AppDynamics Reviews

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.

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.

I'm pretty new to the product. For me, the most valuable feature is defining the health rules and seeing the metrics; defining the health rules so that I can get alerted in time. I think so far, I have only dealt with that.

I'm trying to learn new features that I have come across; use cases that I don't know if it's possible with AppDynamics, but I'm trying to find that out.

It has definitely improved us with performance. Now, we get alerted in time. We can see the call graphic and see where it's taking the most time. Then, we can go back to our code, improve it and optimize it. That's one thing I have seen happening.

Server visibility is an area with room for improvement. I use .NET services for one of my applications. When you see the CPU usage or memory for the .NET services, it gives you that data for the server, not for the individual service. I wanted to see them separated, how much each one of them is consuming.

I spoke to the AppDynamics guys about it. I found out that it's already coming in the next release, 4.3. That's something I wanted to see and it's already coming out.
I cannot think of anything other than that.

I wouldn't say I am 100% satisfied. There have been times that it fails. Sometimes I think the controller is down and I'm getting alerts. I'm still trying to figure out a way around that, because I don't want to be alerted when there is no issue.

But, it's good. Overall, it's good.

I think scalability's good because we are adding a lot of new applications. It's actually very easy to configure AppDynamics for all of those. I'm not involved with the implementation part. The DevOps guys do that. I cannot comment a lot on that.

Technical support is really good. The response is very fast. They are helpful. I get answers to my questions. I'm happy about that.

I definitely recommend it. When I was at my previous company I had no idea about AppDynamics. I got introduced to it when I came to my current company and I realized that this could solve so many problems.

The reason why I have not rated the product higher is mostly not a reflection on APM. It's just that I am new and I'm still trying to figure things out. The documentation is pretty good. I get to learn a lot from that. Still, I think it can improve a bit more when I have to find answers. There is the AppDynamics community. You can ask questions on that, but there have been times when I haven't got answers to my questions or my ticket is still pending. They are responding, and it's not like they don't help. Sometimes, I just feel that it could have been better. There have been some answers that I have been looking for and I haven't gotten for quite a long time. That's one reason.

I’m only using APM at this time. I’m not using any other AppDynamics product.

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.

Integrated and aggregated performance analytics traces transactions across multiple tiers in which web services deployed in separate data centers call each other. It tracks the time spent from the beginning to the end across multiple layers (web, servlet, JMS, EJB) and forked threads. It tells the full story about a transaction in addition to resource utilization. It tells you if one of many servers ran a major GC (garbage collection) in the last five minutes, or if one of the transactions took more than 10 seconds. It also drills down to its components.

It provides full visibility of what’s happening in complex transactions which involve services running in our NJ, AR, and CO data centers. It provides data beyond standard monitoring, including method invocation-level insights.

It could understand more invocation protocols. Some custom-built web service processors are not recognized. As a result, the requests are identified as plain servlet calls. For example, it does not recognize Pega’s customized web service calls. I hope the vendor will accumulate experiences and exceptions, and provide guidance to customers on how to handle them.

I have been using AppDynamics for four years.

It was involved in resource utilization issue in one of many of applications that is based on Oracle Fusion.

I did not have any scalability issues. It is well designed for good scalability. Even with 1000s of servers, it is easy to identify a few that are suspicious by sorting the metrics by latency, CPU utilization, garbage collection time, and so on.

Technical support was excellent. They are very responsive. I usually get responses the same day.

We used HP Diagnostics. It could only analyze resource utilization without correlating this to transactions.

As far as the customer is concerned, it was easy. But the vendor needs to do the bulk of the work setting up the SaaS.

Get bulk pricing. The volume will be higher than you think.

We looked at most competitive products on the market, including Dynatrace and HP lines.

Don’t treat it as a monitoring tool. Use it as a troubleshooting tool. It helps you understand how the apps run in much more detail than good or bad. You can see where you need to improve.