AppDynamics Reviews

The fast setup of AppDynamics independent from the details of the application landscape is valuable.

We mainly use AppDynamics in our test lab to monitor the application undergoing testing together with its surrounding systems. The possibility to quickly drill down into problematic requests in combination with the drill down into all kinds of different monitoring data greatly reduced the time to analyze problems which we uncover during our load tests.

The graphical display of the monitoring data is very simple and unscientific. Histograms should be plotted as histograms. An easy export of the data of a graph in CSV or Excel format would be helpful for the creation of individual reports.

The advantage of a histogram plot is that you see the measuring intervals (bins) and are not mislead

to believe in a linear increase or decrease, where there was none. As for the export to .csv-files. It is very often necessary to prepare reports for customers or management. For those people the data need to be prepared individually with different kind of plots to emphasize the important point. Therefore a .csv-Export is very helpful.

We have been using this solution for four years.

AppDynamics was very stable. It needed maintenance about 1-2 times a year.

We did not encounter scalability issues, but our test laboratory does not host a large scale application landscape.

We got our questions answered in a timely manner.

At the time of our decision about which product to use, we tried several of the ‘main’ products and settled on AppDynamics.

The initial setup was straightforward. The most difficult part was the procedure until we had the correct license installed.

If you go in this field, consider that you will build a long-term solution, which will include a large part of your infrastructure. The tool is then very helpful, but you have to plan the long-term cost in your budget.

The simplicity of usage implies that you need not get a decent course on how to use this product. But if you go to a course, you can learn different approaches and you can get into contact with people to whom you might ask questions at a later 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 feature is just the sheer visibility it gives us, especially being on the performance team. It's basically our "eyes" to the application. Without it, we don't know the flow, we don't know where things are being impacted. We just love the visibility it gives us.

We have a lot of legacy systems. We have a lot of engineers, people. Not everybody knows the whole picture, where AppDynamics basically stitches all that together for us. So, you don't have to go to 10 different people, you can go to one screen and see that full view.

It improves the way we work, it improves our efficiency; a whole host of things, actually. It allows us to be more proactive than reactive. It even helps us more in our non-prod environment. We find issues before we ever get to production.

We're definitely looking for adoption of more platforms. We have some legacy z/OS systems that we use, so we're looking to help stitch those in. It's pretty difficult to; things aren't on the open system side. We’re definitely looking for that.

Given the testing we do, we look for ways to save detailed information on tests, such as "point in time". If we have a test we run, and we want to save that granularity and be able to pull it up, like a month later. We've expressed our want for that.

We haven't had any stability issues. Overhead seems to be pretty low. With some existing monitoring solutions we've had, we've always had the concern for overhead. We don't seem to have that concern with the AppDynamics solution.

It seems to be scaling well for us. We have hundreds of nodes, hundreds of agents out there right now. I don't admin the tool too much but from what I've heard, it's scaling pretty well.

We have technical support. We have the technical services. We work with one of their engineers on a monthly basis. It’s great, very responsive, knowledge is really good.

Adoption: It's hard to do with just one person driving it. If you have that adoption, the team doing it, that definitely makes it a lot easier. Start on a couple small things. Work your way up. Don't try to do one "big bang" and get it all in there. At least for us, that's the way it's worked well.

In general, when I’m looking to work with a vendor, the most important criteria are definitely reliability, where they sit in the industry, responsiveness. They have to be responsive. They have to be cutting edge. Those are basically the main points.

As far as using other AppDynamics solutions, we started to get into the database monitoring side, so we can see some query performance, and not have to bug the DBAs; we can look at that ourselves. We’re enjoying that.

AppDynamics shows different tiers of our application from front-end to back-end, so it's really easy for us to toggle down to each tier and find the bottleneck.

Last year, I worked on the load and performance test for our service. AppDynamics allows us to know how long requests to our service take. From that, we can know whether there is a database delay or some other reason. It really helps us to find underlying problems, some of which are not so evident and are waiting like a bomb inside our system. This is one of the benefits AppDynamics brings us.

Actually, it still takes some time when I want to find some requests in time ranges. It's a little slow. I think maybe they could improve there.

I like to check real time requests and whenever I select a time range in APM, I feel it responds quickly. And the data looks very correct. So I think it has good stability.

APM checks a lot of our loads and we have lots of similar environments. Our system requires a lot of scalability.

I have not used technical support.

I feel AppDynamics is really unique, because I really want to check our loss. We have lots of similar products to choose from like Elastic, Kibana, and Datadog but for the server stuff, we only have AppDynamics. So I feel it does a really good job and is really unique in the industry, and I don't think other products have all the features that AppDynamics can provide.

I was not involved in the initial set up. I just use APM.

No, we didn’t have any other vendors for server monitoring solutions; only AppDynamics.

My advice is just to play with it. It has so many dashboards and it's very intuitive and easy to understand. The visualization is also very good.

Regarding choosing a vendor, I think the most important thing is that they keep updating and improving the product. They also need to have great customer support. We want to have very precise data regarding real time data on the server.

We have analyzed so many of our APIs and web services. It showed how much data and how many times each and every API and web service is used. We didn’t know how much they cost; we are paying thousands of dollars for our web services. If we can save on those costs and enhance the performance, that's priceless.

I think the performance and interface are the most important features.

The way we execute it, it takes a bit of time, like every tool. If they can improve that; instead of taking 10 seconds, say it takes 5 seconds or 3 seconds, that would be great. Maybe some more CPU power or something like that could be an area to improve.

It's pretty stable; there has been no down time, and it does not hang.

It scales very well for our needs.

The support is awesome, so whenever we get something, we call them. We get 24-hour support, which is great.

Initial setup was straightforward; that's awesome.

We looked at many other products at a few conferences. We saw a couple of more products and then we came back to AppDynamics; we are working with them for the last two years.

We decided to go with AppDynamics based first of all on performance, features, and the benefits we would get; whether the product was being offered per instance, per developer or for the whole team. The price, is it per instance or per year? We decided, based on all of these, that we should go for AppDynamics.

Go through the features it has; it has many of them. If you just buy it and use it for small things, it's not worth it. It has many features and capabilities; it is capable of doing many things. Go through the features in detail, or even go through training to get an idea of what it can do. It's a big product.

The valuable features of this product are being able to monitor the network traffic and know where my calls are generated from and where they are going to. This makes it easier for me to triage and diagnose, if there have been any problems.

We've been able to triage and diagnose problems sooner and proactively tell the teams involved if there have been lags in their performances, so they could look into them before there are any errors in production.

I would like to see some more work done for custom extensions. I don't think that there is enough support in that aspect.

We primarily have Java applications and that could be expanded as well.

It's been decent so far, at least since I've been working with it.

We did expand our licenses recently. It has been fine with the large number of servers that we have been monitoring.

We have used technical support. They have been proactive in answering all our queries.

Our company was using other applications and tools previously. However, they wanted a consolidated solution, so AppDynamics did offer a lot in regards to what they were looking for.

I'm not sure of all the tools that they were using but I know that they were using Nagios and GigaStor. I may be missing a few names but there were quite a few. Now we have narrowed it down to AppDynamics.

I was not involved with the initial setup.

I would recommend others who are looking out for a similar solution to try this product. However, it does depend on each business individually and what suits its needs; so I won’t be able to get into any specifics.

I personally don’t use any other solution besides APM but there are people on my team using End User Monitoring.

There's always room for improvement in this product.

• Unified Monitoring
• Application Performance Management
• End User Monitoring
• Infrastructure Visibility
• Application Analytics Business Insights: real-time insights into IT operations, customer experience and business outcome.
• Business to Transform your application performance monitoring into business results.

• Full-stack network monitoring in terms of m, switches, (Third-party tool integration should be enabled).
• be m jitter, retransmission, retransmission timeouts, delays, Window size or other network issues.
• Solution should be enabled to integrate with a storage monitoring platform.
• SAP applications full-stack monitoring.

Three to five years.

Did not have any issue with Stability.

Did not have any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is good and prompt.

Technical Support:

Technical support is good.

I have used Dynatrace Ruxit, New Relic APM solutions. We did not switch to Appdynamics, still we are using other Application Performance Management solutions. It depends on the customer requirement and APM fit for the application.

Dynatrace Ruxit-

* One Agent solution to support multiple technology and platforms.

* More technology and platform support

* displays All the problems at one place.

Limitation-

* Dashboard customization is limited and cannot create more executive dashboards. It does not connect the dots between application performance and business outcome.

* Its infrastructure auto discovery is not much more effective compare to AppD.

NewRelic-

Limitation

* Only have SaaS model

* Multi platform or technology support is limited.

* Infrastructure Auto discovery is not effective.

* it does not have any open API's to customize the operation like to integrate JIRA

Agent configuration/deployment is straightforward. We can have enterprise deployments being monitored

We implemented through an In-house team.

Yes, Riverbed, Dynatrace Ruxit, NewRelic

is more effective in terms of business insights- Connect the dots between application performance and business outcomes with custom dashboards.

Get visibility into the business impact of customer experience quality

Breaks the Silos and create the common language IT and the business.

Can see business results in real-time

Viewing JVM performance and the business transactions for latency and SLA.

It helps us to quickly pinpoint specific application problems related to memory and slow queries.

Yes, the custom dashboard. Making custom dashboards is really tedious. I wish there was just a drag and drop to slap things together quickly.

1 year

No. I've had some bugs where machines stop behaving correctly with the agents but a lot of it had to do with the fact that I had them joined under one product name and then I had changed the machine or put in a different one. A lot of these issues were probably self inflicted and not due to AppDynamics. Deployment has been pretty smooth.

None at all.

For what I'm doing it's been perfectly scalable to what I need.

Customer Service: Good. Initially with the sales engineer, we spoke about training but what ended up happened was that I needed to negotiate the price (which was fine) but what I missed was some of the hands on training. It's a complex product, and I could benefit from an online video, etc. because I didn't going through the formal training to learn the app. Some scenario driven walk thru's would be very helpful.Technical Support: It's been good. What I've needed to do is send them a whole pile of logs. It can be a pain digging them up but I understand why they need them to troubleshoot. You can't troubleshoot without them. I gather the logs, send them all on the ticket and I haven't had a problem with their response.

We weren't previously using another APM solution. We were only using a very basic Java profiler beforehand.

I was on my own, but it was fine. AppDynamics walked me through a few things because I had the free version installed on a different system and then we upgraded. They walked me through to make sure I had it set up correctly the first time. Deployment was easy.

With AppDynamics I'm really barely scratching surface with what it can do. I don't have any SLA metric configured or alerting. What I'm trying to do with AppDynamics is use it in such as way that it's a pulse on my app.

AppDynamics was the only product I evaluated in a production setting. All my previous APM use was in a development environment.

AppDynamics does exactly what it says it can do. It's well readable and easy to navigate. Configuration and changing things around is easy enough.