Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

AppDynamics has over six products and most of them install pretty easily, with the application agent installation and configuration being the easiest.

AppDynamics includes a service application map of the call load, response, environment health index, and transactions that are dynamically rated on one easy-to-use page. Each page has visual clues that make debugging easy.

AppDynamics automatically creates a dynamic baseline for the apps performance that varies over time. For example, the definition of a slow transaction might vary under low and high loads on the system.

We are currently rolling the tool out to the whole organization, so more to come here....

Support is off-shore and somewhat slow. The EULA does not contain strong language for support. That being said, the support has not been a problem to date.

The licensing model is difficult to use and can be expensive. Our technology landscape is very broad, so understanding the pricing model by agent can only be done after a deep dive into matching agents to types of technologies. That being said, AppDynamics has worked closely with us to understand our needs and license appropriately.

As stated, deployment was easy as a SaaS solution.

No stability issues.

The SaaS solution scales well.

Customer Service:

Excellent sales support!

Technical Support:

Technical support is off-shore and often questions have at least one day of turnaround.

By far the most valuable/important feature for us is the ability to correlate the performance of individual business transactions across multiple nodes and applications in our environment.

Usually when a performance issue occurs there is a lot of finger pointing and spin that happens as a result. AppDynamics makes it very clear when/where the issue is occurring and it makes us quickly find and solve the root of the problem. It has also helped us foster more trust in our teams and the applications those teams build because everyone is being monitored by the same application.

The alerts and pro-active monitoring need work. I have found it very cumbersome to setup meaningful rules. This has led us to use the tool as a reactive tool instead of a proactive tool. Also, it would be great if this could be an iPad app (or at least not flash) so we could have easier access when working remotely. Lastly, this app needs better support with LDAP authentication (see below for more details regarding this topic).

We have been using this solution for a little over 6 months in total.

Yes, we still don't have AppDynamics properly working with LDAP. The actual LDAP integration was not hard. However, we have a large organization and something about pulling up our LDAP user list causes the UI to completely freeze. This has essentially made it to where we cannot provide everyone we want access without a lot of hassle.

Nothing conclusive, however there have been times where we don't see full business transactions. I believe this is because of our use of MongoDB which doesn't seem to be completely supported for which we configured custom exits for.

Not yet.

No, another part of our company used New Relic though. We could not use that solution because it is cloud based and the specific data our group interacts with cannot be externally hosted.

I believe our setup was fairly straightforward, however it was difficult to get the MongoDB interactions to work correctly (still think we have some issues even now with this).

IT is fairly hard to quantify exactly, but I believe the ROI was very high. I believe this product saved us countless hours/time and really has allowed us to focus on building/maintaining software instead of digging through logs while doing more rudimentary application monitoring.

Yes, as stated above we considered New Relic but could not use it because it was a hosted solution.

I would say the best thing people could do is to monitor as much as possible. By this I mean don't just monitor the app your team/group is building, but also everything it interacts with. I found the most use out of this tool when we could see the whole picture not just our small slice.

We are using it for monitoring.

Our applications are in AWS, and the monitoring system is part of AppDynamics.

We have been able to monitor our applications more accurately.

It has better dashboards and more control over everything.

One to three years.

The stability is fine. We have had downtime. However, we do receive alerts when we have downtime. Downtime has been the result of config, application, or cord issues.

The scalability is good.

We were previously using Dynatrace, then we shifted to AppDynamics because it was more convenient. For example, it was fast and easily accessible for all our data.

We had no issues with the integration.

Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace was good.

I was just looking into Datadog, and it seemed like it might be a better solution that AppDynamics.

I would definitely recommend AppDynamics.

The primary use case is everything related to monitoring.

It provides everything into one view, so we can track information from one place to another. This allows us to be able to track information all day.

It provides all the monitoring that we need in one place.

The integration with cloud services is still pending with AppDynamics. We would like the product to be serverless. 

Three to five years.

We have seen ROI, because we are able to view whatever issues there are in the application, then resolve them faster.

We are looking forward to purchasing the solution on the AWS Marketplace.

We are comfortable with the pricing.

We also evaluated Splunk. However, AppDynamics provided more features, agents, and monitoring capabilities.

It provides all the features that we need for on-premise applications.

The product integrates with all of our applications, because it has be deployed on all the servers so it can collect data.

AWS has not provided us the code. They will be moving it to their AWS services later. Right now, it is providing us a framework, like with Java. The AWS agents are able to capture all the information related at the code label, which is a benefit for us.

Right now, this tool is very good for on-premise applications, but there might be an issue with cloud applications.

It automatically detects “slow” and “error” as transaction snapshots. The transaction snapshots help me find the root cause of the problem. Transaction snapshots collect business transaction information such as the application call stack and SQL statements.

It also captures important information about business transactions, such as method parameters and HTTP information (header, session, and cookie). The snapshots also correlate application calls among all monitoring nodes. It can identify the entry point to help us trace from the first tier to the back-end tier.

The solution helped me to find out if the slow transactions are caused by SQL statements or by external system calls. We also use it to trace the socket leak issue that occurred with the old mobile device version.

Adobe Flash Player is a forbidden program in many companies' IT security policies. AppDynamics was using HTML5 to improve its UI and replace Flash Player over the course of the last two years. However, its UI still has some features that require Flash Player as a display interface. They need to update their UI to HTML5 customer can easy to use and optimize UI performance.

We have used this solution for four years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give it the highest rating in terms of technical support. The support engineer responds to questions very quickly and his answers clarify the issues.

Our previous solution did not fulfill our monitoring requirements, so we chose AppDynamics to replace the old solution.

The AppDynamics initial setup is a very easy, out-of-the-box installation.

We evaluated Dynatrace and New Relic.

AppDynamics provides a complete online document. Everyone can learn by him/herself through the instructions provided in that document.

The fast setup of AppDynamics independent from the details of the application landscape is valuable.

We mainly use AppDynamics in our test lab to monitor the application undergoing testing together with its surrounding systems. The possibility to quickly drill down into problematic requests in combination with the drill down into all kinds of different monitoring data greatly reduced the time to analyze problems which we uncover during our load tests.

The graphical display of the monitoring data is very simple and unscientific. Histograms should be plotted as histograms. An easy export of the data of a graph in CSV or Excel format would be helpful for the creation of individual reports.

The advantage of a histogram plot is that you see the measuring intervals (bins) and are not mislead

to believe in a linear increase or decrease, where there was none. As for the export to .csv-files. It is very often necessary to prepare reports for customers or management. For those people the data need to be prepared individually with different kind of plots to emphasize the important point. Therefore a .csv-Export is very helpful.

We have been using this solution for four years.

AppDynamics was very stable. It needed maintenance about 1-2 times a year.

We did not encounter scalability issues, but our test laboratory does not host a large scale application landscape.

We got our questions answered in a timely manner.

At the time of our decision about which product to use, we tried several of the ‘main’ products and settled on AppDynamics.

The initial setup was straightforward. The most difficult part was the procedure until we had the correct license installed.

If you go in this field, consider that you will build a long-term solution, which will include a large part of your infrastructure. The tool is then very helpful, but you have to plan the long-term cost in your budget.

The simplicity of usage implies that you need not get a decent course on how to use this product. But if you go to a course, you can learn different approaches and you can get into contact with people to whom you might ask questions at a later time.

The main thing is that you can use the tool to visually see the transactions happening; figure out the bottlenecks quickly; and the ability to drill down from a high level and go down to the details and figure out where bottlenecks are.

Our architecture is very complicated. We're an e-commerce company, so we have a lot of integrations, a lot of server types, all kinds of server types. What AppDynamics lets you do is see all of it at a high level and then drill down to each node and figure out if we have a real problem.

If you want to complete the picture of monitoring applications, I think AppDynamics should invest more in client-side monitoring. That includes having smart plugins to figure out if you have issues, and JavaScript running, and things like that. For example, companies like Bugsnag complete the picture. If AppDynamics wants to complete their portfolio, I think they should invest in the client side, because client side is growing.

We use Bugsnag as a complementary tool. It has features that I'd like to see implemented in AppDynamics.

The tool is a little complicated. I think the UI should be more friendly. It should have a simple version and a customized version; an advanced mode and simple mode. Simple mode should guide you more, should have more straightforward flows for newcomers. Then, as you move along and become more of an expert with the tool, you should have an advanced mode and change the view to something with more details. Right now, you go in and it's overwhelming.

One of the biggest problems is when you connect it to database monitoring or other nodes, it also has some impact on the system. You have to figure out the right things to monitor; for us, we have to pick our battles.

It can be slow at times. I'm guessing that maybe it's mainly because we have a lot of information that it has to process. Other than that, I think it's fine.

The first thing is you need to identify where the main issue is: do you need end-user monitoring or do you need more of an infrastructure monitoring tool. Then figure out where to place it and how to connect it to everything.

In general, when I’m looking to work with a vendor, the most important criteria are fast response, and having the right attention to details when we have an issue.

We also use AppDynamics Database Monitoring. We tried a few other tools, like the End User Monitoring. We tried a lot of tools. We have been using a lot of AppDyanmics portfolio tools. In general, we're happy with them.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it can instrument without the developers having to do anything special or significant. You can just install it on the same machine that it runs on with the application and it works.

We're using it to give an overall picture of health for certain applications. It gives a little higher-level view of our application health.

I don’t know about room for improvement. I think it's pretty good at what it's designed for. I think it does a great job at what it's designed to do, which is Java, JVM, instrumentation.

See my answer regarding scalability.

It's stable. It's pretty good. The stability's good. It's got redundancy, failover, recovery of databases if one node goes down. It's pretty good. It's pretty solid.

Scalability-wise, I think it's a little limited on an enterprise-wide scale. It's like a medium-class scale. As far as load and distributed load, I think it could use some work.

Their technical support is great.

We were guided towards it from an architectural standpoint. Another person guided us to use it, so we set it up and we installed it.

Initial setup was both straightforward and complex in that most of the instructions worked fine, but then we had a specific situation where we had to go in and actually modify some files. That was the complex part.

It looks very powerful, and it looks like you really need to spend some time with it to get to know it, so don't just expect results right out of the box. Spend some time with it and get to know how to use it.

I believe we are using APM with AppDynamics reporting service.
My rating reflects the fact that I'm kind of a tough sell, I guess.