AppDynamics Application Analytics 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.

Excellent sales support!

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

With this solution, we see traditional use cases with companies that have a digital business model, such as insurance companies, travel or banking companies. It's really for where they have an application that is critical for the business and that brings in revenue. And when these applications are not available, they lose money.

For example, in the tourism sector, when you want to book a flight or just about anything, and the app is too slow, then the use case is quite easy to calculate because clients leave the page, go and find alternatives and don't come back.

Most of our customers are midsize and enterprise companies, it's not really a solution for small companies. We are an IT service provider and a Cisco partner, and we represent and invest in AppDynamics. I'm the Director of Application Performance Management.

The most valuable feature is that it shows and gives you an application propo-topology straight away so you see the relationships between the different nodes. The other thing is that you can really look inside the method and analyze problems on the code level.

I think what AppDynamics is doing is a good way forward. They are currently investing in situations and environments, where clients use exclusively IT. In the past, it was only possible to monitor Java applications, .net applications, and the like, but they now have a particular agent for the SAP environment and that is a good thing.

It's a highly automated solution but still requires a few manual tweaks. I don't think that can be changed because every business to a certain extent is different. 

I've been using the solution for 12 months. 

It's a stable solution. 

Scalability is fine. Actually, there is a very low overhead on the CPU. Even with big installations, the maximum overhead of the CPU is like 2% which is really fine. You don't feel it. You can easily add it into your environment without slowdowns or anything.

I think the technical support is quite okay, there is a lot of self service, so it's easy to resolve problems by yourself. And then you have the SLA's, the standard SLA's and SLA's that you agree with the company. We don't get many complaints about that. It usually works well.

DataDoc is a solution that we might have used but it's really suited to small companies. I would really say if you are an enterprise company, then AppDynamics is the product of choice, but if you are a small company, just starting a business and you need a solution that is quick and easy to install and gets up to speed very quickly, then DataDoc is an alternative.

AppDynamics has a lot of functionality, features - a whole set of functions around business IQ that required a lot of research. You have to make sure that you have a team in place to get the best out of the solution. It's a very rich tool and requires a structure within an organization. If you are a small company and you cannot guarantee that you have somebody on your team or a whole team to deal with it, you won't get the best out of it.

It is very easy to set up a first installation and to get results very quickly. It is a little bit more complex to do customizations. You do have a dashboard or standard dashboards where you can get business results or show business results, but you have to do a lot of customization because every business is different.

We carry out the implementation for customers.

Cost is reasonable. They have developed a very solid and good methodology to find out if the use case is valid, meaning whether there is a return on investment. If you find a valid use case, like in tourism, in banking, insurance, or even in production environments like manufacturing in confined business cases, then it's worth the investment. It's easy to calculate and the return on investment is quite quick. If the technical fit is not so good, it would be too expensive and not worth the investment.

I would suggest a company takes the time to do an analysis of use cases, of the situation,of what you really need, and then pick the best fit. It's not something you compare by price or simply by features. It is something you should look into for your specific situation and then make a decision based on the use case, based on the business case, the justification that it gives your organization to invest in that tool. Take your time to do that.

The other thing is, when you invest in a very rich tool, make sure that you have the people in place to look after it or get a managed service to do it. It's not something that you install and it's there and you get the most out of it. You have to look after it.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

If you talk about the Application Analytics, we have different systems, all kinds of integrations from the application space, I have so many systems to integrate. For business transactions, I have more than 20-25 systems. Without getting these analytics, where there are bottlenecks in the system, and where I see an issue, it's very difficult to track and debug.

If I spend a long time debugging an issue, I'll see more revenue loss; more bad customer experiences, which impacts my business’ revenue. What we do with the analytics, we have installed AppDynamics, instrumentation, and everything. At any point in time, if we want instrumented data, we just go back and take it, pull up the analytics, and see what it is throwing up. It's drilling down; showing snapshots of everything; bringing together different systems. It's really helping us. It's easy. It doesn’t take too much time and does not impact any performance on the servers. It's not too complicated of a system to understand. It's very easy, more readable to the users; just go over and grab the snapshots, and say, “Hey, here is the issue.” Just go over and fix it, drill down to see what is causing a problem.

Recently, it helped us discover some security issues, which now we see have been there for few years. There is a loophole in the security system. It was taking way too long. I've been running millions of transactions, and we were not able to discover it. But with AppDynamics, we just started monitoring. It simply brought our attention to analytics, saying “Hey, here it is. It's behaving weird.” We were able to drill down and we found a few servers that were behaving weird. We're able to develop a fix. There was previously no way to discover the issue. If it’s working fine, it’s working fine, but those few transactions were taking a long time.

It's really helping. We're so happy. That's why we want to understand, see how much further we can leverage it. It is not just the analytics, but how can we take it to the business; how can we turn this into a business-centric tool, as well as application monitoring. We have seen some of other vendors and it's really awesome.

As of right now, we are just going with demand-based monitoring, when there is an issue, a performance bottleneck or something. However, we are also exploring how we can set the continuous monitoring system, where we can get more of the analytics, see more of the long snapshots and see what the actual problems are and where, even if we're meeting customer experience very well, we can go beyond these customer expectations by improving some things. These analytics are helping us to build on those areas.

In the Business iQ, I don't know how much they’re trying to grab it, but we want to see more of the transaction, each and every area, from the users’ perspective to the end of the transaction, from the user to the network. There could be situations where the user is sitting in some other region, trying to access a system that is located in US data centres; there wasn't a problem from that. I want the transaction details from the data centre to the back end systems, and the back end systems to third-party integration. I should be able to correlate different transactions; all the pieces onto the dashboard, saying, “This is how it turns out.” That's what we are actually looking for.

We want a single monitoring tool. We don't want thousands in there because right now, I am discarding analytics monitoring tools. It's difficult to compare. Each tool has a different perspective but if you have a monitoring tool across everything, that’s where we see scope for improvement.

We want to explore more. We just started. We were on a different technology. We just started, so we want to explore it more and then see how it scales up.

It works as usual. I'll give an example. We have seen some other application monitoring systems from other vendors I won’t mention, where, as soon as we implement the monitoring system and start the application, the monitoring itself kills the performance, which is severe and so complicated in solutions. AppDynamics is just simple to put in. The agent shows a zero impact on the application servers, which we use Oracle. It's really good.

We've never used technical support, because it’s easy, super easy. We have reached out a few times just to understand more of how much we can use it, but not on the performance which AppDynamics is causing. There were misconceptions in the beginning that maybe it is causing a problem, but even after turning it off, the problem did not go away. We later realized it is not the problem. There were some interpretations about it later on, but it was pretty good.

We were previously using a different technology.

I was not involved in the setup. We have separate team for that. We are the architects. We requested they put it in the first place but there is an infrastructure team. They do the setup. The guidance which AppDynamics provided was really helpful.

I definitely would recommend AppDynamics. After looking at the snapshots, I think I see we're using less than 5-10% of what AppDynamics is capable of. I would definitely recommend exploring not just the analytics and the Business iQ, but I would also encourage you to show the network stats on the Business iQ, which is very important, very critical, and is very difficult to find out those things. Definitely those are really helpful.

We do not use any other AppDynamics solutions, but we were exploring the Business iQ at a recent AppDynamics conference. There was another application, End User Monitoring. I wanted to see that piece of it. It looks pretty interesting and I want to see how it takes.

AppDynamics lets you monitor applications and databases and provide a unified view of your infrastructure. You are able to monitor a single point but this would not be useful and with this solution, you would not use it this way. You want to monitor how your application is impacted from the application perspective to the backend, through to the server infrastructure, database, hardware, network, and application labs. It is all able to be monitored by AppDynamics. It monitors all the aspects from the infrastructure up to the user, and the application.

All the metrics are baselines in networks, infrastructure, application, and user experience. AppDynamics offers its own query language. It is called ADQL. You can write code of any kind to do queries and analysis and you can use those within the reporting or other research. Additionally, together with everything which comes out of the box, you can create your own analytic views, analytic reports, and do a deep analysis of the environment. All the values or all the metrics which are gathered are quite powerful.

This feature needs to be properly described to a client, and then the client needs to have a use case. There are some clients which do not need it and some clients who do. It is not for everyone and is dependant on their use case.

I have been using AppDynamics Application Analytics for approximately seven years.

The solution is stable.

We have done large deployments without any issues. It is scalable.

They provide detailed documentation for support.

The installation has to be done by professionals. If the client wants to take control and do it themselves they will have to do a bit of training.

The pricing of the solution is reasonable for what features you receive.

I would recommend this solution to others. However, they have to make sure it fits their use case.

I rate AppDynamics Application Analytics a nine out of ten.

• The analytics are great.
• The business and session monitoring are great.

One thing that could be improved is the user interface. Things could be more intuitive.

I have used AppDynamics Application Analytics for a few months. I have used Dynatrace for a few years.

It is a stable product.

It is very good from a scalability perspective.

Technical support is great.

It's difficult to install. AppDynamics uses multiple agents. The challenge in the installation is that you have to configure a lot of things manually. The way you install and configure it is not straightforward.

AppDynamics is a great tool but Dynatrace is slightly ahead in terms of user-friendliness.

I would recommend it.