AppDynamics Reviews

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.

Once all the metrics are collated during the analysis phase, the troubleshooting section is very important to me. It provides the entire overview of the performance bottlenecks at different layers of the application landscape.

It helps me to prioritize my activities in solving or fine-tuning the application. It helps me in my interactions with the development, infrastructure, and operations teams.

This solution helps us conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of critical performance issues. We can communicate clearly with detailed insights. This saves time and prevents ambiguities.

As a performance engineering architect and a practice evangelist for performance engineering practice, this has enabled our performance tester to provide more engineering value-based solutions/deep dives. These showed how the applications fared during the load conditions and linked the performance bottleneck to the exact line of code.

This practice has transitioned our testers to “engineers”. AppDynamics solutions complement performance testing.

I would like to see the following:

• A better way to export data to reports.
• A better way of distributing the AppDynamics reports with deep dive details.
• Better integration with load testing tools such as NeoLoad and JMeter. The current integration is very cumbersome.

I have been using APM tools since 2004. I have been implementing this solution across different industries for the past year and a half.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

Technical support is very good. We have a good team working with Wipro and AppDynamics.

The auto-discovery was good. It was a straightforward configuration of agents on web and app servers.

I truly appreciated the SaaS license mode that provides the AppDynamics controller on the cloud. There are bits and pieces of licenses that need to be procured in order to have a complete APM. This includes application, server health, browser-level monitoring, UEM, and DB monitoring.

When you add this all up, the price is not appealing. The procurement of AppDynamics licenses is a bit tricky. You need to be careful with it.

AppDynamics has come a long way in terms of user friendliness with day-to-day use. This solution has an edge over others in terms of adaptability between team members with different roles and responsibilities.

You should start off with application monitoring licenses which provide very user-friendly functionality. You need to spend more time to generate the reports with deeper insights.

The application interrogation and business transaction mapping are the most valuable features.

It allows us to quickly get to a mean time to repair by identifying the problem a lot faster.

I would like to see better dashboarding and an easier way to redefine transaction names.

Stability’s fine; it’s pretty stable.

It definitely is scalable over many different applications.

AppDynamics technical support is top notch.

We were not previously using any solution. We knew that we needed to find some way to do some application interrogation.

I'm not sure what my current company looked at before they brought it in.

At previous companies, I've looked at AppDynamics competitors including New Relic, Dynatrace and BMC APM.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is functionality and ease of implementation.

Do your homework and make sure that AppDynamics is right for you. I'm pretty sure it would be.

It works really well. It does its job, as far as digging into the Java and finding out what the problems are when they occur in real time.

We are not using APM with other AppDynamics products.

We've used AppDynamics to easily identify application slowdowns and rectify them on several occasions. It has also helped in our QA environment to analyze new releases and ensure they are not harming performance.

Stack trace of PHP calls through the application and timings of those calls.

None.

Just that we've run out of agents in our license :P :(

Customer Service: 10 out of 10, all our questions and issues have been addressed and resolved quickly.Technical Support: 10 out of 10, as above, all questions and issues have been addressed and resolved quickly.

No, AppDynamics was our first.

Very simple- install controller, install agents, configure agents, done.

In-house

Quicker turnaround on finding/resolving issues or improving performance, which leads to improved client experiences.

We investigated several other APM solutions prior to going with AppDynamics, specifically New Relic and dynaTrace.

Read up on documentation, and play around with the config settings, there is a vast wealth of information that can be retrieved if you know how to look for it.

We have been able to proactively correct issues from newly launched applications without even receiving complaints from the end users, and the amazement of users when you notify them personally that an error they never reported has been corrected is priceless.

The detailed metrics that are collected about the JVM and the transaction snapshots, those have been most valuable to us to correct complex bugs.

The granularity of historic data could be improved.

The Java agent never was the cause of any application crash since we've used them.

So far we have never reached the limits of AppDynamics Pro, it scales at our pace.

Customer Service: AppDynamics is one of those rare companies that put the customer experience first. Once you become a customer you are appointed a technical account manager that helps you get the most out of your investment. I have a conference call with mine every other week and it really improves our understanding and use of the solution.Technical Support: Very good, we never had any major issue and we have always been helped promptly.

We did not use a comparable solution before, we choose AppDynamics when we initially compared the different Application Performance Management solutions.

Setting up AppDynamics is a breeze. We never encountered any installation issue nor with the Java agents, machine agents or the controller. We always installed the components ourselves without any help other than the documentation.

As mentioned before we implemented it ourselves without any external help.

Our ROI is very good, the areas that profited the most were productivity, customer experience, software quality and bug fixing time.

AppDynamics was chosen over several competitors which we evaluated: CA Wiley and Compuware dynaTrace.

I rate the AppDynamics Pro usability, stability and customer experience as the best. This solution is very advanced and they keep on improving the features that make it great. Once you use AppDynamics it feels like you were standing in the dark before. Implementing it is a breeze even if you never used it before, and out of the box it gives you so much useful information that you only need to fine-tune it. I never heard of any other product that is up and running this fast.

I am using AppDynamics in order to monitor Java applications.

It helped to find quick solutions for specific business transactions. For example, in the case of slowness or a job being stuck at some stage.

The most valuable features are Data Flow and memory monitoring.

As per my experience, the drill-down feature can be improved at the class level.

It should generate a report similar to what Oracle provides.

I have been using AppDynamics for two years.

AppDynamics monitors the ICT environment by just installing a Java or .NET agent and machine agent on the server. It shows how all the components in the infrastructure work together to run an application. You can pinpoint easily where the performance issues for your application are.

We once installed an agent on an IIS server and then noticed that there was a memory issue on this server. Also, we once had performance issues on a Websphere application server, which was caused by memory leaks in the JVM. The IBM tooling did not warn for this, but AppDynamics showed it was a problem, because you can look at the data over a longer period.

We solved one issue with performance on our online application, which was caused by a slow batch application running on the same server/database.

One thing that can be improved is the license structure. It is not easy to see which agent is included in the license and which is not.

We have been using AppDynamics for about four years now.

The controller and the agents are easy to deploy; 30 minutes at the most.

In the years that we have used AppDynamics, we never encountered stability problems.

We only encountered scalability issues when switching agents over servers related to the license structure.

The level of customer service is very good.

Questions are answered within 24 hours. When there is an issue, real effort is made to help.

Previously, we used the hardware monitoring and logging tools of the hardware vendors. This meant several different views on our environment.

We used IBM tooling and Oracle monitoring tools. For Java applications, we used the monitoring tools of the JVM.

It was very easy to install and setup. If the environment is complex, AppDynamics will help to make the best suitable setup.

We made an in-house implementation and configuration with help of technical support.

Configuration in the IT environment is very important. It has to be done with the vendor, our development teams, our infra support teams and the business.

Testing the customer behavior to learn their problems on a website, the heatmap flow, and other information.

• IT department
• Software production
• Test environment
• QA testing
• KPIs of the business
• Heatmap
• An APM

This tool is so good to work with.