Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

The most valuable features are monitoring the application, using the metrics of the different applications and looking into various business transactions we do with different customers. That's what we look into more often, the business transactions; where the calls are coming in, whether they are inbound or outbound calls.

We can track the visibility of the calls, how many calls we are getting. Being in the hotel industry, we want to get the feedback of the customers who are going to the various hotels we have under the IHG umbrella. We want to know how many people are calling for reservations and so on, that's what we look at.

Since we have a lot of applications in our company, we are right now looking into analytics and also RUM (real-user monitoring) for the mobile apps. Going forward, we want to be on par with the market.

We have been using it for about three years.

It has pretty much scaled properly for our needs.

We have been using AppDynamics for about three years as of right now, and we are a pretty well-satisfied customer. We continue to strive for new technology, whatever the AppDynamics people are releasing, the new versions or whatever, we keep upgrading.

We have a lot of development teams and they ask a lot of questions. Being the admin for AppDynamics at IHG, I raise a support ticket. They are very good with responding immediately. The response time is very good, as in a couple of hours. We are pretty satisfied. I work with a lot of guys from AppDynamics, and I work with one guy in England. They're pretty good. The support is very good, technically sound.

We weren’t really using something else before. I think my management wanted to get some metrics out of the application.

I do the configuration on the application, setting up the app agent and the machine agent. Being a SaaS controller, I think your ops team would take care of it.
It is not that complex; not at all.

When we were finalizing the deal, I'm not sure about which vendors were on the shortlist.

When selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, we want to get as much out of the tool that we purchase.

There are so many tools in the market, depending upon the criteria and what you want, I would definitely suggest AppDynamics, because of the REST things and all of that. You can deep dive into data and get to the granular level.

We are pretty much a satisfied customer.

We are not really using APM with any other AppDynamics products at this time.

We are more on end-user monitoring, so it helps us to find out each and every page, do the analytics on the pages, the user experience; correlate that information with the real-time experience of the user. Though, there are some things we just enabled. It gives only the system time, not the actual user time. We have a lot of virtual pages. It's a one-page app, but we have a lot of virtual pages. In those cases, the analytics will come in handy and we'll be able to find out more information, more detail to look into.

We just started using it, so we are just trying to find out where the problems are, and we're trying to fix them, even before the user complains.

We just started using this product in the last six months. We have started implementing more and more applications. We are in the learning phase now, so we haven't implemented the full thing yet. We are just under observation; we'll see how we can use this effectively.

I would like to see improvements with the dashboards. Dashboards and reports is where we see a lot of lag. If that can be improved, it would be good. The expectation from our side is mostly with the dashboards and reports. I'm not sure whether it might be a bug or something. It's all been reported already. They're saying that this will be addressed in the upcoming versions. Hopefully; we are waiting for it.

We have been using it for six months.

We have not had that many stability or scalability issues.

We were previously using a few software tools. We are in process of consolidating the applications into one enterprise tool, inside of having multiple tools doing individual jobs. We want to have one solution for the enterprise. That's why started doing the PoCs and then we ending up getting AppDynamics.

We have used technical support many times. We have created so many tickets. They're really good. The response is really very fast. That's the one thing I like about the tech support: They respond really fast.

We also looked at New Relic Insights.

It wasn’t our decision to choose AppDynamics. We just gave our feedback on the tools to management and they made the decision, whichever was the cost-effective one.

When we look at a vendor to work with, the most important thing is that they have to understand our business. That's what we are looking for. The vendor should understand our business and customize or direct us on what is our need, and just stick to that. Offering a thousand tools, we don't want that. We just need one tool that solves our issues.

Go through the AppDynamics docs first, before you start implementing. The documents are good, and you have good videos. It has step-by-step instructions, and it is straightforward. Go out and do it. For any new user, just go to the documents; anyone can read them and get started.

We also use AppDynamics APMJava monitoring and the .NET agents. We are also using the database monitoring and the server monitoring service availability. We’re happy with them.

The most valuable feature is being able to trace and follow transactions through a complex environment.

It improves production troubleshooting, it improves pre-production performance testing and it improves our development quality, because they can find and troubleshoot performance and quality issues prior to testing.

I would like to see cross-tier, transaction tracing across applications.

It's been fairly stable. It has been fairly solid.

Scalability is an issue. We are pushing the product to its limits on our current hardware allocation, so it's hard to fault the product for that.

We constantly use technical support. It’s pretty good, depending on the nature of the challenge we're having. Sometimes it can be a little difficult getting answers but I think they're still doing a very good job.

We were previously using another, competing product and we re-evaluate all the products on the market regularly.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. At a large scale, it is incredibly complex but not because of the product itself. The product itself is relatively straightforward.

We evaluated Riverbed, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic; that was pretty much it.

We chose AppDynamics because of ease of use for the end users, as well as a relatively compact footprint, as far as the required infrastructure to host it.

We don't select a vendor; we select a product. The vendor needs to meet certain minimum requirements, of course, but ultimately the product speaks for itself.

As always, do your homework. Know everything about the industry that you’re playing in. Know who all of your options are and pick the solution that's best for you.

It's providing massive value for a relatively massive investment, as well, but it is proving itself to be easier to use and therefore more widely adopted than previous solutions. That has been a huge relief to all of us who have been doing APM for years and have wanted to spread that around the company wider than just a small set of analysts.

We are using a little bit of AppDynamics EUM and Analytics.

Performance is the most valuable feature, especially the tag and follow, which has to do with multiple JVMs and diaries. Also, getting to know when you hop into different segments and trying to figure out where this is actually happening, and then that too, if it is happening to the backend. That is the key and that helps.

Server Monitoring has saved us time. We have issues that previously took days to solve, become resolved quickly. Once you know what's your normal, you know your anomaly. That's the key.

We have our own challenges because the amount of JVMs we are dealing with. But still, this is really helpful in trying to analyze a lot of our issues with certain types of JVMs. Not necessarily out-of-memory errors, but a few memory leaks, and a few applications that had third party JVMs that got leaked. Had I not known this, it would have taken a long time to solve these issues. There are ways to find them, but it takes more time.

One area that needs improvement is application integration. They do have it now, but that has to be improved. What happens is, right now, we cannot deep-dive into it. Four years back, I requested application integration. It took four years get it. At least it is there. The thing is that it has to improve. That's it.

Stability is good. I mean, we had issues. I have been using APM for four years, so I know where it was, and now where I am I know, so I'm so happy with it. It's much improved.

Scalability, it's good. It has challenges too, because I'm dealing with a very large setup. Scalability is definitely there, but now with the new features that are coming out, with a backend, it definitely will be better.

I am happy with technical support.

There were initial setup issues on both sides. I don't want to complain and it's not fair to do that, but now, if you look at it, it's reasonably stable, but every upgrade is a challenge. I mean, software is like that. Especially with the amount of changes they are making. The only thing about AppDynamics is they release quickly. Hopefully, they know you cannot keep up with this pace. A big enterprise, cannot handle that many releases like that. It requires a lot of coordination to upgrade to a new release.

And the biggest thing I wanted them to do, is to not require agent upgrades. That means every agent must be recycled. Someday they will push the agent from the controller with automatic upgrades. Something has to happen like that. Hopefully that will happen. That is my next ticket.

Use it, and when you use it, use it regularly. If not, don't use it at all. You won't get the benefit unless you use it properly on a regular basis, so you know what normal looks like. You need to know how this thing looks, so that you know your anomalies and can resolve issues quicker.

I use AppDynamics Database Monitoring to monitor application performance.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring's dashboarding is its best feature.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring would be improved with more support for microservices architecture.

I've been working with AppDynamics Database Monitoring for one year.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is less stable than Dynatrace.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is scalable.

The initial setup was easy, and deployment took around two days.

We used an in-house team.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is widely used, so it's given us some ROI.

I recommend choosing Dynatrace over AppDynamics Database Monitoring as it's easier to use. I would rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring seven out of ten.

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.

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.

Monitoring and mediating the risks are the most beneficial features.

Before we moved the code to AppDynamics, we had to compare the agile process and also had to make sure that they're following the standards. Thus, monitoring the actual quality of work in AppDynamics is the most valuable feature to us.

It would help to maybe have a more graphical interface and more user-friendly graphics. I don't think that Java is so adaptable since the marketplace has improved a lot. Thus, they have to improve in terms of the GUI.

There was not that much downtime experienced.

It is scalable across the board. We have implemented it across our company. It will meet the needs of the company, going forward.

The other team took care of the support. I am only a DBA but as far as I know, I haven't heard of any issues as such.

The setup is very simple. To be honest, it is pretty straightforward. They sent a team to help us out with the implementation. From the database side, we worked with the product team members to put in the database and also for the infrastructure laydown. It was straightforward.

It is a good product and I would highly recommend it.

Whilst looking for a vendor, the most important criteria is honesty. I don't want to waste time, so I want honest feedback. We don't want any lame excuses such as, there is no patch or that they are still working on it and so on. Thus, honesty is most important.