AppDynamics Reviews

• Business Transaction Tracking
• HTTP Header values
• Introspecting slow and error transaction at different tier levels
• Analytics helps to group business calls based on vendor by using HTTP values

• Finds the bugs in dev and test environments before they escape into staging/prod
• Helps to pinpoint where the issue is by application tier
• Identify performance bottlenecks
• Group business calls (API) by vendor
• The above key points mentioned have helped the DevOps team work more effectively and reduce the turnaround time between releases
• Reduced the debug time

The primary feature we are looking for is tracking async calls because most of our API are async calls. We cannot view HTTP data.

We require a seamless way to upgrade the controller and .NET agents.

The plugins available are tedious to use and not robust, e.g. URL monitoring.

The application(controller) is very heavy on hardware. This increases our cloud cost.

It should be more intuitive and provide better metrics when drilling down in the UI.

1. Instrumenting Async method calls:
   For example, let's say we have Async Rest API call written in C#.net with this method - public async long Multiply (int x, inty). Now this call may take 5-15 seconds for REST Response. In AppDynamcis we have an option to instruement a specific method by providing the method definition and its parameters passed and returned values. We can define as variable data collectors to do this, and this is available with the drill down of the call stack. The data collector or variables should show the value which doesn't, and we also tried the diagnostic mode where we can introduce a delay. Though AppDynamics say there are settings to enable tracking of Async calls, but I think it's more inclined and friendly for POJO(Java) calls than POCO(dotnet) calls.
   
2. HTTP Data Collector for Async calls:
   In the above example, if we like to see the HTTP data collectors then there is an option to view the HTTP header variables and custom variables. However, there is no way to see the JSON request and Response data in AppDynamics. I can view this in IE or Chrome using developer tools on the client but not within AppDynamics. I'm not sure if this feature is available in EUM which we haven't procured yet. Also, I don't rule out possibility I might have over looked something and missed it, but I really tried to get this working. Also, the AppDynamics team failed to assist to get this working.
   
3. Plug-in's tried:(SQL monitoring and URL monitoring)
   There was a requirement where we wanted to query our database directly and display certain values (integer) in the AppDynamics UI for monitoring, say, a number of active sessions or database locks etc. Though AppDynamics doesn't provide an out of the box solution, the plug-in's available on Git-Hub which are claimed to be stable aren't working either. Ultimately, we succeed in writing custom VBS files which leverages database machine agent service provided by the tool. With this tool we dump the data to metrics file and manage to integrate. This was very good experience to get our hands around and customize few things which not found in the community of AppDynamics.

This also goes with URL monitoring script provided by community in Git-Hub and also Plug-In repositories on the AppDynamics site. This plug-in is a little tedious to configure because of the YAML file, and only supports HTTP 200 is alive i.e ping request to PORT 80. There's no script for login automation. Again we managed to write custom scripts here for logging using VBS.

There seems to be a certain disconnect between the AppDynamics development and support teams. Maybe because this is a developer intensive engineering tool and support guys need to understand the framework of .NET or a Java ecosystem and applications that cut across various design architectures. This could be a gap which AppDynamics needs to bridge.

I have used this solution for one year.

The controller slows down with Windows platforms.

Sometimes the MySQL process of the AppDynamics controller takes lot of memory and the controller hangs, despite configuring it as per requirement.

Since the application is agent driven (client side), if we need to upgrade the .NET agents on 100 servers, then we need to visit 100 servers to upgrade or deploy them.

The technical capabilities of people sitting in technical support is questionable. The reason being this is an engineering tool for application instrumentation both for .NET and Java. We have asked queries and also raised some issues. For most of the issues, especially regarding tracking async for .NET API, we never received a solution. Also, some configuration issues where primitive in nature but not resolved immediately.

The technical documentation contradicts technical support.

We started using version 3.8 of the tool, and since then, I don't see many changes on the support side.

No, we didn’t use anything in the past for application monitoring. This was the best out there in the market as per evaluation by market research. The tool was a good fit when we did a POC.

Initial setup was complex.

Setting up configuration to track the metrics is little tedious.

Understanding the metrics numbers is little confusing as they contradict, e.g. The number of API calls displayed on the main screen is different than on the analytics screen.

A normal user would find it difficult to understand and read the metrics, because too much drill down is necessary, and the numbers are difficult to interpret and relate to the problem.

Implementation was done in house. The tool is configuration intensive. A good development and operations team need to know the application dynamics to configure this application.

Since it’s high on budget, it’s recommended to buy a developer license and play around with this tool in a dev environment and then procure for production.

I don't think premium vendor support is required for setup and configuration.

We haven’t reached the stage where we calculate ROI, as we are in the early stages of onboarding customers. We can probably gauge this once we have a sizable number of customers on board, which will take time. Measuring ROI will be calculated by using the API call tracking by customer and also the turnaround time (time saving) in the early stages of development cycle.

The pricing is way too high, especially with the analytics feature and end-user monitoring.

They have separate licensing offerings for development and production.

The best option is to get into an engagement for a few months before procuring this tool.

This is purely an application instrumentation and monitoring tool with good features for business analytics.

It is probably more integrated and works well with Java application, as some features for .NET don't work.

Host the AppDynamics controller on a Linux machine with a medium or high profile. A Windows server machine would show symptoms of disliking it within 2 to 3 weeks of setup.

It is not comparable with infrastructure tools. The plug-in available to track infrastructure-related activities are not stable and not robust.

The totality of the product has allowed us to decrease our mean time to resolution when issues are detected. Also, because we’ve implemented this in our test dev environments, we now use it to measure and quantify performance improvements prior to ever releasing to production.

The modules that we are finding most valuable are as follows:

• Applications: This provides us insight into how our applications are performing within our environments and affords us the ability to identify opportunities and make changes to code / environment to effect positive performance lift.
• Databases: This module is amazing; allows our developers the ability to view into the SQL nodes themselves to quickly rule in/out any hardware issues. It also provides them with access to download execution plans directly via AppDynamics, which in turn helps improve turnaround time for fixes and such.
• End User Monitoring: Whereas the Application module gives us insight as to how our applications are performing within our environments, End User Monitoring provides us similar data from a browser perspective. In other words, it provides us the complete experience from the clients’ perspective; tremendously valuable indeed.

The product has a pretty diverse metrics browser, but I’d like to see better out-of-the-box visual reporting so that we can roll this up to management. I have no doubt that will be improved in the next release.

The product has been rock solid from a stability standpoint.

Scalability is easily controlled via scripting, a REST API and included utilities for copying configurations between applications.

Technical support is 10/10. They are very responsive to support requests.

The initial deployment of .NET and database agents was done in minimal time. We had our first application set up in a matter of minutes.

We chose to deploy in-house and that turned out to be the correct decision for us, as it allowed us to become more familiar with the behind-the-scenes workings of the software. As far as advice, while auto-discovery is nice, we’ve found that prior planning in regards to configuration of applications, tiers and nodes pays off by ensuring the returned data is in a format that is most digestible to your organization.

We are still in the process of completing our ROI calculations, but we already have examples of a 89% reduction in MTTR for one application... and a multitude of examples of money saved in others, including savings of around $150,000 for one particular issue that we were almost set to throw more hardware / software at.

We evaluated several other products in addition to AppDynamics (Ruxit, New Relic & Dynatrace). While each possesses some great tools, none provided the totality or completeness of toolset that we required for our complex environments.

Take the time to plan what exactly it is you are looking to get out of the software; it will pay dividends after implementation.

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).

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.

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.

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.

We are using it for monitoring.

Our applications are in AWS, and the monitoring system is part of AppDynamics.

We have been able to monitor our applications more accurately.

It has better dashboards and more control over everything.

One to three years.

The stability is fine. We have had downtime. However, we do receive alerts when we have downtime. Downtime has been the result of config, application, or cord issues.

The scalability is good.

We were previously using Dynatrace, then we shifted to AppDynamics because it was more convenient. For example, it was fast and easily accessible for all our data.

We had no issues with the integration.

Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace was good.

I was just looking into Datadog, and it seemed like it might be a better solution that AppDynamics.

I would definitely recommend AppDynamics.

The primary use case is everything related to monitoring.

It provides everything into one view, so we can track information from one place to another. This allows us to be able to track information all day.

It provides all the monitoring that we need in one place.

The integration with cloud services is still pending with AppDynamics. We would like the product to be serverless. 

Three to five years.

We have seen ROI, because we are able to view whatever issues there are in the application, then resolve them faster.

We are looking forward to purchasing the solution on the AWS Marketplace.

We are comfortable with the pricing.

We also evaluated Splunk. However, AppDynamics provided more features, agents, and monitoring capabilities.

It provides all the features that we need for on-premise applications.

The product integrates with all of our applications, because it has be deployed on all the servers so it can collect data.

AWS has not provided us the code. They will be moving it to their AWS services later. Right now, it is providing us a framework, like with Java. The AWS agents are able to capture all the information related at the code label, which is a benefit for us.

Right now, this tool is very good for on-premise applications, but there might be an issue with cloud applications.