Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

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.

Now, my team is not that close to the APM information. Using AppDynamics, it was possible to delegate how to read information on the client side because of how easy that is.

The most valuable features are:

• Error analysis in the troubleshooting sections go straight to the point.
• Autodiscovery of transactions.

If you are analyzing real time dashboard or metrics, AppDynamics will give you a refresh each minute, no matter what number you are watching.

This is a real situation when you are facing the screen during a load test or a the "hot" midnight of cybermonday for instance. When you have high stress of visits I do not know if you are more stress because of the amount of visits or because you have to wait eternal 60 seconds to find out it things are going well or you already have mess. And is even worse when you see suddenly a worse number but you do not know if this is a an spike or meanwhile your system is already "down", You just think in other tools with high "resolution" like CA (every 15 seconds.

Once you reach the limit of sizing in resources, the application becomes unstable.

We did not really encounter any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is 3/10.

Technical Support:

Technical support is 6/10.

We previously used Introscope, which was difficult to use and not intuitive at all

Initial setup was easy going with a wizard.

A local vendor with a very good level of expertise implemented it for us.

I have never calculated ROI, but I need to do that.

It is not a cheap tool, but you also save in manpower to setup because it is easy and fast. At the end of the day, I think the revenue is much better.

BUT, they have an awful co-term mode of licensing.

Two years ago, we evaluated Dynatrace and New Relic.

Features that are valuable to us are the business transaction transparency from one tier to the next and the ability to be able to drill down into the called stack. The ability to identify the stalled and error transactions in real time. And be able to investigate it, pick up the trends. That's one of the useful things. Because we use that as part of our root cause analysis and as a proactive, as well as a reactive way, to look at the incident and see what we can do to fix it.

For example, without getting in to the specifics of the issue, we've had some issues with our application where the capability in which we use tracing functionality to write the logs and stuff like that. And one of them had been enabled and it was writing it to a file instead of writing it to an HW, which was costing a lot of I/O. And unfortunately, at the time, the file share server that was taking all these logs was having an issue with the I/O. But it wasn't apparent because the experience of the customer was that the transaction was taking longer to complete. And we were trying to understand where's the bottleneck because everything looks healthy. But the requests kept stacking up.

But then, when we looked into the AppDynamics it make it very easy for us to identify that it was trying to write it to a log. And that operation, out of the entire chain, was this one step where it was trying to write to a location and that's where it was reporting a huge latency. In a matter of, I'd say about 15-20 minutes, we were able to trace it and be able to basically identify what the issue was and we fixed it. In fact, it drove a chain of reactions, in retrospect. Because obviously, it meant we need to look into these things much more carefully because to avoid these kind of incidents from happening in the future.

AppDynamics lets you find things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to see.
Without APM, you'd be spending a lot more time to try and investigate into all the individual event logs. Our services are massive. It's not a simple application with a front end and a back end. We have a lot of other micro-services that talk to each other. I think one of the trainers at a recent conference mentioned that one single touch starts a chain reaction. And when you have such a topology, it's very difficult manually to go through every single layer and figure out where the bottleneck is. Versus APM giving you an end-to-end workflow and gives you exactly which layer the AppDynamics thinks is having problem. Then it lets you drill down and further down. The zooming capability is brilliant.

I'm not aware that we use any other AppDynmics products along with APM. I've used the reporting and stuff like that. I'm part of an incident response team, so we are the command center for AppDynamics products. So we are more focused on the operation side of things.

One of the things that I've noticed is when you have a massive scale, turning on too much of data logging is not possible. So sometimes what's happening is we would use the snapshot capabilities to a minimum. But then what's happening as a result is we miss certain transactions and we need the snapshot.

I was working on a case and I knew what the problem was. I knew what the root cause was. I was trying to reproduce that case so I can collect the data in APM, which is a lot more user-friendly. Because I knew what the issue was, but if I needed to explain it to someone, I don't want to write an email. So I wanted a diagram view of what the issue was. And I was trying to reproduce it.

It took me a long time to get that snapshot in to the APM, because I think it wasn't taking very frequent snapshots. And it's probably the way we configured APM, because of the volume of data that generates it. They probably deemed it necessary to not just take every snapshot because obviously, it's a very expensive operation and it costs a lot of I/O and performance as well. So, that is something I would probably say that would be useful. To be able to say - I'd like to be able to do a snapshot much more frequently if it's possible in any way.

The monitoring capability could be improved. It's dateless right now. But, at a recent conference, I think one of the CTOs or COs mentioned that they're working with another monitoring solution to integrate it. But at the moment, it does have a monitoring capability, but it's very, very basic. Just to give you an example. Let's say if you get an alert, you don't want another alert in the next five minutes to say that it's down. You need to be able to increase the counter on that alert to say, look, it's still down but I don't want to trigger another alert. And every alert in our space would mean a ticket to our space. So you don't want to flag a hundred alerts for the same type of issue like a hundred times, if you know already what the issue is. So it's those capabilities. The integration, either with the existing monitoring capability, and that smooth transition. In fact, I was just looking at my email today. I have like 15 emails from APM. It's just way too much traffic for me.

Scalability is part of our day to-day jobs. At a recent conference, one of the trainers that mentioned very clearly that none of the databases are not growing. They are growing every day. The users are growing and the expectations are growing. They need faster and faster response times with complex systems. So, scalability is a number one priority for us. Because when the customer gets on-boarded, they are relatively small. But as the time passes by, they grow. But if you provision the capacity based on their initial requirements, eventually you'll hit a problem with the scalability.

So, it's very important to keep those factors in mind. And the best way to look at it is the usage analytics, the response rate. And the best part, and this is something that I took away from recent training is the base-lining. Because you don't want to be too late into identifying that you're hitting scalability issues. By then, customers would start experiencing issues. If you see that a deviation in the performance based on your baseline data, I think that's when you need to start thinking, okay, looks like the usage is going up. How do we scale better? How do we get more capacity, or fine tune if it's in any way possible, or distribute it? So, that's what I do every single day.

We have not really used technical support. I'm not on the side of configuring APM. I'm a user of APM. I just look at the data that it's already providing to me. Although there are a few questions, we usually pass them on to our guys who work with the AppDynamics to get them sorted out. I'm more of a subscriber to that.

I want a vendor to be honest. I've never been involved in those kind of conversations. But I'd expect them to tell me what exactly it does and what it exactly doesn't do. Nobody expects a product to be perfect. Nobody expects the product should have every single bell and whistle. But if you sell it that way, you're going to be disappointed. I'd rather know that upfront. And probably setup a roadmap and say, look, we are getting these features in the pipeline, which is a much more realistic conversation.

My advice is that just before you turn on APM, think about what's important to you. Just don't go ballistic on putting everything under the sun under the AppDynamics. The danger of doing so, the side effect of that is you're looking at way too much information and it gets foggy. Start with a subset that is critical to your business. Understand it from a customer perspective. Don't look at it from an operational perspective. Where do the customers feel the pain the most? Start with that and then start instrumenting those. Try and get as specific as possible because that way, whatever you're looking for in APM is important to you. If I'm an operations person and I'm dealing with hundreds of incidents every day, I'd like to see an incident that I'm absolutely working on. So try and reduce the noise ratio as much as possible. And try and look at the important ones that you should be straight away looking into and action on. I think that's probably the key advice that I would give anybody who wants to implement not just AppDynamics, but any APM into their products.

It’s great that APM monitors in real-time. When we have an issue, we find out fairly quickly if there's a problem with our hardware.

For example, we were in crisis calls all last week. So, that's the first tool we look at to see what's going on and where the problem is. Then we start to troubleshoot from that point on.

One of the big things was the license management. It was just something I've been asking for over a long time, because we have several groups that use it so it get very clustered. The new feature with license management coming out, I've been waiting for it. That's going to be great for us. Should help us with a lot of problems.

We have had some stability issues for a few sites. I'm on the supply chain side so there have been a few. At distribution centers, we've had a few issues, but not as a whole. Only for a few pieces here and there we do.

We solve these by just looking at our code, see if the hardware is kind of lined up to see if it's a hardware issue or if it's networking. We look at the bigger picture basically.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have used technical support a few times. They have been great. Last time we had to actually have them join our crisis call and they were able to join within the next 5 minutes, which was great.

We had several tools, but we never used them properly. Mainly because we had five different tools and were working five different things. We were trying to bring everything together, is basically where I think everybody came together with that balance.

Initial setup was very straightforward. The documentation is very clear. It's a matter of reading through it, but it's very straightforward.

I don't have the names on top of my head, but we looked at several other companies. I wasn't the one who made the decision, but again, mainly because the multiple pieces that you can look at with AppDynamics, that's what helped us the most.

When looking at a vendor, first of course is money and the features to see how valuable it's going to be. Our main requirement is, is it going to actually get us some revenue? The value of it versus the cost. That's the main thing.

I would give AppDynamics an 8/10. I guess we're not using it fully to what it's capable of and that's mainly on us. We're working with AppDynamics support to take it to the next step; actually properly fully using all aspects of it. That includes the server, utility, the infrastructure presets coming out, and basically using it for what it's supposed to be and not parts of it. Our rating is mainly because of us.

I would advise others to automate early on. Streamline a lot of it before getting started. That's going to save you a lot of time later on if you have thousands of JVMs running.

The flow map is very valuable to us. Before we installed APM, we had no idea how our application looked. If the developer who designed it decided to leave the company, we would be in dead waters. We had no idea what the application looked like. To understand the architecture, we would have to literally go back to the developers and ask them if they can at least put some blocks on paper. That was like, "okay, help me out, please. Let's go for dinner, let's go for lunch. You have to do something."

After installation of APM, we realized the value within five or ten minutes. We could see what our application looked like and this created value for upper management. They better understood that our single point of failure is a database connected to 10 or 15 servers. This is the only single point of failure. AppDynamics became our risk management tool. Now the senior management comes in, has a look, and says, "If you have a single point of failure, who is looking into this? Do we have a plan to make another database, a standby?" This is the key value that I see in this tool, and for which everyone is loving the company.

I would like to see more of a unified platform. They're very, very new on the server side, machine agents. I want them to be more mature in this area. The approach I understand they're taking is that we connect between an application and the server, but that's it.

That's the point where, if you have to describe the value of this tool in front of a super–techie Windows administrator, he will not appreciate the tool, because he's not getting the metrics that he wants to see. He wants to see message queue size. He wants to see how his virtual memory looks. He wants to see packets incoming, outgoing, what's the packet drop rate. He wants to see many, many technical details, which is not what we want.

Since I want to keep happy both sides of the board, I cannot live with just one application side being happy in the company.

We have used APM for about a year.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not reached a stage where we can talk about scalability, so I'm not the right one who can answer.

I have used technical support. They jump on right in. If the individual is not able to understand my question, or if he thinks that he is not the right technical fit for this case, he will not hesitate to say so. Whereas I've worked with so many vendors and nobody says that they don't know something. They all say that they’re the best. So, support is good. It's a very stable application, no issues so far.

We have other monitoring tools, so I can easily compare them.

We were not using anything previously. They were relying on custom scripts and manual actions.

Unfortunately I was not involved in the initial setup, but I'm expanding AppDynamics to a larger audience now. I am implementing it in other parts of our office.

The implementation is very straightforward. They have done a good job understanding the difficult areas of installation and configuration. They have just one agent that you have to just use as a start option for a program. So when you start an application, you have to tell the application that when you start, use this agent. You don't have to make any changes in your application. You don't have to make any changes on the server. You don't have to make any changes on your web server. So they've done an intelligent job in not putting pressure on the application team to redesign. It's very simple, straightforward.

They have to look into the money aspect. It becomes difficult on the people who are advocating for the tool in their organization. I have to go and literally convince my upper management to give me more funds because it's beyond my budget capacity. It becomes so difficult for me and my upper management to get convinced that, yes, this is the right tool.

As a technical person, and as an application development team, they all understand that this is the right tool for us. But when it comes to budget and financial matters, it takes days and weeks to convince upper management to buy this tool. So they should do something more on licensing costs.

When choosing a vendor to work with, I want to know how truthful is he with me when he's talking. I don't want him to be a sales guy coming up and trying to sell me something. He should be honest in his opinion. He should be truthful when he says that, "yes this tool will solve your problem". I don't want a person who comes and says that AppDynamics is the gold and he will solve world hunger and poverty. I don't want to hear that. Tell me the benefits, tell me the drawbacks, and leave it up to me to decide whether these drawbacks are something that I can live with or not.

That's one. Second, I would like my partner to understand that he should understand our environment first. He should not come on day one and say, "here I am, I have 20 years of experience, I will solve your problem". 20 years, yes you do have, but you have an [outer world experience, not with my company. So come sit here for seven days and look into the environment. I will get you the meetings that you need, but first understand us and then give me a pitch. So I want him to be careful with what he wants to say; don't jump the gun.

Third, help with the technical aspects. I've faced a lot of problems with other tools. Everyone says that, "yes, I am the champion, I can solve the problem", and I don't want to hear that. Tell me how much you know, as simple as that. I'm learning, you are learning, everyone keeps on learning everyday. So just put how much you know on the table. I need that honest opinion, honest answer, from my vendor or my partner. If you keep bluffing me, or you keep making me a fool, that will last for a week, a month, or a year, but not more than that.

With the limited features that we have used so far, I would rate APM an 8/10. The reason I don't want to rate them a 10 is that I've not used the tool to full capacity. So far, I have no issues. It has all the features that I need. But, there are some areas that they are lacking. If I have to get into technical details, I would say more on the JBoss, web server side, they are lacking some functionality.

I will definitely recommend AppDynamics. Look into APM and see if it fits in your environment. We know there are many APM software competitors. Go for it and at least give a try. Set it up to use in your environment. If you don't have a server, AppDynamics has a SaaS portal, and they can immediately install one controller for you. I would recommend that you understand the difficult areas you have in your environment. Just because it's a fancy tool, don't go for it.

Understand the difficult areas. Where are the areas that you get the most hit from the customers? It can be customer service complaining that your websites are slow. But that's a very subjective statement. What does the slow mean? So try to understand those areas. If you have more clarity, you can talk more intelligently to the AppDynamics team. But give it a try.

I think the most important thing is the end-to-end view that you get of all of your servers when you set it up. You can see where problems are without having to actually experience them or tell they're experiencing the problems. You can be preemptive.

I think it allows you to go down and get real data about what's wrong, instead of having to email around screenshots. It let's you actually get the depth that you need, even the code level and code lines and that kind of thing.

I think a little more control over which transactions get that depth attached to them would be good. Right now, it seems like there's certain thresholds that you can set, but it would be nice if there was a more dynamic way to archive transactions, or keep around certain transaction types.

Stability and scalability look pretty good, from what I can tell; especially the cloud SaaS APM solution.

We have not needed technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We are currently moving from a monolithic application to a more service-oriented model where we're going to do micro-services. Spring Boot was the choice for that, because it has actuator support which provides some of the same features. We're looking at that, and weighing this because we already have it. We want to see if we can use of both, or maybe just use AppDynamics going forward.

I think price and scalability are important when choosing an APM vendor. If it's a third party solution, is it going to be able to keep up with the solution you're using? How is the technical support, and how cutting edge is the solution. Are they keeping up with their competitors? So far, we have found all these things in AppDynamics.

The easiest thing to do is to find all the transactions that you don't necessarily know about, what they are to discovery. A lot of times it shows you things that you had no idea was going on like performance problems you didn't know existed. It ties everything together and makes it easier to relate one transaction to all the different bits and pieces.

For example, one of our guys found that another system was hitting his system every hour, which was causing a lot more traffic than it should have. It wasn't affecting any other parts of the system and wasn't impacting the users, but was just causing way too much undue load on the system. They were able to track down why it was doing that and get the problem resolved in a week.

APM gives us easier troubleshooting and notification of issues. We can report off of that data to show application performance improvements over time. For example, we know that in this release, our baselines were X, Y, Z. The next release, we can then say, this was 20 percent faster or this was 10 percent slower. And then be able to figure out what we need to take off or what's just humming along fine.

We also use AppDynamics Infrastructure monitoring and End-User Monitoring.

Increasing the 200 business transaction limit would be great. The ability to compare releases a little bit more and with a little bit more accuracy. Right now, it'll show you the previous release and the next release. And it shows you all the numbers, but it doesn't you any relative change between them. You have to do all that on your own.

Overall, stability is very good. We've never had much of an issue with any of the agents. They install quickly and install easily. We have had a couple of glitches in the UI, but support's been very, very on the ball, both responding and handling issues.

Scalability seems to be going pretty okay. The 200 business transaction limit, while I entirely understanding the reasoning behind it, it's just irritating. There's a lot of times I want to monitor more than it will allow and I have to make sacrifices in some things for performance.

I look for responsiveness in a vendor. Whether they're willing to work around our schedule, our needs. Just having knowledgeable people on the front line is great. I mean, just all the initial support. Level one helped us and they've been able to answer most of my questions right off the bat. And they generally seeming to care about the product and care about their clients.

We didn't have anything at all. So, it was obvious that we needed something and AppDynamics was just really easy to get going and gave us more than enough information.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward, just to get it up and running. It takes an hour to do the install and the initial configuration. But once you're able to see everything that it can give you, that's when the complexity really comes in. You don't know what issues it will find until it finds them. From that, you can then branch out and build on different types of monitoring. But just getting it going, you run the installer and pick what you want and done.

I wasn't involved with choosing a solution, so I don't know.

Do it right from the beginning. Do a lot of planning. Everything flows from getting it setup correctly originally. And in a lot of ways, if you go and change something, if you need to kind of go back and re-do some things, you're going lose all your data historically. So do it right from the beginning.

I give APM an 8/10 because nothing's perfect. There are times where we had a couple of outages over the past couple of weeks. Just an hour or two where it was not available. We had to increase memory twice on the database monitoring agent. And when that dies, it doesn't respond. It doesn't report and it doesn't notify. So we go in a week later, look at our database information, and just don't have a week's worth of data. And that's an artifact of Java taking way too much memory. It's just little things. Nothing major.

Auto-integration with applications and how easy it is to identify errors/issues are the most valuable features for this product.

Along with APM, we use End User Monitoring; I personally use it. We have a unique business model where at the end of the month there is a peak in usage. This product helps us to monitor that usage and makes sure that we target issues even before they occur.

We were using the New Relic solution before AppDynamics and had a lot of issues for configuring it and making it suitable for our use. However, AppDynamics was very easy to configure. We were able to deploy it within a month and get real benefits from this product just within a 6 week to 2 month span of time. So that was the main reason we went for AppDynamics.

For example if I remember correctly, the end of every month is like a war zone for us. Since we have implemented this solution, it is going smooth and we are getting positive feedback from customers, consultants and everybody else. It has changed our life.

Further integrations with other monitoring systems would be very helpful. I want to see it interacting more with the infrastructure, to get more statistics and details from our infrastructure environment and not only applications.

It's fairly stable. I don't think I have seen any issues occur since we have implemented this product.

However, my team needs more training and familiarization with how to setup custom features.

Now we are using the Auto Scaling functionality with AWS. It was very easy to install again. We are not using it for all our applications and AWS but we are in the process of applying it.

We haven't used any technical support yet; we use a partner who helps us to deploy and stabilize the system. We haven't used this tool for a long time to need actual technical support.

We are all part of the community where we post questions, get answers and have access to a lot of resources there so support would be great.

I wasn't part of the selection of this tool but as soon as I came to know that this is the solution our organization had picked, I supported this decision a hundred percent.

I was managing the team that deploys it. I wasn't involved in the selection of the solution but as soon as I came to know that this is the tool we are selecting, I supported it.

We implemented it and had no issues since we have a vendor that supports us in the initial deployment efforts.

AppDynamics is a unique system. It depends on the environment that you are in. It is probably applicable to any kind of company but if you don't know how to configure it correctly or how to use it and get all the details that you want from it, it may not be your best solution. You might go with a much smaller scale solution but for any enterprise organization, this is the best solution you can implement.

We still haven’t implemented this APM tool completely in all our applications.