AppDynamics Reviews

By far the most valuable/important feature for us is the ability to correlate the performance of individual business transactions across multiple nodes and applications in our environment.

Usually when a performance issue occurs there is a lot of finger pointing and spin that happens as a result. AppDynamics makes it very clear when/where the issue is occurring and it makes us quickly find and solve the root of the problem. It has also helped us foster more trust in our teams and the applications those teams build because everyone is being monitored by the same application.

The alerts and pro-active monitoring need work. I have found it very cumbersome to setup meaningful rules. This has led us to use the tool as a reactive tool instead of a proactive tool. Also, it would be great if this could be an iPad app (or at least not flash) so we could have easier access when working remotely. Lastly, this app needs better support with LDAP authentication (see below for more details regarding this topic).

We have been using this solution for a little over 6 months in total.

Yes, we still don't have AppDynamics properly working with LDAP. The actual LDAP integration was not hard. However, we have a large organization and something about pulling up our LDAP user list causes the UI to completely freeze. This has essentially made it to where we cannot provide everyone we want access without a lot of hassle.

Nothing conclusive, however there have been times where we don't see full business transactions. I believe this is because of our use of MongoDB which doesn't seem to be completely supported for which we configured custom exits for.

Not yet.

No, another part of our company used New Relic though. We could not use that solution because it is cloud based and the specific data our group interacts with cannot be externally hosted.

I believe our setup was fairly straightforward, however it was difficult to get the MongoDB interactions to work correctly (still think we have some issues even now with this).

IT is fairly hard to quantify exactly, but I believe the ROI was very high. I believe this product saved us countless hours/time and really has allowed us to focus on building/maintaining software instead of digging through logs while doing more rudimentary application monitoring.

Yes, as stated above we considered New Relic but could not use it because it was a hosted solution.

I would say the best thing people could do is to monitor as much as possible. By this I mean don't just monitor the app your team/group is building, but also everything it interacts with. I found the most use out of this tool when we could see the whole picture not just our small slice.

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.

The most valuable feature is the immediate view into what the system looks like – how it's doing; how it's performing, and what are the connected pieces; that instantaneous, real-time view of what's going on.

A benefit of the solution is the ability to identify real-time problems before the customers even notice them. Even when customers do notice them, it gives us the ability to diagnose very, very quickly where the problem is and what's actually going on, so that we can do a much faster solution.

We're struggling a little bit with the way it auto-configures the various endpoints and how to work it. Some of the endpoints are not quite defined correctly, in its ability to sort of go in and tidy things up after the initial install and configuration. That's a little tough to get in and figure out. It's also made tough by there being very few people that are doing this as a job. It's basically me.

Other than that, I can't really think of anything.

The stability is fantastic.

The scalability’s been great. We've deployed it over two data centers; multiple agents; all over the place. It's great.

We have used technical support a couple of times, but it's pretty much self-explanatory, how to actually use it.

Technical support has been fine; very fast response times; taking us through to getting the question answered rather rapidly. It was good.

We previously tried a couple of different things, but it was really just the practice. I've been at the company a long time, 10 years. When issues would arise, a lot of the diagnosis was based on gut feeling. I've known the application for so long, and been a part of its development for so long, that if I felt like the problem was something, that's probably what happened. That's just not good enough as the business grew.

We started looking for solutions that would give us true, real data and scientific answers for everything that's going on in the system. That's how AppDynamics came to be part of the discussion.

We also looked at one other outfit. I think BMC was the one that we were looking at.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is, does it work?

Buy it. Buy AppDynamics, but you have to invest in your team too. It has to be someone's job to be setting the system up; to watching the system; making configuration changes. It has to be someone's job to report on the data that AppDynamics is coming with.

I have given it a perfect rating because of how quickly we can go in and see what's going on, diagnose issues before they become issues, but also respond. When we haven't got there first, when someone's reporting a fault, how quickly we can go in and see exactly what's going on, pull up the error message, see the red line on the errors, and so on. We're so much faster in responding to issues than we've ever been before.

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

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.

It focuses on a much better idea of the end-user experience, of what they’re doing. We're not using end-user monitoring per se, but it gives a much better idea of what it's feeling like for them. We have all these hundreds of different URLs and web pages they can end up going on; be able to track all those individually and separately, and have it all be automated. We don't need to go through and say, "Hey, track these ten pages." It just loads it up, all on its own. It picks up new transactions that come through, new pages. When they release new code, we don't need to go through and manually assign what needs to be monitored.

AppDynamics allows us to quickly determine where a problem may lie. If a customer complains about slowness there may be hundreds of different servers that could be responsible for the slowdown. AppDynamics allows us to quickly determine where the choke point is. For example, is it a slow database call, a slow webservice call, or maybe a slow method that needs to be re-written by our engineering group? It can take less than a minute to determine where the fault lies. This means we spend less time trying to determine what the issue is, and more time fixing actually it.
The depth of monitoring that AppDynamics offers also means that we are aware of issues very quickly. It is very rare for our customer support to alert us of issues before AppDynamics already has. Most things are fixed before a customer even has a chance to call into our support center.

I’d like the mobile app to scale out a little bit better. There have been things that are missing from the mobile app that show up in the desktops. Also, there are some usability things in terms of, how quickly can I get down to active alerts? How can I filter off of those, especially when we have a lot of applications, a lot of tiers, a lot of business transactions? The mobile app gets the job done but it's missing a lot. I often times feel it is easier and faster to just pull out the laptop, boot that up and go through there instead of the mobile app.

The mobile app needs a little bit of work, making sure that the feature set that is available on the desktop, that we can copy it over and do the same thing on the mobile app.

Stability’s been good. We are using the hosted environment and sometimes it's a little bit slow, but most of the time, it works pretty good.

Scalability is kind of mixed. One of the problems that we come from is how they do the pricing. It's always per node or per module, but a lot of companies, including mine, know that often times you'd rather have a lot of smaller server instances instead of a few bigger ones. However, because we get charged per instance, all of a sudden that gets much, much more expensive as opposed to doing fewer large server instances.

I did open up one incident and it was resolved. I didn't really like the answer that came back, but it worked.

We weren’t really using any solution at all, and that was our problem. We had high-end server monitoring tools and log management, but we never had a true APM in the past. So, we looked around a bit, and this is the one we chose.

There weren’t any other vendors on the shortlist, as far as I know. I came in after most of those decisions were made. I wasn't involved with that initial discovery phase.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics are uptime, usability, and making sure it has the features and meets the needs that we have.

It works great, especially if you don't have anything that's currently doing that type of monitoring. It works great for doing what you need, when you want to track response times and error rates; and especially being able to dig down to individual transactions and see the actual call methods. That's amazing when you’re trying to debug issues and figure out what's causing slowness. So, we love it. It works well.

We’re not using any other AppDynamics products; just the APM right now. We've looked into a few of the other products, but the way our environment is laid out, it doesn't really make financial sense for the time being.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it can instrument without the developers having to do anything special or significant. You can just install it on the same machine that it runs on with the application and it works.

We're using it to give an overall picture of health for certain applications. It gives a little higher-level view of our application health.

I don’t know about room for improvement. I think it's pretty good at what it's designed for. I think it does a great job at what it's designed to do, which is Java, JVM, instrumentation.

See my answer regarding scalability.

It's stable. It's pretty good. The stability's good. It's got redundancy, failover, recovery of databases if one node goes down. It's pretty good. It's pretty solid.

Scalability-wise, I think it's a little limited on an enterprise-wide scale. It's like a medium-class scale. As far as load and distributed load, I think it could use some work.

Their technical support is great.

We were guided towards it from an architectural standpoint. Another person guided us to use it, so we set it up and we installed it.

Initial setup was both straightforward and complex in that most of the instructions worked fine, but then we had a specific situation where we had to go in and actually modify some files. That was the complex part.

It looks very powerful, and it looks like you really need to spend some time with it to get to know it, so don't just expect results right out of the box. Spend some time with it and get to know how to use it.

I believe we are using APM with AppDynamics reporting service.
My rating reflects the fact that I'm kind of a tough sell, I guess.

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.

The most valuable feature is the standard APM agent for Java and .NET. We always find bottlenecks in applications with these agents.

We've seen tasks the end users have to do on a daily basis that used to take 30-60 seconds been improved to take under two seconds, based on reports and recommendations we have written based on AppDynamics. The developers had been troubleshooting this specific issue for months before we installed AppDynamics. We installed AppDynamics, found the bottleneck, wrote the report and gave our recommendation within four hours.

In general, AppDynamics is by far the easiest APM tool to use. The biggest room for improvement is related to maintenance of the solution. A centralized upgrade of agents is sorely missed.

We have been delivering services around AppDynamics for two years now.

We have not encountered any issues with deployment, stability or scalability. However, it can be confusing deploying the analytics agents; this had to be planned carefully.

AppDynamics has hands-down the best technical support I've experienced, and I've worked with all the major APM vendors.

Initial setup, if you choose the SaaS solution, is very straightforward and well documented. Choosing the on-premise solution is more complex, but not any worse than its competitors.

I cannot discuss our customers’ ROI. I would advise to get as many APM agents as you have application servers, to start easy with EUM, and grow the EUM as your website/app grows. Don't do analytics at first, if you don't have a clear business case for it.

We have delivered, and deliver, services related to Dynatrace and HPE. AppDynamics is, today, the solution that is easiest to deploy and gives the quickest ROI.

Just try it. AppDynamics has a free, 14-day trial. If you don't have the needed staff or knowledge, talk to one of AppDynamics’ partners.