AppDynamics Reviews

Java application instrumentation across a microservices architecture build.

When adopting / implementing a micro services application stack, you have to get all of the services to move / upgrade at the same time. This has led to a disjointed implementation of AppD. Disjointed implementations of tools do not lead to home run capabilities to build / run / operate.

Insights outside of the code we write. We find some of our adopted libraries perform sub-optimally. Sub-optimal performance leads to a search for alternate libraries to help us scale.

Transactions are not collected across the board. Your application needs to fail before AppD starts collecting deep metrics.

Three to five years.

Monitoring log and statistics using graphs to see how we are monitoring our network traffic, and whether systems are healthy or not.

In real-time, when we have our peak seasons, we can determine if customers are experiencing something that they are not supposed to, such as customer impact on a service being down or not.

The most valuable feature is having our services being available and healthy. We can determine whether or not, at a given point in time, something is wrong. Then, we can dive deeply into the product to see what is happening by troubleshooting, debugging, and monitoring.

Sometimes, it is hard to navigate through and find if something is wrong or figure out where an error stemmed from. I would like AppDynamics to be easier to navigate in.

One to three years.

I have not seen any issues with stability.

I usually don't see any issues with scalability, and we have pretty large servers.

Our environment is huge. Within a season, we have hundreds of thousands of current users.

I haven't used technical support.

The integration and configuration of the product in our AWS environment was easy. AWS made it easy.

I was not involved in the decision-making process.

I would still use AppDynamics now, because I haven't seen another player on the market give us exactly what we want that AppDynamics can't. There are a lot of companies who are doing the exact same thing and trying to put their own spin on it, but there is no reason for me to pick another competitor.

By stack trace exception I mean the automatic correlation between the exception stack trace with the request. For example, you can ignore specific know issue and In transaction snapshots, an ignored exception does not appear as an error in the Summary and Error Details sections of any transaction snapshot that was in progress when the exception occurred.

Concerning the ability to see the history of executionsI mean the ability to list of transaction snapshots, using Transaction Snapshot Flow Map displays.

You can see the history of the execution time, and timestamp of the transaction. The flow map also provides details of the overall time that is spent in a particular tier and in database and remote service calls.
The Applications dashboard and tabs, is a major point of the intuitiveness of the product, in fact It allows in a single view to have an overall impression of each application performance (for example Application Flow Map which depicts communications between different nodes and backends…).

The call Graph which is a powerful feature which allow to list the methods in a call stack and provides detailed informations about each call is another intuitiveness feature of the tool belong many other but the the better is to experiment the tool in a normal diagnostic case, my company and I can explain and assist your team more further with those features (we are based in France but also based at Montreal).

This product has improved the performance management of our applications before deploying them to the end user. (Les Douanes du Sénégal is our main reference.)

We used this solution for five years.

Sometimes different results appear for the same scenario.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have not contacted technical support.

I have not used a different solution.

Initial setup was more or less simple.

We have some experience with Dynatrace.

This product facilitates load testing and visibility of their results and facilitates diagnosis and analysis for code optimization (SQL queries, instructions and inefficient code).

Right now, we are using it for monitoring our mobile and user interfaces. We monitor the application in terms of the business transactions. We monitor end-user responses and then we track how many calls we are making from the balancer, which is impossible to track with any other applications.

We have moved our application from on premise to Azure. After we moved to Azure, we don't have an on-premise monitoring tool, for what we are supposed to be using it. AppDynamics has come in handy. We are able to monitor all of the cloud services, we are able to monitor all the VMs on it, and we are able to monitor the Azure services, too.

There are many features we’d like to see in upcoming releases, which we have already mentioned to the accounts team. They're working on it; we expect to get some kind of releases from them.

We have been using it for the past two-and-a-half years. We migrated from the older version to the current version. We feel like it's better, it's improving. Initially, we had stability issues but now it's fine.

We are using the HA version of it and we find scalability to be good.

Technical support is pretty good. They're very at you; we get the response immediately.

We are no longer using the previous solution. We were using it for on premise. When we moved from on premise to Azure, we started using AppDynamics. We evaluated some other tools, but we found AppDynamics to be very good.

When we did the initial setup, for the Windows platform, it was straightforward, but the Linux version was a little complicated, but it's not that hard.

We evaluated Logility; some other tools, such as Log Analytics, as well; and then even some related to Splunk. We do use Splunk, as well, with AppDynamics; both are currently used.

As far as the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, it's not my selection. The management finds out what AppDynamics can do and then looks at their business relationship with them. It's more like a business partner, as opposed to being just a customer that is using a product and not knowing what the product is going to come out with. In those terms, I think the AppDynamics team is very helpful to us and they have been like a part of our external organization.

We became 100% dependent on AppDynamics after we started using it. Apart from some performance issues, we haven’t found any major issues with AppDynamics. Some of the services are not available with Azure, such as IoT and so on, but other than that, 90% of our monitoring depends on AppDynamics.

We also use AppDynamics’ End User Monitoring and Mobile User Monitoring.

The most valuable features are basically the customer experience that it provides, and the deep dive that it gives; the overall dashboards, and then the strength of the dashboards, so you get a single pane and can see across the platforms.

It's much easier to set up and manage than the previous products we've had. It is basically a lot cleaner. It's just simpler to set up, simpler to manage, and gives a much better picture of anything else we've had.

The biggest thing that we need is on-prem synthetic monitoring. That is probably near the top of our list of things that we want, and actually need to have put in place. A lot of our business comes through intranet only, so a SaaS product can't provide that. We really need an on-prem synthetic monitoring solution.

I haven’t rated the product higher basically because of the synthetic monitoring piece. We started discussions with AppDynamics probably about two years ago now. Even at that time, they were saying on-prem synthetic monitoring was going to be coming. We had our hopes up really high for that, and it seems like there's been some feet dragging there. From our side, we're a little bit impatient about it. That's probably the only reason why I haven’t rated it any higher.

It is very stable. We haven't had any problems with it going down, crashing, getting upgraded or anything like that. It's been very stable.

Right now, we're using it for a very small piece of our environment; running it in a pilot right now. We've had it for probably about six months in production, so it’s relatively new. From a scalability perspective, we do plan on expanding it out, and it seems like it would be easy to do, we're just not mature enough at that point.

It's been very good. I personally haven't been the one opening the tickets, but whenever the people that work for me have opened up tickets, they've gotten quick responses. It's been very easy to get things answered and any fixes put in.

We currently, and actually still have, the APM product by CA, and it has been kind of a headache to manage from day one. Any sort of maintenance on it, any sort of upgrades on it were always a pain to get done. That, in combination with the strengths of what AppDynamics provides from a dashboarding perspective, a metrics perspective, business transactions perspective, it's a lot stronger than what we're getting out of CA. The strengths combined with CA's maintenance and headaches, it was kind of a no brainer for us to want to switch.

With initial setup, everything was actually relatively simple. It went pretty smooth. There is somewhat of a learning curve from our side of things, but overall it was simpler than other things we've had to deal with.

We didn’t really consider any other solutions. We did some pretty extensive research when we went with CA, which was basically only four years ago. Once we saw AppDynamics out there, a little bit more mature than when we were first looking at products, and we saw there was a front runner and leader in the industry, it was kind of a no brainer. We didn't really shortlist anything else when we wanted to go away from CA.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is the strength of the company and the strength of the product. Is it at the top of the charts for Gartner? A clear leader: It seemed like they were a vision leader in the industry, so that was one of the driving forces.

I really don't have any negative things to mention about it. It's been all positive. Depending on how the environment is, it can be a bit pricier than other products. The benefits that you get out of it seem to outweigh the costs, from what we've seen so far.

We've also got AppDynamics’ End User Monitoring piece, and we're evaluating the database agents.

One thing we like about AppDynamics is the fact that you get the end-to-end topology right out the gate. There's not a whole lot of configuration that's needed. Usually, right when you start up a new application it's automatically reporting. You can actually get some of those deeper dives right out of the gate, without having in-depth knowledge of your application or new features that are out. It just automatically makes those connections for you.

Some of the ways it's improved our work is being able to actually get development teams involved. They can look at the same things that we're looking at with their own login credentials and see the specific call and the amount of time it's taking. So we can contact them with more specific information instead of just saying "there's something wrong with functionality as a whole" and they can see what we see.

By default, AppDynamics tends to only capture a lot of the high-level stuff, and you can actually go in and manually configure a lot of the lower level stuff manually. But one of the problems that I see, is that since you have to configure lower level functions manually, what you don't know can limit what you can do. Things ca pop up that you never see if you have to configure it manually.

Also, I would like to see a lot more of that stuff get pulled into the forefront so you know what you're actually working with, and you can see some of those issues as they pop up instead of trying to track them down. If you don't know what you're looking for, you don't know what to turn on and it can lengthen the actual time that it takes.

We haven't had any stability or scalability issues, but our company made a custom implementation of APM, where we created a bunch of PowerShell stuff where they're actually doing a full install off to the side. So it doesn't take very long for us, but it's kind of a custom thing that we created.

We also have Dynatrace, and the way that we actually have it set up is we have multiple servers per node. So we'll have a few of the servers on AppDynamics and a few on Dynatrace, and we tend to do all of our high-level stuff and our basic triage in AppDynamics. Then, once we get covered up to the point where we're having a hard time seeing an issue, then we dive deep into Dynatrace.

From a infrastructure standpoint, AppDynamics is much easier to support and it takes a lot less resources. It is lot easier to roll out, quicker setup, creates a lot of pretty pictures in topologies and flow maps, and it's really good. But on the flip side, Dynatrace is a lot uglier. It's difficult to configure and it takes lots of servers to support it, but it records everything.

It records so much that it takes a lot of infrastructure to hold it all. But when we're having a specific issue we can dive down, because it does record every little nook and cranny. It does have additional overhead as well, which causes some issues, but that's why we have the split environments, so we have the best of both worlds.

When I look for a vendor I want them to deliver on what they say. A lot of times they will say they can do stuff and you bring them in for a proof of concept and they can't do it. But they always guarantee that they will. And they can never actually get it working.

I would advise a colleague to sit down with one of the senior architects and map out what their needs are, and the best way to do it. What you need is based on the individual technologies you have and you might need more of a custom split for what you're actually looking to get out of it.

I like the real-time alerts. Basically, whenever the server goes down due to resource limits, such as JDBC connection pool resource limits, you get to a critical warning as a real-time alert. That's really good. Whenever an absolute restart happens on JVM, it sends a real-time alert, lights, mains, SMSs, and everything.

Also, for the dashboards and reports service, we’ve configured custom transactions. Based on that, we can see which particular transactions are getting more errors and slower performance, which gives us a chance to fix them.

It has really helped us in troubleshooting. It's like you're taking proactive action, so before it happens, you come to know, "Okay, there's something going wrong." We can minimize the effects of failures by taking proactive action.

The main improvement I would like to see is in reporting. If you set it to send daily reports, it just takes a snapshot of the report and sends it to us. For example, we want to see all the events that happened, including exceptions according to the timeline. It just gives you the first page. If you want to go to the second page, you need to get into the AppDynamics console and then go scroll down, replace, scroll down.

Stability is pretty good.

Scalability also is good. It's little glitchy, but otherwise it scales and it really gives a lot of information.

Technical support is slow. Basically, we mail, we wait, we mail. But I think depending on the priority they take immediate action, because if it is a production server getting affected, they come immediately. So it's really good. If it's development related or research or configuration, they come a little later, but it does not cause problems.

There was nothing before basically. We have this in-house application, and if we saw some exceptions, we sent out email. That was how we used to do it before installing AppDynamics. But that was only at the application level. At the server level and JVM level, we did not have anything.

We also have a third-party application called Splunk.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I am the application side, so the configuration admin side is a different group. Once they install everything, that's where I get to pitch in and configure everything on the application side.

We looked at Dynatrace, but AppDynamics had much better features. I was on vacation at the time, so I was not there. I was not involved, but I was told that Dynatrace did not have many features. AppDynamics is a lot better. Industry-wide, it's a leader, so they went with that.

In choosing a vendor, one issue is the business impact should be minimized. Because of AppDynamics, we came to know where the bottlenecks are in the infrastructure by using the system agent, as well as the JVM agent. We code mostly with Java. That really helped us to know where to concentrate, and where to troubleshoot, and where to take action to minimize the impact on business.

I would go with the AppDynamics, because they have new analytics and new features coming, which will really helpful. Log analytics allow you see the performance metrics and at the same time, what is happening. The data is in the logs. It really helps and minimizes troubleshooting and the release cycle is minimized.

It gives us good insight into our end-to-end business transactions. In the past, we've had to rely on customers calling us and telling us things were having problems. We can now not only do real-time monitoring, but also trending analysis, which allows us to reduce those calls.

We can utilize AppDynamics not just from a monitoring standpoint, but our capacity teams, our service health teams. It allows not just one group to utilize the data and utilize the metrics, but across our other teams. Other operational and even our business units can utilize the data, for trending purposes or whatever they need.

Nothing’s perfect. With any application, there's room for improvement. Based on what they were discussing at a recent AppDynamics conference, I do see some excellent new opportunities that they're going to be releasing soon. We're looking forward to those. For example, the Business iQ was one that I saw that I thought was very, very interesting. I could definitely see our company utilizing that. That would be an improvement; absolutely, no question.

We're not currently using any of the analytics part of AppD, but I'd like to see our company utilize some of the other capabilities of the tool.

I can't think of any specific additional features I’d like to see or improvements to the APM, what we're currently using.

I think we've been using AppDynamics for about three years.

As far as I’m aware and from what I’ve seen so far, we have not had any stability or scalability issues. I think we've been using AppDynamics for about three years now and I'm relatively new to the company. If there were issues, they were early on during the initial deployment. Any upgrades we've done, anything from the specific app level, has been seamless.

I have not used technical support. We can troubleshoot a high percentage of issues – I don’t know the exact percentage – in house, with either our internal monitoring group specifically or other groups.

If you asked me about it, I would provide our experiences, what we're seeing and that would be it. I would say, “Here are some of the things we were having problems with. Here are some of the things that AppDynamics was the solution, where we have seen improvements.” I would probably steer towards that and then have them talk to a rep, who would be able to tell them, for their business, what they could do to help them.

In general, when I’m looking at vendors to work with, I look for a company that's willing to partner up with us, and not only through the sale of an application, but through installation and then ongoing development; really partner with them to say, "Here are the issues we're having. Talk to us about your roadmap. In three months, six months, one year, where are you going to be in that time? What can we do to help you improve the tool?" That's very important.

So far, I've been happy with the vendor itself, with AppDynamics, with the developers that are constantly asking what can they do to help us and looking for feedback of what are the things that we'd like to see. They're doing that very well.

We do not use any other AppDynamics solutions; just this one.