AppDynamics Reviews

Line-level tracing: This helped massively with identifying and eliminating performance bottlenecks. We had a significant slowdown in our app that we were struggling to identify. Using AppDynamics to trace hosted code to bottlenecks proved invaluable. This however only got us so far. When we reached the limit with AppDynamics, we sought advice from their technical team. After all, we were using a very expensive product that didn’t get us all the way. Under NDA, AppDynamics took a working branch of our code and investigated the bottleneck internally. They did this using other tools besides AppDynamics. This was beneficial to them to identify things that could not be achieved with AppDynamics. Later, they were able to discover a way to make this easier within AppDynamics.

AppDynamics has become the go-to tool for issue identification. The DevOps team was able to take more ownership for defect detection to improve discovery time and reduce risk of issues becoming known to end users. It also reduced the involvement of third-line support in issue detection.

The UI is clumsy and slow. The AppDynamics portal had an Adobe Flash UI, a bit dated for a modern SaaS. It had an old feel to it; unusual for a company with advanced technology. It would often take a while for the portal (controller) to load, making it a little tedious to use at times. I’m not sure why it took so long, maybe it was doing real-time processing of data, which, if so, I’m more forgiving.

I used it for three years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Techccial support is 10/10. See a case study from my previous company here: https://www.appdynamics.com/case-study/the-test-factory/.

We previously used New Relic. We switched because AppDynamics offered a broader and deeper range of functionality.

Initial setup was straightforward for Azure virtual machines, but not so easy for cloud services. The installable was difficult to get running in cloud services, but the AppDynamics technical team were supportive.

AppDynamics is a premium tool. You’ll soon realise this expense would’ve been greater without AppDynamics.

Before choosing this product, I personally did not evaluate other options.

I primarily use AppDynamics for my servers.

AppDynamics' best feature is automation - for example, when I add a note, it can understand the data automatically.

AppDynamics' modules and hardware resources are very high.

I've been using AppDynamics for a year.

AppDynamics is stable and reliable.

AppDynamics' scalability is good.

I didn't have a good experience with AppDynamics' technical support. Its knowledge base is locked up and unavailable.

I also work with Zabbix, which has better education and hardware specification, though AppDynamics is more user-friendly.

The initial setup was complex because we had to configure every agent and module, use a specific server for every module, and manage every visual and virtual machine.

I used an outsourced company.

AppDynamics is really pricey as it requires licenses for every feature.

AppDynamics forces you to depend on the company to do what you want, which may be a negative if you prefer to work independently. I would rate AppDynamics as seven out of ten.

We deployed our agents on the cloud for a Kubernetes application. We get the hardware details from the Azure and AWS monitoring. We import those matrices into AppDynamics and we see all of those details, along with our application performance detail, within the AppDynamics solution.

We are not using machine agents because we are making use of the Azure Monitoring and get the matrices from there.

The most valuable feature is the application performance. We have details such as CPU utilization and memory utilization, which we make use of to finalize the amount of CPU power or memory that we should allocate to our ports.

AppDynamics is easy to implement if you follow the documentation, and the documentation that they provide is good.

The agent deployment could be simplified by, for example, adding a GUI.

Correlation should be improved.

End-user monitoring should provide options for data collection, including using a JavaScript file or using a network request in the case of a mobile application.

It should automatically upload the mapping file.

I have been using AppDynamics for a few months.

This seems like a stable product and we plan to continue using it.

AppDynamics is scalable.

I would say that the support is 50/50. It is not very fast and there is definitely room for improvement in terms of support.

When we were installing it for the first time, it took us some time and we had some issues. One issue we faced was because we deployed all of the agents on all of the ports together. This created some problems, so the next time, we deployed it one by one. This is the process recommended by AppDynamics but somehow, we missed that part.

After that, it was stable and it continued working without any issues.

For the whole application, we were able to deploy in less than two hours.

We deployed it ourselves, although we had a consultant available online who was available for assistance. We didn't face any issues, other than deploying all of them at one time.

One technical person who has the details and information on the ports should be present. They need to know all of the commands that are used to deploy the agents.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using it for performance management. We are using its latest version. Right now, we are in the adoption stage. We are going through the training process, and slowly we will start using it. Initially, a team of 50 people will be using AppDynamics. Our goal is that all teams use AppDynamics so that we can benefit from it. 

With AppDynamics, we were able to identify where the database query was taking more time, that is, whether it was taking time on logical IOs or physical IOs. So, it helped to track down a lot of issues. It is also giving proactive alerts that help us to narrow down issues much quickly and fix them before they start impacting our customers. It has also been quite helpful when we want to show to our management or customers how this application helped.

From the performance management side, I like everything from business transaction work to tracking. On the database side, we can get a lot of insights from the database. On the server monitoring side, it helped us a lot to find out some of the issues on the VM side because VMs were creating a little trouble for us.

At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot.

In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring.

When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software.

I have been using AppDynamics since 2019, so almost one and a half years.

It is stable, but I noticed that a lot of times, the controller takes more time to load metrics, which impacts our productivity because we have to spend a little bit more time on this. I don't know if it is something internal or something that needs to be done from our side in terms of licensing and deployment.

I am satisfied with their support.

It is easy. We need to configure a few transaction detection rules. It also works well out of the box. For deploying for other customers, it has export and import functionality, which is good.

We were exploring some open-source tools, but then we decided to go for an enterprise-level tool because we have a lot of customers. We have a cloud as well. That's how we decided to go for AppDynamics.

It is a very much recommended tool. It is a really good and helpful tool for productivity.

I would rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten. I love this tool, and I don't have any issues with this tool.

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.

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.

Ability to identify end user performance issues and drill down into root cause to improve MTTR and application availability.

Reduced MTTR and put us on a trajectory to be more focused on the end user experience. Provides monitoring more around business processes versus just servers, applications, etc. E.g., with complex systems, where a business process passes across multiple applications, the business needs us to monitor the heath of the process, not just a segment of the application.

• Business transaction capturing
• Analytics
  

Needs more integration with applications suites, like Oracle Enterprise Server or BMC Remedy.

More than one year.

Monitoring and mediating the risks are the most beneficial features.

Before we moved the code to AppDynamics, we had to compare the agile process and also had to make sure that they're following the standards. Thus, monitoring the actual quality of work in AppDynamics is the most valuable feature to us.

It would help to maybe have a more graphical interface and more user-friendly graphics. I don't think that Java is so adaptable since the marketplace has improved a lot. Thus, they have to improve in terms of the GUI.

There was not that much downtime experienced.

It is scalable across the board. We have implemented it across our company. It will meet the needs of the company, going forward.

The other team took care of the support. I am only a DBA but as far as I know, I haven't heard of any issues as such.

The setup is very simple. To be honest, it is pretty straightforward. They sent a team to help us out with the implementation. From the database side, we worked with the product team members to put in the database and also for the infrastructure laydown. It was straightforward.

It is a good product and I would highly recommend it.

Whilst looking for a vendor, the most important criteria is honesty. I don't want to waste time, so I want honest feedback. We don't want any lame excuses such as, there is no patch or that they are still working on it and so on. Thus, honesty is most important.