AppDynamics Reviews

AppDynamics can be used for understanding where the bottlenecks are in your environment, and where your applications are struggling. For example, when you have major data collections, you can easily see in AppDynamics, when you have slow responses.

The most valuable feature in AppDynamics is the identifying of the slow responses. Additionally, it is easy to use.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately six years.

AppDynamics is a stable solution.

The scalable of this solution is relative. I have an issue with the fact that when having a hundred servers, for instance, that's a hundred licenses. Sometimes, from a cost perspective, you might need to decide which 50 do you want to monitor, and not monitor.

We have approximately 5,000 using the solution.

The technical support is great. After you have spent a certain amount with AppDynamics they provide you with dedicated support for your company.

The installation was simple, and it took approximately one hour.

The application owner can install it on their own if they follow the documentation.

There is an annual cost to use this solution. The licensing model could be improved by making it more cost-effective.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

On-premises

We've been able to chase down some big problems with our website. When the problems are more obscure in nature, it's allowed us to drill down into our code and find things we wouldn't normally be able to find as easily.

It's actually saved us tons of man hours because we've been able to narrow in on where actual problems are, rather than having to chase our tails looking at everything along the way. It's changed the target area. It's reduced that dramatically, so we know where to look for problems quicker.

Things I struggled with most were the visual widgets in dashboards. I feel like there could have been more online guidance.

Synthetics would be much easier if we didn’t have to learn Python and could use a GUI tool like Dynatrace.

I would also like to see alerting if our transactions or log transactions daily allowance has been met.

I like the looks of the network feature coming. That looks really cool. As far as the product itself, I've been really happy. Everything I've needed from it has been easy to find. Beyond the items I’ve mentioned, I don't have any big ideas for enhancements. As I’ve mentioned, I've been happy with what we have.

It's worked when we needed it, all the time. It's been very stable. I've never had an issue with it.

I don't have much experience with scalability. We're smallish, I'd say. We're a web farm of 4-8 servers. Even during the busy times, it's scaled for what we've needed it. I've never had to test that.

Technical support has been awesome. I've only had to call them a couple of times. Every time I did, I got an immediate response and they weren't happy until I was happy. Of all the tech companies I've ever worked with, they're definitely one of my favorites to work with.

We did not previously use a different solution. That was the thing: It was an untapped area for us, really. I guess when we found them at another conference, Velocity, a few years ago, and decided it was something we really needed.

I think my boss at the time looked at New Relic and maybe Dynatrace. We didn't know much about APM at the time, but I think pricing was the overall factor there.
To be perfectly honest, to me, the most important criteria when selecting AppDynamics was the experience. We had a really great sales team to work with. They made it easy. The support we got along the way was phenomenal.

Take time to get into the forums. That wasn't something we did right away. The forums, the online AppDynamics University, all of them are really, really helpful.
I've been really happy with it and everything we want it to do, it's done. If it was something we thought couldn't be done when we reached out to support, we got help to the ends we needed it.

We will be using other AppDynamics products. We just started, actually; we signed a contract a few months ago. A lot of that stuff is new to us. We're mainly skilled in APM. We're learning the synthetics and the transaction analytics now, which look to be really promising. I'm excited about the demos we've seen. We've had some professional time with a couple of consultants, who showed us how to use them. It looks really, really valuable.

It reduces the time to resolve issues and requires less manpower. When issues happen, we have the whole triage going on and we used to have like 30 people on the call trying to figure out what's going on. AppDynamics cuts that down; you don't need that many people. You need two or three key people going into the console to see what's going on and pinpoint the root cause, as opposed to people trying to figure it out from all different sources. That takes forever, and that's very inefficient.

Being able to monitor transactions end-to-end, throughout all the layers, basically, is very valuable; the ability to pin-point issues irrespective of the layer in which they happened. That's really helpful and very valuable.

The network diagnostics that they are adding will be really useful. They could add more detail into what is going on in the network. Right now, that is one area where we have to use other tools. That would be very, very useful. I think that should give us a better view of the entire system.

It's pretty stable. We haven’t had any major issues, anywhere we implemented it. It's pretty stable and it's very light as well.

Scalability is good for our systems; we have 7+ million lines of code. It works with that big of a system, so it does scale.

We have used technical support sometimes, when we had some questions and issues or whatever. They're pretty knowledgeable. They know their stuff and they provide solutions pretty quickly, as well. They have very quick turnover time.

We had IDCAMS from IBM. That was not really useful. They're pretty heavy on the actual JVMs. They don’t help that much with resolving issues or finding issues. We had this challenge where we actually had to use a new system that was built to replace the legacy mainframe system, and it was not scaling at all. With 100,000 users, it was barely working. We had to scale it from 100,000 to 10 million members. That's when I looked around for different solutions, what is out there, and found AppDynamics, and that's what we brought in. It really helped us a lot with scale it.

Initial setup for most of the regular pieces are straightforward but we have a complex system, so we needed to do some tweaks. AppDynamics helped to detect some endpoints and so on. We have custom batch jobs and so on, which usually have a different way of having endpoints. AppDynamics guided us with how to configure those. It took a little time because it's not like a regular web application. It's a very complex healthcare system.

Price can get really expensive sometimes, depending on the type of setup you have. Sometimes you have smaller JVMs instead of larger ones, for some reasons, such as architectural reasons. Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools.

It gets a little pricey.

I looked at New Relic as well. We just evaluated it quickly. Because of our system’s complexity, it can't actually track everything in our system. We did not try other things such as Wiley. We knew what that is capable of. We knew the shortcomings, too. We didn't try that, but these two we tried, New Relic and AppDynamics.

When selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, the most important criteria is that the product has to be great. It has to be useful. That's the first criteria. Then, when we need support, we need knowledgeable resources who can help us get through. AppDynamics do a really good job with it.

I definitely recommend it. It's a pretty robust tool. For monitoring APM, all the DevOps and whatever they want to use it for, it's a pretty robust tool. It has all of the features; whatever is needed. I recommend it without thinking twice.

We do have licenses for AppDynamics EUM, but we cannot implement it yet because our system is a little more complex and it's a little older technology, the UI part of it. We'll roll it out at some point, when we get the chance.

The most valuable features are monitoring the application, using the metrics of the different applications and looking into various business transactions we do with different customers. That's what we look into more often, the business transactions; where the calls are coming in, whether they are inbound or outbound calls.

We can track the visibility of the calls, how many calls we are getting. Being in the hotel industry, we want to get the feedback of the customers who are going to the various hotels we have under the IHG umbrella. We want to know how many people are calling for reservations and so on, that's what we look at.

Since we have a lot of applications in our company, we are right now looking into analytics and also RUM (real-user monitoring) for the mobile apps. Going forward, we want to be on par with the market.

We have been using it for about three years.

It has pretty much scaled properly for our needs.

We have been using AppDynamics for about three years as of right now, and we are a pretty well-satisfied customer. We continue to strive for new technology, whatever the AppDynamics people are releasing, the new versions or whatever, we keep upgrading.

We have a lot of development teams and they ask a lot of questions. Being the admin for AppDynamics at IHG, I raise a support ticket. They are very good with responding immediately. The response time is very good, as in a couple of hours. We are pretty satisfied. I work with a lot of guys from AppDynamics, and I work with one guy in England. They're pretty good. The support is very good, technically sound.

We weren’t really using something else before. I think my management wanted to get some metrics out of the application.

I do the configuration on the application, setting up the app agent and the machine agent. Being a SaaS controller, I think your ops team would take care of it.
It is not that complex; not at all.

When we were finalizing the deal, I'm not sure about which vendors were on the shortlist.

When selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, we want to get as much out of the tool that we purchase.

There are so many tools in the market, depending upon the criteria and what you want, I would definitely suggest AppDynamics, because of the REST things and all of that. You can deep dive into data and get to the granular level.

We are pretty much a satisfied customer.

We are not really using APM with any other AppDynamics products at this time.

Right now, we use a lot of the metric browsers, we use the APIs to then ingest that into Splunk, and then create nice visual graphs that upper management can then digest very easily. We use AppDynamics not only from a troubleshooting point of view, but also for trending, analysis, and capacity.

It's definitely cut down our troubleshooting, from a mean time to restore or repair, and pinpoint the actual problem that we are having; reducing that time.

I don't think we've tapped into everything that AppDynamics can do. I can't really mention something it should do because AppDynamics might already do that and we just haven't implemented that yet.

Nonetheless, I know that a lot of the problems that the people are having is they lost work. It'll be really good if they could retain the data a little bit better.

From my standpoint, it’s pretty stable. I know that when we first set it up, we put everything under one application. Now, we are kind of breaking away from that, and we are losing a bunch of the data. From that standpoint, people are getting upset, but I understand that's the limitation of the app. I think some people just need to move on.
Once we get everything the way we want it, the maps are going to show up the way we want it. I think it will be a lot more beneficial.

Scalability is a lot better now that we can see one application, can see the other application, whereas before, we didn't have that visibility. That's why we put everything under one application. Now, I think we can do as much or as little as we want.

I personally haven't used technical support but the company definitely has. They're on site all the time. I know from talking to our monitoring guys, they love it. They think that the support is always there and always readily available. They are the administrators; I am more of a power user.

We weren't previously using any APM solution. We were flying blind. We knew we had to do something. That's when the monitoring manager got wind of AppDynamics and really pushed hard for us to implement it.

I was involved in the initial setup a little bit but not all too much; just from a 40,000-foot view of, “Hey, this is what's coming down. You might want to play around with it.” I wasn't involved in the installation or anything of that nature.

From what the installation people said, initial setup was pretty easy. All you had to do was put the agent on. I know our development were kind of balking about putting the RUM JavaScript out on all their pieces of code. Now that it’s out there, they're pretty good about adding more and more to it because they are seeing the benefits of doing that. From a standpoint of installation, I think everything has been running pretty smoothly.

I don’t know any of the other vendors that were on the shortlist. I am sure there was but I don't know. I wasn't a part of that conversation.

If you're not getting the support or if you're not getting the answers when they are trying to troubleshoot, then this is a definitely a really good solution and it will save you time in the long run.

With the benefits of pinpointing the issue quickly, we can get either our servers or our application up and running better. We've pinpointed a lot of long transaction times and were able to fix that. Not knowing that, because we fixed that, it also fixed three or four different applications.

It’s also nice to see the mapping. Once you start building all these things and its building on top of each other, AppDynamics does a very good job of showing, “Holy cow, we actually are talking to all these other different servers.”

As I’ve mentioned, we were flying blind and now we are starting to see. It's been a lot better.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we use EUM as well. We are trying to get our company off of Google Analytics and go straight AppDynamics, but it’s a slow boat.

The most valuable feature is being able to trace and follow transactions through a complex environment.

It improves production troubleshooting, it improves pre-production performance testing and it improves our development quality, because they can find and troubleshoot performance and quality issues prior to testing.

I would like to see cross-tier, transaction tracing across applications.

It's been fairly stable. It has been fairly solid.

Scalability is an issue. We are pushing the product to its limits on our current hardware allocation, so it's hard to fault the product for that.

We constantly use technical support. It’s pretty good, depending on the nature of the challenge we're having. Sometimes it can be a little difficult getting answers but I think they're still doing a very good job.

We were previously using another, competing product and we re-evaluate all the products on the market regularly.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. At a large scale, it is incredibly complex but not because of the product itself. The product itself is relatively straightforward.

We evaluated Riverbed, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic; that was pretty much it.

We chose AppDynamics because of ease of use for the end users, as well as a relatively compact footprint, as far as the required infrastructure to host it.

We don't select a vendor; we select a product. The vendor needs to meet certain minimum requirements, of course, but ultimately the product speaks for itself.

As always, do your homework. Know everything about the industry that you’re playing in. Know who all of your options are and pick the solution that's best for you.

It's providing massive value for a relatively massive investment, as well, but it is proving itself to be easier to use and therefore more widely adopted than previous solutions. That has been a huge relief to all of us who have been doing APM for years and have wanted to spread that around the company wider than just a small set of analysts.

We are using a little bit of AppDynamics EUM and Analytics.

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.

Transactional awareness. The team really enjoyed being able to track a transaction from start to finish. Not really a feature but I find the interface easy to use.

Gave us a tool to track down slow transactions quickly.

LDAP integration.

1 year

Just LDAP integration.

We haven't seen any stability issues.

We haven't seen any scalability issues.

Customer Service: 8 out of 10 - I felt that the AppDynamics team was very engaged and more than willing to help but we never really got to a reasonable solution within the timeframe I had.Technical Support: 7 out of 10 - same reasoning as above.

AppDynamics setup was straightforward.

In-house