AppDynamics Reviews

The most valuable features are:

• Automatic flow maps to visualize application environment
• Snapshots of method-level execution timing
• Automatic baselines of all metrics
• Native mobile agent

The product has improved our understanding of system performance. It has given us more time to find and fix problems.

This product could be improved by having a cross-application flow that can split the monitored systems into smaller business applications. I would like to see more flexible custom dashboards.

We have used this solution for four years.

The earlier version of the .NET agent had some problems with stability and performance, but I found no stability issues with the current version.

If you design a very big business application, visibility will suffer due to a large number of tiers and transactions.

The technical support was one of the absolute best in the industry. Tickets are promptly processed and escalated. There was no terrible first level support to 'get through' before getting to the right level. I was able to get the level of support I needed right away.
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I had a brief experience with Dynatrace at another company.

It was very simple to install the controller and install some of the agents with default settings.

Get the full scope of the price including analytics, real-user monitoring (RUM) and anything that might be relevant from the start. You might get a worse price when adding licenses in the middle of a licensing period since you are already locked in.

We evaluated Dynatrace before we chose this product.

Take some time to train technicians and development personal who will use the tool. Make sure you design the correct Business Applications and Business Transactions.

We are using AppDynamics for application management.

It is easy to gain visibility into complex environments with AppDynamics. It has the ability to combine operation information of the environment and business information with strong business IQ support. 

The solution makes it easy to find the root cause of the problems and provided the visualization of data. It is really simple, useful, and intuitive. 

It enables integration with other systems very easily. It can monitor applications of different technologies as well as manage log files. 

It has a lot of capabilities and the solution features function well overall.

The solution could improve by covering more technologies. For example, it does support .NET Core applications. However, it could be a bit better. Additionally, there are some outdated technologies which are not covered out of the box with this solution, such as C++ which is old technology. They can be monitored but it takes a bit more effort. They have done a decent job but they could improve.

I have used AppDynamics for approximately seven years.

It is highly scalable. You can go from a small deployment into tens of thousands of nodes to monitor an application.

We provide support for this solution. We are the biggest AppDynamics partner in Europe, we have approximately 60 experts.

We work closely with research and development. They are quite quick and flexible when it comes to helping and supporting. We are quite satisfied. When we come from the field directly, we do not need months or weeks to fix issues that we have found or to implement new features. They have been excellent.

I am more in the pre-sales department, I am not that technical, but I do understand and know the basics. The installation difficulty depends on a variety of factors. it can be simple. Out of the box, it is already quite simple. However, there are tons of specifics that you need to know, but it is not overly difficult for typical environments. The software can add another layer of difficulty. Overall the difficulty is dependant on the environment.

For those who appreciate the value and had issues with the visibility of the performance of their applications, then the pricing is good. For somebody who does not need it, it can be pricey, but overall, it is worth the money which it costs.

I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for application monitoring and the alerting mechanism.

We have a complex platform infrastructure, deployed in multiple JBoss Fuse, ActiveMQ, and Data Grid servers.

It improves our organization by providing the right alerts, and there are so many parameters to choose from that it allows us to set the right level of alerting mechanism for approximately one hundred and twenty services.

The most valuable feature is the detailed statistics, like the consumer count, for the ActiveMQ server. It is amazing.

It helps to monitor our complex infrastructure very effectively.

Rolling out version upgrades is a difficult job at times.

• Business Transaction Tracking
• HTTP Header values
• Introspecting slow and error transaction at different tier levels
• Analytics helps to group business calls based on vendor by using HTTP values

• Finds the bugs in dev and test environments before they escape into staging/prod
• Helps to pinpoint where the issue is by application tier
• Identify performance bottlenecks
• Group business calls (API) by vendor
• The above key points mentioned have helped the DevOps team work more effectively and reduce the turnaround time between releases
• Reduced the debug time

The primary feature we are looking for is tracking async calls because most of our API are async calls. We cannot view HTTP data.

We require a seamless way to upgrade the controller and .NET agents.

The plugins available are tedious to use and not robust, e.g. URL monitoring.

The application(controller) is very heavy on hardware. This increases our cloud cost.

It should be more intuitive and provide better metrics when drilling down in the UI.

1. Instrumenting Async method calls:
   For example, let's say we have Async Rest API call written in C#.net with this method - public async long Multiply (int x, inty). Now this call may take 5-15 seconds for REST Response. In AppDynamcis we have an option to instruement a specific method by providing the method definition and its parameters passed and returned values. We can define as variable data collectors to do this, and this is available with the drill down of the call stack. The data collector or variables should show the value which doesn't, and we also tried the diagnostic mode where we can introduce a delay. Though AppDynamics say there are settings to enable tracking of Async calls, but I think it's more inclined and friendly for POJO(Java) calls than POCO(dotnet) calls.
   
2. HTTP Data Collector for Async calls:
   In the above example, if we like to see the HTTP data collectors then there is an option to view the HTTP header variables and custom variables. However, there is no way to see the JSON request and Response data in AppDynamics. I can view this in IE or Chrome using developer tools on the client but not within AppDynamics. I'm not sure if this feature is available in EUM which we haven't procured yet. Also, I don't rule out possibility I might have over looked something and missed it, but I really tried to get this working. Also, the AppDynamics team failed to assist to get this working.
   
3. Plug-in's tried:(SQL monitoring and URL monitoring)
   There was a requirement where we wanted to query our database directly and display certain values (integer) in the AppDynamics UI for monitoring, say, a number of active sessions or database locks etc. Though AppDynamics doesn't provide an out of the box solution, the plug-in's available on Git-Hub which are claimed to be stable aren't working either. Ultimately, we succeed in writing custom VBS files which leverages database machine agent service provided by the tool. With this tool we dump the data to metrics file and manage to integrate. This was very good experience to get our hands around and customize few things which not found in the community of AppDynamics.

This also goes with URL monitoring script provided by community in Git-Hub and also Plug-In repositories on the AppDynamics site. This plug-in is a little tedious to configure because of the YAML file, and only supports HTTP 200 is alive i.e ping request to PORT 80. There's no script for login automation. Again we managed to write custom scripts here for logging using VBS.

There seems to be a certain disconnect between the AppDynamics development and support teams. Maybe because this is a developer intensive engineering tool and support guys need to understand the framework of .NET or a Java ecosystem and applications that cut across various design architectures. This could be a gap which AppDynamics needs to bridge.

I have used this solution for one year.

The controller slows down with Windows platforms.

Sometimes the MySQL process of the AppDynamics controller takes lot of memory and the controller hangs, despite configuring it as per requirement.

Since the application is agent driven (client side), if we need to upgrade the .NET agents on 100 servers, then we need to visit 100 servers to upgrade or deploy them.

The technical capabilities of people sitting in technical support is questionable. The reason being this is an engineering tool for application instrumentation both for .NET and Java. We have asked queries and also raised some issues. For most of the issues, especially regarding tracking async for .NET API, we never received a solution. Also, some configuration issues where primitive in nature but not resolved immediately.

The technical documentation contradicts technical support.

We started using version 3.8 of the tool, and since then, I don't see many changes on the support side.

No, we didn’t use anything in the past for application monitoring. This was the best out there in the market as per evaluation by market research. The tool was a good fit when we did a POC.

Initial setup was complex.

Setting up configuration to track the metrics is little tedious.

Understanding the metrics numbers is little confusing as they contradict, e.g. The number of API calls displayed on the main screen is different than on the analytics screen.

A normal user would find it difficult to understand and read the metrics, because too much drill down is necessary, and the numbers are difficult to interpret and relate to the problem.

Implementation was done in house. The tool is configuration intensive. A good development and operations team need to know the application dynamics to configure this application.

Since it’s high on budget, it’s recommended to buy a developer license and play around with this tool in a dev environment and then procure for production.

I don't think premium vendor support is required for setup and configuration.

We haven’t reached the stage where we calculate ROI, as we are in the early stages of onboarding customers. We can probably gauge this once we have a sizable number of customers on board, which will take time. Measuring ROI will be calculated by using the API call tracking by customer and also the turnaround time (time saving) in the early stages of development cycle.

The pricing is way too high, especially with the analytics feature and end-user monitoring.

They have separate licensing offerings for development and production.

The best option is to get into an engagement for a few months before procuring this tool.

This is purely an application instrumentation and monitoring tool with good features for business analytics.

It is probably more integrated and works well with Java application, as some features for .NET don't work.

Host the AppDynamics controller on a Linux machine with a medium or high profile. A Windows server machine would show symptoms of disliking it within 2 to 3 weeks of setup.

It is not comparable with infrastructure tools. The plug-in available to track infrastructure-related activities are not stable and not robust.

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 it to monitor the load testing environment.

It has improved our organization with its ability to catch issues quickly and fix them.

• Code profiling
• Monitoring

The cost is prohibitive.

We are a solution provider and I am a presales engineer. AppDynamics is one of the products that we implement for our clients and have experience with.

At this time, I'm using it for training purposes, for the team.

The features that I like best are the dashboard and Business Journey.

AppDynamics is dealing with a lot of products and technologies, so we need to have clear documentation.

The community support needs to be a little bit better.

In the future, I would like to see the inclusion of better programming language options. This would allow for wider use, and make it more versatile.

I have been working with AppDynamics for about nine months.

AppDynamics is stable and we haven't faced any bugs.

As we are not an AppDynamics end-user, our experience with technical support is different. At the same time, from a support perspective, I have dealt with the AppDynamics community. I would say that support from the community is good enough, although it is not amazing. I think that community support needs to be a little better.

We did not work with another similar solution prior to AppDynamics. We are a Cisco partner, so we keep moving forward with the same technology.

The first time I deployed AppDynamics wasn't very easy because I didn't have much experience with Linux. However, aside from the Linux-related issues, I found it totally easy.

The deployment is really quick, taking just two or three days. However, we need more time for configuration. If the deployment is good then the configuration will take about one more week.

We do the implementation in-house. We have three people who are working with it.

AppDynamics is a good product and I totally recommend it. Once you feel that you have the full journey for your end-users and you are tracking them, it's awesome. Overall, I am very happy with this product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.