AppDynamics Database Monitoring Reviews

Because AppDynamics sells this as end-to-end visibility, there are no use cases in the databases. Use case applied to AppDynamics Brower Real-User Monitoring can be applied here as well. If the user experiences latency on its request, it's most likely because the database is effectively queuing the request. The same scenarios can apply.

The performance of AppDynamics Database Monitoring is good, I have not had any complaints.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is straightforward, there is not a lot to it, it either monitors or it doesn't.

One of the key features that are missing is the ability to manage users centrally, which is a real pain when it does not happen. That is a feature that their main competitor has had for quite some time. I'm surprised they don't have it already.

I believe they need to increase their level of visibility in the infrastructure, particularly in the infrastructure monitoring section, which currently lacks visibility.

The license model is a bit complex. They should make it a little bit easier, which I believe they will do in the next quarter, or in the next two quarters. I also dislike it because it is based on CPU, which will increase the cost of deployment and licensing. They currently have a complex model and charge on a per-node basis. They plan to change this in the future to make it less complicated, but it will be more expensive because it will be done on a CPU basis rather than a node basis. And this is not good. I deducted one point for that.

We have been providing AppDynamics Database Monitoring for six years.

It is deployed both on the cloud, and on-premises.

The stability of AppDynamics Database Monitoring is fine.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The time it takes to deploy an agent varies depending on the customer and the application, but it can take up to 15 minutes.

The licensing scheme is very complex. They need to make it easier.

AppDynamics is a good tool that offers excellent out-of-the-box dashboards and application topology. Even for their competitors, their current technology is unrivaled in these two areas. 

I would rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring an eight out of ten.

We are monitoring lots of different databases with AppDynamics Database Monitoring, such as Couchbase, SAP HANA, DB2, Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, and Postgres. 

In Turkey, most companies push their workers to work with the on-prem side because the government regulation is very strict. So 97% of my customers are working on the on-prem side, although we have three accounts working with the SaaS solution.

The most profitable benefit of this solution is that it reduces the mean time to resolution, which is very important for solving extraordinary problems. With AppDynamics Database Monitoring, problems are easy to understand and pinpoint, significantly reducing operational costs.

The most beneficial feature is the ability to correlate different metrics from the core APM to the database. You can fully see lots of different views of the pages. You can also measure each database query historically and see the reaction of your business transactions on the database side. 

AppDynamics Database Monitoring provides a single view of the problem and helps identify the guilty database query, which is unique compared to other solutions.

Based on my experience, some databases like Couchbase, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB require a little bit of enhancement as they are newer and not as widely used as other databases. The limitations are often due to the vendors not supplying all the profiling features to AppDynamics.

I guess we have been using it for more than 11 years.

I can give the stability of the solution a ten out of ten. It is very stable.

The scalability of the solution is also ten out of ten.

Customer service and support are good. The quality has been affected recently due to the company's acquisition by Splunk, causing some workers to leave and new ones to join. Hence, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is very straightforward and takes only two or three minutes to install a collector on an independent computer. After installation, you can use the collector on up to a hundred different database instances. No other installation is needed.

With the mean time to resolution reduction provided by AppDynamics Database Monitoring, it greatly reduces operational costs, thus offering a good ROI.

The price is not cheap, however, considering the benefits and the price ratio, I would rate it nine out of ten.

This is really a unique solution. If you want to monitor both the application and database sides, there is no other solution like this in the market. Most products offer only database solutions, yet AppDynamics combines both APM and independent database monitoring.

We use it to monitor the end-user responses of Oracle and Microsoft SQL. We still use OEM for deep dives.

The product provides visibility to the end-users who didn’t have visibility before.

Visibility to the end-users is a valuable feature.

The solution must improve security and setup. It runs off its own box now. The metrics could be standardized. It should add more databases.

I have been using the solution since 2016.

I rate the tool’s stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a six out of ten. We run quite a few servers.

I have used a lot of database monitoring products like OEM and SolarWinds SQL Sentry. We chose AppDynamics Database Monitoring because we bought APM.

The tool is deployed on the cloud, but we put an agent on-premise. The initial setup is straightforward. There are some complexities if we want additional features like automatic password rotation. We needed five people to deploy the product. It requires maintenance. There's not a great way to know when it's not reporting. We have to figure it out. It does not have a good alarm system to notify us when it stops.

We have seen a return on investment.

The price is okay.

We’re planning to replace the solution. It is a good tool. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

The solution is used for observability, AIOps, monitoring microservices, SAP monitoring, and application performance monitoring.

AppDynamics is predominantly marketed and sold as an APM solution. Customers use it for both database and application monitoring. I have not seen a customer buying AppDynamics only for database monitoring. The product is good at database monitoring, availability and performance monitoring. I have always used it as a holistic product.

The product requires high maintenance. We need a dedicated resource to manage it because the solution manages a complex environment.

I’ve been using the solution as a system integrator for eight years.

The tool is stable, but our clients are not using its features to the fullest due to a lack of knowledge of APM. The customers are not very clear on what features an APM product offers. Customers have a limited understanding of APM and its use cases.

The tool’s scalability is good. Our customers are enterprise-level businesses such as large hospitals, manufacturers, and banks.

Technical support is good. Support must provide faster responses for production-related issues.

Positive

We have used ManageEngine before. AppDynamics is better than the other products we have used. The tool provides a pretty good user experience. The dashboards are very well-defined. Business-related data is very well projected on the dashboards. The technical team also gets good information on their dashboards.

AppDynamics monitors pretty much all the applications, though the applications are built on various technologies. ManageEngine has a limitation. It cannot monitor various technologies. The most important factor is security. Security is very well defined in AppDynamics, whereas ManageEngine's security is not up to the mark.

The initial setup is neither easy nor very difficult. It requires specific knowledge of the infrastructure. When installing the product, we must be aware of how it will be configured at the database, application, and infrastructure levels. Earlier, the tool was deployed on-premises. Nowadays, customers are willing to deploy it on the cloud.

Typically, to install the product, we take help from infrastructure experts. We need to be aware of the infrastructure before installing the product. The deployment takes seven to ten days. We need one architect and two engineers to deploy the product. The number of resources required to maintain the solution depends on the environment. We need two resources for medium-sized environments, but we may need four to five resources for larger environments.

One of the main downsides to the solution is its cost. We pay a yearly licensing fee for the product. AppDynamics and Dynatrace have almost the same pricing. Compared to ManageEngine, AppDynamics is relatively higher in cost. For cloud-based solutions, users only pay for licenses if they opt for a subscription. However, for on-premises solutions, they must buy support separately.

The application layer in AppDynamics performs fairly well. However, network monitoring is not at an advanced level. It is mediocre.

People wanting to use the solution must not use it only for database monitoring. It should be used for end-to-end application performance monitoring. If someone has requirements involving applications, observability, and AIOps, they must consider the product. If they need only database monitoring, several other tools are available in the market that are lower in cost and offer a lot of capabilities.

When it comes to end-to-end monitoring, network monitoring also plays a crucial role. It is an area of improvement for AppDynamics. Network monitoring could be better. AppDynamics has acquired a product called ThousandEyes. How well the product grows in the network monitoring space is yet to be seen.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We implemented AppDynamics to have a clear, real-time monitoring solution for our critical business systems. 

We have two tenants; one for production and the other for our quality control environment. We are using more than fifty probes, including application and database probes.

Our company is worldwide, across geography. We are using the public cloud deployment model.

We have gained a lot from this solution because it helps us to check what is there in terms of exceptions, and so on. We were able to correct problems, which led to an increase in availability, time savings, and performance for our solutions.

We are having a problem where one of our tenants has had issues with availability over the past two months. There is a lot of downtime for the SaaS tenant. Based on the user experience feedback that we have had, I think that the most important thing to improve is the availability of the SaaS, the cloud environment.

The mobile application needs to be improved.

We are evaluating a solution from SAP, and we are interested in is seeing the integration or the interface, and what we can get out of these new probes. We had a conference call with AppDynamics and challenged them to resolve the SAP solution monitoring so that it works side-by-side with our critical applications.

We are having availability issues with the SaaS.

In terms of scalability, this solution is good and has worked for us. With our licensing model, each time we have a need or requirement, we have our probes available for new solutions in less than forty-eight hours.

Technical support for this solution is mixed. We are using a local outsourcing company in Portugal as our contact for AppDynamics. They keep in touch with us every week, so we don't have any problem.

The problem has to do with reaching out to our account manager. Sometimes, we simply receive no response from them. For instance, we have sent them emails related to the cloud environment stability issues two weeks ago, and we still have not received a response from AppDynamics. This is a little bit of a struggle for us.

We are working with an outsourcing company, and have used products from Micro Focus.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

In terms of pricing, I feel that when you compare the benefits that we get to the price that we paid, it is reasonable.

We did a proof of concept with the AppDynamics and also with the Dynatrace. The feedback that we received from our users, and from the IT department, was that the AppDynamics interface was more user-friendly than that of Dynatrace.

We collect user experience feedback from many countries, all over the world.

We have already recommended this product to some of our partners, and they have implemented it based on our advice.

This is a good product, but we still have issues with the cloud and stability.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten, due to stability issues and no feedback from EMEA AppDynamics.

We're a partner and reseller for AppDynamics. We had a bank that we had to monitor from start to finish. We did the bank, and I then moved on to another product, but one of my mates is still busy working with AppDynamics.

Most of it was on-prem. We did some product testing on the cloud, but the client at that stage didn't have much on the cloud. Connecting to a cloud was quite simple as well.

Knowing which tables on the database were working the most was valuable. It helped the client understand where they need to focus. They streamlined a lot of their queries and brought the resource usage down. It helped them to find long-running queries. They rewrote them completely so that they don't take as long and the application performs better.

The synthetic scripting for end-user monitoring could be a little bit broader. Instead of using just Python, they can include a few other languages so that not everyone has to jump on the bandwagon for Python and do Selenium scripting. They can open up that a bit to make it simpler for people to do the scripting.

On the dashboarding side, it's very difficult to do dashboards on the database portion because they don't let you include a lot of the elements in dashboards. They should give a bit more functionality and add more views from the database side. Other than that, all the clients I've worked with are very happy with it. It had everything they needed. No one had any complaints. Only on the application portion, do people get very confused if they're not tech-savvy, but on the database side, you usually work with tech-savvy people. So, the database and the elements are great.

I have been using this solution since 2018 or so. It has been four years.

It is very stable.

If you got the on-prem resource, it's very easy to scale out. If you have the full server resources that you need, scalability is very easy.

In terms of its usage, within the bank, its adoption was very difficult. People didn't adopt it very well, but in one of the telecoms, the adoption rate was very good. They had a team of two to three people managing close to 150 users. It was very straightforward to manage.

I have worked with an IBM solution previously. The main pro of AppDynamics Database Monitoring is user-friendliness. It was very easy to click around and say to the clients that this is what they need. It was all clearly visible and easy to navigate.

On the database side, it was very straightforward. I don't have a lot of database experience, but installing it on them was straightforward. It just takes the information from the sites, manipulates it, runs it as a query, creates the user, and gives it permissions. It is very easy. The only one I struggled with was the IBM Db2 because the bank had very strict permissions to get around, and that wasn't as easy.

It could be a bit lower, but looking at the scalability, functionality, and other things, you can understand why AppDynamics is so expensive as compared to some of the cheaper products that don't have that full single pane of glass they've got. Dynatrace has got three different elements that you need to log into just to get a full view, which is not so good, and because of that, it is a bit cheaper.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

The primary use we have for this product is application performance monitoring for mission-critical applications. We are a reseller.  

The old way that people would remediate when there was a problem with performance is that they would have to dig into the logs and manually find where the bottlenecks were. A solution like AppDynamics is a definite advantage because it can pinpoint the areas that the person(s) reviewing the issue need to focus on. This makes the technicians a lot faster in remediating issues that an application is presenting.  

Our customers are most interested in monitoring transactions, page loads, the infrastructure, the CPU, and memory monitoring.  

AppDynamics needs to consolidate their technology agent types into one agent that could be deployed on any host no matter what the technology is that it is running. It is really the implementation of AppDynamics that is very difficult because it is very manual. They really need to improve upon that and do more to simplify user processes. So, I would like them to have a single agent type instead of an agent-based on the technology. I think that having a single binary agent that you can put onto any host would make it a lot easier to work with.  

We have been partners with AppDynamics for about six years now.  

The stability of the product is there. It is fine.  

My impression of the scalability of the solution is that it is not very scalable. They are not the market leader anymore. Because they do not have the ability to monitor microservices and containers, I do not see the product having a huge future. For example and for comparison, there is Dynatrace which is a better solution and an easier solution to work with. AppDynamics has failed to lead the way.  

We usually have two engineers on staff for the deployment and maintenance for our clients.  

I think their technical support is good. There is no problem there that I know of.  

I think the initial setup is too complex. You have to figure out exactly what is running on the servers you are going to monitor. Many times — especially if there are older applications still operating — the clients do not even know what all the technologies are that are running on the server. It just takes a lot of time just to find that out. It is just very time consuming to have to go through the process and it should be quicker and easier.  

We do the deployments. Deployment usually takes several weeks and the strategy is just to get in there and get it done as quickly as possible. People regularly use an integrator, a reseller or consultant for the deployment. We are a reseller.  

The setup cost, pricing and licensing is different for every customer depending on how big they are and how many servers they are putting the product on. So I can not give a direct answer to that question. Really cost is based on the implementation.  

We have evaluated Dynatrace and eventually it could replace AppDynamics. It is a simple comparison of the pros and cons between the two products. Dynatrace is easier to instrument and implement and Dynatrace gives the clients quicker results. Also, Dynatrace points to the root cause of an issue instead of just correlations which are a lot more vague.  

As advice to people considering the solution, I would tell them to scope it out really well and to do a lot of research on their intended application and their business use cases. There may be another, better solution available for their needs.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven. I would rate them at a seven because they definitely have a better product than several other products on the market, they have good functionality, and I think they are fairly affordable. The reason I would not rate them higher is because there are other products on the market that are obviously better solutions that exist right now.  

It's mainly used to monitor both applications and databases. That's primarily how I use it.

Essentially, I use it for monitoring. I perform performance testing and use it to monitor database performance, CPU usage, and generate alerts on different nodes based on CPU utilization and other factors. It's mainly used to check the performance of the nodes.

I find it helpful, especially in terms of self-learning.

The major concern lies with reports, specifically their configurability. It's like, if I want to combine multiple reports and generate them all at once, that's not possible. Even though there's a setup for generating 25 reports, I wanted to group them all and generate them in one go, which isn't currently feasible. I have to manually run each report and set the time for it. There should be an option to schedule them collectively, like selecting 10 reports, setting a particular time, and having them scheduled.

The ability to schedule multiple reports at once, which is currently lacking. This is a challenge I face in my day-to-day work with AppDynamics.

I have been using this solution for more than a year.

It is a stable solution.

It's definitely scalable. The number of environments in our implementation has been increasing, so it's adaptable. It's a large enterprise, definitely not medium or small.

Maintenance is handled by the maintenance team.

In my experience, it's easy to use. There's nothing complex to learn or fear. You can quickly adapt to it without the need for extensive training. That's my advice.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.