Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

Integrated and aggregated performance analytics traces transactions across multiple tiers in which web services deployed in separate data centers call each other. It tracks the time spent from the beginning to the end across multiple layers (web, servlet, JMS, EJB) and forked threads. It tells the full story about a transaction in addition to resource utilization. It tells you if one of many servers ran a major GC (garbage collection) in the last five minutes, or if one of the transactions took more than 10 seconds. It also drills down to its components.

It provides full visibility of what’s happening in complex transactions which involve services running in our NJ, AR, and CO data centers. It provides data beyond standard monitoring, including method invocation-level insights.

It could understand more invocation protocols. Some custom-built web service processors are not recognized. As a result, the requests are identified as plain servlet calls. For example, it does not recognize Pega’s customized web service calls. I hope the vendor will accumulate experiences and exceptions, and provide guidance to customers on how to handle them.

I have been using AppDynamics for four years.

It was involved in resource utilization issue in one of many of applications that is based on Oracle Fusion.

I did not have any scalability issues. It is well designed for good scalability. Even with 1000s of servers, it is easy to identify a few that are suspicious by sorting the metrics by latency, CPU utilization, garbage collection time, and so on.

Technical support was excellent. They are very responsive. I usually get responses the same day.

We used HP Diagnostics. It could only analyze resource utilization without correlating this to transactions.

As far as the customer is concerned, it was easy. But the vendor needs to do the bulk of the work setting up the SaaS.

Get bulk pricing. The volume will be higher than you think.

We looked at most competitive products on the market, including Dynatrace and HP lines.

Don’t treat it as a monitoring tool. Use it as a troubleshooting tool. It helps you understand how the apps run in much more detail than good or bad. You can see where you need to improve.

The most valuable features are:

• Automatic flow maps to visualize application environment
• Snapshots of method-level execution timing
• Automatic baselines of all metrics
• Native mobile agent

The product has improved our understanding of system performance. It has given us more time to find and fix problems.

This product could be improved by having a cross-application flow that can split the monitored systems into smaller business applications. I would like to see more flexible custom dashboards.

We have used this solution for four years.

The earlier version of the .NET agent had some problems with stability and performance, but I found no stability issues with the current version.

If you design a very big business application, visibility will suffer due to a large number of tiers and transactions.

The technical support was one of the absolute best in the industry. Tickets are promptly processed and escalated. There was no terrible first level support to 'get through' before getting to the right level. I was able to get the level of support I needed right away.
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I had a brief experience with Dynatrace at another company.

It was very simple to install the controller and install some of the agents with default settings.

Get the full scope of the price including analytics, real-user monitoring (RUM) and anything that might be relevant from the start. You might get a worse price when adding licenses in the middle of a licensing period since you are already locked in.

We evaluated Dynatrace before we chose this product.

Take some time to train technicians and development personal who will use the tool. Make sure you design the correct Business Applications and Business Transactions.

• Unified Monitoring
• Application Performance Management
• End User Monitoring
• Infrastructure Visibility
• Application Analytics Business Insights: real-time insights into IT operations, customer experience and business outcome.
• Business to Transform your application performance monitoring into business results.

• Full-stack network monitoring in terms of m, switches, (Third-party tool integration should be enabled).
• be m jitter, retransmission, retransmission timeouts, delays, Window size or other network issues.
• Solution should be enabled to integrate with a storage monitoring platform.
• SAP applications full-stack monitoring.

Did not have any issue with Stability.

Did not have any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is good and prompt.

Technical Support:

Technical support is good.

I have used Dynatrace Ruxit, New Relic APM solutions. We did not switch to Appdynamics, still we are using other Application Performance Management solutions. It depends on the customer requirement and APM fit for the application.

Dynatrace Ruxit-

* One Agent solution to support multiple technology and platforms.

* More technology and platform support

* displays All the problems at one place.

Limitation-

* Dashboard customization is limited and cannot create more executive dashboards. It does not connect the dots between application performance and business outcome.

* Its infrastructure auto discovery is not much more effective compare to AppD.

NewRelic-

Limitation

* Only have SaaS model

* Multi platform or technology support is limited.

* Infrastructure Auto discovery is not effective.

* it does not have any open API's to customize the operation like to integrate JIRA

Agent configuration/deployment is straightforward. We can have enterprise deployments being monitored

We implemented through an In-house team.

Yes, Riverbed, Dynatrace Ruxit, NewRelic

is more effective in terms of business insights- Connect the dots between application performance and business outcomes with custom dashboards.

Get visibility into the business impact of customer experience quality

Breaks the Silos and create the common language IT and the business.

Can see business results in real-time

We have analyzed so many of our APIs and web services. It showed how much data and how many times each and every API and web service is used. We didn’t know how much they cost; we are paying thousands of dollars for our web services. If we can save on those costs and enhance the performance, that's priceless.

I think the performance and interface are the most important features.

The way we execute it, it takes a bit of time, like every tool. If they can improve that; instead of taking 10 seconds, say it takes 5 seconds or 3 seconds, that would be great. Maybe some more CPU power or something like that could be an area to improve.

It's pretty stable; there has been no down time, and it does not hang.

It scales very well for our needs.

The support is awesome, so whenever we get something, we call them. We get 24-hour support, which is great.

Initial setup was straightforward; that's awesome.

We looked at many other products at a few conferences. We saw a couple of more products and then we came back to AppDynamics; we are working with them for the last two years.

We decided to go with AppDynamics based first of all on performance, features, and the benefits we would get; whether the product was being offered per instance, per developer or for the whole team. The price, is it per instance or per year? We decided, based on all of these, that we should go for AppDynamics.

Go through the features it has; it has many of them. If you just buy it and use it for small things, it's not worth it. It has many features and capabilities; it is capable of doing many things. Go through the features in detail, or even go through training to get an idea of what it can do. It's a big product.

Line-level tracing: This helped massively with identifying and eliminating performance bottlenecks. We had a significant slowdown in our app that we were struggling to identify. Using AppDynamics to trace hosted code to bottlenecks proved invaluable. This however only got us so far. When we reached the limit with AppDynamics, we sought advice from their technical team. After all, we were using a very expensive product that didn’t get us all the way. Under NDA, AppDynamics took a working branch of our code and investigated the bottleneck internally. They did this using other tools besides AppDynamics. This was beneficial to them to identify things that could not be achieved with AppDynamics. Later, they were able to discover a way to make this easier within AppDynamics.

AppDynamics has become the go-to tool for issue identification. The DevOps team was able to take more ownership for defect detection to improve discovery time and reduce risk of issues becoming known to end users. It also reduced the involvement of third-line support in issue detection.

The UI is clumsy and slow. The AppDynamics portal had an Adobe Flash UI, a bit dated for a modern SaaS. It had an old feel to it; unusual for a company with advanced technology. It would often take a while for the portal (controller) to load, making it a little tedious to use at times. I’m not sure why it took so long, maybe it was doing real-time processing of data, which, if so, I’m more forgiving.

I used it for three years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Techccial support is 10/10. See a case study from my previous company here: https://www.appdynamics.com/case-study/the-test-factory/.

We previously used New Relic. We switched because AppDynamics offered a broader and deeper range of functionality.

Initial setup was straightforward for Azure virtual machines, but not so easy for cloud services. The installable was difficult to get running in cloud services, but the AppDynamics technical team were supportive.

AppDynamics is a premium tool. You’ll soon realise this expense would’ve been greater without AppDynamics.

Before choosing this product, I personally did not evaluate other options.

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.

Excellent sales support!

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

In a few clicks, we are able to identify the root cause of performance issues, without any prior knowledge of the application structure nor its components. And this was true for both Java and .NET.

• Flowmap
• Snapshots
• End-user monitoring (web and mobile)

• Analytics
• SQL statement monitoring

I have not encountered any stability issues so far.

I have not encountered any scalability issues so far.

Technical support is excellent.

We used to use CA APM. We found AppDynamics much more user friendly, easy to spot performance issues, and great unified end-to-end monitoring capabilities.

Initial setup was easy and straightforward.

The product’s licencing policy is competitive. However, properly identify and size your needs to get the best rate.

We also evaluated CA APM, Dynatrace and New Relic.

Properly identify your needs, and allocate the required resources. Otherwise, you might face some scalability issues.

My favorite part of the application is that it auto-baselines the application that you instrument with it. I work with other monitoring tools such as SCOM and Splunk. These tools are great, but the automatic baselining offered by AppDynamics is like an easy button.

Products like SCOM and Splunk require you to have to know exactly what you want to alert on. From a Splunk perspective, that is generally a very specific log entry such as an error. SCOM deals with hard thresholds and there is work to tune those to be meaningful for an organization. What make sense for organization A might be completely different for organization B. For example, when to alert on a drive filling up. Does 80% make sense and give enough proactive warning to get the issue resolved?

With AppDynamics, the product keeps track of how your application is performing and rolls that into an aggregated value that is compared against how the application is performing right now. It then lets you alert on a deviation away from what is considered normal. This creates immediate value in the alerts it provides without any real interaction from a tuning standpoint.

With its automatic flow maps, as well as its ability to automatically baseline key metrics out of the box, it allows support individuals to quickly focus in on the exact location of the application problem reducing MTTR. It also has enabled us to be more devops focused, creating stable releases in a faster, more efficient manner.

As an administrator, I would love to be able to manage the update of agents from the controller itself. This would allow for enhanced version control, as well as eliminate the need to target various applications and their corresponding servers individually due to their unique configurations.

I would also like to see better license management from an auditing standpoint. Knowing how many licenses are being consumed by an application would be a great feature. Being a large organization, it would assist with understanding total cost of ownership, as well as growth predictions on a per-application basis.

We have been using the product for the last three years for numerous applications.

While I wouldn’t consider this an issue, when the business originally brought AppDynamics in, a centralized support structure had not been identified. We ended up with a controller for each application, which is not the ideal enterprise solution. When I took on support of the product with my team, we consolidated to an on-premise enterprise controller. That process was extremely easy to perform so, for us, it was really more of a bad design problem that my team had to fix.

Technical support and customer service have been amazing. I have been able to get support both through the portal, and from our sales support extremely fast. They have a great customer service focus. This is one of the reasons that deployment of the product is also so easy.

AppDynamics setup is very easy from an installation process. The best part is, when you decide to go with the product, they work directly with you to assist in the initial implementation to ensure you get the most of the product.

AppDynamics helped with the initial implementation. That was very focused with the support teams of the applications. I would absolutely recommend getting your development teams involved ASAP, so they begin to use the tool and see its immediate value to them.

We also evaluated New Relic. In the end, the features, ease of use, and customer service provided by AppDynamics was what tipped the scale towards them.

They offer a free trial. If you are struggling with finding the root cause of a reoccurring issue, then give it a shot. We got immediate, actionable results.

My rating reflects its ease of use as well as the scope of solutions that it can monitor, including MongoDB.