Monitoring log and statistics using graphs to see how we are monitoring our network traffic, and whether systems are healthy or not.
Software Engineer at a tech company with 201-500 employees
We can dive deeply into the product to see what is happening by troubleshooting, debugging, and monitoring
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature is having our services being available and healthy."
- "Sometimes, it is hard to navigate through and find if something is wrong or figure out where an error stemmed from."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
In real-time, when we have our peak seasons, we can determine if customers are experiencing something that they are not supposed to, such as customer impact on a service being down or not.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is having our services being available and healthy. We can determine whether or not, at a given point in time, something is wrong. Then, we can dive deeply into the product to see what is happening by troubleshooting, debugging, and monitoring.
What needs improvement?
Sometimes, it is hard to navigate through and find if something is wrong or figure out where an error stemmed from. I would like AppDynamics to be easier to navigate in.
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For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have not seen any issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I usually don't see any issues with scalability, and we have pretty large servers.
Our environment is huge. Within a season, we have hundreds of thousands of current users.
How are customer service and support?
I haven't used technical support.
How was the initial setup?
The integration and configuration of the product in our AWS environment was easy. AWS made it easy.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I was not involved in the decision-making process.
I would still use AppDynamics now, because I haven't seen another player on the market give us exactly what we want that AppDynamics can't. There are a lot of companies who are doing the exact same thing and trying to put their own spin on it, but there is no reason for me to pick another competitor.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
IT FrontOffice & QA Manager at VENCA
Used to test customer behavior on a website. The QA and test environment need improvement.
Pros and Cons
- "It is used to test customer behavior on a website."
- "The QA and test environment need improvement."
What is our primary use case?
Testing the customer behavior to learn their problems on a website, the heatmap flow, and other information.
What needs improvement?
- IT department
- Software production
- Test environment
- QA testing
- KPIs of the business
- Heatmap
- An APM
For how long have I used the solution?
Trial/evaluations only.
What other advice do I have?
This tool is so good to work with.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
AppDynamics
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about AppDynamics. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
831,071 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Senior Consultant with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has helped us to increase customer acquisitions and reduce revenue leakage
Pros and Cons
- "Has helped us to increase customer acquisitions and reduce revenue leakage."
- "There needs to be an option to capture all the sessions for all the users, not just samplings."
What is our primary use case?
For customer journey monitoring: Stitch together complex journeys involving the entire ecosystem (internal through external IT) and multiple stakeholders.
How has it helped my organization?
Has helped us to increase customer acquisitions and reduce revenue leakage in the following:
- Conversion rates
- Average revenue per user
- Customer acquisition costs
- Rate of customer churn
- Recurring or incremental revenue
- Renewals and/or subscriptions.
What is most valuable?
End user experience monitoring, which includes:
- Uptime (availability)
- App response time
- Database response time
- Percentage of transaction time spent in database
- Resource utilization
- Database query times.
What needs improvement?
Areas which could be improved:
- Integrated dashboard for user
- Application
- Infrastructure
- Network layers.
There also needs to be an option to capture all the sessions for all the users, not just samplings.
For how long have I used the solution?
Three to five years.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Application Architect at T2 systems
lets us quickly diagnose customer problems that occurred in production
What is most valuable?
Being able to quickly diagnose customer issues and their performance problems.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability has been fine. I have not had any problems.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Software Development Consultant at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
It shows how all the components in the infrastructure work together to run an application.
What is most valuable?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using AppDynamics for about four years now.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
The controller and the agents are easy to deploy; 30 minutes at the most.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In the years that we have used AppDynamics, we never encountered stability problems.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We only encountered scalability issues when switching agents over servers related to the license structure.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
The level of customer service is very good.
Technical Support:Questions are answered within 24 hours. When there is an issue, real effort is made to help.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
It was very easy to install and setup. If the environment is complex, AppDynamics will help to make the best suitable setup.
What about the implementation team?
We made an in-house implementation and configuration with help of technical support.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Monitoring Lead at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees
We use it to monitor end-user responses and track how many calls are being made.
What is most valuable?
Right now, we are using it for monitoring our mobile and user interfaces. We monitor the application in terms of the business transactions. We monitor end-user responses and then we track how many calls we are making from the balancer, which is impossible to track with any other applications.
How has it helped my organization?
We have moved our application from on premise to Azure. After we moved to Azure, we don't have an on-premise monitoring tool, for what we are supposed to be using it. AppDynamics has come in handy. We are able to monitor all of the cloud services, we are able to monitor all the VMs on it, and we are able to monitor the Azure services, too.
What needs improvement?
There are many features we’d like to see in upcoming releases, which we have already mentioned to the accounts team. They're working on it; we expect to get some kind of releases from them.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have been using it for the past two-and-a-half years. We migrated from the older version to the current version. We feel like it's better, it's improving. Initially, we had stability issues but now it's fine.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We are using the HA version of it and we find scalability to be good.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is pretty good. They're very at you; we get the response immediately.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We are no longer using the previous solution. We were using it for on premise. When we moved from on premise to Azure, we started using AppDynamics. We evaluated some other tools, but we found AppDynamics to be very good.
How was the initial setup?
When we did the initial setup, for the Windows platform, it was straightforward, but the Linux version was a little complicated, but it's not that hard.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated Logility; some other tools, such as Log Analytics, as well; and then even some related to Splunk. We do use Splunk, as well, with AppDynamics; both are currently used.
As far as the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, it's not my selection. The management finds out what AppDynamics can do and then looks at their business relationship with them. It's more like a business partner, as opposed to being just a customer that is using a product and not knowing what the product is going to come out with. In those terms, I think the AppDynamics team is very helpful to us and they have been like a part of our external organization.
What other advice do I have?
We became 100% dependent on AppDynamics after we started using it. Apart from some performance issues, we haven’t found any major issues with AppDynamics. Some of the services are not available with Azure, such as IoT and so on, but other than that, 90% of our monitoring depends on AppDynamics.
We also use AppDynamics’ End User Monitoring and Mobile User Monitoring.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Software Engineer Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
We are able to figure out problems before the customers find them. It also lets us see how our application scales under load.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of this product is figuring out problems before the customers find out.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of this product is very good. We have experienced no issues with downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This product has scaled well.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Production Support Analyst III/ Enterprise Monitoring at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
We needed application interrogation. Technical support is top notch.
What is most valuable?
The application interrogation and business transaction mapping are the most valuable features.
How has it helped my organization?
It allows us to quickly get to a mean time to repair by identifying the problem a lot faster.
What needs improvement?
I would like to see better dashboarding and an easier way to redefine transaction names.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability’s fine; it’s pretty stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It definitely is scalable over many different applications.
How are customer service and technical support?
AppDynamics technical support is top notch.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were not previously using any solution. We knew that we needed to find some way to do some application interrogation.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Updated: January 2025
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Browser RUM collects data on every load event that you have instrumented, and it also takes detailed snapshots periodically and when performance issues are detected. Over time, the load event metrics are rolled up based on averages and percentiles. Sometimes you want to see results based on all of the data.
With Browser Analyze, every single event is collected and stored for a license specified period in the AppDynamics Platform Events Service. Using the Analyze tab you can see results based on this cumulative data.