Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

We are a reseller and AppDynamics is one of the products that we sell to our customers.

Our customers use it to gain insight into performance.

The most valuable feature is the end-user monitoring.

I would like to see support for mobile testing and mobile monitoring.

The cost is something that can be improved.

We have been working with AppDynamics for almost 10 years.

We have not had any issues with stability.

Scalability has not been a problem.

We provide in-house technical support for our clients. We have found that AppDynamics is pretty selective when it comes to providing technical support.

The initial setup is not very straightforward, so it takes some time to complete.

Implementing this solution will require some help.

This price of this product is expensive.

Some of our customers are making the transition to cloud-based deployment, which is something that we are helping them with.

Overall, this is a good product and it is one of our top recommendations.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use AppDynmaics Server Monitoring to monitor and gain insight into what is happening in our infrastructure.

This solution gives us quite good insights that we might otherwise overlook, or it might take a really long time to debug those issues. In our environment, we don't have visibility across multiple systems. They are all independently managed by different teams and it takes a very long time to contact each team, then get details about each different layer of the architecture. With AppDynamics, we have application transaction monitoring and database monitoring, which are quite good features.

The user interface is quite good and it is easy to navigate.

The insights and metrics that the system provides are very useful.

I would like the ability to choose from some pre-defined dashboards and reports because as it is now, you have to define them separately for each implementation.

The configuration of user monitoring is a bit complex and should be made easier.

In our virtualized environment, we have visibility only up to the database. It would be helpful if we had more visibility beyond this point.

We have been using this product for almost six months.

This solution is quite stable.

In terms of scalability, it is quite easy to expand.

We have more than 150 servers that we are monitoring right now. There are three teams including development, operations, and implementation, and between them, we have more than 100 people using it.

The technical support is quite good.

This is the first enterprise-level tool that we have implemented for this purpose. Prior to AppDynamics, different departments and different teams were using other products for monitoring.

The initial set up is quite easy. It requires the deployment of a monitoring agent and it can be done in a couple of minutes.

My understanding is that the price of this solution is quite high, compared to other products. As such, pricing may be a concern for smaller organizations.

This is a good product and one that I definitely recommend.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

I have been using AppDynamics for two years. 

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

We have ten to fifteen employees who manage this solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With this solution, we see traditional use cases with companies that have a digital business model, such as insurance companies, travel or banking companies. It's really for where they have an application that is critical for the business and that brings in revenue. And when these applications are not available, they lose money.

For example, in the tourism sector, when you want to book a flight or just about anything, and the app is too slow, then the use case is quite easy to calculate because clients leave the page, go and find alternatives and don't come back.

Most of our customers are midsize and enterprise companies, it's not really a solution for small companies. We are an IT service provider and a Cisco partner, and we represent and invest in AppDynamics. I'm the Director of Application Performance Management.

The most valuable feature is that it shows and gives you an application propo-topology straight away so you see the relationships between the different nodes. The other thing is that you can really look inside the method and analyze problems on the code level.

I think what AppDynamics is doing is a good way forward. They are currently investing in situations and environments, where clients use exclusively IT. In the past, it was only possible to monitor Java applications, .net applications, and the like, but they now have a particular agent for the SAP environment and that is a good thing.

It's a highly automated solution but still requires a few manual tweaks. I don't think that can be changed because every business to a certain extent is different. 

I've been using the solution for 12 months. 

It's a stable solution. 

Scalability is fine. Actually, there is a very low overhead on the CPU. Even with big installations, the maximum overhead of the CPU is like 2% which is really fine. You don't feel it. You can easily add it into your environment without slowdowns or anything.

I think the technical support is quite okay, there is a lot of self service, so it's easy to resolve problems by yourself. And then you have the SLA's, the standard SLA's and SLA's that you agree with the company. We don't get many complaints about that. It usually works well.

DataDoc is a solution that we might have used but it's really suited to small companies. I would really say if you are an enterprise company, then AppDynamics is the product of choice, but if you are a small company, just starting a business and you need a solution that is quick and easy to install and gets up to speed very quickly, then DataDoc is an alternative.

AppDynamics has a lot of functionality, features - a whole set of functions around business IQ that required a lot of research. You have to make sure that you have a team in place to get the best out of the solution. It's a very rich tool and requires a structure within an organization. If you are a small company and you cannot guarantee that you have somebody on your team or a whole team to deal with it, you won't get the best out of it.

It is very easy to set up a first installation and to get results very quickly. It is a little bit more complex to do customizations. You do have a dashboard or standard dashboards where you can get business results or show business results, but you have to do a lot of customization because every business is different.

We carry out the implementation for customers.

Cost is reasonable. They have developed a very solid and good methodology to find out if the use case is valid, meaning whether there is a return on investment. If you find a valid use case, like in tourism, in banking, insurance, or even in production environments like manufacturing in confined business cases, then it's worth the investment. It's easy to calculate and the return on investment is quite quick. If the technical fit is not so good, it would be too expensive and not worth the investment.

I would suggest a company takes the time to do an analysis of use cases, of the situation,of what you really need, and then pick the best fit. It's not something you compare by price or simply by features. It is something you should look into for your specific situation and then make a decision based on the use case, based on the business case, the justification that it gives your organization to invest in that tool. Take your time to do that.

The other thing is, when you invest in a very rich tool, make sure that you have the people in place to look after it or get a managed service to do it. It's not something that you install and it's there and you get the most out of it. You have to look after it.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

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.

• The analytics are great.
• The business and session monitoring are great.

One thing that could be improved is the user interface. Things could be more intuitive.

I have used AppDynamics Application Analytics for a few months. I have used Dynatrace for a few years.

It is a stable product.

It is very good from a scalability perspective.

Technical support is great.

It's difficult to install. AppDynamics uses multiple agents. The challenge in the installation is that you have to configure a lot of things manually. The way you install and configure it is not straightforward.

AppDynamics is a great tool but Dynatrace is slightly ahead in terms of user-friendliness.

I would recommend it.

The primary use we have for this product is application performance monitoring for mission-critical applications. We are a reseller.  

The old way that people would remediate when there was a problem with performance is that they would have to dig into the logs and manually find where the bottlenecks were. A solution like AppDynamics is a definite advantage because it can pinpoint the areas that the person(s) reviewing the issue need to focus on. This makes the technicians a lot faster in remediating issues that an application is presenting.  

Our customers are most interested in monitoring transactions, page loads, the infrastructure, the CPU, and memory monitoring.  

AppDynamics needs to consolidate their technology agent types into one agent that could be deployed on any host no matter what the technology is that it is running. It is really the implementation of AppDynamics that is very difficult because it is very manual. They really need to improve upon that and do more to simplify user processes. So, I would like them to have a single agent type instead of an agent-based on the technology. I think that having a single binary agent that you can put onto any host would make it a lot easier to work with.  

We have been partners with AppDynamics for about six years now.  

The stability of the product is there. It is fine.  

My impression of the scalability of the solution is that it is not very scalable. They are not the market leader anymore. Because they do not have the ability to monitor microservices and containers, I do not see the product having a huge future. For example and for comparison, there is Dynatrace which is a better solution and an easier solution to work with. AppDynamics has failed to lead the way.  

We usually have two engineers on staff for the deployment and maintenance for our clients.  

I think their technical support is good. There is no problem there that I know of.  

I think the initial setup is too complex. You have to figure out exactly what is running on the servers you are going to monitor. Many times — especially if there are older applications still operating — the clients do not even know what all the technologies are that are running on the server. It just takes a lot of time just to find that out. It is just very time consuming to have to go through the process and it should be quicker and easier.  

We do the deployments. Deployment usually takes several weeks and the strategy is just to get in there and get it done as quickly as possible. People regularly use an integrator, a reseller or consultant for the deployment. We are a reseller.  

The setup cost, pricing and licensing is different for every customer depending on how big they are and how many servers they are putting the product on. So I can not give a direct answer to that question. Really cost is based on the implementation.  

We have evaluated Dynatrace and eventually it could replace AppDynamics. It is a simple comparison of the pros and cons between the two products. Dynatrace is easier to instrument and implement and Dynatrace gives the clients quicker results. Also, Dynatrace points to the root cause of an issue instead of just correlations which are a lot more vague.  

As advice to people considering the solution, I would tell them to scope it out really well and to do a lot of research on their intended application and their business use cases. There may be another, better solution available for their needs.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven. I would rate them at a seven because they definitely have a better product than several other products on the market, they have good functionality, and I think they are fairly affordable. The reason I would not rate them higher is because there are other products on the market that are obviously better solutions that exist right now.  

What we do in general is analysis on the application side. When we have slow SQL requests we jump on the database monitoring to see, for example, the total time the request has been pending in the database. We can solve SQL requests by their pending time. 

The explain plan is the solution's most valuable feature.

The database monitoring is quite simple.

An improvement could be if the monitoring was able to be summarized into something more clear and simple for people who don't have the technical skills on the database side.

The solution needs to have some prepared dashboards on the database. When we use AppDynamics we have a lot of screens and we have to jump from one screen to another. It would useful is if, on the database, monitoring required merely a click on a button and then you have the monitoring dashboard that you can display for easy access.

I've been using the solution for three years now.

The solution is very, very stable. We haven't faced any bugs or glitches on the system.

The solution does not offer good scalability. It's quite technical, but basically, when we have to monitor one database we have to check if our Java program allows for the amount of monitoring we need. If it doesn't, we'll need to restart and get more database agents and perhaps spend more money to scale.

We don't have a lot of users on the solution on the database monitoring portion. It might be as many as 20 people. They are software engineers and database admins.

We only use the solution occasionally when we suspect there are problems on the database side. It isn't used daily.

We create a lot of support tickets with AppDynamics. We've been using the solution for a few years now. The support is quite weak. There's a lot of back and forth, however, eventually, they give us decent solutions.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex at all.

It only takes about 10 minutes to create the user on the database.

The initial setup is actually done in two parts. The first part is to create the user on the database that we want to monitor. This part is done by the database teams etc. The second part is handling the AppDynamics controller. This part is handled by me or someone on my team.

A company only needs one person to handle the maintenance once it is up and running.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

I'm not in charge of licensing. I don't know what the costs associated with it would be.

For me, the first recommendation I would have to other organizations considering implementation would be to have a person or people who have good skills on database monitoring. How AppDynamics works is basically just monitoring the metrics that already exist in the databases. These metrics are really technical metrics, so a company has to have some people that are really specialized in reading them. They need to have a good database administrator or database analyst in place.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.