Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

I'm familiar with agent-based database monitoring. It easily integrates and monitors various databases like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, with minimal configuration. There are also some advanced, AI-infused use cases.

It's better to enable additional metrics and custom metrics if needed, depending on the specific application.

It's made a difference. The correlation between database and application performance allows us to proactively identify issues that could impact the user experience. This helps the application team improve the user experience and reduce the impact of any problems. The proactive monitoring from AppDynamics definitely helps.

ASM deployment feature is the most useful for me. As soon as you enable the prerequisites, you can deploy the tools. That's one of the major use cases.

The downside is that it's a little costly. And if you get stuck with a problem related to deployment, it can take some time to get it resolved. You need domain expertise support to troubleshoot issues. It's not easy to get things done if you run into trouble.

My experience has been good. Both are premium support users; so it's for a separate, additional price to the licensing. Since they're [Dyntrace and AppDynamics] part of the core monitoring ecosystem, especially with the premier experience.

There are different levels of supports. So, starting from your standard support to your 24/7 support, then you have your engineering support. In both cases, you have to go through an assessment before implementation in terms of what kind of application it is.

Positive

We used Dynatrace, which comes with full-stack observability. Full-stack observability has evolved to the point where, competitively, you can ask how AppDynamics and Dynatrace compare. Dynatrace takes a slight lead here. It can do dynamic baselining and anomaly detection.

It gives a little more transactional insights and is more comprehensive. There's a slight difference, but not a major impact, in terms of database monitoring on both tools. They are both competitive products. One way they try to compete is in terms of APIs, but the only difference I see is that AppDynamics has a slight advantage in one area. We don't have multiple agents, we go with the concept of one agent. Second, Dynatrace leads in observability, integrating with other on-premises and cloud systems.

They are both competitive enough in the same pricing range. They are not so different, they are both in the same range. If you go and negotiate, they are the same.

The deployment itself doesn't take much time. Once you install the agent and enable the prerequisites, you'll be able to start monitoring.

The deployment is a matter of days. If the prerequisites are in place, it's just a matter of days. But the only thing is, in most scenarios, the domain administration team might not be aware of what exactly they want to monitor. 

In that case, we have to do a detailed discovery to understand the database, the type of application it serves, and the issues they want to prioritize. Based on that, we determine the metrics to monitor from both the AppDynamics side and the database application side.

ROI depends on the criticality of the application. If your application is super critical and impacts the end-user experience, then investing in this tool will make a real impact, and you'll get good data management too.

It is expensive. If you opted for the MSP model, you will get premium support because you're already a premium customer to them. If you're not opted for the MSP model and are on a standard model, then it is a little costly. It depends upon the number of licenses you're procuring. Based on that, you might get a discount.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

For business purposes, the analytics side is a very unique part of the APM solution. There are lots of different APM products in this ecosystem, but other than AppDynamics, there is no business insight or very limited capacity. Other APM solutions on the business side are limited. Most of our bank customers and fintech customers use the Analytics side with very high priority.

From the C-level perspective, they mostly do not care about the operational metrics, for example, response time, CPU memory, or different kinds of technical metrics. They focus on the business side. The business impact of their application: Is it good? Is it healthy? Is their revenue increasing or not? Or stable? With the business analytics side, we provide a hundred percent of this business info. Before their end-to-end process, we provide real-time business metrics. 

For example, one of our banking customers uses business analytics to measure real-time ATM transactions, how much their customers withdraw or deposit from the ATM machine, or maybe POS machine, or in Europe, SEPA and SWIFT transactions. Customers manage their transactions from another site. We also measure real-time money transfers.

From each level, for example, ATM side, Internet banking side, mobile banking side. The business analytics side is the further version of an APM product for all APM products.

When you use the full AppDynamics product, for example, analytics and the performance measuring site, when you gather all this information correctly and fully, you can easily talk the same language between business and technical teams.

Most of the issue is not only the exact application problem or response time problem. Mostly, we face the issue of telling this problem or understanding the problem from the business side to the technical or operational team side. We cannot use the transition between this level. So AppDynamics gives us a good approach, good visibility, and a good language for both teams. 

For example, business, operational, software, and database teams use the same language to understand each other very easily. It decreases the meantime to resolution and TTR metrics, for example.

It’s a very centralized solution from the analytics perspective. So, when users expand their licenses, they can expand their visibility. For example, they measure the license count from the analytics perspective, daily transactions. They measure daily transactions, for example. One transaction analytics license gives visibility to one million transactions per day.

So if users want to expand the visibility, if users want to expand their usage of the Analytics site, they need to expand the license also, based on your transactions per day. So it’s easy.

The premise has its own AI capabilities, both on the SaaS and the on-prem side. So, if users want to use this AI feature, other than the other APM product, for example, Dynatrace, users can easily use it as a disconnected on-prem application. This means there is no need to communicate with the Internet connection or product owners, only the communication between the data center and the Internet site. So users can easily use it as a disconnected on-prem, which is the only solution in the APM ecosystem. For example, the big competitor in this area is Dynatrace. Dynatrace has its own daily static analytics features, which need a source connection. 

So, even if users use an on-prem solution, if they want to use the AI options, they need to communicate with their analytics units via an Internet connection. This is important from a technical perspective. 

Another thing is it’s totally free when users own this product with different kinds of agents. Users can also own these AI features. For example, when someone looks at the Dynatrace site, they need to pay for daily data units.  So it’s cost-based. It’s a transaction-based cost with another product, but in AppDynamics, there is no additional cost. So this is one of the advantages.

AppDynamics and the other APM products are really, really much further than other products. So, with this perspective, there are some minor enhancements that can be made, but for the major sites, there is no negative impact or any alternative application. 

For example, some cosmetic enhancements. We live in Turkey, so we have our currency, we have some number formats, or something like that. Sometimes, we can face issues getting the business metric and using or calculating it because of this format or some locality issue. So, I’m specifically talking about this kind of enhancement to enhance its localization capabilities.

I have been using it for more than 12 years now. I have been using it since the beginning. I use it both on cloud and on-premises. 

More than as an application performance management [APM] site other than AppDynamics, I have used APM products for more than twenty years.

It has been super stable. I can easily rate it a ten out of ten because there is no overhead or something like that. There’s no code application, and no code declaration is needed here, so it’s very superior.

From an analytics perspective, when users expand their visibility, there’s no need to expand the license level other than, for example, there’s no additional code application, no additional technical improvement, or something like that. Users only need to expand the license based on their daily transactions. So it’s super easy.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It has been stable, scalable and manageable. 

In Turkey, we are working with more than 75 different companies. We are also responsible for the EMEA region, including Qatar and Austria. So, these are medium to larger organizations.

This is a global company, so there are lots of different support teams all over.

Positive

I used to work with lots of different APM products in my personal career. More than maybe six different products, for example, Dynatrace, CUI, HP Diagnostic (now Micro Focus APM solutions), and other free APM solutions, open-source APM services I used to work with.

We are an APM company. So we make PoCs with lots of different APM vendors throughout the years. For example, last year, I made maybe three different PoCs with other APM vendors. 

But now, for the last nine years, my personal technical perspective and the customer needs in Turkey really align with AppDynamics because it’s a very unified platform. It’s very easy to understand, easy to use. So because of that, I’ve been working with AppDynamics for the last nine years.

We can divide it into two sections. One of them is the agent-based installation, and the other one is the platform-based.

This is a server-side application, so it has lots of different components. Based on my experience, it is easier than other APM solutions as a platform and data warehouse. But the agent side is very different because there are lots of different applications. 

The agent side includes .NET agent, Java agent, Linux agent, Windows agents. There are different types of products on the agent side. It depends on the agent types you need. But from a general point of view, I used many different kinds of APM products, for example, NetTrace, Riverbed, Eternity, and HP Diagnostics. I have a license here too.

So, the initial setup has been simple for me.

AppDynamics delivered financial benefits to our clients. For instance, we are monitoring the money transfer services’ performance metrics, such as response time, how many calls per minute are in a specific time range, and how many other transactions are per minute in a specific time range. These are the technical metrics, the performance metrics specifically. But we are also measuring their business metrics inside the method parameters for HTTP data collectors. 

So we can get this business metric data easily without any code application. This is a very important part. We don’t need any code declaration or development on the development side. We can measure parameters like the amount of money, the success of their transactions, and other business success metrics from these method parameters without any code declaration.

Another example is a loan team in a bank that measures their loan services from their clients. They track how many applications are processed within a specific time range, the success rate, and the correlation of their performance metrics, such as slowness or error rates, with their business outcomes.

For example, yesterday, they released a new application update to address performance issues. Today, we are monitoring their application performance. After this release, their performance went down, response time increased, and success rate decreased. By measuring these performance metrics, their C-level executives and business teams can correlate these performance issues with business impact.

Normally, there’s a baseline, for example, on Wednesday from 10 AM to 11 AM, where they process ten loan applications per minute. If this release negatively affects the business, they can see that response time is increasing, error rate is increasing, and it is impacting their loan applications. So, instead of processing ten applications per minute, they might only process five or three. They can easily measure this impact on their business.

The pricing is very competitive because the prices depend on the customer and customer priority. Based on my knowledge, if I can correlate the business effect and business opportunity to their price, I would rate it a nine out of ten, with one being not cost-effective and ten being very cost-effective.

I would recommend it to other users. Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We worked on the kernel, and being able to monitor our application is important. We have utilized some predictive analysis, and that seems to be the biggest advantage.

The real-time feature provides me with insights into what's happening. It also tells me if there are opportunities.

I still need to thoroughly assess the stability.

I am not very impressed with support. The service could be better.

Neutral

We previously used Elasticsearch. We switched to AppDynamics for its capabilities. In terms of application monitoring, the differences were evident. The shift occurred starting December, over the last six months, and has shown improvements.

We consulted the company for the setup.

The mean time to respond when there are no issues is crucial. It is about finding the right balance. If running transactions, you should be able to respond promptly, which translates into a figure.

End-user licenses are crucial. We have users who require consistent monitoring, and they engage with it daily. This involves desktop usage and professional management. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

AppDynamics is used to monitor multiple applications in our company. Our company recently faced an issue with a mobile banking application. The tool conveyed that many people logged in successfully in the aforementioned application, and for others, the login failed. 

AppDynamics showed us at our company that the customers on a specific telecom carrier have a problem with the SSL certificate between the mobile device and our company's firewall.

In our company, we also had an issue with slow functionality in a mobile application that also belonged to the mobile banking category; AppDynamics showed us that it was an issue with the database, as found in database monitoring. Another use case of the solution is for basic server monitoring such as CBU, disk memory, Network I/O, and similar operations.

The transaction snapshots are the most valuable feature of AppDynamics. I find this feature valuable because for every transaction running through any application server that is detected by AppDynamics, you can check the code that makes the flow list and an issue, which can come from any functionality, and in our company, we can utilize the saved time for troubleshooting and reduce the time to repair and the developers can enhance the security and functionality. 

The solution is available at an inflated cost. 

I have been using AppDynamics for three years. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. In our company, AppDynamics has been deployed in the main data center and we have two controllers related to a single application, we haven't faced any issues related to the application's stability. The stability of the solution depends on the number of applications being monitored efficiently using AppDynamics. 

Our company has integrated AppDynamics to around 8000 end users. In our organization, we are using AppDynamics to monitor applications, infrastructure, and a few network devices. Numerous cloud-based applications in our bank are monitored using AppDynamics. 

AppDynamics offers excellent customer support from professionals, process, and technology perspectives. I would rate the tech support a nine out of ten. 

Positive

Before AppDynamics, our organization used New Relic APM, CA APM, and Broadcom APM. In our company, we switched to AppDynamics because it supports numerous applications developed in Java, PHP, Dot.Net, and other programming languages.

CA APM offers support for a limited number of languages. AppDynamics is used for end-user monitoring, while CA APM is used for front-end or back-end applications. Our company switched to AppDynamics for end-to-end monitoring, starting from the customer to the data center. 

Our company is an institutional bank with numerous customers who need to avail themselves of and be satisfied with our digital services. AppDynamics helps us reduce the response time and investigate issues related to the end user. Our organization has received an ROI with the solution. 

I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. The solution is highly expensive. Our company pays for the solution on a yearly basis, if we don't add new modules or features to the license, we need to pay $1000000 every year. AppDynamics is subscription-based and can cost between $800 to $1000000. 

Before choosing AppDynamics, we evaluated New Relic and Dynatrace. The troubleshooting feature is more enhanced in New Relic and Dynatrace than in AppDynamics. In our company, we have an instant or global agent in our application.

The NOC team and application support team in our company use AppDynamics to extract the root cause analysis for an incident, when evaluating multiple tools it was found that AppDynamics has more features in this area. 

We have an NOC team in our company that is responsible for monitoring the response time of bank applications. The core responsibility of the NOC team is to monitor the response of each channel, which is supported by a customer-facing application for the bank.

The aforementioned channels include end-users, data centers, and each vital component. I would rate AppDynamics as eight out of ten overall. AppDynamics lacks a DR architecture; customers will receive benefits from the product, but the value versus cost is extremely high. 

AppDynamics keeps up with the market trends in application performance management. One of the market trends is analytics performance, and AppDynamics addresses it with the feature of a smart agent, where you can deploy one agent and procure insights on the application's infrastructure, performance, and analytics. The vendor is constantly working on the development and improvement of AppDynamics. 

We use the software for proactive incident detection, root cause analysis, and fine-tuning.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring's most valuable feature is the ability of the out-of-the-box to update the information, provide various metrics, and possibly include custom metrics.

The product's drawback is the licensing pricing. It could be better.

We have been using AppDynamics Database Monitoring for five years.

We encounter stability issues related to performance.

We have 100 AppDynamics Database Monitoring users in our organization. It is a scalable product.

Sometimes, the first line of the support team takes too long to escalate the issues to the second line. This particular area could be improved.

Neutral

The initial setup is easy. It requires one executive and takes a few minutes to deploy it completely. It is a SaaS product and doesn't require maintenance.

I could implement the product myself as I have access to all environments in the company. I need the help of another team to provide credentials to proceed with the configuration.

The product generates a return on investment in terms of money and time. It reduces the average amount of time for resolving incidents. Time improvement saves around 20% to 30% of money.

AppDynamics offers a yearly basis license.

We have integrated AppDynamics Database Monitoring with ServiceNow and Grafana. We have been trying to integrate it with other ecosystems as it is mandatory nowadays.

I rate it an eight out of ten.

The main use case for AppDynamics in our company is monitoring and managing the performance of our web and mobile applications. 

We use AppDynamics to identify and resolve performance issues, such as slow loading times or transaction errors. It also helps us track the availability of our applications and ensure an optimal user experience for our customers. 

Additionally, we use AppDynamics reporting and analytics to make informed decisions about the scalability and sizing of our infrastructure, allowing us to provide quality, reliable service as we grow.

AppDynamics has improved our organization in a number of ways. 

First, it gives us complete visibility into the performance of our applications, allowing us to proactively detect and fix issues before they impact users. This has significantly reduced downtime and improved user experience.

Additionally, AppDynamics provides us with detailed information about the performance of the underlying infrastructure, including servers, databases, and external services. 

This has allowed us to identify bottlenecks and optimize resources, improving operational efficiency and reducing unnecessary costs.

The most valuable features of AppDynamics are its real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, transaction mapping, reporting and analysis, and real-time alerts. These features allow us to proactively detect and fix performance issues, optimize our infrastructure, and make informed decisions to improve the user experience. 

Real-time monitoring helps us stay aware of any anomalies and respond quickly, avoiding costly downtime. 

Deep diagnostics allow us to quickly identify the root causes of problems, accelerating resolution time. 

The transaction map gives us complete visibility into the flow of our applications, helping us identify bottlenecks and prioritize improvements.

As for areas of improvement, AppDynamics could benefit from greater integration with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. This would allow the tool to automatically analyze and correlate application performance and behavior data to detect patterns and anomalies not evident to users. 

Additionally, the ability to track performance in multi-cloud environments would be valuable as many organizations are adopting hybrid cloud or multi-cloud strategies. In terms of additional features, it would be beneficial to include a capacity management module that allows operations teams to proactively plan and adjust capacity, avoiding performance issues related to lack of resources.

I have been using AppDynamics for three years

AppDynamics offers good scalability. The tool is designed to handle large enterprise environments, with the ability to monitor and manage complex, distributed applications.

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The product requires in-depth knowledge of the infrastructure and the application to be monitored. 

You need to install and configure agents on the appropriate components, which can take time and require a careful approach.

Before investing in AppDynamics, evaluate your needs, compare prices, consider long-term value, and make sure you understand the details of the licensing and support offered.

We did not evaluate other options. 

I'd advise users to make sure they dedicate enough time and resources to properly configure and customize the tool. This includes defining relevant metrics and thresholds, setting effective alerts, and customizing dashboards to reflect specific needs and goals. 

A proper setup will ensure that companies get the most value from AppDynamics and can take full advantage of its application monitoring and management capabilities.

I use AppDynamics since all of our company's servers, applications, and services are configured with AppDynamics. In case of unavailability or when the servers go down, we log into AppDynamics in our company to check our CPU memory and file system utilization. AppDynamics helps our company understand the availability status of the servers and figure out when the server went down or came up while trying to find any HTTP errors.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the fact that it is very easy to use, making it easy to implement while configuring it with any server. The product also offers a role-based login, providing role-based access, including operator- or admin-level access. It is very easy to assign roles in AppDynamics.

The integration part in AppDynamics with other systems is an area with a little difficulty, especially when it comes to the configuration area. The integration of AppDynamics with other products takes a lot of time. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement.

AppDynamics needs to focus on its integration capabilities with cloud-based solutions. Some new features are being introduced in AppDynamics, including some DevOps tools, allowing a person to integrate AppDynamics with DevOps tools, like Docker Kubernetes and other cloud-based tools.

I have been using AppDynamics for three years. My company is a customer of the solution.

It is a very stable solution.

Currently, we are using AppDynamics on VMs and not on the cloud, so scalability is a bit tough because there will be a need for licenses, and we will have to get into the installation phase again in our company. The agents must be installed in all the servers for the product's installation, making it a bit complex.

AppDynamics has around 1,000 users in my company.

The solution's technical support is good. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

In my company, I have worked with Datadog. AppDynamics is better than the other solutions I have worked with in the past since AppDynamics can be easily installed, configurations are easy, scalability is easy, and most users use it very smoothly owing to its stability. The only area where AppDynamics lacks is its ability to integrate with other tools.

The installation phase of AppDynamics is very easy.

The installation of AppDynamics took a week.

A team of 20 people is required to manage the deployment phase of AppDynamics.

Price-wise, AppDynamics is a cheap product compared to other tools in the market, like Splunk and Datadog.

Yearly payments have to be made toward the licensing costs of the solution. The solution has no additional costs apart from the licensing costs.

The maintenance of AppDynamics is very easy since you can easily implement the patches and upgrade the solution. Around 20 people in my company are involved in the maintenance of AppDynamics.

AppDynamics is an excellent tool for any data center operations or services to monitor while providing good features like alerting capabilities. I recommend the solution to those planning to use it.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

The tool provides more insights, but maybe if in the recommendation section, we can use some AI tool for the optimization of the database, then it would be helpful.

With AI, it would be good if the tool could help us with the database optimization part. If my company can get product support, it would be great since the tool has the ability to make predictions based on the database performance that something may be going wrong and notify us of the precautions to be taken.

I have been using AppDynamics Database Monitoring for two years.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The tool is used by four to five people.

Whenever my company interacted with the solution's technical support or engineers, we had a better experience compared to the ones we had with other tools. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase is easy since a separate machine is required, and it is not directly installed on a database as it is a type of proxy. We collect the logs, which is a model that is pretty easy to handle.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in a day or two.

Cost saving in terms of not an HR-based perspective, but I know that some performance improvements are there. The tool helps in overall cost optimization. Maybe we are not making decisions to increase the database and its resources. Once we know that there are some performance issues, then we can fine-tune the tool and save on the costs. The costs for my company have been reduced by 15 to 20 percent using the solution.

The tool is expensive. If one is expensive and ten is low price, I rate the product price as seven out of ten.

I know about two products. AppDynamics Transaction Analytics was already a part of AppDynamics solution when my company bought it with an enterprise-level licensing, so it provides some business analytics dashboards. The other product I use is not related to analytics, so I didn't use it much.

In terms of optimizing our company's data operations, the tool provides insights on whether there are any challenges in databases or if there is something related to queries, which is helpful. One can monitor the performance and see if there are any delays that occur in the databases when we are dealing with the queries, and it helps to find out what the issues are.

I don't know what the features of the tool are for performance analysis, but when any application generates codes to extract particular information from a database, it sometimes gets stuck on some queries. At the query level, monitoring and providing more insights are beneficial.

A scenario where the real-time monitoring aspect of AppDynamics was crucial for our team was when we were adding a new application and testing it with our production environment or in the UAT; the tool was helpful because we could fine-tune the application and optimize it. If there are certain issues, we can easily identify such issues with the tool, especially when adding a new application since the product helps a lot.

Speaking about how the alerting system in AppDynamics helps in preventing potential database issues, I can say that from my observation, if there is some problem at a certain point in time, we get alerts, but I am not sure if prevention to help us identify issues is available or not in the tool. It would be good if we can identify the issues before it affects our company. There are some slow performance areas that need to be identified.

My company often takes care of the maintenance of the tool. One engineer can maintain the tool.

I recommend the tool to others.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.