Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

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.

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.

It is very useful to monitor user behavior and see the user experience.

It has helped us to address issues well. For example, if the application is being used worldwide, it's possible that the application is performing well when accessed from the US but that it has issues when accessed from other countries, such as China. So, AppDynamics can clearly show you which users are having issues when accessing your application, and this helps you address it.

It is a stable solution. I have found the features that help me see the user experience to be valuable. For example, it will tell you all the visual screens on the mobile application that a user has been visiting. It will also show you how long they have been visiting this particular screen and all the actions the user has taken on the browser.

We can view the end-user experience and end-user response time. For example, if your application is performing well but the users are still complaining, then you will be able to investigate whether it is a network issue or a connection issue. 

AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring will give you these types of details. It will tell you from which part of the world your application is being accessed, it will give you the page rendering time, how the page is behaving, and when it is being accessed from different parts of the world.

If you have a single URL and all the operations are coming in as part of the header, you will not be able to segregate them for different actions. I think this could be improved.

There are different things which can be achieved using Core Change, but it cannot be easily done using the configuration change on the controller.

Also, functionality could be increased on the End-User Monitoring side.

I have been using this solution for the last five years.

It is stable.

I think that it is scalable.

Their technical support is good, but there's room for improvement. The way the technical support staff handle the user could be improved.

Also, technical support staff could be faster and more knowledgeable. They need staff who are more technical. Most often, they ask a standard set of questions, even if they are not relevant to the particular case that has been raised. This could be changed.

The installation is pretty simple. It is a Core Change. For example, if you have to implement End-User Monitoring for a particular browser application, then you will need to inject the JavaScript Agent on the code. This usually takes about one or two hours.

We implemented it ourselves.

AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring does have licensing cost associated with it. We currently have a yearly license.

There are very few products which use End-User Monitoring, and I would rate AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring at seven on a scale from one to ten.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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