AppDynamics vs Elastic Observability comparison

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AppDynamics Logo
19,417 views|12,620 comparisons
89% willing to recommend
Elastic Logo
12,577 views|10,415 comparisons
90% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jun 27, 2023

We performed a comparison between AppDynamics and Elastic Observability based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: The setup process for AppDynamics can be difficult depending on the environment and use case. In contrast, the complexity of the initial setup for Elastic Observability varies due to its distributed nature and implementation strategy. The number of individuals involved in the setup also varies depending on the chosen platform.
  • Features: AppDynamics provides release management capabilities, business insights, and automation, with scalability and user-friendliness. It also offers sensor data. On the other hand, Elastic Observability is easy to deploy and has machine learning, as well as a good design and the ability to use the Elastic User Interface framework for custom development. It is also an economical option.
  • Pricing: AppDynamics is a costly solution for large companies with a complicated licensing model, while Elastic Observability offers more reasonable licensing costs and open source components but may have increased pricing for some features and usage.
  • Service and Support: The customer service for AppDynamics has had mixed feedback, with some complaints regarding communication and knowledge. However, there have also been positive experiences. On the other hand, Elastic Observability's customer service has been largely positive, with supportive tech assistance and a helpful online community.
  • ROI: AppDynamics offers precise performance measurement and real-time transaction monitoring, while Elastic Observability is a cost-efficient solution that helps prevent incidents and provides comprehensive visibility to identify root causes.

Comparison Results: Elastic Observability offers ease of deployment, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness compared to AppDynamics' wider range of features. Despite having a steep learning curve, Elastic Observability offers machine learning and a comprehensive toolset at a lower price point. Elastic Observability is a good choice for those seeking a flexible and cost-effective observability solution.

To learn more, read our detailed AppDynamics vs. Elastic Observability Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The release management capabilities are great.""I like that AppDynamics allows every organization to have what they want to see, like for my organization, we're able to customize the dashboard to show us details of what we want to see in our transactions.""The most valuable feature is the detailed statistics, like the consumer count, for the ActiveMQ server.""AppDynamics has been stable.""What I like best about AppDynamics is that it's functional, particularly in APM in Java and .NET.""AppDynamics' best feature is automation - for example, when I add a note, it can understand the data automatically.""Has helped us to increase customer acquisitions and reduce revenue leakage.""It provides everything into one view, so we can track information from one place to another."

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"It has always been a stable solution.""The solution has been stable in our usage.""We use AppDynamics and Elastic. The reason why we're using Elastic APM is because of the license count. It's very favorable compared to AppDynamics. It's inexpensive; it's economical.""The solution is open-source and helps with back-end logging. It is also easy to handle.""The solution allows us to dig deep into data.""Machine learning is the most valuable feature of this solution.""The ability to ensure that the data is searchable and maintainable is highly valuable for our purposes.""Its diverse set of features available on the cloud is of significant importance."

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Cons
"AppDynamics scaled well up to around 3,000 agents. The performance deteriorated after that, while Dynatrace could support more than 10,000 agents. We were surprised that AppDynamics' scalability is not so good.""One area for improvement is the MST model. It would be more helpful if it could be offered as a managed service provider model with more multi-tenancy and features.""I’d like to see better out-of-the-box visual reporting so that we can roll this up to management.""Sometimes, it is hard to navigate through and find if something is wrong or figure out where an error stemmed from.""Rolling out version upgrades is a difficult job at times.""Their support should be improved. Clusters and monitoring can also be improved.""This solution is expensive.""The training on the dashboards that is provided could be a little bit better, as could the use cases. They should have some good examples out there. As it is right now, I had to scour YouTube to find some stuff."

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"The solution needs to use more AI. Once the product onboards AI, users would more effectively be able to track endpoints for specific messages.""Elastic Observability’s price could be improved.""They need more skills in the market. There are not enough skills in the market. It is not pervasive enough on the market, in my opinion. In other words, there isn't a big enough user base.""There is room for improvement regarding its APM capabilities.""The cost must be made more transparent.""If we had some pre-defined templates for observability that we could start using right away after deploying it – instead of having to build or to change some of the dashboards – that would be helpful.""The solution would be better if it was capable of more automation, especially in a monitoring capacity or for the response to abnormalities.""Elastic Observability is reactive rather than proactive. It should act as an ITSM tool and be able to create tickets and alerts on Jira."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The product’s licencing policy is competitive. However, properly identify and size your needs to get the best rate."
  • "As a technical person, and as an application development team, they all understand that this is the right tool for us. But when it comes to budget and financial matters, it takes days and weeks to convince upper management to buy this tool. So they should do something more on licensing costs."
  • "It is not a cheap tool, but you also save in manpower to setup because it is easy and fast. At the end of the day, I think the revenue is much better. BUT, they have an awful co-term mode of licensing."
  • "It could be cheaper. It's a little cost prohibitive. There are so many features that also show a lot of value, but it’s not always easy to justify the cost."
  • "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 would be better if there were more solutions incorporated into the base price. ​"
  • "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."
  • "Take into consideration what you get for specific pricing models and how much it costs to add on things you may need later.​"
  • More AppDynamics Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing to someone that is discussing pricing of the solution."
  • "There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."
  • "Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."
  • "The price of Elastic Observability is expensive."
  • "Users have to pay for some features, like the alerts on different channels, because they are unavailable in different source versions."
  • "One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."
  • "Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us."
  • "We will buy a premium license after POC."
  • More Elastic Observability Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning… more »
    Top Answer:I rate the pricing a five out of ten. The product is not that cheap.
    Top Answer:The tool's scalability involves a more complex implementation process. It requires careful calculations to determine the number of nodes needed, the specifications of each node, and the configuration… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    19,417
    Comparisons
    12,620
    Reviews
    22
    Average Words per Review
    459
    Rating
    7.9
    Views
    12,577
    Comparisons
    10,415
    Reviews
    16
    Average Words per Review
    445
    Rating
    7.9
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    AppD, AppDynamics APM
    Learn More
    Overview

    AppDynamics is a leader in APM (application performance monitoring) tools. The solution is designed to help you spot application issues on the spot so you can get to the root causes of problems, all in real time. In addition, AppDynamics offers seamless traceability and is fully capable of enhancing application performance and visibility in the multicloud world. It uses AI to solve application problems and prevent them from occurring in the future. AppDynamics is a great tool that can help your organization make critical, strategic decisions and is ideal for businesses of all sizes.

    AppDynamics Features

    AppDynamics has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Code level visibility
    • Dynamic baselining
    • Powerful alerting
    • Visibility and control
    • Quick installation
    • Mobile real-user monitoring
    • Browser real-user monitoring
    • Application performance management
    • Database agents
    • Server visibility
    • Trend database performance over time
    • Data retention
    • Monitors multiple platforms
    • Troubleshoots performance issues
    • Synthetic monitoring
    • Continuously monitors in a high-volume environment

    AppDynamics Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing AppDynamics. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Deep insights: The AppDynamics solution can provide deep insights into your processes, including real-time insights into performance, user experience, objectives, and business outcomes.
    • Unified monitoring: With AppDynamics, six monitoring applications are combined into a single robust solution. In turn, you gain complete visibility and multi-channel user experience management. The solution’s unified monitoring also quickly produces previews that are more accurate.
    • Data-led customer experience: By using AppDynamics, you can ingest and analyze data across your entire technology stack and transform it into detailed visualizations. This allows you to easily make the right business decisions while enhancing the user experience and also driving better business results.
    • Advanced network visibility: AppDynamics allows you to gain insight across your entire technology stack. As a result, you have greater visibility of the external networks that your applications rely on, which enables you to quickly resolve issues with connections to Domain Name Service (DNS), Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the AppDynamics solution.

    Chandan K., Associate Director at a financial services firm, says, “The tracing is the most important aspect of the solution. The way it traces the information within the particular application or within the particular infrastructure is great. That actually helps. Apart from that, all of the data that's in the production APM is good.”

    PeerSpot user, Yacin H., Responsable Commercial at Zen Networks, mentions, “You can use one module for each server, for each application, and for each API”. He also adds, “With the solution you can put add-ons on it and it's very customizable. You can customize it easily. If you want something that the tool doesn't have, you can add it easily.”

    Another reviewer, a Head Of Information Technology at a mining and metals company expresses, "The solution helps us save a lot of time on certain tasks. The dashboards of the solution are excellent. The stability is good.”

    David G., Systems Engineer at a tech services company, states, “The solution has beneficial application analysis, is highly scalable, and has a great ROI.”

    To effectively monitor and gain insights across your distributed systems, you need to have all your observability data in one stack. Break down silos by bringing together application, infrastructure, and user data into a unified solution for end-to-end observability and alerting.
    Rely on the most widely deployed observability platform available, built on the proven Elastic Stack (also known as the ELK Stack) to converge silos, delivering unified visibility and actionable insights.
    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
    PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm32%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Aerospace/Defense Firm6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization40%
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company27%
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise69%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business8%
    Midsize Enterprise45%
    Large Enterprise47%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise55%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise67%
    Buyer's Guide
    AppDynamics vs. Elastic Observability
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about AppDynamics vs. Elastic Observability and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 153 reviews while Elastic Observability is ranked 7th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 22 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while Elastic Observability is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Elastic Observability writes "The user interface framework lets us do custom development when needed. ". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security, New Relic and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, whereas Elastic Observability is most compared with Dynatrace, New Relic, Azure Monitor, Sentry and Datadog. See our AppDynamics vs. Elastic Observability report.

    See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors and best Container Monitoring vendors.

    We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.