AppDynamics Reviews

The most valuable feature is mainly the graphs that it puts together; the JVM, the heaps, the classes that get called, the number of calls from tiers to tiers.

I think the graphs are mainly used by developers to see what happens in production. We don't know; our workloads. We've been exposed to the internet. We don't know what's coming.

I would like, for example, to see something similar to a heap dump; exactly which objects are over there. I'm not sure it's possible or not. This is a challenge.

A friend compares it to JavaMelody, which I think gives them some of the features that they still want that application to be active. I think it's mainly about the number of threads, SQL executions and similar items, at a certain point in time when you look at them. That could be something.

Sometimes, it can be a little bit too crowded; all the screens. Once you put your dashboards together and you know exactly what you're looking for, it's OK. But if you're always trying to find new problems that you don't know about, maybe that's a little bit harder.

I haven’t had any stability or scalability issues; that's good.

I haven’t had to use technical support.

It kind of came my way from the development team. We used to have Confio Ignite, which was pretty good for me. Then we dropped everything, and then at some point, we needed something new, and we came across AppDynamics.

In general, when I’m considering vendors to work with, I look for the quality of the product and the support. I don't want to be offered professional services every time I call in for an issue, because we are kind of self-reliant. Those are the two things I look for.

Initially, I had the internal controller, which was a little bit more challenging, but then we switched to the cloud ones. It's just easier, I guess.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options.

It's very easy. It's been easy. The dashboard that comes automatically, the mapping with all the services, the externals; those are all pretty good.

I do not use any other AppDynamics solution.

The most valuable feature is the ability for developers to do performance analysis functions by functions, be able to understand response time, and be able to improve code when they need to.

I can’t really discuss organizational improvements, yet. We're still at the early adoption stage with AppDynamics.

The big feature that I would love to see is the ability to extract all the data automatically into some type of a data repository, big data lake, or something where we can do even deeper analysis of the data that AppDynamics gives us.

So far, stability and scalability have been really good. We haven't had any scalability or stability problems.

We have opened very, very few tickets; low numbers. We've been satisfied with technical support.

Initial setup has been pretty straightforward.

Get your developers trained as soon as possible. They're going to be the ones who need to utilize it.

AppDynamics is a complete tool for server and usability monitoring.

I've been working with AppDynamics for the past two years.

Once you get past installation, AppDynamics is highly stable and we get good results.

AppDynamics is scalable.

AppDynamics technical support is good.

AppDynamics is easy to use overall, but the installation part is a battle. Installation and configuration can be very tough. An average user without specialized knowledge can't do this. You need to have DevOps and QA teams handle it. During installation, a lot of customers get stuck trying to track the database or the API part, and they have to contact customer support.

AppDynamics is a bit costly for an APM tool. The cheapest is New Relic. 
AppDynamics and Dynatrace are about the same. 

I also use Dynatrace with some of my customers' companies. It's a much better product than AppDynamics in terms of features and ease of installation. 

I rate AppDynamics five out of 10. 

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.