Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

AppDynamics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Ranking in Container Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
156
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (3rd)
Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in Container Monitoring
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
138
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AppDynamics is 5.7%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 9.3%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Unique Categories:
Mobile APM
25.6%
Container Monitoring
28.5%
Network Monitoring Software
3.8%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
5.5%
 

Q&A Highlights

BH
Dec 10, 2020
 

Featured Reviews

CK
Mar 13, 2023
Good tracing capabilities and helpful technical support but needs better analytics
We do have a combination of areas that need improvement. We do have the integration, such as end-user integration and experience that could be better. It is not just from the response point of view; it is more from the error and error detection point of view. This is due to the fact that these are all the banking applications as used by the banking staff, not by the end-user directly. Based on the banking staff feedback, based on the staff security or maybe dealing with the capital market, there needs to be some improvement. They do provide the input growth on a daily basis in terms of what is coming in and how we receive the applications and how many we have. We've now started looking for a particular product that can make sure that it should connect with files and statements inside the product. The IO ratio, which we are looking for in terms of a report, is one of the concerns. We do monitor those details from AppDynamics, however, reporting and monitoring could be better. There needs to be more analytics. That is what we are missing from the tool point of view. We need more information geared more towards helping us in making better decisions. When you do the coding that's for a banking situation or maybe in the incidents or capital market, it becomes very important that how much time I'm investing inside the transaction. A transaction which needs to be carried out for either confirming the payments or maybe either releasing the payments - these kinds of things. What I have seen with the use, as of now, is a bit of a lag when we are running on the global cloud or the public clouds, like Azure or the Google platform. Right now, we are fighting between three different stakeholders. With the networks, we have a different chat, with the vendors we have a different chat, and with the application team, we have a different chat. This approach doesn't provide a holistic view. Everyone has their own excuses and everyone has their own reasoning and conditions. If it can be able to intelligently provide all the things we need to look at, from a data point of view, that would be very useful.
RA
Oct 25, 2022
Good tags, easy integration, and increases visibility
The tags are quite useful. They are providing the capability to give meaning to on-premises hardware (since it was not possible outside of cloud solutions and containers) as well to tag traces and logs. The full stack of integrations made it easier to monitor the different technologies and platform providers, including Software as a Service providers, that otherwise would need a lot of work and customization to be able to see what is happening. We'd also need to use several other separate tools that would require an increase in the required staff to operate them. Datadog gave us the opportunity to have a single platform for observability.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"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."
"The initial setup is simple."
"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."
"The best features of AppDynamics would be the code application monitoring capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is that you can easily determine the load on the application."
"The most valuable feature is the detailed statistics, like the consumer count, for the ActiveMQ server."
"The most valuable feature in AppDynamics is the identifying of the slow responses. Additionally, it is easy to use."
"Having a wealth of information has helped us investigate outages, and having historical data helps us tune our system."
"The most valuable feature is the dashboards that are provided out of the box, as well as ones we were able to configure."
"It is great that creating an incident is possible from Slack while having all the relevant data in Datadog."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"Datadog helps us detect issues early on and helps in troubleshooting."
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"The observability on offer is the most useful aspect of the product."
"It brings in observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities - all of which we need to operate at scale."
 

Cons

"AppDynamics could benefit from greater integration with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning."
"AppDynamics's agent management could be improved."
"I would like to see something that lets me set real dollar figures, not just to outages, but to the solutions as well... 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."
"As per my experience, the drill-down feature can be improved at the class level."
"This solution is expensive."
"If AppDynamics could do a one-agent function with their actual monitoring effectiveness, it will be the greatest tool."
"I would like to be able to monitor both cloud an on-prem infrastructures, displayed in one dashboard."
"While it is scalable, it could be better."
"I've found that the documentation is lacking in certain regards."
"Could be a little more user friendly."
"Datadog could have a better business analysis module."
"Stability of the product has been a concern for us outside of the primary monitoring agents."
"Lacks some flexibility in the customization."
"Deploying the agents is still very manual."
"Datadog needs more local Asia-Pacific support, and if they don't have a SaaS solution in Asia-Pacific, they should offer an on-prem version. I'm told that's not possible."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AppDynamics is priced on the higher side."
"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."
"The pricing model for AppDynamics could be better. You have to subscribe to a yearly or a three-year licensing, which isn't very handy. The solution is one of the most expensive in the market today."
"I was not involved with the procurement of AppDynamic, but I believe it's expensive."
"There is a license to use this solution. However, the clients pay for the licenses we are the service provider."
"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."
"The solution is highly expensive"
"AppDynamics is an expensive solution."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"The tool is open-source."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Answers from the Community

BH
Dec 8, 2020
Dec 8, 2020
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitoring. We maintain critical processing on our mainframe so there was a desire to include this in our transaction trace. Due to a highly mature ELK implementation, we are not trying to incorporate log ...
2 out of 5 answers
HK
Oct 20, 2020
Could you please share your requirements ? There are a lot tools can be added to the list. I spent almost 6 months to test and check many tools then I select eG enterprise.
RM
Oct 20, 2020
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitoring.  We maintain critical processing on our mainframe so there was a desire to include this in our transaction trace.  Due to a highly mature ELK implementation, we are not trying to incorporate log analytics into solution buy may consider in the future.  We had AppD, Dynatrace, New Relic, and CA Wily all in house at the time of our evaluation.  We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing.  Between Dynatrace and New Relic, Dynatrace won based on the automation, integrated AI, support for "old" techs, and confidence we could eliminate multiple APM and infra monitoring tools.   I would not include products like BigPanda, MoogSoft, in this analysis. They are not monitoring solutions but event correlation solutions.  You will need additional monitoring products to capture data and feed them.  Having said that if you cannot consolidate tools you will likely need to purchase an event solution to make sense of all the alarms. We did evaluate these products but with Dynatrace AI did not feel the business value was there for the investment. Here's a quick pro/con list on Dynatrace & New Relic from our analysis. New Relic Pros: Insights is an awesome product and capability. Lots of capabilities and plugins to extend data collection. The APM dashboard is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Good training and documentation are available to support the product. New Relic Cons: Requires lots of manual configurations to implement and support.  Insights product requires an investment of time to achieve value. Licensing is a nightmare as there is virtually no transparency in what you are being charged for. Lack of solution to consolidate alerts across implementation other than significant investment in insights to manually achieve this.   Dynatrace Pros: Very simple to implement and maintain with out of the box automation which supports modern (cloud/Kubernetes) and "old" (mainframe). In-app chat is helpful.  High integration of infra and APM data for full-stack observability and engineering.  Topology and trace discovery is more reliable than other products or our CMDB.  Synthetics are easy to set up for any user. AI-assisted problem analysis on the trace discovery streamlines troubleshooting.  AI includes "events" in an analysis like VMotion, deployment events. Have not done yet but looking to leverage monitoring as code for a fully integrated and automated delivery pipeline. See keptn.sh open source project. Dynatrace Cons: User SQL lacks some functions of NRQL for user analysis.  Host, process, and service data is not available to query within the product.  Alarm processing lacks some granular controls. The Plug-in library is less robust. Good luck with your decision!
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
44%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Educational Organization
34%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
What do you like most about Datadog?
Integrating Datadog with other platforms has made our monitoring processes a bit easier. It's not super simple, but it's manageable.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AppD, AppDynamics APM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
Find out what your peers are saying about AppDynamics vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.