AppDynamics Reviews

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.

The flow map is very valuable to us. Before we installed APM, we had no idea how our application looked. If the developer who designed it decided to leave the company, we would be in dead waters. We had no idea what the application looked like. To understand the architecture, we would have to literally go back to the developers and ask them if they can at least put some blocks on paper. That was like, "okay, help me out, please. Let's go for dinner, let's go for lunch. You have to do something."

After installation of APM, we realized the value within five or ten minutes. We could see what our application looked like and this created value for upper management. They better understood that our single point of failure is a database connected to 10 or 15 servers. This is the only single point of failure. AppDynamics became our risk management tool. Now the senior management comes in, has a look, and says, "If you have a single point of failure, who is looking into this? Do we have a plan to make another database, a standby?" This is the key value that I see in this tool, and for which everyone is loving the company.

I would like to see more of a unified platform. They're very, very new on the server side, machine agents. I want them to be more mature in this area. The approach I understand they're taking is that we connect between an application and the server, but that's it.

That's the point where, if you have to describe the value of this tool in front of a super–techie Windows administrator, he will not appreciate the tool, because he's not getting the metrics that he wants to see. He wants to see message queue size. He wants to see how his virtual memory looks. He wants to see packets incoming, outgoing, what's the packet drop rate. He wants to see many, many technical details, which is not what we want.

Since I want to keep happy both sides of the board, I cannot live with just one application side being happy in the company.

We have used APM for about a year.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not reached a stage where we can talk about scalability, so I'm not the right one who can answer.

I have used technical support. They jump on right in. If the individual is not able to understand my question, or if he thinks that he is not the right technical fit for this case, he will not hesitate to say so. Whereas I've worked with so many vendors and nobody says that they don't know something. They all say that they’re the best. So, support is good. It's a very stable application, no issues so far.

We have other monitoring tools, so I can easily compare them.

We were not using anything previously. They were relying on custom scripts and manual actions.

Unfortunately I was not involved in the initial setup, but I'm expanding AppDynamics to a larger audience now. I am implementing it in other parts of our office.

The implementation is very straightforward. They have done a good job understanding the difficult areas of installation and configuration. They have just one agent that you have to just use as a start option for a program. So when you start an application, you have to tell the application that when you start, use this agent. You don't have to make any changes in your application. You don't have to make any changes on the server. You don't have to make any changes on your web server. So they've done an intelligent job in not putting pressure on the application team to redesign. It's very simple, straightforward.

They have to look into the money aspect. It becomes difficult on the people who are advocating for the tool in their organization. I have to go and literally convince my upper management to give me more funds because it's beyond my budget capacity. It becomes so difficult for me and my upper management to get convinced that, yes, this is the right tool.

As a technical person, and as an application development team, they all understand that this is the right tool for us. But when it comes to budget and financial matters, it takes days and weeks to convince upper management to buy this tool. So they should do something more on licensing costs.

When choosing a vendor to work with, I want to know how truthful is he with me when he's talking. I don't want him to be a sales guy coming up and trying to sell me something. He should be honest in his opinion. He should be truthful when he says that, "yes this tool will solve your problem". I don't want a person who comes and says that AppDynamics is the gold and he will solve world hunger and poverty. I don't want to hear that. Tell me the benefits, tell me the drawbacks, and leave it up to me to decide whether these drawbacks are something that I can live with or not.

That's one. Second, I would like my partner to understand that he should understand our environment first. He should not come on day one and say, "here I am, I have 20 years of experience, I will solve your problem". 20 years, yes you do have, but you have an [outer world experience, not with my company. So come sit here for seven days and look into the environment. I will get you the meetings that you need, but first understand us and then give me a pitch. So I want him to be careful with what he wants to say; don't jump the gun.

Third, help with the technical aspects. I've faced a lot of problems with other tools. Everyone says that, "yes, I am the champion, I can solve the problem", and I don't want to hear that. Tell me how much you know, as simple as that. I'm learning, you are learning, everyone keeps on learning everyday. So just put how much you know on the table. I need that honest opinion, honest answer, from my vendor or my partner. If you keep bluffing me, or you keep making me a fool, that will last for a week, a month, or a year, but not more than that.

With the limited features that we have used so far, I would rate APM an 8/10. The reason I don't want to rate them a 10 is that I've not used the tool to full capacity. So far, I have no issues. It has all the features that I need. But, there are some areas that they are lacking. If I have to get into technical details, I would say more on the JBoss, web server side, they are lacking some functionality.

I will definitely recommend AppDynamics. Look into APM and see if it fits in your environment. We know there are many APM software competitors. Go for it and at least give a try. Set it up to use in your environment. If you don't have a server, AppDynamics has a SaaS portal, and they can immediately install one controller for you. I would recommend that you understand the difficult areas you have in your environment. Just because it's a fancy tool, don't go for it.

Understand the difficult areas. Where are the areas that you get the most hit from the customers? It can be customer service complaining that your websites are slow. But that's a very subjective statement. What does the slow mean? So try to understand those areas. If you have more clarity, you can talk more intelligently to the AppDynamics team. But give it a try.

The easiest thing to do is to find all the transactions that you don't necessarily know about, what they are to discovery. A lot of times it shows you things that you had no idea was going on like performance problems you didn't know existed. It ties everything together and makes it easier to relate one transaction to all the different bits and pieces.

For example, one of our guys found that another system was hitting his system every hour, which was causing a lot more traffic than it should have. It wasn't affecting any other parts of the system and wasn't impacting the users, but was just causing way too much undue load on the system. They were able to track down why it was doing that and get the problem resolved in a week.

APM gives us easier troubleshooting and notification of issues. We can report off of that data to show application performance improvements over time. For example, we know that in this release, our baselines were X, Y, Z. The next release, we can then say, this was 20 percent faster or this was 10 percent slower. And then be able to figure out what we need to take off or what's just humming along fine.

We also use AppDynamics Infrastructure monitoring and End-User Monitoring.

Increasing the 200 business transaction limit would be great. The ability to compare releases a little bit more and with a little bit more accuracy. Right now, it'll show you the previous release and the next release. And it shows you all the numbers, but it doesn't you any relative change between them. You have to do all that on your own.

Overall, stability is very good. We've never had much of an issue with any of the agents. They install quickly and install easily. We have had a couple of glitches in the UI, but support's been very, very on the ball, both responding and handling issues.

Scalability seems to be going pretty okay. The 200 business transaction limit, while I entirely understanding the reasoning behind it, it's just irritating. There's a lot of times I want to monitor more than it will allow and I have to make sacrifices in some things for performance.

I look for responsiveness in a vendor. Whether they're willing to work around our schedule, our needs. Just having knowledgeable people on the front line is great. I mean, just all the initial support. Level one helped us and they've been able to answer most of my questions right off the bat. And they generally seeming to care about the product and care about their clients.

We didn't have anything at all. So, it was obvious that we needed something and AppDynamics was just really easy to get going and gave us more than enough information.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward, just to get it up and running. It takes an hour to do the install and the initial configuration. But once you're able to see everything that it can give you, that's when the complexity really comes in. You don't know what issues it will find until it finds them. From that, you can then branch out and build on different types of monitoring. But just getting it going, you run the installer and pick what you want and done.

I wasn't involved with choosing a solution, so I don't know.

Do it right from the beginning. Do a lot of planning. Everything flows from getting it setup correctly originally. And in a lot of ways, if you go and change something, if you need to kind of go back and re-do some things, you're going lose all your data historically. So do it right from the beginning.

I give APM an 8/10 because nothing's perfect. There are times where we had a couple of outages over the past couple of weeks. Just an hour or two where it was not available. We had to increase memory twice on the database monitoring agent. And when that dies, it doesn't respond. It doesn't report and it doesn't notify. So we go in a week later, look at our database information, and just don't have a week's worth of data. And that's an artifact of Java taking way too much memory. It's just little things. Nothing major.

From our side, I like that I can monitor the site performance in real-time. We have had the same issues in the past where users complained about slowness. There are many times where I go to the APM dashboard and I can see that there are some hung users or the JVM is doing garbage collection. APM helps us identify which server is getting hit the most. You look in the server logs or you see that the necessary resources are being depleted. AppDynamics is helping us identifying those issues.

It's mostly our business users who are constantly on the site. They are trying to experience what the end user experiences, and once they have seen the issue, that the site is slow, it's a big deal for us. End users might have seen the same thing.

At a recent conference, several questions came up regarding the memory heap utilization. AppDynamics is an APM tool that reduces heap utilization to 90-95%, even though it doesn't give you a heap dump. But you have other tools for that.

I have never seen the project crash on us. But again, we are a small company and we have limited JBMs and it has scaled to our needs. I'm not sure how the big companies that have hundreds of JBMs are doing.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. I think I'll be honest here. Setting up one of machine agents was kind of a challenge. But other than that it was good.

We were looking at other vendors as well. But the APM dashboard is simple. It was very easy to configure, it was all SaaS based, and support was really good. We got very prompt replies to our questions and they were quite willing to work with us. I was new to the tool, so I needed some hand holding initially. So, yeah, it was good.

Start digging and do it. There are a lot of things that initially we didn't know. So once I started digging into it, I found out more about it. They have good webcast sessions on the site, so go to the sessions and reach out to them. It's as simple as that. Their support response is very good. So they will let you know right of the end.

Application Flow Map, Operational Dashboards, Transaction Scorecards, Exception details (stacktrace, sql queries, etc), it provides all the information required to engage the issue, Metric browser, Information Points, Correlation Analysis.

We can evaluate the performance of an application by doing a few clicks and find bottlenecks very easily. Automatic alerts on resource exhaustion for DB connection pools, HTTP app thread pools, discovering unexpected performance difference between identical applications instances. We have become more proactive rather than reactive.

Charting is cumbersome; inability to do decimal fraction arithmetic in expressions (for alerts), so everything has to be done in % rather than as natural fractions. Can’t get response time by host for an given host group without laboriously setting it up in the chart widget.

For seven months. We started with the controller hosted at AppDynamics servers, then we put the controller in an in-house virtualized environment and finally in a physical server in-house.

I didn't encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability.

It’s good, they have really fast response times.

Excellent in terms of commitment, response times and technical knowledge.

We haven't used any other solutions in past, this is the first APM solution we use for our Java based applications.

It was pretty much straightforward, we didn’t face any big problems when setting up AppDynamics.

We implemented through an In-house team.

Yes, I evaluated OPNET as well.

Scale the product properly within your system’s architecture to get better results in order to analyze your app's performance properly.

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.