AppDynamics Reviews

Our main use of this AppDynamics is to monitor customer applications, such as web applications. For example, to monitor the availability of online stores, and to figure out whether we have any problems.

AppDynamics has a very broad range of supported technologies, and it's user-friendly. It looks nice, and it's easy to sell the solution to the stakeholders when we can visualize how the website is working. For example, where we have any problems through visual analytics.

The end-user experience is not really good because we can't catch all of the transactions. We only can catch the full stack of flow transactions, but I think that this is caused by the technology they use. If they will catch every transaction, it will cause a very big load on the performance of applications. The monitoring of all transactions needs improvement.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately eight years.

The solution has been stable in my experience. 

The solution is scalable. AppDynamics has been flexible enough for what I use it for.

I have not contacted support. We have only used our local distributors, and they have been good.

I have used an older version of Dynatrace previously.

The solution is easy to deploy if you know what you are doing. It was simple for me.

The price of AppDynamics could be reduced in my region.

My advice to others that want to implement this solution is to have a test environment, and then go to production. Sometimes it requires tuning of the software and restarting services a couple of times,  it's better to make all of these changes on a test environment, and then to move to production.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately eight out of ten.

The product is good for the enterprise SAS application performance monitoring. It's good for a larger scale deployment such as what my company is working on.

The solution is scalable.

The solution is complex. 

We'd like the solution to offer more AI features.

The initial setup could be easier.

They need to improve the infrastructure and make it less complex. There are too many modules and components. 

It would be helpful if the product had local support in our area. 

We acquired the solution last year after we did a bit of research on its capabilities. We've been using it for a few months so far.

The scalability is good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's a good product for large-scale projects and enterprises. 

We don't have AppDynamics local support in my area. We only have a partner in my region, which is not really AppDynamics. In terms of the whole implementation, the experience, I wonder if the experience is good enough. I suspect a direct connection with AppDynamics might be better. If they had a product team in my region we might be better off.

The initial setup is not easy or straightforward. It's quite complex. You really need to have local support.

We are just a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with AppDynamics. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been happy with its capabilities over the time we have used it. 

I would recommend the solution, even with all of the complexity that it brings. However, I would advise new users or companies considering the product to make sure they have local support.

We use this product for performance monitoring.

The monitoring is similar to Dynatrace.

The dashboard can be better. Also, the automated reports could be improved.

The UI in Dynatrace is more user-friendly.

I would like to see more automated reports. 

We were using AppDynamics from 2017 to 2019.

I have no issues with the stability of this solution. I have not had any problems.

AppDynamics is a scalable solution.

I have not had the need to contact technical support.

With my experience using Dynatrace, I would rate it a ten out of ten. It is more detailed and it offers more technology.

I was not part of the initial setup.

I would recommend Dynatrace, it's better than AppDynamics.

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

Being able to quickly diagnose customer issues and their performance problems.

It lets us quickly diagnose customer problems that occurred in production, but also lets us look at our system and load test in the quality assurance period so we find problems before they go to production.

The stability is generally pretty good. Sometimes you get anomalies which are hard to explain and sometimes data seems to disappear, but except for that it is generally pretty good.

Scalability has been fine. I have not had any problems.

The support that we received was pretty good. Around July, we had some technical resources come on site and help train us and the team on how to use it. We asked them a couple of questions but generally we figure stuff out using the help system.

We had built our own login and diagnostic tools but it was hard to add features to that, while at the same time try and diagnose any problems quickly. So it is nice to have something which is already done, which you just learn how to use and have a quick turnaround without having to worry about it. And if we have problems, we just phone technical support.

We looked at about three or four different vendors, one of which was Dynatrace. We talked to Dynatrace a lot, and even had it installed, but decided to go to AppDynamics as it seemed to work better for us.

AppDynamics does exactly what I want it to do. It diagnoses problems quickly so if one of our customers is having problems, we can tell him what's slow and maybe find a solution within a couple of hours. Customers don't mind if you have occasional problems, as long as you can fix them quickly. If it goes on for weeks and weeks, then they start getting annoyed. It is nice to be able to tell them, "This is what happened. This is why it happened. And this is what we did to fix it."

If a colleague of mine was researching AppDynamics I would get them to install it; use the evaluation copy and see if it works for them. It is pretty easy to use.

Features that are valuable to us are the business transaction transparency from one tier to the next and the ability to be able to drill down into the called stack. The ability to identify the stalled and error transactions in real time. And be able to investigate it, pick up the trends. That's one of the useful things. Because we use that as part of our root cause analysis and as a proactive, as well as a reactive way, to look at the incident and see what we can do to fix it.

For example, without getting in to the specifics of the issue, we've had some issues with our application where the capability in which we use tracing functionality to write the logs and stuff like that. And one of them had been enabled and it was writing it to a file instead of writing it to an HW, which was costing a lot of I/O. And unfortunately, at the time, the file share server that was taking all these logs was having an issue with the I/O. But it wasn't apparent because the experience of the customer was that the transaction was taking longer to complete. And we were trying to understand where's the bottleneck because everything looks healthy. But the requests kept stacking up.

But then, when we looked into the AppDynamics it make it very easy for us to identify that it was trying to write it to a log. And that operation, out of the entire chain, was this one step where it was trying to write to a location and that's where it was reporting a huge latency. In a matter of, I'd say about 15-20 minutes, we were able to trace it and be able to basically identify what the issue was and we fixed it. In fact, it drove a chain of reactions, in retrospect. Because obviously, it meant we need to look into these things much more carefully because to avoid these kind of incidents from happening in the future.

AppDynamics lets you find things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to see.
Without APM, you'd be spending a lot more time to try and investigate into all the individual event logs. Our services are massive. It's not a simple application with a front end and a back end. We have a lot of other micro-services that talk to each other. I think one of the trainers at a recent conference mentioned that one single touch starts a chain reaction. And when you have such a topology, it's very difficult manually to go through every single layer and figure out where the bottleneck is. Versus APM giving you an end-to-end workflow and gives you exactly which layer the AppDynamics thinks is having problem. Then it lets you drill down and further down. The zooming capability is brilliant.

I'm not aware that we use any other AppDynmics products along with APM. I've used the reporting and stuff like that. I'm part of an incident response team, so we are the command center for AppDynamics products. So we are more focused on the operation side of things.

One of the things that I've noticed is when you have a massive scale, turning on too much of data logging is not possible. So sometimes what's happening is we would use the snapshot capabilities to a minimum. But then what's happening as a result is we miss certain transactions and we need the snapshot.

I was working on a case and I knew what the problem was. I knew what the root cause was. I was trying to reproduce that case so I can collect the data in APM, which is a lot more user-friendly. Because I knew what the issue was, but if I needed to explain it to someone, I don't want to write an email. So I wanted a diagram view of what the issue was. And I was trying to reproduce it.

It took me a long time to get that snapshot in to the APM, because I think it wasn't taking very frequent snapshots. And it's probably the way we configured APM, because of the volume of data that generates it. They probably deemed it necessary to not just take every snapshot because obviously, it's a very expensive operation and it costs a lot of I/O and performance as well. So, that is something I would probably say that would be useful. To be able to say - I'd like to be able to do a snapshot much more frequently if it's possible in any way.

The monitoring capability could be improved. It's dateless right now. But, at a recent conference, I think one of the CTOs or COs mentioned that they're working with another monitoring solution to integrate it. But at the moment, it does have a monitoring capability, but it's very, very basic. Just to give you an example. Let's say if you get an alert, you don't want another alert in the next five minutes to say that it's down. You need to be able to increase the counter on that alert to say, look, it's still down but I don't want to trigger another alert. And every alert in our space would mean a ticket to our space. So you don't want to flag a hundred alerts for the same type of issue like a hundred times, if you know already what the issue is. So it's those capabilities. The integration, either with the existing monitoring capability, and that smooth transition. In fact, I was just looking at my email today. I have like 15 emails from APM. It's just way too much traffic for me.

Scalability is part of our day to-day jobs. At a recent conference, one of the trainers that mentioned very clearly that none of the databases are not growing. They are growing every day. The users are growing and the expectations are growing. They need faster and faster response times with complex systems. So, scalability is a number one priority for us. Because when the customer gets on-boarded, they are relatively small. But as the time passes by, they grow. But if you provision the capacity based on their initial requirements, eventually you'll hit a problem with the scalability.

So, it's very important to keep those factors in mind. And the best way to look at it is the usage analytics, the response rate. And the best part, and this is something that I took away from recent training is the base-lining. Because you don't want to be too late into identifying that you're hitting scalability issues. By then, customers would start experiencing issues. If you see that a deviation in the performance based on your baseline data, I think that's when you need to start thinking, okay, looks like the usage is going up. How do we scale better? How do we get more capacity, or fine tune if it's in any way possible, or distribute it? So, that's what I do every single day.

We have not really used technical support. I'm not on the side of configuring APM. I'm a user of APM. I just look at the data that it's already providing to me. Although there are a few questions, we usually pass them on to our guys who work with the AppDynamics to get them sorted out. I'm more of a subscriber to that.

I want a vendor to be honest. I've never been involved in those kind of conversations. But I'd expect them to tell me what exactly it does and what it exactly doesn't do. Nobody expects a product to be perfect. Nobody expects the product should have every single bell and whistle. But if you sell it that way, you're going to be disappointed. I'd rather know that upfront. And probably setup a roadmap and say, look, we are getting these features in the pipeline, which is a much more realistic conversation.

My advice is that just before you turn on APM, think about what's important to you. Just don't go ballistic on putting everything under the sun under the AppDynamics. The danger of doing so, the side effect of that is you're looking at way too much information and it gets foggy. Start with a subset that is critical to your business. Understand it from a customer perspective. Don't look at it from an operational perspective. Where do the customers feel the pain the most? Start with that and then start instrumenting those. Try and get as specific as possible because that way, whatever you're looking for in APM is important to you. If I'm an operations person and I'm dealing with hundreds of incidents every day, I'd like to see an incident that I'm absolutely working on. So try and reduce the noise ratio as much as possible. And try and look at the important ones that you should be straight away looking into and action on. I think that's probably the key advice that I would give anybody who wants to implement not just AppDynamics, but any APM into their products.

The most valuable feature of this product is figuring out problems before the customers find out.

This APM tool has helped our organization to find problems before customers find them.

We are able to see how our application scales under load. We are able to simulate that in the load environment and then prepare for the expected volume.

Specific to our environment here, we use .NET and they have more features for the Java platform. So I would like to see all the features that are currently in Java translated to .NET.

The stability of this product is very good. We have experienced no issues with downtime.

This product has scaled well.

Everything was carried out in a timely manner with technical support.

Our sales manager has constantly been in touch with us and given us the resources we need. Even when we do not follow up on certain issues, their engineers get us on the right track and they are really helpful.

We started off with a Microsoft product. We looked at a product called Microsoft Azure Application Insights.

Since our parent company has partnered with AppDynamics, they referred this product to us. Once we found about it, we installed and tested it and realized it performs all the features of the other competitive product we looked at; it may even have more features. Thus, the selection process was quite straightforward.

I was involved in the initial setup along with our team of engineers. It was mostly straightforward. We experienced some hurdles here and there in regards to the mission level monitoring agents. However, we were able to contact support and get that figured out; the mission agents are really straightforward.

In my opinion, training definitely helps if you are looking to choose a similar solution. You should start off with some initial training.

There are a lot of nuances and you have to know how to use this product in a manner where it is going to be most useful to you and this is where the training will help. After that, everything is straightforward.

It is an excellent product for application performance monitoring.

No visibility from application code-level failures: It used to take a lot of effort, but after we implemented this solution, we can easily determine the root cause of issues.

Code-level deep dive analysis and automated application flow service models: Companies maintaining strict compliance such as PCI, etc., can easily use AppDynamics without any restrictions, because it has a completely web-based interface and there is no client.

Use of BCI (Byte Code Instrumentation) is also a key feature that helps AppDynamics to fetch maximum information via Java agents without consuming a lot resources on the application servers.

In the current version of AppDynamics, there is a correlated section, where we can see all servers’ performance along with application performance, but network performance is missing. Including network monitoring would provide an end-to-end correlated view of all factors in a single console view.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

Our Customers previously used APM solutions like DynaTrace, TMART, New Relic, etc.

Initial setup was straightforward. Just install the agent; it will discover all of the relationships and communicate with each and every component of the running application.

We evaluated almost all other similar products, as per the Gartner report. AppDynamics is the best fit as an Application Performance Management solution.

Just go for it.

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.