AppDynamics Reviews

Our use case for AppDynamics is helping customers with performance problems and applications.

What I found is that there is a lot of room to develop things in it and to connect to other tools like IBM.

An area that has room for improvement on the CR and ERP would be the addition of monitoring of the internal solution. For example, you can monitor the day-to-day and everything in the transactions with AppDynamics, but there's also a lot going on in the kernel itself that you cannot monitor. The automation needs to improve as well. As it stands, a lot of customization needs to happen before you can use AppDynamics.

We have been using AppDynamics for four years. 

AppDynamics is scalable for medium-sized companies, but it is more difficult for enterprise companies.

The AppDyniamics technical support is good. We haven't had any problems with them. They answer very quickly.

The initial setup was not really straightforward, but it was also not complex.

We handled the implementation in-house. The installation is not really an issue. You can install AppDynamics in an hour, but the configuration takes a long time before you have everything configured.

Return on investment for most tools takes a long time. Even then, I don't know if it's really the tools giving you a return on investment. Tools point to a problem, but they don't point to a solution. Your engineer needs to come up with a solution.

When deciding whether or not to go with AppDynamics, first take a look at what you need to monitor and what the value of the monitoring is. There are a lot of things that an organization may need to monitor, like, for example, if I have the power system on, I may need to monitor the microcode and the window system. However, AppDynanics doesn't monitor these kinds of things. There still need to be a lot of patches implemented in order to improve performance. Also, these tools give a false positive that the performance is wrong, but then only adjust one parameter in the microcode.

Yes, IBM APM, and Dynatrace

If we have an issue, it is useful for finding the root cause of incidences. So, we use it for troubleshooting.

When we have a large issue, we bring our teams together, working with AppDynamics. This has allowed us to reduce the time to recover applications (for example).

• Performance monitoring
• The real user monitoring: It helps us evaluate our customers' real experiences, which is valuable as an eCommerce company. We can look into their detail, one by one. It is helpful because it is deterministic.  
  

I would like them to change their business model for scalability to accommodate growing companies. The business model should be more flexible.

I am okay with the stability. 

The scalability is good. However, the issue is you need to know in advance how many agents that you will use. With companies similar to ours (in growth mode), this is difficult to forecast. 

They have a very good customer service team that checks in with customers, asking about our experiences.

It took about two weeks to complete the entire implementation and integration of the product. It was easy.

With some training, we were able to implement and configure AWS with a little help.

It is expensive. However, our time to recover has been reduced, and this product has helped recuperate costs and provided us with ROI.

We did not originally evaluate any other solutions.

It is an interesting application. We have tried others: New Relic and Dynatrace. Finally, we decided to stay with AppDynamics because its graphical configuration is very intuitive for our teams to work on.

AppDynamics is doing a very good job.

We used it on-premise, then moved to AWS. On-premise is very similar to using AWS.

The most valuable feature is real-time performance monitoring of my production applications; being able to determine within just a couple of minutes, whether or not my applications are having a problem; and being able to correlate that with issues that my customers report on.

We use it pretty widely across the company. In my particular group, where we've been able to get it situated for all of our .NET and related applications, we've been able to really improve our time to resolution on incidents. We've been able to better institute root-cause analysis for these incidents that we've been having. Whereas before, we were essentially a black box. Customers could say that they were having issues and we would not be able to independently correlate those reports with actual production problems. Now, we have much greater visibility from top to bottom, in terms of the web page and the server level.

We have the database monitoring component, as well. We can take a look and see whether we were having blocking on our database at the time, without needing to engage our database administrator. That also improves our time to resolution.

One of the things that I would like to see is a little bit more ease of use with regards to the analytics component. I know that's new. At a recent conference, there was a session for hands on with analytics that I signed up for. I planned to look at that a little bit. Otherwise, it's been a little bit of a black box to try and get started with our existing infrastructure.

I know that they're moving towards a lot of the things that I would like to see. For example, slightly deeper integration of the database monitoring that's already in place and being able to, a little bit more easily, correlate that to the calls that my web service is making. My applications, in particular, are very, very, very database heavy. Being able to see that more closely linked would be nice. The latest version of the controller has already started moving in that direction.

Being able to use analytics in the way that it's advertised; there's still a gap for me personally, in terms of where we are now and what the capabilities of analytics are. I would really like to see that made a little bit more transparent.

These are small, quality-of-life issues.

The stability of the product, generally speaking, is good. The worst problem that we have with it has to do with firewall rules and making sure that our agents can reach out to our SaaS controller. Once we get that taken care of, we have that data within just a couple of minutes. The stability incidents that we have on the controller level are very rare; it's available most all of the time.

Scalability is pretty good. We're able to on-board new applications and make sure that we get those correlated up very, very quickly. We are actually moving to a full CI/CD stack, which will be integrating our ability to install and upgrade AppDynamics agents seamlessly, without us having to do it manually, like we do right now.

I use technical support all the time. Usually it's user error, stupid user tricks; I'm pretty good at those. There are definitely a couple of times where we've discovered that there's a bug in the agent or the controller.

We also have bi-weekly calls with our technical contacts, as well as our sales contacts. If we're having a problem, that can be escalated up, very quickly as well.

We were not previously using a different solution. It was actually one of my manager’s directives. I actually was with a separate team at Expedia called The Global Customer Operations Center. They had it set up for all of the call centers. If you call 1-800-Expedia, you'll get routed to one of our call centers and they use a set of applications that is supported by this team. It was a situation where users would call up and say that they were having problems, and we weren't able to repro it. They got AppDynamics set up and there was actually a session at that conference that they gave about all of the ways that they're using AppDynamics.

My manager moved to this rather old team at Expedia and one of the things she brought with her was AppDynamics. She was already in the process of getting that set up for that team when I followed her to this other team.

I was not involved of the initial setup of the controller, but we do have several applications that we're on-boarding at this time. Essentially, that is part of our go-live for any of our applications now: “We have this new component coming up. Do we have AppDynamics? Is it reporting?” We refuse to go live on any application until we know that we're reporting that data up through AppDynamics. That is a critical component of our ability to go live on any of our applications.

There weren’t any other vendors on the shortlist at the time. We were pretty much sold on AppDynamics. My manager, Diana, is a very, very big fan of AppDynamics. I feel like it really fits well into that niche of real-time, usable, easy-to-learn application performance monitoring. When I got started in GCO to begin with, it was already there and I knew I couldn't screw it up by going in and poking around. So, I went in, poked around and learned a lot about the application we were supporting; where the problems were; and what we could do about it very, very quickly, within a couple of weeks of my coming onto the team. Things like that all add up into us being pretty dedicated AppDynamics customers. They've got a really good relationship with Expedia, in general. We're very happy with them overall.

In general, the most important criterial when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is ease of use, both with regards to setup and expansion; for example, on-boarding new applications. For me, personally, that low barrier to entry, in terms of becoming familiarized with the product, understanding how it works, seeing where the benefits are for us and our use-case; I think it was extremely compelling.

One of our sister organizations has a WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus instance. They were using the good old stare-and-compare method of making sure that their services were up. They would start their Java application and go stare at the log file. That was how they knew it was running. They didn't have any visibility into how much traffic it was taking, whether that was normal, what their normal call profile looked like. As part of our own evaluation of WSO2 and their Enterprise Service Bus, we asked this team to install AppDynamics on their servers. They came back and said, "How do we get our own?"

Basically, my advice – to people who are looking at better visibility for their applications; better knowledge of how their customers are using their product; knowing whether your application is up or down is one thing but knowing how it gets used can be something else entirely – is, "See if you can get yourself a trial of the controller and some help installing your agents the first time, and then you'll wonder where you've been your whole life without it."

As a general rule, though, AppDynamics is something that we really can't operate without; even in the case of when we had a pretty big network outage earlier this year, where we weren't able to see the controller from our desks. That was sort of like operating with a big, black blindfold on. It's amazing how much we have come to rely on that instant, up-to-the-minute visibility that we have for our applications.

We have other tools like Splunk to help us dig through the logs, but even that doesn't provide the same level of detail that AppDynamics does. I don't really know if there is another product that does. For me, it's a pretty easy win to say that AppDynamics is certainly one of the most important components for us in supporting production environments.

We are not currently using any other AppDynamics products. We're researching how to implement that. Unfortunately, a lot of our applications are legacy. We've got some classic ASP that we haven't moved to .NET. There's a little bit of upgrade hurdle cost with regards to getting the EUM integrated with these classic ASP and related applications. As we start moving towards upgrading and replacing these products, that's something that we're looking at; making sure that we integrate the EUM with it. It's not something we've done yet.

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.

From a reporting and dashboarding perspective, their API, which is what I deal with the most, is unmatched by any company that I've come across.

We're able to get a single view into applications and their performance; the way they run, errors, and trends. We're able to turn that around back to the developers and help them tweak their code and applications.

Coordinating upgrades across systems would absolutely be a huge benefit. I don't deal with a lot of the upgrades. I just get the emails saying that there have been upgrades. We're on the SaaS platform, so I don't see the platform upgrades, either. Nonetheless, that would actually be a huge benefit.

I haven't seen any downtime myself.

I haven't seen a whole lot of limitations from an input perspective. It’s been pretty good so far. The performance actually blows the competition away, from what I've seen.

When I open a ticket, it is resolved quickly. They are very responsive; very fast to get back to us and very thorough with their answers. I’m happy with the resolution.

I was involved in the setup of the single sign-on integration for our company, as well as getting the users set up and trying to get permissions set up. That required a little finessing and conversations with AppDynamics, but for the most part, it was pretty simple.

Reach out anytime you have questions, because they're very responsive to answer.

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.

We have a complex application. We do payments which are highly transactional in nature. With different kinds of workloads that you see in the production environment, how do you really track down specific issues which your lab testing environment can't really reproduce? Your production environment gives you certain workloads, which basically enable you to look at your application more closely. No lab test could really simulate that sort of a load. APM really helps us in getting down to the bottom of these sorts of workloads; how code responds to these sorts of workloads and how we can make our application deliver better latency and a better end-user experience.

Given an extremely transactional, highly complex workload, you just cannot use your testing lab to stress all of your code parts. First of all, it has made us very agile. What happens is, now, you can actually take any one of your deployments or releases, roll it out into production into a very limited set of servers, look at how the APM works, and it gives you insights onto the how the code that you just pushed out is performing.

If everything is fine over a period of a few minutes or a few hours, you can actually roll your deployment out very quickly. You don't have to have an extremely complicated test harness in your preproduction environment. You don't have to go through extensive testing cycles before releasing something into production. It really makes us agile in terms of releasing to market quicker.

For me, the single largest area with room for improvement that I've been requesting the AppDynamics team to deliver for us is APM support for Ruby on Rails and for HHPM. These are the two language environments that we use quite heavily in production. That's something that I'd like to see support for.

Stability depends on the configuration. We work very closely with our solution architects, with AppDynamics, because there's always this question in the minds of consumers: A tool which can do so much as AppDynamics, how do you ensure that it runs with minimal overhead? You've really got to work with the AppDynamics team to size out your environments; that makes it stable for you. That's been our experience.

I can't comment on scalability because our infra is fairly small. We have a total of around 150 nodes that we could probably end up instrumenting. Right now, we do far less than that, so I can't really comment.

Technical support has been pretty good. In our case, we use a few programming languages which are still not supported by AppDynamics, so we've reached out to them to help us with road map information. They've been pretty transparent about when support could get rolled out to these sorts of languages that we use.

For the more run-of-the-mill sort of tickets, where we have issues with the configuration or using the product, it's been pretty good. We've liked our experience with the tech support team.

We had been using a mix of proprietary tools that we developed in house, along with third-party solutions. We were able to get the job done, no doubt about that, but the problem is never having an integrated view of how your application performs. We have uptime alerting running differently; we have business KPI monitoring being done differently; and we have end-user behavior being tracked differently. It was very hard to find a correlated view across all of these four. To debug specific sessions or to debug specific instances, I think that's where AppDynamics really comes in. The integrated view that it gives of your application.

I was not directly involved in the initial setup but my team was. It's pretty straightforward. I think it's really important that whoever is setting up the application first fundamentally understands what the application does. I think that's critical. The tool is fairly complex and powerful. The setup needs to be handled by someone who, on this side, really knows what the application being monitored can do. If you put a rookie on the job, it's going to be really tough.

We did consider other vendors. We were looking at New Relic. As a developer and as someone who builds and has a team who builds stuff, I feel New Relic is actually a very powerful option. However, as I mentioned, we wanted something that could work on-premise.

We went with AppDynamics because we are in the payments industry and from a compliance perspective, we needed an on-premise solution and AppDynamics was, I think, the best solution that also worked on-premise.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics for us is, first of all, from the product perspective. As I mentioned, we had a mix of various proprietary and third-party solutions that we were using earlier. We needed a product that could provide end-to-end visibility into the infrastructure and the application. That was a high priority for us. Beyond that, what we really needed was a global presence with enough strong local support. That was something that AppDynamics brought to the table.

Make use of all of the training material and the university. There's some really useful information in there. Also, the two other things that I’ve mentioned elsewhere:

• Ensure the person who is deploying AppDynamics in your environment is among the top-most performers of your team, someone who knows your application in and out.
• Combine that with good, strong consultation by the AppDynamics team. Get these two in place and you've got a winner on your hands.

The reason why I have not rated it higher is the lack of support for HHPM and Ruby; bring them both and I would rate it higher.

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.