deployment, and we found them to be very skilled.

We have seen ROI in less than twelve months.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We are using the solution to improve the performance of our application transactions.

This solution is easy to use and very powerful, it is a complete tool for us.

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

I have been using the solution for four months.

We have used in the past Wily and Dyatrace. We switched to this solution because of economics and we have found there is more information available to help us improve.

The installation was simple.

We used a partner to help us do the implementation of the solution. The full deployment was approximately one week and we use a three-person technical team for maintenance.

There is a license for the solution and we paid approximately $2,000. There is also an additional cost above the standard license which cost us approximately $3,000.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Our use case for AppDynamics is helping customers with performance problems and applications.

What I found is that there is a lot of room to develop things in it and to connect to other tools like IBM.

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.

We have been using AppDynamics for four years. 

AppDynamics is scalable for medium-sized companies, but it is more difficult for enterprise companies.

The AppDyniamics technical support is good. We haven't had any problems with them. They answer very quickly.

The initial setup was not really straightforward, but it was also not complex.

We handled the implementation in-house. The installation is not really an issue. You can install AppDynamics in an hour, but the configuration takes a long time before you have everything configured.

Return on investment for most tools takes a long time. Even then, I don't know if it's really the tools giving you a return on investment. Tools point to a problem, but they don't point to a solution. Your engineer needs to come up with a solution.

When deciding whether or not to go with AppDynamics, first take a look at what you need to monitor and what the value of the monitoring is. There are a lot of things that an organization may need to monitor, like, for example, if I have the power system on, I may need to monitor the microcode and the window system. However, AppDynanics doesn't monitor these kinds of things. There still need to be a lot of patches implemented in order to improve performance. Also, these tools give a false positive that the performance is wrong, but then only adjust one parameter in the microcode.

Yes, IBM APM, and Dynatrace

On-premises

I am using this product to monitor all microservice environments. I check all services and performance issues and implement some alerts and dashboards. We are also monitoring all applications that are not in a microservices environment. They are in a WebLogic environment. So, we use it to monitor WebLogic applications, Tomcat applications, and microservice applications that are running in the OpenShift environment or Kubernetes environment.

AppDynamics is in the middle of our monitoring environment. It is connected with all other monitoring applications. It helps us to check all the errors and performance issues because all our alerts, related to the performance of our website or backend applications, are implemented through this. So, it is one of the most important monitoring applications.

The ability to check parameters for microservice applications is most valuable. It is important for me. I can manually create new business transactions for applications and individually monitor business transactions. 

I can also use a lot of extensions. It has a lot of extensions to monitor other third-party applications, such as NoSQL applications, memory cache applications, Kafka applications, and Couchbase applications. It is very useful. We are also using the end-user monitoring site to follow all end-user activities. It is important for us to check the errors on the customer site.

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.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is good when you constantly check it. In our company, we use AppDynamics a lot. We are monitoring all applications with AppDynamics. Therefore, all the time, we need to check if there is something that needs to be improved and all related applications are okay. For example, our database might be getting bigger and bigger. If you are used to checking frequently, it is okay. I have prepared some procedures for checking all AppDynamics components. It is not hard for us.

In terms of the users, mostly the DevOps team is using this solution. On the development site, we have more than 100 users because all developers on the test system are checking all the processes.

It depends on the issue. It is mostly good. Sometimes, we had really difficult issues, and the support team was really trying to solve the problem, but it took a bit more time.

Its initial setup is easy. We are installing all the components on the same server. We don't need to install another database. It is included in its own database, so all the configurations are on just one server site.

As compared to other applications, its price is moderate. Its price is neither very high nor very low.

I recommend doing a central configuration for agent installation. It is really easy to run when we are upgrading our agents. The standard installation is good in my opinion.

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

We deployed our agents on the cloud for a Kubernetes application. We get the hardware details from the Azure and AWS monitoring. We import those matrices into AppDynamics and we see all of those details, along with our application performance detail, within the AppDynamics solution.

We are not using machine agents because we are making use of the Azure Monitoring and get the matrices from there.

The most valuable feature is the application performance. We have details such as CPU utilization and memory utilization, which we make use of to finalize the amount of CPU power or memory that we should allocate to our ports.

AppDynamics is easy to implement if you follow the documentation, and the documentation that they provide is good.

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.

I have been using AppDynamics for a few months.

This seems like a stable product and we plan to continue using it.

AppDynamics is scalable.

I would say that the support is 50/50. It is not very fast and there is definitely room for improvement in terms of support.

When we were installing it for the first time, it took us some time and we had some issues. One issue we faced was because we deployed all of the agents on all of the ports together. This created some problems, so the next time, we deployed it one by one. This is the process recommended by AppDynamics but somehow, we missed that part.

After that, it was stable and it continued working without any issues.

For the whole application, we were able to deploy in less than two hours.

We deployed it ourselves, although we had a consultant available online who was available for assistance. We didn't face any issues, other than deploying all of them at one time.

One technical person who has the details and information on the ports should be present. They need to know all of the commands that are used to deploy the agents.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

We use AppDynamics in our company. I am the IT product manager, who is responsible for the design of the solution.

We use this solution for application performance monitoring, byte code injection, and user experience monitoring, infrastructure, and database performance monitoring.

In 2014 and 2015, AppDynamics was one of the best products on the market.

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.

We have been using AppDynamics since 2015.

It's stable, but it could be better.

Scalability is poor to medium. It's an area that needs some improvement.

We have 3,000 users in our organization 

Technical support is average and they could be improved.

The initial setup on-premises was rather complex.

For a new release upgrade, it can take up to two months to deploy.

I completed the installation with my team.

We have an engineering team of four people, and a support team of ten people.

We do not have any issues with the price.

I would recommend this solution depending on what the use case is. If you want the latest, state of the art, including cloud-native monitoring and docker containers, I would recommend Kubernetes.

I would rate AppDynamics a six out of ten.

On-premises

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

The most valuable feature is the flow map.

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

The alerting mechanism is very good.

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

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

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

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

I have been working with AppDynamics for approximately two years.

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

Technical support is good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We completed the installation ourselves.

Pricing is handled by another team.

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

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We are using it for performance management. We are using its latest version. Right now, we are in the adoption stage. We are going through the training process, and slowly we will start using it. Initially, a team of 50 people will be using AppDynamics. Our goal is that all teams use AppDynamics so that we can benefit from it. 

With AppDynamics, we were able to identify where the database query was taking more time, that is, whether it was taking time on logical IOs or physical IOs. So, it helped to track down a lot of issues. It is also giving proactive alerts that help us to narrow down issues much quickly and fix them before they start impacting our customers. It has also been quite helpful when we want to show to our management or customers how this application helped.

From the performance management side, I like everything from business transaction work to tracking. On the database side, we can get a lot of insights from the database. On the server monitoring side, it helped us a lot to find out some of the issues on the VM side because VMs were creating a little trouble for us.

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.

I have been using AppDynamics since 2019, so almost one and a half years.

It is stable, but I noticed that a lot of times, the controller takes more time to load metrics, which impacts our productivity because we have to spend a little bit more time on this. I don't know if it is something internal or something that needs to be done from our side in terms of licensing and deployment.

I am satisfied with their support.

It is easy. We need to configure a few transaction detection rules. It also works well out of the box. For deploying for other customers, it has export and import functionality, which is good.

We were exploring some open-source tools, but then we decided to go for an enterprise-level tool because we have a lot of customers. We have a cloud as well. That's how we decided to go for AppDynamics.

It is a very much recommended tool. It is a really good and helpful tool for productivity.

I would rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten. I love this tool, and I don't have any issues with this tool.

Private Cloud

We work in the banking industry and we deal with business transactions, including responses for the users. We capture all of the traffic in our AppDynamics platform. It is a really good application tool.

Application monitoring is the most valuable feature.

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.

We have been working with AppDynamics for almost two and a half years.

This is a stable product and we definitely plan to continue using it in the future.

AppDynamics is really scalable. We have a private server on-premises and we haven't had any trouble with scaling. We have more than 1,000 people who are using it.

We use the support portal whenever we face an issue or any kind of problem, then we create a ticket and they assist us.

I am an IT monitoring specialist and I work with similar tools like Geneos and Splunk.

Geneos is straightforward and has different options for infrastructure monitoring. For example, if you have other hardware or memory, then these things are basic. With AppDynamics, these things require that we use extensions, follow the steps, and do the extra setup. These things are really challenging and it's not that easy to handle, the way it is with Geneos.

The people we know who are using Geneos are really happy with it and they think once or twice before moving to AppDynamics. In our case, we have moved to AppDynamics.

The initial setup is straightforward. We downloaded it from the AppDynamics resources, and they had already mentioned the installation steps. We followed the directions and it was easy to handle. It probably took about 30 minutes.

Although we deployed on-premises, we are planning on migrating to the cloud.

Initially, we had a consultant for the installation. Now, we do all of the upgrades by ourselves. We manage it with a team of four people.

The people who work on it are from my team, as well as from production and from pre-sales.

This is absolutely a product that I would recommend to other users. I can see a lot of people are interested in using AppDynamics.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We are a solution provider and I am a presales engineer. AppDynamics is one of the products that we implement for our clients and have experience with.

At this time, I'm using it for training purposes, for the team.

The features that I like best are the dashboard and Business Journey.

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.

I have been working with AppDynamics for about nine months.

AppDynamics is stable and we haven't faced any bugs.

As we are not an AppDynamics end-user, our experience with technical support is different. At the same time, from a support perspective, I have dealt with the AppDynamics community. I would say that support from the community is good enough, although it is not amazing. I think that community support needs to be a little better.

We did not work with another similar solution prior to AppDynamics. We are a Cisco partner, so we keep moving forward with the same technology.

The first time I deployed AppDynamics wasn't very easy because I didn't have much experience with Linux. However, aside from the Linux-related issues, I found it totally easy.

The deployment is really quick, taking just two or three days. However, we need more time for configuration. If the deployment is good then the configuration will take about one more week.

We do the implementation in-house. We have three people who are working with it.

AppDynamics is a good product and I totally recommend it. Once you feel that you have the full journey for your end-users and you are tracking them, it's awesome. Overall, I am very happy with this product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

On-premises

Ability to identify end user performance issues and drill down into root cause to improve MTTR and application availability.

Reduced MTTR and put us on a trajectory to be more focused on the end user experience. Provides monitoring more around business processes versus just servers, applications, etc. E.g., with complex systems, where a business process passes across multiple applications, the business needs us to monitor the heath of the process, not just a segment of the application.

• Business transaction capturing
• Analytics
  

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

More than one year.

Extensive use cases, dozens of primary and secondary use cases ranging from core application monitoring at the global level to micro level performance analysis at the transaction level. AppD provides the ability to also manage total interactions at the web/mobile browser level, the database and core infrastructure including server level and L4 network.

We are a services organization, so we use AppDynamics with our customers. It has allowed us to expand our footprint in the application management business with virtually all of our major accounts. We were able to expand and go into other applications that we weren't in or offering previously. We have a new value proposition for our customers- enhanced visibility, enhanced stability, and we can reduce our costs to them because our cost structure is reduced by using AppDynamics. We have other examples like this as well where AppDynamics has improved the way we function and operate. As of date of this article, our company has in excess of 30,000 AppDynamics agents deployed globally and we are monitoring billions of annual page views for major customers.

Furthermore, AppDynamics is a key toolset and drives tremendous value and efficiency in our remote performance management center which supports over 10,000 retail locations on behalf of our retail customers.

1. Ease of deployment- it's easy to install and use. This is key for us. Even as the product portfolio has expanded to include additional- AD has done a great job of ensuring that the deployment process is straightforward and usually up and running in minutes. Even the upgrade process has been made a very low touch and the simple process makes it easy to keep your deployment up to date with the latest releases.
2. Low infrastructure overhead and footprint, which go hand in hand. Low invasive processes for care and feeding of the solution in extremely large scale environments.. Despite dozens of deployments across hundreds of applications- we have yet to see a case where AD is negatively impacting application execution or functionality.
3. Features- in terms of diagnostics it's very good and very extensible. AD has clearly contemplated the multitude of monitoring workflows and features needed to sustain enterprise application performance across all major tech platforms and architectures.
4. Extremely reliable and resilient agent based technology.
5. Extensibility - the solution has been designed to account for rapidly changing application architectures. A strong example is the mobile and browser related capabilities AppDynamics has brought to market. With near out of the box functionality for iOS and Android- AppD also provides support for single page applications and additional advanced JS type deployments models
6. Integrated view of database system performance and execution- AppD has crafted a powerful single pane of glass view
7. Breadth and depth of portfolio with ever expanding capabilities including synthetics, log management and analytics capabilities
8. The analytics engine, now called BusinessIQ is very, very powerful. The ability to capture business parameter information and operational information and merge it together for integrated dashboarding is one of the pillars of the IT-Business paradigm. I was able to create powerful analytics queries using GUI, or if you want to go deeper- the solution allows for complex SQL statement execution to really perform deep IT level business intelligence

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

More than five years.

We didn't have any issues with stability. Highly stable with extremely light impact- negligible.

We didn't have any issues with scalability. Unbelievably scalable - we selected this solution for its ability to aggregate thousands and thousand of end point monitoring.

Customer Service:

AppDynamics redefines customer services, especially in post sales support- maybe one of the most responsive service desk teams in the industry.

Technical Support:

They have done a superb job of getting some obscenely bright software people with a passion for customer services and unleashed them in the market. Some of the finest technical support in the industry.

We previously used AppSight by BMC software. The problems we had were problems with deployments, stability, visibility and wide support of jvms. Stability was the largest problem. Our technical architects and engineers who are part of my delivery team have used every major application and server monitoring technologies.

Extremely straightforward- we can have an enterprise deployment with several dozen end points being monitored in less than 3 hours.

Our first few implementations we did ourselves and then for our first major customer implementation we got AppDynamics to assist. We currently support all of our internal and external deployments.

We're regularly looking at various options. Even before we made the decision to standardize on AppDynamics, we already had experience with BMC Appsight. We also had experience using Dynatrace, CA and Gomez at some of our customer's environments. We also heard our customers talking about their experiences with these other products.

Basically, you can't over-speak importance of deployment, configuration and infrastructure footprint because what happens is that people get excited when they see the output of various products (such as Dynatrace or CA Wiley). They say, "wow, it's very powerful, we've never had visibility, we're going to implement at all costs." Then they buy the solution and they realize they need 5X the amount of servers, a lot of storage, experts to manage it, etc.

I am using AppDynamics in order to monitor Java applications.

It helped to find quick solutions for specific business transactions. For example, in the case of slowness or a job being stuck at some stage.

The most valuable features are Data Flow and memory monitoring.

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.

I have been using AppDynamics for two years.

On-premises

We use this solution for application monitoring and the alerting mechanism.

We have a complex platform infrastructure, deployed in multiple JBoss Fuse, ActiveMQ, and Data Grid servers.

It improves our organization by providing the right alerts, and there are so many parameters to choose from that it allows us to set the right level of alerting mechanism for approximately one hundred and twenty services.

The most valuable feature is the detailed statistics, like the consumer count, for the ActiveMQ server. It is amazing.

It helps to monitor our complex infrastructure very effectively.

Rolling out version upgrades is a difficult job at times.

One year.

We use it for break fail detection.

AppDynamics makes it much easier for us to detect problems or issues before they become problems. We have alerting on all of our business transactions. Therefore, it makes it very easy for us to keep our applications stable.

The drill down feature is the most useful.

The UI could use a little help.

One to three years.

Our AppDynamics application tracks a large number of business transactions and is able to keep up with our demands.

Our environment scales from several hundred nodes to thousands of nodes per day, so the scalability of AppDynamics with our environment works perfectly.

We contact technical support regularly. We have a dedicated rep who works with us. It is very good support.

Integration with AWS is a time consuming process. You cannot just plug it in and point it at your workloads. You have to go though all of your work spaces to determine what you want to monitor and how you want to monitor it. However, part of the onboarding process is that they provide you with a dedicated resource.

Our purchasing experience through the AWS Marketplace has been pretty painless.

We also considered Dynatrace. We chose AppDynamics because of its feature set.

I would highly recommend it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use multiple APMs, but for smaller projects AppDynamics is too cost-prohibitive. It is a more expensive APM among the competitors, which is fine because it also does a lot more on the auto-detection and the AI side. It also supports a lot more languages. So whenever we hit a project that has the budget and the need, we look to use AppDynamics, especially if the technologies are complicated.

If somebody has a very simple two-tier Python or Node, we can use almost any APM. When we're dealing with somebody who has 50 or 60 tiers, some traditional stuff, some microservices; some stuff is in containers, some stuff is in real instances; there's Node and there's PHP, and there's a bit of C code in there somewhere. This is where we hit a complex case. It's usually a larger app, an app that has existed and evolved over time with many modules at play, making it almost different products, but it's all one big product. This is the type of case where we look towards AppDynamics because we can just drop it in and have it work.

We can't do that with the other APMs that we work with because they just wouldn't work. They'll do this little silo or that little silo, but they won't work with everything. With few exceptions, we have not found any production code that we couldn't make work with AppDynamics.

I can't compare how it makes things better within my company. That would be like asking someone how air makes their life better.

I don't say that lightly. I've been in other companies in the past without APM. Some of our projects don't have budget for APM at all. They're smaller projects, or they're from a smaller client who can't afford it, or in some cases, they don't want APM. Comparing it to that would be the easiest thing. In those cases, if the project is going right and there are no problems that are noticed, it's fine. But we've had a few carrier projects where there are unknown performance issues or unknown crashes or we're seeing, at 3 p.m., when it's not even a high-traffic period, that everything falls apart all of a sudden: The database is not good on connections; or we see the connections, but we don't easily understand why they're there. In those situations, the projects that don't have APM usually spend more on people hours than the APM product would have cost.

In that case, it's made things better by making it faster to troubleshoot and easier to troubleshoot. We don't want our most skilled people spending 40 hours to find one hotspot, when it could take them 30 minutes. It's not a value-add to let them do that manual, old-school troubleshooting. In fact, even on the projects that have, in some cases, not had the budget to buy the agents that we need, sometimes it has boiled down to using a PoC license, with their permission, to try to prove the value. Some of those clients went ahead and bought it. They understood it was, "Look guys, we can charge you 80 hours of troubleshooting, or you can just buy this license." I don't want to claim that that's every case, but there have been a couple cases where we've converted people and the client has accepted APM - where they might have been hostile toward it - after seeing the value of it.

In every APM tool, and this is true in AppDynamics as well, it's that waterfall view where I can see my code hotspots. In APM, it always comes back to that. It's great to have reporting. It's great to have that alerting: Tell me when something deviates from my normal conditions. All the analytic functionality is good for telling me what code to look at. But ultimately, I can't live without that code-level trace. I have to know where things are hot so that I can help the developer with what they actually need to fix. I can't just tell them the app is slow. That's always been the most important thing. In AppDynamics, they make that easier.

There are other products I won't name where you go in and you're looking at 50,000 traces. There's no way to sort and organize those particular traces. In AppDynamics, everywhere I go, there's some sort of grouping and aggregation function, or there's some sort of timeline that lets me zero in more quickly on the traces that I need. They go to more pains to aggregate and bubble the important ones to the top. That removes a lot of manual work; for example, sorting by the ones that took more than a second. I don't have to do that in AppDynamics. Sometimes I do so, in the course of troubleshooting, but for the most part, it tells me. I click on a trace. It's usually a trace that matters, that I can take action on, and that I can have a real impact on.

All those millions and, in some cases billions, of traces, over the course of a couple months, get aggregated into one view that's manageable. The other APMs are good if we don't have millions of requests. As soon as I get into that threshold, I can't look at that many traces anymore, they don't have great ways of looking at the traces in aggregate.

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.

More than five years.

I've been using AppDynamics for almost a decade. In that time, I've seen it run on literally hundreds of applications in that time, and I can quite honestly think of only one situation where it introduced stability problems. I pegged a little of the blame on AppDynamics but a little bit on the app as well. That's pretty good.

There are a lot of products in the APM space, and I've used a lot of them, that have very consistent performance problems, stability problems, or crashing that they'll introduce into the app. The fact that we've only encountered that once, and it was almost a decade ago and it was an exceptional case, is pretty good.

I've never really heard of stability problems and we've used it in some pretty highly important, high-volume apps.

The scalability is excellent. We've never encountered a situation, under loads that we've seen, where we could not scale to meet the needs. We're not running the world's top-ten websites, but we are doing some very high transactions on some very large properties, with a lot of calls. There are very few applications I can imagine that would have scalability issues using AppDynamics. We've seen that across technologies: Some of them are PHP apps, some of them are .NET apps, some of them are a mixture of all of the above. We have yet to see it cap out or not be able to scale.

We've received technical support in two areas.

On the pre-sales side, it's always been extremely professional, really great, even in smaller license situations. If there's somebody available and within a radius that can realistically come to a meeting, they often will. They've worked through some very peculiar application setups with us, where we're not sure how we're going to approach it. We've always been very pleased on that side.

On the post-sales side, as well, once it's deployed, we haven't had to use them a lot. There haven't been a lot of things we've had to contact them about, but where we have, the issues have mostly been around things like training, or understanding. We just haven't seen that many problems. We've always found the training material to be very descriptive. They've always taken the time to hand-hold us through: "Okay, this is what you're seeing, and this is why you're seeing it. Why don't you go look at this in the app." They've always taken the time.

I can't comment on the troubleshooting side because we haven't needed to do it. We may have had a minor case where we needed a quick answer to a license issue or we couldn't figure out why an agent wasn't connecting. They've always been excellent there, but we haven't encountered an "Oh my God," big issue, where it wasn't just something stupid, that we were overlooking. They've been great on that. They've been able to identify those things, but we haven't had to use them a lot on the post-sales side of things.

In terms of the integration and configuration of AppDynamics in our AWS environment, it's been pretty seamless. It doesn't matter if we've been using real instances or if we're using a Kubernetes environment or a docker environment - we've got quite a few different environments. We've never encountered an integration problem, or any issues deploying either manually or via our automation scripts. It's always packaged in very nicely with them.

I can't think of any problems we've encountered that I could critique.

The Kubernetes deployment is three lines of code or one command. They've made it amazingly simple. We just put in into a config file and everything pretty much just goes in a modern environment.

The only one that's been hard is some of the compiled apps on C, but that's such a rare case and it's only hard because it's been a non-.NET compiled app. Everything else has been seamless and just one click. The C apps are rare and we know they're going to be hard, that's just the nature of the way they're designed.

All of our database endpoints were connected, all of our third-party endpoints. Anytime we've had to use the JavaScript on the app it's been seamless. They don't break our sub-calls by accidentally putting them in there.

All of the integration from browser JavaScript to code, through to the database proxy have been seamless for us.

With very few exceptions, we can justify the cost per project and definitely, in the wash of things, it saves money, overall. The only problem that we've had with this is sometimes trying to show that justification.

It's really easy sometimes, where we spend 30 minutes or an hour on the interface and we find a laundry list of problems that we've got to address; big problems. Somebody who's not familiar with APM on the client side will look into and say, "That's it. Why did we need that product for that?" You needed that product because it took 30 minutes instead of weeks and customer complaints, etc.

The product has always been worth it, but trying to bubble up the value has not, I admit, been easy, because there's no value attached to a problem that we find. That's the only problem we've encountered around cost. We have always been able to justify it.

We actively use Instana for some cases as well, and sometimes we use Instana and AppDynamics side-by-side. We do use Dynatrace and have used Dynatrace in the past. Those are the ones that we're using today.

We've used and evaluated, at some point in time over the last ten years, another dozen vendors. The choice is not made lightly. We've actually tested all the other ones.

There is some stuff that everyone supports. Every APM supports Java. If somebody has a simple Java app, any APM is usually going to work. It's not going to be as stable, sometimes, but when we get into the real-world apps where you have a heterogeneous network of different technologies at play on a mixture of platforms, that's where a lot of the APM tools stop working as well as AppDynamics works.

Through our history, AppDynamics has always been the one on top of making sure that it continues to work. It works from the database through to the browser, whether it's a mobile or a desktop. I can see that full interaction. I don't get that out of any other APM with as many platforms.

I see a lot of people migrate towards one product in particular in the market and they never really try the other APM vendors. They'll look at the page and they'll look at the price, but sometimes you just have to pay a little more. Importantly, it's the features that you get that make it worth it. I won't name the new products, the ones people migrate towards a lot - especially developers, it seems like that cohort instantly likes them - but AppDynamics and a couple of the other ones as well are really good for production. AppDynamics, in particular, excels on that. Don't just install AppDynamics, install a couple of them. Pick four or five and run them in production, pick a couple nodes even, and compare the interfaces and the ability to use the interfaces. Most people will quickly find that there is a real difference between them. Some people will gravitate, still, towards certain products rather than others, but I haven't seen a person yet, who has not loved the AppDynamics features and portal and how it does things.

You can't just look at the feature list, spend five minutes on their web page, and then dismiss it. You have to run it on your app, see how easy it is and how much time it saves you.

I have not used the marketplace version. I've used the traditional, agent-based licensing. The reason for that is partly to do with the affordability. I can take the same license for the on-prem and put it on AWS as well. We always use the same license, because we don't know where it's going to end up.

In terms of integrating AppDynamics with other products within our AWS environment, the way to describe that is that we're using it to watch certain services. Obviously, if our database is using endpoints within AWS, which a majority of the apps are, such as Redis or RDS nodes, AppDynamics has seen those. All of the integrations that I can think of, except for the database, are web-based. We see the database integration and we see all the web-based integration. So we have integrated with other products.

We haven't seen a case where we haven't been able to see the interaction between our app and the service. Just to be clear, I have seen other APM products that miss those integrations. You plug them in and you don't see your SNS calls. Usually, it's solvable, but you've got to troubleshoot and set up some special code and it becomes painful. I can't think of a case in AppDynamics where we just didn't plug it in and start seeing those calls right away.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. I've been using it for so long, and have used so many other APM vendors, and it really is the most stable one. It works with the most conditions that we encounter. The only reason I take off one point is the cost. I can't give it a ten because it is not a cheap product. None of them are. The price is fair, but I could use it on more projects if they had a lower price.

Monitor 1000's of .NET, Java, Node.js, and Go applications using an auto-discovering agent-based tool.

We have cut our MTTR by half just by deploying agents. It significantly reduced the amount of time that we spend building synthetic monitors. To the point, we rarely have to build any monitors unless it is a vendor app or appliance we can't access to install an agent on.  

• Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic
• Baselining of every single metric that you throw at it.
• Easy to use API
• Customizable extensions
• Facilitates business, dev and ops communication
• Agents have low CPU overhead compared to other agent-based products we have tried.

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.   

One to three years.

Very rarely. Solid performance on our controllers.

None. The SaaS team worked with us on our rollout and expansion, making sure our controller is tuned for the metric and event loads.

• Great SaaS support, performance and uptime
• Responsive support team
• Responsive extension Dev team

The previous tool was:

• Clunky
• Had difficulty in configuring alerting.
• Did not use baselines.
• Required hard thresholds for each metric.
• Had a Java-based GUI, performed poorly.
• Nobody wanted to use it.

There is currently no automated agent management/upgrades for every agent type (currently the Universal Agent supports Java, expanding to .NET and machine agents in the future). So, if you do not have a solid automation tool already in use, deploying agents can be time consuming.   

We had an in-house team of two people, and a vendor team assisting. The team was a mix of beginner to expert, and it worked out great.

Dynatrace and HPE Diagnostics.

RUM, synthetics, mobile, network, and browser analytics make this a well-rounded tool.

Java application instrumentation across a microservices architecture build.

When adopting / implementing a micro services application stack, you have to get all of the services to move / upgrade at the same time. This has led to a disjointed implementation of AppD. Disjointed implementations of tools do not lead to home run capabilities to build / run / operate.

Insights outside of the code we write. We find some of our adopted libraries perform sub-optimally. Sub-optimal performance leads to a search for alternate libraries to help us scale.

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

Three to five years.

We use it for service level monitoring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than five years.

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

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

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

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

We have partially seen ROI.

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

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

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

We are only using the AWS version.

We are using it for monitoring.

Our applications are in AWS, and the monitoring system is part of AppDynamics.

We have been able to monitor our applications more accurately.

It has better dashboards and more control over everything.

One to three years.

The stability is fine. We have had downtime. However, we do receive alerts when we have downtime. Downtime has been the result of config, application, or cord issues.

The scalability is good.

We were previously using Dynatrace, then we shifted to AppDynamics because it was more convenient. For example, it was fast and easily accessible for all our data.

We had no issues with the integration.

Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace was good.

I was just looking into Datadog, and it seemed like it might be a better solution that AppDynamics.

I would definitely recommend AppDynamics.

Monitoring log and statistics using graphs to see how we are monitoring our network traffic, and whether systems are healthy or not.

In real-time, when we have our peak seasons, we can determine if customers are experiencing something that they are not supposed to, such as customer impact on a service being down or not.

The most valuable feature is having our services being available and healthy. We can determine whether or not, at a given point in time, something is wrong. Then, we can dive deeply into the product to see what is happening by troubleshooting, debugging, and monitoring.

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.

One to three years.

I have not seen any issues with stability.

I usually don't see any issues with scalability, and we have pretty large servers.

Our environment is huge. Within a season, we have hundreds of thousands of current users.

I haven't used technical support.

The integration and configuration of the product in our AWS environment was easy. AWS made it easy.

I was not involved in the decision-making process.

I would still use AppDynamics now, because I haven't seen another player on the market give us exactly what we want that AppDynamics can't. There are a lot of companies who are doing the exact same thing and trying to put their own spin on it, but there is no reason for me to pick another competitor.

The primary use case is everything related to monitoring.

It provides everything into one view, so we can track information from one place to another. This allows us to be able to track information all day.

It provides all the monitoring that we need in one place.

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

Three to five years.

We have seen ROI, because we are able to view whatever issues there are in the application, then resolve them faster.

We are looking forward to purchasing the solution on the AWS Marketplace.

We are comfortable with the pricing.

We also evaluated Splunk. However, AppDynamics provided more features, agents, and monitoring capabilities.

It provides all the features that we need for on-premise applications.

The product integrates with all of our applications, because it has be deployed on all the servers so it can collect data.

AWS has not provided us the code. They will be moving it to their AWS services later. Right now, it is providing us a framework, like with Java. The AWS agents are able to capture all the information related at the code label, which is a benefit for us.

Right now, this tool is very good for on-premise applications, but there might be an issue with cloud applications.

If we have an issue, it is useful for finding the root cause of incidences. So, we use it for troubleshooting.

When we have a large issue, we bring our teams together, working with AppDynamics. This has allowed us to reduce the time to recover applications (for example).

• Performance monitoring
• The real user monitoring: It helps us evaluate our customers' real experiences, which is valuable as an eCommerce company. We can look into their detail, one by one. It is helpful because it is deterministic.  
  

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

Three to five years.

I am okay with the stability. 

The scalability is good. However, the issue is you need to know in advance how many agents that you will use. With companies similar to ours (in growth mode), this is difficult to forecast. 

They have a very good customer service team that checks in with customers, asking about our experiences.

It took about two weeks to complete the entire implementation and integration of the product. It was easy.

With some training, we were able to implement and configure AWS with a little help.

It is expensive. However, our time to recover has been reduced, and this product has helped recuperate costs and provided us with ROI.

We did not originally evaluate any other solutions.

It is an interesting application. We have tried others: New Relic and Dynatrace. Finally, we decided to stay with AppDynamics because its graphical configuration is very intuitive for our teams to work on.

AppDynamics is doing a very good job.

We used it on-premise, then moved to AWS. On-premise is very similar to using AWS.

For monitoring application performance: I worked for a company which concentrates on application performance consulting service. Cisco AppDynamics was one of the tools used.

• Quickly triaging problems: Before using the APM tool, I had no adequate information about the application's detail. 

• APM tool provides comprehensive information about several elements like performance, errors, and resources.

Stack information: I use this function to explain the problem to customers most of the time.

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

One to three years.

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

The solution is doing great.

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

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

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

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

More than five years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it to monitor the load testing environment.

It has improved our organization with its ability to catch issues quickly and fix them.

• Code profiling
• Monitoring

The cost is prohibitive.

One to three years.

Testing the customer behavior to learn their problems on a website, the heatmap flow, and other information.

• IT department
• Software production
• Test environment
• QA testing
• KPIs of the business
• Heatmap
• An APM

Trial/evaluations only.

This tool is so good to work with.

The primary use case is application performance monitoring. It performs well.

It has improved my organization because we are able to proactively and reactively look at performance issues.

• Looking at every tier in the application's path. 
• Being able to correlate performance between tiers. 
• Being able to drill down within the individual tiers for metrics.

It needs strengthening in the database tiers.

One to three years.

It seems stable.

The scalability is very good.

We have used the technical support, and it is very good.

The previous solution seemed to be stagnated, in terms of its ability to monitor new technologies and its ability to move into a cloud/SaaS environment.

It was both straightforward and complex to set up, like any tool. General configuration is usually straightforward, and when you start to look for integration or enhanced capabilities, that is when things start to get complex.

Cost and licensing will constantly go up, so there are some cost opportunities there. 

The way it is structured in terms of price could be better. You pay for individual modules and that adds on to the cost, which detracts you from implementing those modules and slows you down. It would be better if there were more solutions incorporated into the base price. 

We evaluated AppDynamics vs New Relic APM and Precise. It was really a customer-driven mandate at the time, so I do not know if it was a fair comparison end-to-end of capabilities and cost. 

Look at the whole picture. Take into consideration what you get for specific pricing models and how much it costs to add on things you may need later.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: cost.

For customer journey monitoring: Stitch together complex journeys involving the entire ecosystem (internal through external IT) and multiple stakeholders.

Has helped us to increase customer acquisitions and reduce revenue leakage in the following:

• Conversion rates
• Average revenue per user
• Customer acquisition costs
• Rate of customer churn
• Recurring or incremental revenue
• Renewals and/or subscriptions.

End user experience monitoring, which includes:

• Uptime (availability)
• App response time
• Database response time
• Percentage of transaction time spent in database
• Resource utilization
• Database query times.

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.

Three to five years.

The way APM works with the different applications, as well as the various analytics and metrics that it provides.

Right now we are not using it with any other products but we will soon be integrating AppDynamics with ServiceNow.

We just started using it so it is a little too early to tell but we have already seen how APM finds the issues with the different applications, which is very important for us. That has really improved a lot of business areas and business transactions for us.

It has been pretty stable for us so far.

We haven't gotten to the point yet where we have tested the scalability since we just started using it.

We were using Nagios but we wanted more application analysis, which Nagios does not provide.

The setup was not really straightforward. We were able to do it because we got help from AppDynamics. But it was definitely not straightforward.

I would recommend to my colleagues that they start using it as soon as possible for their applications.

I'd say BTs, and being able to set health goals. Those probably would be the best. Second to that would be being able to monitor what's going on in real-time, this is going to make a big difference.

I think that previously we were more reactionary than proactive. I hope that this is what we can really get out of AppDynamics, the switch to a more proactive stance. Before anybody else knows what is going on, we will know, and we will be able to cut down our meantime to fixes going out, and to identifying them.

Looking at it from the standpoint of a developer, I see the biggest improvement being that it gives the developers more visibility and ownership, it really lets them see what is going on. I feel that this will lead the devs to make better code and better decisions. It will help them be more cognizant of resources, and other things.

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.

I have not seen any problems with the stability. It seems to be very stable.

I have not heard of any problems with the scalability. 

We have used the technical support and it was very good. We had a good response.

We were not previously using a different solution. We decided to invest in AppDynamics because we wanted to move from being reactionary to being proactive, that's really what it comes down to. Instead of our customers calling us up and saying, "There is something going on," now we will know it before they do, and hopefully we will be resolving it before they even notice.

We are looking into also utilizing Database Monitoring. We're still checking that out.

My criteria when choosing a vendor would be the reputation behind them, the product they bring to the table, and of course the pricing. I wasn't involved in selecting AppDynamics but I know that these criteria always play a role in everything.

I would recommend AppDynamics to my colleagues, because the solution works. It really comes down to whether or not the price point works for them.

Being able to quickly diagnose customer issues and their performance problems.

It lets us quickly diagnose customer problems that occurred in production, but also lets us look at our system and load test in the quality assurance period so we find problems before they go to production.

The stability is generally pretty good. Sometimes you get anomalies which are hard to explain and sometimes data seems to disappear, but except for that it is generally pretty good.

Scalability has been fine. I have not had any problems.

The support that we received was pretty good. Around July, we had some technical resources come on site and help train us and the team on how to use it. We asked them a couple of questions but generally we figure stuff out using the help system.

We had built our own login and diagnostic tools but it was hard to add features to that, while at the same time try and diagnose any problems quickly. So it is nice to have something which is already done, which you just learn how to use and have a quick turnaround without having to worry about it. And if we have problems, we just phone technical support.

We looked at about three or four different vendors, one of which was Dynatrace. We talked to Dynatrace a lot, and even had it installed, but decided to go to AppDynamics as it seemed to work better for us.

AppDynamics does exactly what I want it to do. It diagnoses problems quickly so if one of our customers is having problems, we can tell him what's slow and maybe find a solution within a couple of hours. Customers don't mind if you have occasional problems, as long as you can fix them quickly. If it goes on for weeks and weeks, then they start getting annoyed. It is nice to be able to tell them, "This is what happened. This is why it happened. And this is what we did to fix it."

If a colleague of mine was researching AppDynamics I would get them to install it; use the evaluation copy and see if it works for them. It is pretty easy to use.

Monitoring and mediating the risks are the most beneficial features.

Before we moved the code to AppDynamics, we had to compare the agile process and also had to make sure that they're following the standards. Thus, monitoring the actual quality of work in AppDynamics is the most valuable feature to us.

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.

There was not that much downtime experienced.

It is scalable across the board. We have implemented it across our company. It will meet the needs of the company, going forward.

The other team took care of the support. I am only a DBA but as far as I know, I haven't heard of any issues as such.

The setup is very simple. To be honest, it is pretty straightforward. They sent a team to help us out with the implementation. From the database side, we worked with the product team members to put in the database and also for the infrastructure laydown. It was straightforward.

It is a good product and I would highly recommend it.

Whilst looking for a vendor, the most important criteria is honesty. I don't want to waste time, so I want honest feedback. We don't want any lame excuses such as, there is no patch or that they are still working on it and so on. Thus, honesty is most important.

The totality of the product has allowed us to decrease our mean time to resolution when issues are detected. Also, because we’ve implemented this in our test dev environments, we now use it to measure and quantify performance improvements prior to ever releasing to production.

The modules that we are finding most valuable are as follows:

• Applications: This provides us insight into how our applications are performing within our environments and affords us the ability to identify opportunities and make changes to code / environment to effect positive performance lift.
• Databases: This module is amazing; allows our developers the ability to view into the SQL nodes themselves to quickly rule in/out any hardware issues. It also provides them with access to download execution plans directly via AppDynamics, which in turn helps improve turnaround time for fixes and such.
• End User Monitoring: Whereas the Application module gives us insight as to how our applications are performing within our environments, End User Monitoring provides us similar data from a browser perspective. In other words, it provides us the complete experience from the clients’ perspective; tremendously valuable indeed.

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.

The product has been rock solid from a stability standpoint.

Scalability is easily controlled via scripting, a REST API and included utilities for copying configurations between applications.

Technical support is 10/10. They are very responsive to support requests.

The initial deployment of .NET and database agents was done in minimal time. We had our first application set up in a matter of minutes.

We chose to deploy in-house and that turned out to be the correct decision for us, as it allowed us to become more familiar with the behind-the-scenes workings of the software. As far as advice, while auto-discovery is nice, we’ve found that prior planning in regards to configuration of applications, tiers and nodes pays off by ensuring the returned data is in a format that is most digestible to your organization.

We are still in the process of completing our ROI calculations, but we already have examples of a 89% reduction in MTTR for one application... and a multitude of examples of money saved in others, including savings of around $150,000 for one particular issue that we were almost set to throw more hardware / software at.

We evaluated several other products in addition to AppDynamics (Ruxit, New Relic & Dynatrace). While each possesses some great tools, none provided the totality or completeness of toolset that we required for our complex environments.

Take the time to plan what exactly it is you are looking to get out of the software; it will pay dividends after implementation.

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

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

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

I have used AppDynamics for two years.

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

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

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

We didn’t switch.

Initial setup was straightforward/simple.

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

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

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

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

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

Once all the metrics are collated during the analysis phase, the troubleshooting section is very important to me. It provides the entire overview of the performance bottlenecks at different layers of the application landscape.

It helps me to prioritize my activities in solving or fine-tuning the application. It helps me in my interactions with the development, infrastructure, and operations teams.

This solution helps us conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of critical performance issues. We can communicate clearly with detailed insights. This saves time and prevents ambiguities.

As a performance engineering architect and a practice evangelist for performance engineering practice, this has enabled our performance tester to provide more engineering value-based solutions/deep dives. These showed how the applications fared during the load conditions and linked the performance bottleneck to the exact line of code.

This practice has transitioned our testers to “engineers”. AppDynamics solutions complement performance testing.

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.

I have been using APM tools since 2004. I have been implementing this solution across different industries for the past year and a half.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

Technical support is very good. We have a good team working with Wipro and AppDynamics.

The auto-discovery was good. It was a straightforward configuration of agents on web and app servers.

I truly appreciated the SaaS license mode that provides the AppDynamics controller on the cloud. There are bits and pieces of licenses that need to be procured in order to have a complete APM. This includes application, server health, browser-level monitoring, UEM, and DB monitoring.

When you add this all up, the price is not appealing. The procurement of AppDynamics licenses is a bit tricky. You need to be careful with it.

AppDynamics has come a long way in terms of user friendliness with day-to-day use. This solution has an edge over others in terms of adaptability between team members with different roles and responsibilities.

You should start off with application monitoring licenses which provide very user-friendly functionality. You need to spend more time to generate the reports with deeper insights.

It automatically detects “slow” and “error” as transaction snapshots. The transaction snapshots help me find the root cause of the problem. Transaction snapshots collect business transaction information such as the application call stack and SQL statements.

It also captures important information about business transactions, such as method parameters and HTTP information (header, session, and cookie). The snapshots also correlate application calls among all monitoring nodes. It can identify the entry point to help us trace from the first tier to the back-end tier.

The solution helped me to find out if the slow transactions are caused by SQL statements or by external system calls. We also use it to trace the socket leak issue that occurred with the old mobile device version.

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.

We have used this solution for four years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give it the highest rating in terms of technical support. The support engineer responds to questions very quickly and his answers clarify the issues.

Our previous solution did not fulfill our monitoring requirements, so we chose AppDynamics to replace the old solution.

The AppDynamics initial setup is a very easy, out-of-the-box installation.

We evaluated Dynatrace and New Relic.

AppDynamics provides a complete online document. Everyone can learn by him/herself through the instructions provided in that document.

AppDynamics monitors the ICT environment by just installing a Java or .NET agent and machine agent on the server. It shows how all the components in the infrastructure work together to run an application. You can pinpoint easily where the performance issues for your application are.

We once installed an agent on an IIS server and then noticed that there was a memory issue on this server. Also, we once had performance issues on a Websphere application server, which was caused by memory leaks in the JVM. The IBM tooling did not warn for this, but AppDynamics showed it was a problem, because you can look at the data over a longer period.

We solved one issue with performance on our online application, which was caused by a slow batch application running on the same server/database.

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.

We have been using AppDynamics for about four years now.

The controller and the agents are easy to deploy; 30 minutes at the most.

In the years that we have used AppDynamics, we never encountered stability problems.

We only encountered scalability issues when switching agents over servers related to the license structure.

Customer Service:

The level of customer service is very good.

Technical Support:

Questions are answered within 24 hours. When there is an issue, real effort is made to help.

Previously, we used the hardware monitoring and logging tools of the hardware vendors. This meant several different views on our environment.

We used IBM tooling and Oracle monitoring tools. For Java applications, we used the monitoring tools of the JVM.

It was very easy to install and setup. If the environment is complex, AppDynamics will help to make the best suitable setup.

We made an in-house implementation and configuration with help of technical support.

Configuration in the IT environment is very important. It has to be done with the vendor, our development teams, our infra support teams and the business.

The fast setup of AppDynamics independent from the details of the application landscape is valuable.

We mainly use AppDynamics in our test lab to monitor the application undergoing testing together with its surrounding systems. The possibility to quickly drill down into problematic requests in combination with the drill down into all kinds of different monitoring data greatly reduced the time to analyze problems which we uncover during our load tests.

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.

We have been using this solution for four years.

AppDynamics was very stable. It needed maintenance about 1-2 times a year.

We did not encounter scalability issues, but our test laboratory does not host a large scale application landscape.

We got our questions answered in a timely manner.

At the time of our decision about which product to use, we tried several of the ‘main’ products and settled on AppDynamics.

The initial setup was straightforward. The most difficult part was the procedure until we had the correct license installed.

If you go in this field, consider that you will build a long-term solution, which will include a large part of your infrastructure. The tool is then very helpful, but you have to plan the long-term cost in your budget.

The simplicity of usage implies that you need not get a decent course on how to use this product. But if you go to a course, you can learn different approaches and you can get into contact with people to whom you might ask questions at a later time.

We've been able to chase down some big problems with our website. When the problems are more obscure in nature, it's allowed us to drill down into our code and find things we wouldn't normally be able to find as easily.

It's actually saved us tons of man hours because we've been able to narrow in on where actual problems are, rather than having to chase our tails looking at everything along the way. It's changed the target area. It's reduced that dramatically, so we know where to look for problems quicker.

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.

It's worked when we needed it, all the time. It's been very stable. I've never had an issue with it.

I don't have much experience with scalability. We're smallish, I'd say. We're a web farm of 4-8 servers. Even during the busy times, it's scaled for what we've needed it. I've never had to test that.

Technical support has been awesome. I've only had to call them a couple of times. Every time I did, I got an immediate response and they weren't happy until I was happy. Of all the tech companies I've ever worked with, they're definitely one of my favorites to work with.

We did not previously use a different solution. That was the thing: It was an untapped area for us, really. I guess when we found them at another conference, Velocity, a few years ago, and decided it was something we really needed.

I think my boss at the time looked at New Relic and maybe Dynatrace. We didn't know much about APM at the time, but I think pricing was the overall factor there.
To be perfectly honest, to me, the most important criteria when selecting AppDynamics was the experience. We had a really great sales team to work with. They made it easy. The support we got along the way was phenomenal.

Take time to get into the forums. That wasn't something we did right away. The forums, the online AppDynamics University, all of them are really, really helpful.
I've been really happy with it and everything we want it to do, it's done. If it was something we thought couldn't be done when we reached out to support, we got help to the ends we needed it.

We will be using other AppDynamics products. We just started, actually; we signed a contract a few months ago. A lot of that stuff is new to us. We're mainly skilled in APM. We're learning the synthetics and the transaction analytics now, which look to be really promising. I'm excited about the demos we've seen. We've had some professional time with a couple of consultants, who showed us how to use them. It looks really, really valuable.

• End-to-end business transaction breakdown: clear picture of where the application is taking time
• Easy user interface to work on

In a critical project where, along with the monitoring solution, RUM is also deployed, it gives you complete clarity why my business transaction failed and what is technically causing that to occur. Instead of wasting time mugging up in logs, fighting with server logs, and manually capturing CPU resource statistics, AppDynamics does it a lot easier without a lot of installation effort, in a single dashboard. On top of that, if you also have RUM, life gets easy from the end-user perspective too.

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.

I have been using it for four years.

Nowadays, CI is very much in demand and because of that, Docker compatibility is increasing. However, to install AppDynamics on Docker is still a challenge. I have done it, but only after lot of consultation with AppDynamics support. Also, if the txn DB size increases, AppDynamics gets a bit tired and performance slows down.

Technical support is 7/10. There is still a lot to improve. If you contact them regarding a specific technology, then that person becomes the only person aware of the issue, which should not be the case.

We previously used Dynatrace. The AppDynamics interface was intuitive and more easy to understand. Also, deployment is easy.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Well, if it is a simple application, go with your in-house team for implementation. On the other hand, if there is a complex e-commerce app and you want to exploit every functionality of AppDynamics and integrate all of the interfaces, then go for external consultant implementation.

I cannot discuss ROI in terms of money, but, yes, RCA became easy, which ultimately saves time/cost/efforts and which becomes large with time-critical applications.

Have a look on all three solutions: AppDynamics, Dynatrace and New Relic.

The most valuable feature is the standard APM agent for Java and .NET. We always find bottlenecks in applications with these agents.

We've seen tasks the end users have to do on a daily basis that used to take 30-60 seconds been improved to take under two seconds, based on reports and recommendations we have written based on AppDynamics. The developers had been troubleshooting this specific issue for months before we installed AppDynamics. We installed AppDynamics, found the bottleneck, wrote the report and gave our recommendation within four hours.

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.

We have been delivering services around AppDynamics for two years now.

We have not encountered any issues with deployment, stability or scalability. However, it can be confusing deploying the analytics agents; this had to be planned carefully.

AppDynamics has hands-down the best technical support I've experienced, and I've worked with all the major APM vendors.

Initial setup, if you choose the SaaS solution, is very straightforward and well documented. Choosing the on-premise solution is more complex, but not any worse than its competitors.

I cannot discuss our customers’ ROI. I would advise to get as many APM agents as you have application servers, to start easy with EUM, and grow the EUM as your website/app grows. Don't do analytics at first, if you don't have a clear business case for it.

We have delivered, and deliver, services related to Dynatrace and HPE. AppDynamics is, today, the solution that is easiest to deploy and gives the quickest ROI.

Just try it. AppDynamics has a free, 14-day trial. If you don't have the needed staff or knowledge, talk to one of AppDynamics’ partners.

By stack trace exception I mean the automatic correlation between the exception stack trace with the request. For example, you can ignore specific know issue and In transaction snapshots, an ignored exception does not appear as an error in the Summary and Error Details sections of any transaction snapshot that was in progress when the exception occurred.

Concerning the ability to see the history of executionsI mean the ability to list of transaction snapshots, using Transaction Snapshot Flow Map displays.

You can see the history of the execution time, and timestamp of the transaction. The flow map also provides details of the overall time that is spent in a particular tier and in database and remote service calls.
The Applications dashboard and tabs, is a major point of the intuitiveness of the product, in fact It allows in a single view to have an overall impression of each application performance (for example Application Flow Map which depicts communications between different nodes and backends…).

The call Graph which is a powerful feature which allow to list the methods in a call stack and provides detailed informations about each call is another intuitiveness feature of the tool belong many other but the the better is to experiment the tool in a normal diagnostic case, my company and I can explain and assist your team more further with those features (we are based in France but also based at Montreal).

This product has improved the performance management of our applications before deploying them to the end user. (Les Douanes du Sénégal is our main reference.)

We used this solution for five years.

Sometimes different results appear for the same scenario.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have not contacted technical support.

I have not used a different solution.

Initial setup was more or less simple.

We have some experience with Dynatrace.

This product facilitates load testing and visibility of their results and facilitates diagnosis and analysis for code optimization (SQL queries, instructions and inefficient code).

The benefits are less man hours, less downtime, and faster resolutions. In the past, it was, "Oh no. The application isn't working. Let's fix it." It might get fixed within 24 hours because we did not have any idea what the issue was. It always came down to, “Well, reboot the servers. That usually works.” It worked, but we never knew what the root cause was.

Once we got AppDynamics, we could see that this part of the application is where the issue is. When they're trying to process these certain files, something's wrong in this sector. We may still have to reboot the servers to get the customers up and running immediately, but then we can circle back around that day and address the actual issue.

The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application: Are all of our transactions going smoothly? Are we having a bottleneck somewhere? Identifying problems before they impact the users. The live reporting and dashboard(s) allow us, at a quick glance, to see the overall health of our nationwide (US) application. We can see the health of our individual office locations (cities) and the individual users (PCs). At any given time we can tell which specific city and\or user is experiencing poor application performance. It even helps us determine if the issue is application, network, or user specific. Before we had AppDynamics APM, we were reactive. We’d wait for a phone call or email to tell us there was a problem and then go looking for it, find it, and resolve it. Now, after installing AppDynamics APM, we’re proactive. We can see the problems developing in real time. We can identify a problem and be half way to resolving it before we’ve even received a phone call or email. We’ve even discovered and resolved problems without the end users or management even realizing there was a problem.

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.

I’ve never had a stability problem with it. It's always working; it's always operational. I’ve never had a glitch; never had the server just stop working. It's spot on.

I can't address scalability because we haven't been able to scale yet. As I’ve mentioned, the way the customer works, it's just one little group that wanted it, and everybody wants it now. Again, we have to go through the process of approval and funding. We haven't been able to touch on the scalability yet.

We have it on 400 servers and machines.

We use technical support all the time. They were great when we finally acquired it. They came in and they helped set it up in our environment; made sure everything was discovered, reporting was working; explained the transactions, reports, the dashboard, all of that to us. We had some more questions at the 2015 AppSphere, and it is great because you can see the guys. We got in touch with someone else and they helped us with licensing issues. There was a couple of extensions we were trying to get working that we couldn't. They got all that squared away.

Recently, we had some consultant hours we needed to use. One of their guys spent three days with us on WebEx, fully customizing even more on the dashboards and the reporting center; and explained baselines to us better.
Technical support is excellent.

We did previously did not use an APM at all. It was just, applications would stop working; there would be bottlenecks; they'd be real slow; and complaints. You'd have the network guys saying, "No, everything's good on our end." You’d have the middle-tier guys saying, "Nope, my servers are online and running." You have the devs for the application saying, "No, no, no, no, it's not my code." It was just, point the finger, pass the buck.

With AppDynamics, we're able to say, "No, it is the network. Something's going on in this city.”, or “No, it is the middle-tier servers because of this." We can tell where the issue is and what the issue is.

I do know that they tested with CA. There was a third one because with our customer, we have to have three competitors. We have to have three products and say, "This is why we're picking AppDynamics. This is why these two will not fit the bill." I don't remember who the third person was.

I think they ended up going with AppDynamics because of the personality of the marketing reps and the engineers that we talked to. It was pricing. It was the capabilities of AppDynamics versus CA and the third company. AppDynamics just brought more to the table.

Personality is quite big when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics. If you come in, and you're snotty, and high and mighty, you go down the list. That's just what it is; that's business.

Pricing: We don't want the cheapest; we don't want the most expensive; we want somewhere in the middle, like when you're buying a TV; you don't want something that's going to break in six months.

The historic background of the company: If you've only been around for six months, it's a bit of a gamble. If you've been around for six years, you're not going to have IBM, HPE, or Xerox buy you. We've had problems with that before. You are your company; you're not going anywhere. In five years, you'll still be there to support us.

Ongoing support: Can we give you a call on a Tuesday at 3:00 PM and get an answer? Or, do we have to submit a ticket, wait a week, maybe get a phone call back and then get a guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about, doesn't want to be at work that day?

It's the overall package.

Give them a call. Check out the field. I know that AppDynamics was more than willing to give us temporary licenses; come in and help us set it up in a dev environment; and show us how it works in our environment, not just the canned demo: “Here's the little website we made and this is how it works.” Of course, it works perfectly because we've made it work perfectly.

They will do a demo in your environment, on your servers, so you can see, “Yes, this is our data. This is what we will see. This is how it will help us.”

The only reason I did not give it a perfect rating is because I don't think anything is 100% perfect. Nothing is the best ever. There's always room for improvement. There's always room to grow. This is the highest I can give because I don't believe in giving that perfect rating.

We’re not yet using any other AppDynamics products. Due to our customer, we can't just buy the newest and greatest, and implement it. There is a long process for testing, approval, and funding; and then more testing and implementation. We're usually about a year and a half behind the latest and greatest.

Right now, we are using it for monitoring our mobile and user interfaces. We monitor the application in terms of the business transactions. We monitor end-user responses and then we track how many calls we are making from the balancer, which is impossible to track with any other applications.

We have moved our application from on premise to Azure. After we moved to Azure, we don't have an on-premise monitoring tool, for what we are supposed to be using it. AppDynamics has come in handy. We are able to monitor all of the cloud services, we are able to monitor all the VMs on it, and we are able to monitor the Azure services, too.

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.

We have been using it for the past two-and-a-half years. We migrated from the older version to the current version. We feel like it's better, it's improving. Initially, we had stability issues but now it's fine.

We are using the HA version of it and we find scalability to be good.

Technical support is pretty good. They're very at you; we get the response immediately.

We are no longer using the previous solution. We were using it for on premise. When we moved from on premise to Azure, we started using AppDynamics. We evaluated some other tools, but we found AppDynamics to be very good.

When we did the initial setup, for the Windows platform, it was straightforward, but the Linux version was a little complicated, but it's not that hard.

We evaluated Logility; some other tools, such as Log Analytics, as well; and then even some related to Splunk. We do use Splunk, as well, with AppDynamics; both are currently used.

As far as the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, it's not my selection. The management finds out what AppDynamics can do and then looks at their business relationship with them. It's more like a business partner, as opposed to being just a customer that is using a product and not knowing what the product is going to come out with. In those terms, I think the AppDynamics team is very helpful to us and they have been like a part of our external organization.

We became 100% dependent on AppDynamics after we started using it. Apart from some performance issues, we haven’t found any major issues with AppDynamics. Some of the services are not available with Azure, such as IoT and so on, but other than that, 90% of our monitoring depends on AppDynamics.

We also use AppDynamics’ End User Monitoring and Mobile User Monitoring.

The most valuable feature is the immediate view into what the system looks like – how it's doing; how it's performing, and what are the connected pieces; that instantaneous, real-time view of what's going on.

A benefit of the solution is the ability to identify real-time problems before the customers even notice them. Even when customers do notice them, it gives us the ability to diagnose very, very quickly where the problem is and what's actually going on, so that we can do a much faster solution.

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.

The stability is fantastic.

The scalability’s been great. We've deployed it over two data centers; multiple agents; all over the place. It's great.

We have used technical support a couple of times, but it's pretty much self-explanatory, how to actually use it.

Technical support has been fine; very fast response times; taking us through to getting the question answered rather rapidly. It was good.

We previously tried a couple of different things, but it was really just the practice. I've been at the company a long time, 10 years. When issues would arise, a lot of the diagnosis was based on gut feeling. I've known the application for so long, and been a part of its development for so long, that if I felt like the problem was something, that's probably what happened. That's just not good enough as the business grew.

We started looking for solutions that would give us true, real data and scientific answers for everything that's going on in the system. That's how AppDynamics came to be part of the discussion.

We also looked at one other outfit. I think BMC was the one that we were looking at.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is, does it work?

Buy it. Buy AppDynamics, but you have to invest in your team too. It has to be someone's job to be setting the system up; to watching the system; making configuration changes. It has to be someone's job to report on the data that AppDynamics is coming with.

I have given it a perfect rating because of how quickly we can go in and see what's going on, diagnose issues before they become issues, but also respond. When we haven't got there first, when someone's reporting a fault, how quickly we can go in and see exactly what's going on, pull up the error message, see the red line on the errors, and so on. We're so much faster in responding to issues than we've ever been before.

We are not using APM with any other AppDynamics products at this time.

The transaction snapshots are probably by far the most used feature because it gives a lot of details. It adds a lot of value. You can really get to the details really, really quick. You can drill down very, very quick. When you show it to somebody who's a stakeholder, they typically get it right away. You don't have to explain. You don't have to “translate.” That really helps with the communication. That really gets people focused on the task at hand, rather than trying to pass the buck around. That really helps quite a bit.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere about correlation, it's really helpful because I don't have to spend time with multiple teams. A lot of times, what might have happened in the past was where, if there was a problem, we would call like six, seven, or eight different SMEs from different domains: network, storage, compute; not on all problems, but at least some of the ones that we suspected. Application; if you have multiple applications, sometimes you have a different person who owns each of the different applications; maybe the database guy. You can really start adding more people in there. If you think about it from a productivity point of view, it's a waste of a lot of time, if you have to keep doing that for every single problem day in and day out.

Whereas, when you have AppDynamics, it's actually tracing the call. So, if three out of four services are functioning fine, for the most part, I don't even have to worry about them. It is common to call the networking guy because nobody really knows where the problem is. Now, he's or she’s out of the picture. I'm sure he's or she’s a lot happier about it, too. Same with the storage and compute: You start leaving these people out of the conversation that don't need to be there, which is a good thing for the company, and us. We don’t also have to spend that time explaining and hearing what they have to say. That’s not to say they don't have value to add, but if there's really nothing there, we're wasting their time, as well. So, it's really helpful.

AppDynamics helps me not just rule in the areas, but rule out where I don't have to talk. More often than not, the rule-out gets hidden away, but it's a really good add-on because I'm only focusing on the problems.

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.

Stability’s very good. Once in a while, we've had some hiccups around the UI being slow, but that typically gets resolved pretty quickly. A lot of times, we don't even have to talk about it. Once in a while, we've had to raise a couple of tickets. I think one time it was us using the environment a little more aggressively than maybe we should have been, and we could have been, for that matter. Most of the time, stability’s not an issue. Once in a while, you do get the spinning circles. I've experienced worse. This is nowhere near that bad. It's very good for the most part.

We're a fairly large install. It scaled well, but then again, it's a SaaS solution. They've got their magic sauce working, of course, really well for us.

We use technical support quite a bit. We've got a team of engineers and there are at least five or six of them that have the capability to open up tickets. We typically get really good responses. Every time I've opened a ticket, I usually get a response in good time. Not just a response; it's usually a good response; it's a meaningful response; it's something that helps you solve the problem that you have.

Once in a while, as you can imagine with any product, they get dragged out because maybe it needs a longer-term solution. I don't think I've seen anything that would cause concern.

We were using a tool prior to this that was not doing any of the stitching; the correlation. We tried another one that was doing some of it, but we found AppDynamics was doing it better.

We went through the PoC because we had our fingers twisted the wrong way a few times with our old tools. It was using up a lot of our time. Of course, when we heard that they could do it, we really wanted to see what they had to offer. The PoC was very helpful. We actually used it on live projects – testing projects not production – to figure out if it would be able to help. We were able to do a lot of it, without much overhead. It was a game changer right out the door.

I was involved in the PoC, as well as the initial setup. The initial engagement is a little complex, but when you look back – hindsight, they say, is 20/20 – but in this case, it really made good sense on how it's structured. Initially, it felt a little limited but then, as you see it over and over and over again, you realize that there's good thought process that's gone into it. It was pretty smooth sailing for the most part.

There were hiccups that we had with an arrival tool that tool's vendor was not able to resolve. This was during the PoC stage. With AppDynamics, we went through the technical support team. They really had the right answers in the right places. They knew how to solve it.

We did a PoC with New Relic for about eight months, in 2014. We haven't really gone back since then to look at New Relic, to really be able to compare in a meaningful manner, but we looked at them at that time.

There were other areas where New Relic wasn't planning on supporting; some of our legacy footprint, such as WebSphere 6 and Oracle E-Business Suite. AppDynamics was doing that, as well. It was another add-on that really mattered a lot because that was a very large footprint of our agents.

In general, ease of use was definitely one of the most important criteria when we selected the vendor; ability to correlate in an automated matter; and be able to gather diagnostic data or just even transaction data. We'd already seen how transaction data is helpful with Dynatrace, for which we just had a limited on-prem set of licenses. We were really happy with the PurePath and so on, but we didn't want to take Dynatrace into production for a variety of reasons. A prime one was that they capture all the snapshots, which we know would've added a lot of overhead. That's probably another really good criteria: added overhead. Then, of course, breadth of coverage, when it comes to different technologies because, if you have to buy a different license or a different tool for everyone, you’re kind of setting yourself up for other problems down the line. Those are some of the key points.

Give it a shot. If you want to do a PoC, definitely do it. You should definitely have AppDynamics in there. I have no qualms about recommending the tool outright, but I think for your use case, you should probably PoC it on your own because you will really see the value add. If you don't, of course, then it is what it is, but I think most people will see the value add very, very quickly. They have a very competent team. They have the right people in the right places. Once they decide to commit to something, they actually do it and do it well. That's definitely a good plus.

I have not given it a perfect rating because I would like to see the heap analysis and the connection leak. There are some hiccups, I feel. I probably have to keep visiting the new feature sets that are coming with the leak analysis. Those minor things, those problems, the heap analysis and the connection leaks, are pretty time consuming, but in the grand scheme of things, the rest of the feature set is really, really great.

I haven’t even mentioned elsewhere the vast set of metrics that we have available to us, which is very helpful. I can create my own metrics if I want, if I choose to.
It definitely ticks a lot of checkboxes and there are a lot plus marks.

We also use AppDynamics End User Monitoring a little bit; not as much as APM. APM is used by a lot more of our internal clients. End User Monitoring is used and that's also helpful. There's a feature where you can actually see the traffic going from the End User snapshot down to the APM snapshot. That correlation is very, very helpful because then I don't have to do it manually. If you have to do it manually, a lot of it is a bit of guessing game, unless you have other ways of doing the manual correlation, which is a lot tougher, especially when it comes to production, where you want to really get things moving faster rather than slower. That can be very helpful.

A couple of things that it's done is that it's allowed us to become a bit more proactive as opposed to reactive. We can see from the dashboards when a problem is happening before it becomes too serious. It allows us to react much quicker than we had in the past, so our mean time to resolution is improved.

For example, we know that there's a particular report in our system that whenever it's executed, it can cause some performance issues. So, we have created a specific business transaction that looks for that specific call in our application. Whenever that call happens, it issues out an alert to let us know that somebody is running that report. We can then make sure that it's not consuming too many resources.

What I like about the APM is that it allows us to quickly identify where there are issues. It allows us to configure health rules so that we can, based on our own experience, determine when an application is behaving incorrectly. It's very configurable, but also has a lot of functionality right out of the box.

It has become a very integrated tool in our company, to share with developers, as well, some of the information that AppDynamics APM is showing us. It's becoming a bit of a cultural change for us to really look at AppDynamics and to leverage its full capabilities.

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.

Three to five years.

We have had stability issues. One thing that we found very nice about AppDynamics is that they are very quick to respond to issues. We've opened tickets in the past. For example, one of the collectors, for the .NET agent, was causing our IIS service to crash intermittently. That was a bug that we raised to AppDynamics. They did a deep-dive investigation and their recommendation was to lower the frequency with which it takes snapshots. That was one issue that we ran into. It was a production issue, so it did cause a little bit of a problem. We were able to resolve it with AppDynamics, though.

Scalability is also something that we brought up with AppDynamics. Again, they're very helpful and quick to respond. When you have an environment where you have deployed multiple agents, different types of agents, SQL agents and .NET agents, for example, and a new version comes out, how do you update all those agents? How do you go about doing it? We've had a lot of talks with them. Right now, it's a manual process to update the 50-odd agents. We have to go and uninstall, and reinstall the new one.

From the keynote address at a recent conference, I think that there's going to be a way now to automate the deployments of the agents.

Moving to APM was an initiative from the ops team. We knew that we needed visibility into the application. We already have very good visibility into the infrastructure, but the application was always something that we didn't have.

I was the project manager working on the project to deploy it. I didn't do the actual deploying itself; it was our senior network engineer who did it.

I think it's pretty straightforward to install. Installing the agents themselves, that's really fast; simple configuration. So, the initial setup was pretty fast. You get a lot of value right from the initial setup.

I think the one part that requires a little bit more thought and a little bit more time is how to now take it from the initial install, in that vanilla sort of setup, to really fine tune it for your own application. That's a lot of back and forth with dev, with the performance team, with the ops team, with the devops team, the CM team, and a lot of iterations to get it right. That's a constantly evolving and learning process.

We looked at a few competitors. We looked at Dynatrace. We looked at New Relic, as well. Then, we saw AppDynamics.

When we first purchased it about three years ago, our sense was they were still kind of new to the market, but we wanted to give them a chance, as well. They had a pretty compelling vision, an idea, and a story; then, a good personal touch; the sales team, as well. So, we decided to go with them to give us that visibility, but we knew we needed it.

In general, one thing that we look for in a vendor is completeness of vision. I think that's important; being able to understand the needs, our needs, as well; expertise in the space.

It's a fantastic product. Just make sure that you take the time to really understand it. Know what you're getting into. It's not just, "Let's purchase it, let's install it. Okay, it's great. Now it's working, let's put it up on the dashboard."

There's so much to it; you can just scratch the surface or you can really dive into it and it can do a lot. Look at those extra features and spend the time to do it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we also use AppDynamics SQL and EUM. We are very happy with them. The EUM, End User Monitoring, is really, really cool. The database one, as well, for SQL, it's also something that we've just started using. We're not fully leveraging it yet. We've just purchased it and we're starting to deploy it, so it's something that we're still learning. I know that we're right now in a PoC, proof of concept, with Log Analytics, as well. And we may be looking at the Synthetics module, as well, in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have a complex application. We do payments which are highly transactional in nature. With different kinds of workloads that you see in the production environment, how do you really track down specific issues which your lab testing environment can't really reproduce? Your production environment gives you certain workloads, which basically enable you to look at your application more closely. No lab test could really simulate that sort of a load. APM really helps us in getting down to the bottom of these sorts of workloads; how code responds to these sorts of workloads and how we can make our application deliver better latency and a better end-user experience.

Given an extremely transactional, highly complex workload, you just cannot use your testing lab to stress all of your code parts. First of all, it has made us very agile. What happens is, now, you can actually take any one of your deployments or releases, roll it out into production into a very limited set of servers, look at how the APM works, and it gives you insights onto the how the code that you just pushed out is performing.

If everything is fine over a period of a few minutes or a few hours, you can actually roll your deployment out very quickly. You don't have to have an extremely complicated test harness in your preproduction environment. You don't have to go through extensive testing cycles before releasing something into production. It really makes us agile in terms of releasing to market quicker.

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.

Stability depends on the configuration. We work very closely with our solution architects, with AppDynamics, because there's always this question in the minds of consumers: A tool which can do so much as AppDynamics, how do you ensure that it runs with minimal overhead? You've really got to work with the AppDynamics team to size out your environments; that makes it stable for you. That's been our experience.

I can't comment on scalability because our infra is fairly small. We have a total of around 150 nodes that we could probably end up instrumenting. Right now, we do far less than that, so I can't really comment.

Technical support has been pretty good. In our case, we use a few programming languages which are still not supported by AppDynamics, so we've reached out to them to help us with road map information. They've been pretty transparent about when support could get rolled out to these sorts of languages that we use.

For the more run-of-the-mill sort of tickets, where we have issues with the configuration or using the product, it's been pretty good. We've liked our experience with the tech support team.

We had been using a mix of proprietary tools that we developed in house, along with third-party solutions. We were able to get the job done, no doubt about that, but the problem is never having an integrated view of how your application performs. We have uptime alerting running differently; we have business KPI monitoring being done differently; and we have end-user behavior being tracked differently. It was very hard to find a correlated view across all of these four. To debug specific sessions or to debug specific instances, I think that's where AppDynamics really comes in. The integrated view that it gives of your application.

I was not directly involved in the initial setup but my team was. It's pretty straightforward. I think it's really important that whoever is setting up the application first fundamentally understands what the application does. I think that's critical. The tool is fairly complex and powerful. The setup needs to be handled by someone who, on this side, really knows what the application being monitored can do. If you put a rookie on the job, it's going to be really tough.

We did consider other vendors. We were looking at New Relic. As a developer and as someone who builds and has a team who builds stuff, I feel New Relic is actually a very powerful option. However, as I mentioned, we wanted something that could work on-premise.

We went with AppDynamics because we are in the payments industry and from a compliance perspective, we needed an on-premise solution and AppDynamics was, I think, the best solution that also worked on-premise.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics for us is, first of all, from the product perspective. As I mentioned, we had a mix of various proprietary and third-party solutions that we were using earlier. We needed a product that could provide end-to-end visibility into the infrastructure and the application. That was a high priority for us. Beyond that, what we really needed was a global presence with enough strong local support. That was something that AppDynamics brought to the table.

Make use of all of the training material and the university. There's some really useful information in there. Also, the two other things that I’ve mentioned elsewhere:

• Ensure the person who is deploying AppDynamics in your environment is among the top-most performers of your team, someone who knows your application in and out.
• Combine that with good, strong consultation by the AppDynamics team. Get these two in place and you've got a winner on your hands.

The reason why I have not rated it higher is the lack of support for HHPM and Ruby; bring them both and I would rate it higher.

The most valuable feature is primarily the ability to do business transaction analysis in real time; for us to be able to use it for multiple areas. We use it for our cloud services, as well as our in-house application stack. Pretty soon, we're going to go into the analytics side; that's one of the next big ones for me.

It has improved the speed at which we are able to respond to issues. Typically, production issues for us in the past used to take hours and several people to resolve. Now, it's a matter of minutes and a couple of people to isolate, do a root-cause analysis and quickly to solve the problem.

The turnaround time is the biggest benefit for me.

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.

I had this implemented about 16-18 months ago.

We use the SaaS model. I wouldn't say I'm really, really comfortable with it yet. We seem to have a lot of issues, with the agents going down repeatedly. We're still finding some issues with the SaaS model, from the controller. I wish it would get a little more stable; hopefully, in the next release.

Scalability-wise, so far, so good. The next big one is the cloud services. That's where I'm really interested in the scalability, but everything I've heard so far and what I've seen, I've been very happy.

Technical support is great. We’ve got great resources on that team, both on the delivery side, as well as on the support side.

We weren’t previously using any solution, and that was the problem. Everything was a manual effort. My team would spend hours trying to figure out the root cause of an issue and it was not helping our customers, because any time lost in our e-commerce environment is money lost. We needed to get a tool that would help us turn this around really quickly. That was when we started looking at this. I had this implemented about 16-18 months ago. Since then, it's been great.

Initial setup was relatively straightforward. There was some nuances but I guess a lot of that has to do with the company and the way we've set up our application stack; dictates how the agent is installed. By and large, it was pretty straightforward.

There were other vendors on our shortlist. We actually got a couple of others that I'm trying to migrate away from.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor like AppDynamics are ease of use, good support, really good stability, ability to extend easily, and native integration to a lot of application stacks.

It's a great tool. I definitely recommend looking at it. At least go to a conference and attend one of the sessions; see what the tool can do. It's definitely valuable.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating because of stability, the SaaS controller. If it's as stable as I hope it'll be in the next release or two, I'll probably give it a perfect rating.

It reduces the time to resolve issues and requires less manpower. When issues happen, we have the whole triage going on and we used to have like 30 people on the call trying to figure out what's going on. AppDynamics cuts that down; you don't need that many people. You need two or three key people going into the console to see what's going on and pinpoint the root cause, as opposed to people trying to figure it out from all different sources. That takes forever, and that's very inefficient.

Being able to monitor transactions end-to-end, throughout all the layers, basically, is very valuable; the ability to pin-point issues irrespective of the layer in which they happened. That's really helpful and very valuable.

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.

It's pretty stable. We haven’t had any major issues, anywhere we implemented it. It's pretty stable and it's very light as well.

Scalability is good for our systems; we have 7+ million lines of code. It works with that big of a system, so it does scale.

We have used technical support sometimes, when we had some questions and issues or whatever. They're pretty knowledgeable. They know their stuff and they provide solutions pretty quickly, as well. They have very quick turnover time.

We had IDCAMS from IBM. That was not really useful. They're pretty heavy on the actual JVMs. They don’t help that much with resolving issues or finding issues. We had this challenge where we actually had to use a new system that was built to replace the legacy mainframe system, and it was not scaling at all. With 100,000 users, it was barely working. We had to scale it from 100,000 to 10 million members. That's when I looked around for different solutions, what is out there, and found AppDynamics, and that's what we brought in. It really helped us a lot with scale it.

Initial setup for most of the regular pieces are straightforward but we have a complex system, so we needed to do some tweaks. AppDynamics helped to detect some endpoints and so on. We have custom batch jobs and so on, which usually have a different way of having endpoints. AppDynamics guided us with how to configure those. It took a little time because it's not like a regular web application. It's a very complex healthcare system.

Price can get really expensive sometimes, depending on the type of setup you have. Sometimes you have smaller JVMs instead of larger ones, for some reasons, such as architectural reasons. Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools.

It gets a little pricey.

I looked at New Relic as well. We just evaluated it quickly. Because of our system’s complexity, it can't actually track everything in our system. We did not try other things such as Wiley. We knew what that is capable of. We knew the shortcomings, too. We didn't try that, but these two we tried, New Relic and AppDynamics.

When selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, the most important criteria is that the product has to be great. It has to be useful. That's the first criteria. Then, when we need support, we need knowledgeable resources who can help us get through. AppDynamics do a really good job with it.

I definitely recommend it. It's a pretty robust tool. For monitoring APM, all the DevOps and whatever they want to use it for, it's a pretty robust tool. It has all of the features; whatever is needed. I recommend it without thinking twice.

We do have licenses for AppDynamics EUM, but we cannot implement it yet because our system is a little more complex and it's a little older technology, the UI part of it. We'll roll it out at some point, when we get the chance.

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

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

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

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

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

Stability is excellent; no worries at all with that.

Scalability is excellent; no worries at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It helps us find the root cause quicker, so it's helped us with MTTI and MTTR. In fact, just last week, we had an issue. They used our other tools to try to find the solution, and they said, “This is the root cause.” Then, we were analyzing it in AppDynamics, and we said, “You know what? We're seeing something different.” They doubled back and realized that what AppDynamics had shown was actually the root cause, not what they were initially thinking was the root cause.

AppDynamics is very easy to use, and easy to deploy in our environment, especially because we're a central organization that helps other application teams with their APM solution. For me, that flow map makes all the difference for the customers. You show them the flow map. You tell them, “OK, green is good, yellow is a problem, and red is warning. Where do you see your problem?” They're like, “Right there.” That makes life a lot easier, compared to all the other tools that I've used in the past.

That visual representation’s been really good, also the overhead that AppDynamics creates is quite small. We've tried Dynatrace in the past. Some of the applications didn't work as well with Dynatrace. Those are two of the things that makes AppDynamics different.

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.

We've had some growing pains with AppDynamics but overall, the products been very stable. Their support’s awesome, so whenever we have issues, we open a support ticket. They jump on and they come up with a solution to help us. Even with the few minor hiccups that we've had, I would say overall, it’s very stable.

Scalability is excellent. In the last year, we've gone from a few hundred metrics to close to 10,000 metrics per minute injestion.

I haven't seen any other vendor even come close to AppDynamics’ support. I've been raving about them. I have told the guy that runs their support organization, how great he's doing the job.

The thing that sets them apart is, if I have an issue, I open a ticket with them. Within 2-4 hours, I have the solution. I don't get an email saying, "We're looking into it.", and then not hear from them for two days or for a week, which I've had with other APM providers.

With AppDynamics, they're on it. If they can't find a solution, they're going to get on a GoToMeeting to duplicate the problem. They'll get their engineers involved. We've had multiple times when they got the developers involved on the GoToMeeting because the support guy couldn't get beyond that. He just got the developer for that product involved to come up with a solution.

It’s a funny story. The PoV was done before I joined the company. I was a Dynatrace user, Intrascope, New Relic. I've done pretty much all the major APM providers in my career. At my previous job, I was using Dynatrace and my entire interview was, “Why are you guys using AppDynamics instead of Dynatrace?” I'd done a PoC of AppDynamics about five years ago. At that time, the product was in its infancy and it didn't really provide what we were looking for. There were a lot of issues; they were at version 2 or something like that at that time. When I joined the company, it had already been decided that AppDynamics was what we were going to use, so I didn't have a say in that.

Very quickly, my impression of the product changed. As I used it, I was like, "Whoa!" Between version whatever that I PoV'd with in the past compared to version 4, there was a night-and-day difference. Very quickly, I became a proponent of AppDynamics.

Our setup was quite complex. Our leadership decided that we were going to use one controller for everything, and we've got thousands of applications. Now, they're reaching the point where they’re realizing that it's not feasible to have just one controller for our huge infrastructure.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, until we started pushing some really heavy applications, and then we started seeing problems. We got involved with some of their tuning experts. They're basically getting every ounce of power out of the machine that they can. It's been an excellent journey.

Dynatrace was on the short list. My predecessor did a comparison between the two tools. One of the issues that we saw with Dynatrace was scalability. Dynatrace itself pushes so much information. It's capturing every single transaction, compared to AppDynamics, which captures a subset of the transactions. For Dynatrace, you just need massive hardware and you have to have multiple servers because you run out of space very quickly. That was one of the issues with Dynatrace.

The other issue was it didn't play nicely with some of our applications. We actually saw problems with one of our critical business applications that we were doing a PoV with. When we put AppDynamics on that same application, we didn't see any issues. Dynatrace was creating quite a large memory overhead; AppDynamics, under 1%.

When I'm looking for a vendor, before, the most important criteria used to be, what does the tool provide, but after working with AppDynamics, it's support. It doesn't matter how great the tool is; if the support isn't that good, you can't get the most out of the tool.

Do a PoV of AppDynamics on a critical application. Get that initial win, and use that win to drive adoption throughout the organization.

I haven’t rated it higher because of the comparison between AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Dynatrace does give you more, richer information, but it's not scalable. There are certain things that I kind of miss with AppDynamics but it's not something that I'm going to cry about because of the other overall value that it provides, and the ease of use of it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we're also using RUM and Mobile UM.

I'm pretty new to the product. For me, the most valuable feature is defining the health rules and seeing the metrics; defining the health rules so that I can get alerted in time. I think so far, I have only dealt with that.

I'm trying to learn new features that I have come across; use cases that I don't know if it's possible with AppDynamics, but I'm trying to find that out.

It has definitely improved us with performance. Now, we get alerted in time. We can see the call graphic and see where it's taking the most time. Then, we can go back to our code, improve it and optimize it. That's one thing I have seen happening.

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.

I wouldn't say I am 100% satisfied. There have been times that it fails. Sometimes I think the controller is down and I'm getting alerts. I'm still trying to figure out a way around that, because I don't want to be alerted when there is no issue.

But, it's good. Overall, it's good.

I think scalability's good because we are adding a lot of new applications. It's actually very easy to configure AppDynamics for all of those. I'm not involved with the implementation part. The DevOps guys do that. I cannot comment a lot on that.

Technical support is really good. The response is very fast. They are helpful. I get answers to my questions. I'm happy about that.

I definitely recommend it. When I was at my previous company I had no idea about AppDynamics. I got introduced to it when I came to my current company and I realized that this could solve so many problems.

The reason why I have not rated the product higher is mostly not a reflection on APM. It's just that I am new and I'm still trying to figure things out. The documentation is pretty good. I get to learn a lot from that. Still, I think it can improve a bit more when I have to find answers. There is the AppDynamics community. You can ask questions on that, but there have been times when I haven't got answers to my questions or my ticket is still pending. They are responding, and it's not like they don't help. Sometimes, I just feel that it could have been better. There have been some answers that I have been looking for and I haven't gotten for quite a long time. That's one reason.

I’m only using APM at this time. I’m not using any other AppDynamics product.

The most valuable features are monitoring the application, using the metrics of the different applications and looking into various business transactions we do with different customers. That's what we look into more often, the business transactions; where the calls are coming in, whether they are inbound or outbound calls.

We can track the visibility of the calls, how many calls we are getting. Being in the hotel industry, we want to get the feedback of the customers who are going to the various hotels we have under the IHG umbrella. We want to know how many people are calling for reservations and so on, that's what we look at.

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.

We have been using it for about three years.

It has pretty much scaled properly for our needs.

We have been using AppDynamics for about three years as of right now, and we are a pretty well-satisfied customer. We continue to strive for new technology, whatever the AppDynamics people are releasing, the new versions or whatever, we keep upgrading.

We have a lot of development teams and they ask a lot of questions. Being the admin for AppDynamics at IHG, I raise a support ticket. They are very good with responding immediately. The response time is very good, as in a couple of hours. We are pretty satisfied. I work with a lot of guys from AppDynamics, and I work with one guy in England. They're pretty good. The support is very good, technically sound.

We weren’t really using something else before. I think my management wanted to get some metrics out of the application.

I do the configuration on the application, setting up the app agent and the machine agent. Being a SaaS controller, I think your ops team would take care of it.
It is not that complex; not at all.

When we were finalizing the deal, I'm not sure about which vendors were on the shortlist.

When selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, we want to get as much out of the tool that we purchase.

There are so many tools in the market, depending upon the criteria and what you want, I would definitely suggest AppDynamics, because of the REST things and all of that. You can deep dive into data and get to the granular level.

We are pretty much a satisfied customer.

We are not really using APM with any other AppDynamics products at this time.

Right now, we use a lot of the metric browsers, we use the APIs to then ingest that into Splunk, and then create nice visual graphs that upper management can then digest very easily. We use AppDynamics not only from a troubleshooting point of view, but also for trending, analysis, and capacity.

It's definitely cut down our troubleshooting, from a mean time to restore or repair, and pinpoint the actual problem that we are having; reducing that time.

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.

From my standpoint, it’s pretty stable. I know that when we first set it up, we put everything under one application. Now, we are kind of breaking away from that, and we are losing a bunch of the data. From that standpoint, people are getting upset, but I understand that's the limitation of the app. I think some people just need to move on.
Once we get everything the way we want it, the maps are going to show up the way we want it. I think it will be a lot more beneficial.

Scalability is a lot better now that we can see one application, can see the other application, whereas before, we didn't have that visibility. That's why we put everything under one application. Now, I think we can do as much or as little as we want.

I personally haven't used technical support but the company definitely has. They're on site all the time. I know from talking to our monitoring guys, they love it. They think that the support is always there and always readily available. They are the administrators; I am more of a power user.

We weren't previously using any APM solution. We were flying blind. We knew we had to do something. That's when the monitoring manager got wind of AppDynamics and really pushed hard for us to implement it.

I was involved in the initial setup a little bit but not all too much; just from a 40,000-foot view of, “Hey, this is what's coming down. You might want to play around with it.” I wasn't involved in the installation or anything of that nature.

From what the installation people said, initial setup was pretty easy. All you had to do was put the agent on. I know our development were kind of balking about putting the RUM JavaScript out on all their pieces of code. Now that it’s out there, they're pretty good about adding more and more to it because they are seeing the benefits of doing that. From a standpoint of installation, I think everything has been running pretty smoothly.

I don’t know any of the other vendors that were on the shortlist. I am sure there was but I don't know. I wasn't a part of that conversation.

If you're not getting the support or if you're not getting the answers when they are trying to troubleshoot, then this is a definitely a really good solution and it will save you time in the long run.

With the benefits of pinpointing the issue quickly, we can get either our servers or our application up and running better. We've pinpointed a lot of long transaction times and were able to fix that. Not knowing that, because we fixed that, it also fixed three or four different applications.

It’s also nice to see the mapping. Once you start building all these things and its building on top of each other, AppDynamics does a very good job of showing, “Holy cow, we actually are talking to all these other different servers.”

As I’ve mentioned, we were flying blind and now we are starting to see. It's been a lot better.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we use EUM as well. We are trying to get our company off of Google Analytics and go straight AppDynamics, but it’s a slow boat.

The dynamic baselining is a big plus; being able to get rolling baselines for different times of the day, different days of the week, days of the month. Alerting is a big feature; being able to receive alerts when we have things that kind of go out of bounds. Dashboarding is also a pretty big one that we use a lot, along with the API; being able to put in our own data and add that to dashboards related to what AppDynamics itself is finding.

It's led to a very big decrease in MTTR when issues are encountered, as well as helped us to be a lot more proactive to be able to identify issues and customer degradation before customers start complaining about it.

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.

Overall, stability is very good.

I haven't had any issues with availability or scalability.

I did not previously use a different solution; no APM kind of tools.

We realized we needed an APM solution mostly because of the growing complexity of the application. It's a lot easier to monitor an application, per se, if you have good control and you know what all the application is doing. I think most people would agree that as applications are growing, and becoming more and more complex, you have less and less people that actually understand what's going on. You need something like AppDynamics that will help bridge that gap between the people's understanding and what the application is actually doing.

The overall setup of the application is extremely straight forward. We had a little added complexity, due to the size of our deployment, but really, it is far more straightforward than all the competitors’ products that we looked at.

We also primarily looked at CA Wily Introscope and Dynatrace.

The biggest reason we chose AppDynamics was their ROI. AppDynamics was by far the quickest and easiest to get good results out of. The other two products required a lot more investment both as far as capital for purchasing systems to handle the load, as well as time to get the systems to really have useful data in them.

The best advice would probably be to make sure that you know what your requirements are and that you're analyzing the tools to your requirements. Look at things such as capital and time to roll out. That makes a big difference in the ROI for a product.

Overall, it's a very strong product. It has most of the features that I think we need. There are a few things that could be improved, like the ability to exclude stuff from the baseline. It's not quite perfect, but other than some usability improvements, I think it's a very great product.

We use AppDynamics APM, as well AppDynamics EUM.

The business transaction tier of management is the most valuable feature; the fact that we can go into multiple tiers and monitor the transactions from the end-user point of view. That's very important to what we're doing.

It brings everything to the forefront. It helps the application staff plus the executive staff understand what's going on with the end-user performance because, obviously, that's one of the most important issues today.

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.

I haven't seen any problems with stability with any of the AppDynamics products that we're utilizing.

Right now, it's scaled for what we have to do in terms of what we have to add. I think we've already allowed it, in the planning, for adequate scaling. Obviously, you have to put these guys on, various agents, but we've allowed for that.

The professional services that we actually use, we did need their assistance in standing up this product. They were very helpful. They're still behind us even after they left the facility. They check in and log in to make sure that we're on track with what we need to do. Any problems that we did face, they addressed.

We were previously using something else and that company didn't stay current with the times.

Before choosing this product, we did evaluate other options.

Take a test drive of the demo.

I’ve given it a high rating because of the initial dashboards that are being built and the way that they can be built. I haven't seen anything like that. Especially with the flow management that's literally there in real time.

For right now, we are not using any other AppDynamics products. We are only using AppDynamics APM, but the new one they introduced at a recent conference, Business iQ, that seems very appealing too.