Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

The benefits are less man hours, less downtime, and faster resolutions. In the past, it was, "Oh no. The application isn't working. Let's fix it." It might get fixed within 24 hours because we did not have any idea what the issue was. It always came down to, “Well, reboot the servers. That usually works.” It worked, but we never knew what the root cause was.

Once we got AppDynamics, we could see that this part of the application is where the issue is. When they're trying to process these certain files, something's wrong in this sector. We may still have to reboot the servers to get the customers up and running immediately, but then we can circle back around that day and address the actual issue.

The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application: Are all of our transactions going smoothly? Are we having a bottleneck somewhere? Identifying problems before they impact the users. The live reporting and dashboard(s) allow us, at a quick glance, to see the overall health of our nationwide (US) application. We can see the health of our individual office locations (cities) and the individual users (PCs). At any given time we can tell which specific city and\or user is experiencing poor application performance. It even helps us determine if the issue is application, network, or user specific. Before we had AppDynamics APM, we were reactive. We’d wait for a phone call or email to tell us there was a problem and then go looking for it, find it, and resolve it. Now, after installing AppDynamics APM, we’re proactive. We can see the problems developing in real time. We can identify a problem and be half way to resolving it before we’ve even received a phone call or email. We’ve even discovered and resolved problems without the end users or management even realizing there was a problem.

A year earlier, if someone had asked me about room for improvement, I would've said end-user monitoring, which they have now. Analytics was great. I didn't even think that we would need that.

I think I would like to see a better way to deploy and upgrade the machine agents that we use. Currently, we have to use SCCM, and that might just be our environment with the customer. Personally, I am not the best with Linux commands; I'm learning. I'm a GUI person. Give me a button to click on with a mouse pointer, and that's just me.

I personally don't have anything I think they need to add. They're the great minds. They're the leaders of technology, so they'll think of what I need before I do.

I’ve never had a stability problem with it. It's always working; it's always operational. I’ve never had a glitch; never had the server just stop working. It's spot on.

I can't address scalability because we haven't been able to scale yet. As I’ve mentioned, the way the customer works, it's just one little group that wanted it, and everybody wants it now. Again, we have to go through the process of approval and funding. We haven't been able to touch on the scalability yet.

We have it on 400 servers and machines.

We use technical support all the time. They were great when we finally acquired it. They came in and they helped set it up in our environment; made sure everything was discovered, reporting was working; explained the transactions, reports, the dashboard, all of that to us. We had some more questions at the 2015 AppSphere, and it is great because you can see the guys. We got in touch with someone else and they helped us with licensing issues. There was a couple of extensions we were trying to get working that we couldn't. They got all that squared away.

Recently, we had some consultant hours we needed to use. One of their guys spent three days with us on WebEx, fully customizing even more on the dashboards and the reporting center; and explained baselines to us better.
Technical support is excellent.

We did previously did not use an APM at all. It was just, applications would stop working; there would be bottlenecks; they'd be real slow; and complaints. You'd have the network guys saying, "No, everything's good on our end." You’d have the middle-tier guys saying, "Nope, my servers are online and running." You have the devs for the application saying, "No, no, no, no, it's not my code." It was just, point the finger, pass the buck.

With AppDynamics, we're able to say, "No, it is the network. Something's going on in this city.”, or “No, it is the middle-tier servers because of this." We can tell where the issue is and what the issue is.

I do know that they tested with CA. There was a third one because with our customer, we have to have three competitors. We have to have three products and say, "This is why we're picking AppDynamics. This is why these two will not fit the bill." I don't remember who the third person was.

I think they ended up going with AppDynamics because of the personality of the marketing reps and the engineers that we talked to. It was pricing. It was the capabilities of AppDynamics versus CA and the third company. AppDynamics just brought more to the table.

Personality is quite big when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics. If you come in, and you're snotty, and high and mighty, you go down the list. That's just what it is; that's business.

Pricing: We don't want the cheapest; we don't want the most expensive; we want somewhere in the middle, like when you're buying a TV; you don't want something that's going to break in six months.

The historic background of the company: If you've only been around for six months, it's a bit of a gamble. If you've been around for six years, you're not going to have IBM, HPE, or Xerox buy you. We've had problems with that before. You are your company; you're not going anywhere. In five years, you'll still be there to support us.

Ongoing support: Can we give you a call on a Tuesday at 3:00 PM and get an answer? Or, do we have to submit a ticket, wait a week, maybe get a phone call back and then get a guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about, doesn't want to be at work that day?

It's the overall package.

Give them a call. Check out the field. I know that AppDynamics was more than willing to give us temporary licenses; come in and help us set it up in a dev environment; and show us how it works in our environment, not just the canned demo: “Here's the little website we made and this is how it works.” Of course, it works perfectly because we've made it work perfectly.

They will do a demo in your environment, on your servers, so you can see, “Yes, this is our data. This is what we will see. This is how it will help us.”

The only reason I did not give it a perfect rating is because I don't think anything is 100% perfect. Nothing is the best ever. There's always room for improvement. There's always room to grow. This is the highest I can give because I don't believe in giving that perfect rating.

We’re not yet using any other AppDynamics products. Due to our customer, we can't just buy the newest and greatest, and implement it. There is a long process for testing, approval, and funding; and then more testing and implementation. We're usually about a year and a half behind the latest and greatest.

It helps me monitor how well the front end of our application is working.

I think it has improved the way my organization functions, because for me, I think this application is more like the front end application where the user is the agent. The user is more like a real user. I think it does make an impact, because, right now, we already have that monitor in production. Actually, since I'm an engineer, they already have it deployed in production for that particular application, to see how the end user behaves in that production environment.

Stability might be something a system engineer might know more; they use it every day in production.

I just use it. For me, I think there is still room for improvement. I want to track it when I run it. I use LoadRunner to generate traffic to the environment. A lot of times, I know it's slow, but I need to know how it maps with the tracking I use with LoadRunner on the AppDynamics.

There is a workaround for that, and I did implement that. Based on documentation, the AppDynamics team recommended we just put a header in there and we use it. Whatever tracking we have in LoadRunner, it will show the name exactly in AppDynamics. So, there is a workaround, but it's not really official implementation. That's extra work that I have to do, and I don't really like that. I just wish we could just run it so whatever we see in LoadRunner, we can also see in the AppDyanamics EUM module.

Right now, it's just one application. I'm not sure how it will grow in the future. I don't have the roadmap to see how it will scale in the future. I do not know.

I have not used technical support. The system engineer is the guy who's in touch with technical support, but I heard it is not good. They do not provide a quick response. That is only what I heard. Do not take my word for it. We had a meeting where they said something like, “That is something we need to setup, something we need to get out.” Then they said, “Oh it's there, but it's not resolved yet.’" That's just what I overheard in the meeting.

I got invited to a meeting. There were people from AppDynamics that came to my company and talked about a new version upgrade. They talked about, "OK, these are the benefits the upgrade." I happened to be there. Before I came to the meeting, I tried to do research on my own about what AppDynamics is about.

One of the things I think I achieved this year is the mapping and matching the LoadRunner tracking with AppDynamic, the workaround and then the EUM. That's the thing that really helped me a lot with this year’s projects.

Normally, for me, I only look at free stuff. That's why I use Google Chrome. It just happened that they already bought it and the license was there. I just used the license without paying for it.

At a recent conference, I saw Business iQ, which I think is very interesting. We talk a lot about the transaction level for IT, but for business people, this is something that makes sense. We’re not just for IT, but we talk for the business group, too. This is what it is about. There's a mapping between business and how well the system behaves. So, we would normally only look at the back end. Everything is about the back end, but not really about the end user. However, the end user really makes the difference.

Right now, for me, if I go into an application and it is slow, I get frustrated and I don't want to use it. So, this product shifts the direction; it should streamline, maybe get more meaningful information to business. I think it's going in the right direction.

My rating of the product is because I haven't gotten a chance to try all the different devices. I haven't gotten the opportunity. I just ran a test with LoadRunner, but I haven't run tests with real devices; how a iOS device, how an Android device, how a Windows Phone device will send traffic to see how well they capture the information. I haven't gotten a chance, so I cannot give it a perfect rating.

Unless, after I do all of that, I can say, "Oh really, it does capture what I'm looking for." Then, I would maybe give it a perfect rating, but I have rated it based on what I need right now. I just haven't gotten a chance to explore to different areas.

Right now, we are using it for monitoring our mobile and user interfaces. We monitor the application in terms of the business transactions. We monitor end-user responses and then we track how many calls we are making from the balancer, which is impossible to track with any other applications.

We have moved our application from on premise to Azure. After we moved to Azure, we don't have an on-premise monitoring tool, for what we are supposed to be using it. AppDynamics has come in handy. We are able to monitor all of the cloud services, we are able to monitor all the VMs on it, and we are able to monitor the Azure services, too.

There are many features we’d like to see in upcoming releases, which we have already mentioned to the accounts team. They're working on it; we expect to get some kind of releases from them.

We have been using it for the past two-and-a-half years. We migrated from the older version to the current version. We feel like it's better, it's improving. Initially, we had stability issues but now it's fine.

We are using the HA version of it and we find scalability to be good.

Technical support is pretty good. They're very at you; we get the response immediately.

We are no longer using the previous solution. We were using it for on premise. When we moved from on premise to Azure, we started using AppDynamics. We evaluated some other tools, but we found AppDynamics to be very good.

When we did the initial setup, for the Windows platform, it was straightforward, but the Linux version was a little complicated, but it's not that hard.

We evaluated Logility; some other tools, such as Log Analytics, as well; and then even some related to Splunk. We do use Splunk, as well, with AppDynamics; both are currently used.

As far as the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, it's not my selection. The management finds out what AppDynamics can do and then looks at their business relationship with them. It's more like a business partner, as opposed to being just a customer that is using a product and not knowing what the product is going to come out with. In those terms, I think the AppDynamics team is very helpful to us and they have been like a part of our external organization.

We became 100% dependent on AppDynamics after we started using it. Apart from some performance issues, we haven’t found any major issues with AppDynamics. Some of the services are not available with Azure, such as IoT and so on, but other than that, 90% of our monitoring depends on AppDynamics.

We also use AppDynamics’ End User Monitoring and Mobile User Monitoring.

The most valuable feature is the immediate view into what the system looks like – how it's doing; how it's performing, and what are the connected pieces; that instantaneous, real-time view of what's going on.

A benefit of the solution is the ability to identify real-time problems before the customers even notice them. Even when customers do notice them, it gives us the ability to diagnose very, very quickly where the problem is and what's actually going on, so that we can do a much faster solution.

We're struggling a little bit with the way it auto-configures the various endpoints and how to work it. Some of the endpoints are not quite defined correctly, in its ability to sort of go in and tidy things up after the initial install and configuration. That's a little tough to get in and figure out. It's also made tough by there being very few people that are doing this as a job. It's basically me.

Other than that, I can't really think of anything.

The stability is fantastic.

The scalability’s been great. We've deployed it over two data centers; multiple agents; all over the place. It's great.

We have used technical support a couple of times, but it's pretty much self-explanatory, how to actually use it.

Technical support has been fine; very fast response times; taking us through to getting the question answered rather rapidly. It was good.

We previously tried a couple of different things, but it was really just the practice. I've been at the company a long time, 10 years. When issues would arise, a lot of the diagnosis was based on gut feeling. I've known the application for so long, and been a part of its development for so long, that if I felt like the problem was something, that's probably what happened. That's just not good enough as the business grew.

We started looking for solutions that would give us true, real data and scientific answers for everything that's going on in the system. That's how AppDynamics came to be part of the discussion.

We also looked at one other outfit. I think BMC was the one that we were looking at.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is, does it work?

Buy it. Buy AppDynamics, but you have to invest in your team too. It has to be someone's job to be setting the system up; to watching the system; making configuration changes. It has to be someone's job to report on the data that AppDynamics is coming with.

I have given it a perfect rating because of how quickly we can go in and see what's going on, diagnose issues before they become issues, but also respond. When we haven't got there first, when someone's reporting a fault, how quickly we can go in and see exactly what's going on, pull up the error message, see the red line on the errors, and so on. We're so much faster in responding to issues than we've ever been before.

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

The transaction snapshots are probably by far the most used feature because it gives a lot of details. It adds a lot of value. You can really get to the details really, really quick. You can drill down very, very quick. When you show it to somebody who's a stakeholder, they typically get it right away. You don't have to explain. You don't have to “translate.” That really helps with the communication. That really gets people focused on the task at hand, rather than trying to pass the buck around. That really helps quite a bit.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere about correlation, it's really helpful because I don't have to spend time with multiple teams. A lot of times, what might have happened in the past was where, if there was a problem, we would call like six, seven, or eight different SMEs from different domains: network, storage, compute; not on all problems, but at least some of the ones that we suspected. Application; if you have multiple applications, sometimes you have a different person who owns each of the different applications; maybe the database guy. You can really start adding more people in there. If you think about it from a productivity point of view, it's a waste of a lot of time, if you have to keep doing that for every single problem day in and day out.

Whereas, when you have AppDynamics, it's actually tracing the call. So, if three out of four services are functioning fine, for the most part, I don't even have to worry about them. It is common to call the networking guy because nobody really knows where the problem is. Now, he's or she’s out of the picture. I'm sure he's or she’s a lot happier about it, too. Same with the storage and compute: You start leaving these people out of the conversation that don't need to be there, which is a good thing for the company, and us. We don’t also have to spend that time explaining and hearing what they have to say. That’s not to say they don't have value to add, but if there's really nothing there, we're wasting their time, as well. So, it's really helpful.

AppDynamics helps me not just rule in the areas, but rule out where I don't have to talk. More often than not, the rule-out gets hidden away, but it's a really good add-on because I'm only focusing on the problems.

I can think of 2-3 complex problems that probably would be helpful to most customers. Heap analysis is one; memory leaks. That's already there, so maybe that does not count at this point. The second one I would probably call out is connection leaks. So, heap analysis and connection leaks; those would be very helpful.

I think they've already started working on the next version of license management. That should be pretty helpful.

Stability’s very good. Once in a while, we've had some hiccups around the UI being slow, but that typically gets resolved pretty quickly. A lot of times, we don't even have to talk about it. Once in a while, we've had to raise a couple of tickets. I think one time it was us using the environment a little more aggressively than maybe we should have been, and we could have been, for that matter. Most of the time, stability’s not an issue. Once in a while, you do get the spinning circles. I've experienced worse. This is nowhere near that bad. It's very good for the most part.

We're a fairly large install. It scaled well, but then again, it's a SaaS solution. They've got their magic sauce working, of course, really well for us.

We use technical support quite a bit. We've got a team of engineers and there are at least five or six of them that have the capability to open up tickets. We typically get really good responses. Every time I've opened a ticket, I usually get a response in good time. Not just a response; it's usually a good response; it's a meaningful response; it's something that helps you solve the problem that you have.

Once in a while, as you can imagine with any product, they get dragged out because maybe it needs a longer-term solution. I don't think I've seen anything that would cause concern.

We were using a tool prior to this that was not doing any of the stitching; the correlation. We tried another one that was doing some of it, but we found AppDynamics was doing it better.

We went through the PoC because we had our fingers twisted the wrong way a few times with our old tools. It was using up a lot of our time. Of course, when we heard that they could do it, we really wanted to see what they had to offer. The PoC was very helpful. We actually used it on live projects – testing projects not production – to figure out if it would be able to help. We were able to do a lot of it, without much overhead. It was a game changer right out the door.

I was involved in the PoC, as well as the initial setup. The initial engagement is a little complex, but when you look back – hindsight, they say, is 20/20 – but in this case, it really made good sense on how it's structured. Initially, it felt a little limited but then, as you see it over and over and over again, you realize that there's good thought process that's gone into it. It was pretty smooth sailing for the most part.

There were hiccups that we had with an arrival tool that tool's vendor was not able to resolve. This was during the PoC stage. With AppDynamics, we went through the technical support team. They really had the right answers in the right places. They knew how to solve it.

We did a PoC with New Relic for about eight months, in 2014. We haven't really gone back since then to look at New Relic, to really be able to compare in a meaningful manner, but we looked at them at that time.

There were other areas where New Relic wasn't planning on supporting; some of our legacy footprint, such as WebSphere 6 and Oracle E-Business Suite. AppDynamics was doing that, as well. It was another add-on that really mattered a lot because that was a very large footprint of our agents.

In general, ease of use was definitely one of the most important criteria when we selected the vendor; ability to correlate in an automated matter; and be able to gather diagnostic data or just even transaction data. We'd already seen how transaction data is helpful with Dynatrace, for which we just had a limited on-prem set of licenses. We were really happy with the PurePath and so on, but we didn't want to take Dynatrace into production for a variety of reasons. A prime one was that they capture all the snapshots, which we know would've added a lot of overhead. That's probably another really good criteria: added overhead. Then, of course, breadth of coverage, when it comes to different technologies because, if you have to buy a different license or a different tool for everyone, you’re kind of setting yourself up for other problems down the line. Those are some of the key points.

Give it a shot. If you want to do a PoC, definitely do it. You should definitely have AppDynamics in there. I have no qualms about recommending the tool outright, but I think for your use case, you should probably PoC it on your own because you will really see the value add. If you don't, of course, then it is what it is, but I think most people will see the value add very, very quickly. They have a very competent team. They have the right people in the right places. Once they decide to commit to something, they actually do it and do it well. That's definitely a good plus.

I have not given it a perfect rating because I would like to see the heap analysis and the connection leak. There are some hiccups, I feel. I probably have to keep visiting the new feature sets that are coming with the leak analysis. Those minor things, those problems, the heap analysis and the connection leaks, are pretty time consuming, but in the grand scheme of things, the rest of the feature set is really, really great.

I haven’t even mentioned elsewhere the vast set of metrics that we have available to us, which is very helpful. I can create my own metrics if I want, if I choose to.
It definitely ticks a lot of checkboxes and there are a lot plus marks.

We also use AppDynamics End User Monitoring a little bit; not as much as APM. APM is used by a lot more of our internal clients. End User Monitoring is used and that's also helpful. There's a feature where you can actually see the traffic going from the End User snapshot down to the APM snapshot. That correlation is very, very helpful because then I don't have to do it manually. If you have to do it manually, a lot of it is a bit of guessing game, unless you have other ways of doing the manual correlation, which is a lot tougher, especially when it comes to production, where you want to really get things moving faster rather than slower. That can be very helpful.

A couple of things that it's done is that it's allowed us to become a bit more proactive as opposed to reactive. We can see from the dashboards when a problem is happening before it becomes too serious. It allows us to react much quicker than we had in the past, so our mean time to resolution is improved.

For example, we know that there's a particular report in our system that whenever it's executed, it can cause some performance issues. So, we have created a specific business transaction that looks for that specific call in our application. Whenever that call happens, it issues out an alert to let us know that somebody is running that report. We can then make sure that it's not consuming too many resources.

What I like about the APM is that it allows us to quickly identify where there are issues. It allows us to configure health rules so that we can, based on our own experience, determine when an application is behaving incorrectly. It's very configurable, but also has a lot of functionality right out of the box.

It has become a very integrated tool in our company, to share with developers, as well, some of the information that AppDynamics APM is showing us. It's becoming a bit of a cultural change for us to really look at AppDynamics and to leverage its full capabilities.

If you look at, for example, the two big updates that are coming out, as mentioned in the keynote address at a recent conference, I think those are two really big ones. For example, the ability to automate the deployment of the agents and the updates of the agents.

Licensing, as well, is very key. Again, we have many types of agents across different segments of our corporation; being able to manage those license keys in one central location.

We've encountered the business transaction limit. We didn't even know, but when we encountered that, a lot of business transactions were actually being lost because they couldn't be captured any more. Again, we're making tweaks to the system and constantly learning about it. It's a very complex application, and requires almost a full-time person to be in there working on it all the time.

I think training would probably be a good idea, as well. One thing that I found is that when we purchased the Application Performance Management solution and we purchased the agents, when we finished a sales thing, "Okay, great. Well, good luck." It would have been nice for them to recommended to us, “With this, we're going to provide training for your team. And we're going to also include, let's say, two or three days, or a week, of professional services. We can help not just install it and show you the best practices, we'll also start to tweak it for you so you can start to see what you can do with it. Then, we'll let you go on your own. Then, of course, if you want more help, you can always come back.” Just to give us a little bit of a head start.

These tweaks are the reason why I have not given it a perfect rating. I feel like there's a lot of configuration and a lot of work that needs to go into it. I feel that there is still a lot to learn.

With some of the problems that we've had so far – the business transactions, the deploying of the agents - if they can finish that, as the new versions come out and whatnot, I think that they're going to get there. It's a constantly evolving space, constantly evolving product. They're going to get there.

We have had stability issues. One thing that we found very nice about AppDynamics is that they are very quick to respond to issues. We've opened tickets in the past. For example, one of the collectors, for the .NET agent, was causing our IIS service to crash intermittently. That was a bug that we raised to AppDynamics. They did a deep-dive investigation and their recommendation was to lower the frequency with which it takes snapshots. That was one issue that we ran into. It was a production issue, so it did cause a little bit of a problem. We were able to resolve it with AppDynamics, though.

Scalability is also something that we brought up with AppDynamics. Again, they're very helpful and quick to respond. When you have an environment where you have deployed multiple agents, different types of agents, SQL agents and .NET agents, for example, and a new version comes out, how do you update all those agents? How do you go about doing it? We've had a lot of talks with them. Right now, it's a manual process to update the 50-odd agents. We have to go and uninstall, and reinstall the new one.

From the keynote address at a recent conference, I think that there's going to be a way now to automate the deployments of the agents.

Moving to APM was an initiative from the ops team. We knew that we needed visibility into the application. We already have very good visibility into the infrastructure, but the application was always something that we didn't have.

I was the project manager working on the project to deploy it. I didn't do the actual deploying itself; it was our senior network engineer who did it.

I think it's pretty straightforward to install. Installing the agents themselves, that's really fast; simple configuration. So, the initial setup was pretty fast. You get a lot of value right from the initial setup.

I think the one part that requires a little bit more thought and a little bit more time is how to now take it from the initial install, in that vanilla sort of setup, to really fine tune it for your own application. That's a lot of back and forth with dev, with the performance team, with the ops team, with the devops team, the CM team, and a lot of iterations to get it right. That's a constantly evolving and learning process.

We looked at a few competitors. We looked at Dynatrace. We looked at New Relic, as well. Then, we saw AppDynamics.

When we first purchased it about three years ago, our sense was they were still kind of new to the market, but we wanted to give them a chance, as well. They had a pretty compelling vision, an idea, and a story; then, a good personal touch; the sales team, as well. So, we decided to go with them to give us that visibility, but we knew we needed it.

In general, one thing that we look for in a vendor is completeness of vision. I think that's important; being able to understand the needs, our needs, as well; expertise in the space.

It's a fantastic product. Just make sure that you take the time to really understand it. Know what you're getting into. It's not just, "Let's purchase it, let's install it. Okay, it's great. Now it's working, let's put it up on the dashboard."

There's so much to it; you can just scratch the surface or you can really dive into it and it can do a lot. Look at those extra features and spend the time to do it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we also use AppDynamics SQL and EUM. We are very happy with them. The EUM, End User Monitoring, is really, really cool. The database one, as well, for SQL, it's also something that we've just started using. We're not fully leveraging it yet. We've just purchased it and we're starting to deploy it, so it's something that we're still learning. I know that we're right now in a PoC, proof of concept, with Log Analytics, as well. And we may be looking at the Synthetics module, as well, in the future.

The most valuable features are transaction correlation, application flow map, business transactions, and the key metrics that are displayed on the dashboard.

It gives a complete, end-to-end visualization of an environment. That's where it is a little easier to analyze any issue in production compared to the other APM tools. That's the key difference between the other tools and AppDynamics.

The first thing is that they are going in the right direction. That's the great thing because they're linking IT with business. That's why we mostly like it because the other APM tools are just talking about your IT. They're not linking that context to the business. You have your monitoring; your instrumenting; you're doing a byte-code instrumentation; you're doing a threat analysis. You have enough information. All you need to do is just play around with the data and give the visualization of business. What other APM tools are not giving, AppDynamics is great on that point.

As far as the features that we're expecting, the main thing is the universal agent that I’ve mentioned. They're not clear on what month or what year. I think next year, but they're not clear on the release date. That's one killer that we're really expecting. Because that will save a lot of time for an enterprise like us to go for a massive deployment. That's one of the key features I can say that we're looking forward to.

Stability is good so far. We haven't experienced any issues. But after a recent controller upgrade, we experienced a couple of downtimes of the controller, which is not good. On the agent side, not much. We do not see agents stop all of the sudden. We haven't experienced any such things. But in the APM space, the agent is a little tricky, so we have to be a little careful with the agent. With the previous experience around the Dynatrace agent we had, that killed the entire box. The box was completely down.

With this tool, we are taking a few more precautions; meaning, we're not going to production with the agent as of right now. We're putting enough load, enough applications, enough boxes and testing it for 2-3 months. Once we get confident, only then are we planning to go for the production.

Apart from the stability side – as I mentioned, the controller was down a couple of times recently, and the agent is working fine – the agent overhead is not good. It's taking a minimum of 200-300 MB per JVM or per CLR, which is the case with any of the APM tools in the current market. But we expect the overhead to come down. Then, it'll benefit us a lot. For an enterprise like us, we have a lot of shared environments. A box has 50-60 JVMs. A box has 300, 400, 500 virtual machines. In that case, if the overhead is 2-3 personned, we end up killing the box because we have the VM environments.

How we look at scalability is in the controller's scalability. I think AppDynamics is not really there yet. The scalability should be very easy. I think that's what our expectation is. I think it's not even there yet. Controllers won't talk to each other. In a keynote session at a recent NetApp conference, someone was talking about or mentioned controller-to-controller communication. Once that is there, as long as controllers talk to each other, the scalability will become a little easier. That's on the controller side.

On the agent side, the scalability is the main focus area for us now, because we have 100,000 boxes, and we can't really deploy agents app-by-app, machine-by-machine, or manually. We can't really do that. Our approach is automated deployment. But with AppDynamics, the really tricky part is, they expect the application to be modeled in a certain way. They want us to define the app name, tier name, and node name, which is a little tricky.

I can just do mass deployment of agents, but then I have to do configuration also. That is where I think we're a little lagging, so we're working closely with them. We end up developing our own automation scripts to achieve that stage. Again, at that keynote session, people were talking about a universal agent. I think that might really solve the problems from both the deployment and licensing angles.

With their support, if you raise a ticket, the response is very good. But the concern is the consulting days. I think they're offering some consulting days. In the first year of a contract, they offer a certain number of consulting days. After that, the consulting days are free. But to book a consultant, I think we need to book the consultant at least one or two weeks in advance. We can't really do that in the enterprise. A lot of things will happen. All of a sudden, we need support. That's a little tricky. We shared the feedback with AppDynamics. One or two days is what we can spend, but one or two weeks is really a problem.

For us, a large enterprise, the audits and the compliance issues; these things are serious concerns. We have 6,000 applications. We have 100,000-plus boxes. If management asks us, "Hey. Can you tell me what happened with a certain number of the boxes? Why did they go down?” Or “Why did certain applications go down? Can you please pull up the reason? Or can you tell me all of the applications a X person has accessed? Which boxes did he touch? Which routers did he touch?" We have no clue in a large enterprise like us. That's where instrumentation is key for us.

Our model is, we're shifting towards platform. Once we shift towards the platform, we want to offer instrumentation as a built-in stack in it. For that, there are two key things. One is explicit instrumentation, and the other is implicit instrumentation. For the explicit instrumentation, we already developed a solution last year. We’re now planning the implicit instrumentation. That's where we did a lot of market research. Our technology labs did a lot of market research. That's when we also went to the Gartner Report. Then, we finally chose AppDynamics.

Initial setup was straightforward. There are two angles to it. The controller setup is pretty straightforward. The agent setup is also straightforward, but only if you are a simple tech startup or you have only one e-commerce application. For those kinds of companies, I think it makes sense. All they need to do is spend 2-3 days to set up everything. But in our case, we have 6,000 applications. I think AppDynamics is expecting the application to be modeled in certain way. I think we were asking them about this as well. I was expecting to get an update at that conference that they are moving away from that application modeling to something else. Once they move to that, I think that is also going to speed up the initial setup process.

There weren’t really any other vendors on our shortlist at the time. We are using Introscope extensively in production and we are using Dynatrace extensively in the lower-end environments. If this tool works out well, we're probably going to replace the other two.

As far as the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, we have different stakeholders. Each stakeholder has their own use cases. The development team expects certain use cases. The support team expects certain use cases. The SWAT team expects certain use cases. Engineering expects certain things. TA expects certain things. We evaluated the tools from all the angles. On top of that, the future is cloud. The future is platform as a service. So, we want a tool that supports that era. That's where AppDynamics is the winner.

The main point is every company is a software company. Invariably, you talk about it. Every button click is important. What if a customer shares feedback with his colleagues, friends or family? Every button click is important. Having said that, you should know what is happening out in your environment, out on your machines, out on your applications. So, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and end-user monitoring are definitely very important.

We have our own use cases. According to those use cases, we chose AppDynamics. But whatever the product, don't get married to any product; whether it is CA APM, Dynatrace or AppDynamics. Even now, we're not married to any tool. We will always go with a tool which is going to fit in to our model. That's our message to anybody who's researching this case.

One important thing to note is that my rating doesn't mean AppDynamics is not great. AppDynamics is great. It is going in the right direction. At the conference, the CEO or somebody mentioned that they can't shove this product and develop everything that people are expecting for release by 2020. It's being done in a phased manner, in iterations. So far, whatever they have release to us, that's what the rating is for. That will probably be higher in the coming years. With the features that it has and with the expectations that we have, that's the rating we can say. And on top of that, AppDynamics gets the highest rating of any vendor in the APM space. If I rated the other tools, I'd rate them lower.

We have a complex application. We do payments which are highly transactional in nature. With different kinds of workloads that you see in the production environment, how do you really track down specific issues which your lab testing environment can't really reproduce? Your production environment gives you certain workloads, which basically enable you to look at your application more closely. No lab test could really simulate that sort of a load. APM really helps us in getting down to the bottom of these sorts of workloads; how code responds to these sorts of workloads and how we can make our application deliver better latency and a better end-user experience.

Given an extremely transactional, highly complex workload, you just cannot use your testing lab to stress all of your code parts. First of all, it has made us very agile. What happens is, now, you can actually take any one of your deployments or releases, roll it out into production into a very limited set of servers, look at how the APM works, and it gives you insights onto the how the code that you just pushed out is performing.

If everything is fine over a period of a few minutes or a few hours, you can actually roll your deployment out very quickly. You don't have to have an extremely complicated test harness in your preproduction environment. You don't have to go through extensive testing cycles before releasing something into production. It really makes us agile in terms of releasing to market quicker.

For me, the single largest area with room for improvement that I've been requesting the AppDynamics team to deliver for us is APM support for Ruby on Rails and for HHPM. These are the two language environments that we use quite heavily in production. That's something that I'd like to see support for.

Stability depends on the configuration. We work very closely with our solution architects, with AppDynamics, because there's always this question in the minds of consumers: A tool which can do so much as AppDynamics, how do you ensure that it runs with minimal overhead? You've really got to work with the AppDynamics team to size out your environments; that makes it stable for you. That's been our experience.

I can't comment on scalability because our infra is fairly small. We have a total of around 150 nodes that we could probably end up instrumenting. Right now, we do far less than that, so I can't really comment.

Technical support has been pretty good. In our case, we use a few programming languages which are still not supported by AppDynamics, so we've reached out to them to help us with road map information. They've been pretty transparent about when support could get rolled out to these sorts of languages that we use.

For the more run-of-the-mill sort of tickets, where we have issues with the configuration or using the product, it's been pretty good. We've liked our experience with the tech support team.

We had been using a mix of proprietary tools that we developed in house, along with third-party solutions. We were able to get the job done, no doubt about that, but the problem is never having an integrated view of how your application performs. We have uptime alerting running differently; we have business KPI monitoring being done differently; and we have end-user behavior being tracked differently. It was very hard to find a correlated view across all of these four. To debug specific sessions or to debug specific instances, I think that's where AppDynamics really comes in. The integrated view that it gives of your application.

I was not directly involved in the initial setup but my team was. It's pretty straightforward. I think it's really important that whoever is setting up the application first fundamentally understands what the application does. I think that's critical. The tool is fairly complex and powerful. The setup needs to be handled by someone who, on this side, really knows what the application being monitored can do. If you put a rookie on the job, it's going to be really tough.

We did consider other vendors. We were looking at New Relic. As a developer and as someone who builds and has a team who builds stuff, I feel New Relic is actually a very powerful option. However, as I mentioned, we wanted something that could work on-premise.

We went with AppDynamics because we are in the payments industry and from a compliance perspective, we needed an on-premise solution and AppDynamics was, I think, the best solution that also worked on-premise.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics for us is, first of all, from the product perspective. As I mentioned, we had a mix of various proprietary and third-party solutions that we were using earlier. We needed a product that could provide end-to-end visibility into the infrastructure and the application. That was a high priority for us. Beyond that, what we really needed was a global presence with enough strong local support. That was something that AppDynamics brought to the table.

Make use of all of the training material and the university. There's some really useful information in there. Also, the two other things that I’ve mentioned elsewhere:

• Ensure the person who is deploying AppDynamics in your environment is among the top-most performers of your team, someone who knows your application in and out.
• Combine that with good, strong consultation by the AppDynamics team. Get these two in place and you've got a winner on your hands.

The reason why I have not rated it higher is the lack of support for HHPM and Ruby; bring them both and I would rate it higher.