AppDynamics Reviews

We use the solution to monitor transactions and to keep track of, like, data analytics.

I like that AppDynamics allows every organization to have what they want to see, like for my organization, we're able to customize the dashboard to show us details of what we want to see in our transactions. So, it shows us the transactions that are coming in, outgoing transactions, and field transactions. So, we had the freedom to customize, and I think that was priceless.

Regarding Search Guard functionality, there is room for improvement. Also, I think it was pretty good for the area I used.

I have experience with AppDynamics.

I rate the solution's stability as a ten out of ten because it is a very stable platform.

It was scalable on other platforms where we needed to buy licenses because we simply had to customize it again to accommodate whatever we were adding. We didn't use it much since many users weren't using it. It was just for the IT and executive personnel who wanted to view the dashboard. Yeah. So, it was quite easy. Up to 200 users were using the solution.

The initial setup was quite easy because we were given an option or leverage to ask AppDynamics to send staff members over for training. After that training, they were able to come back and deploy the solution for us. So, the process was quite easy, and they were also offering support. For deployment, we prefer to deploy it on-premises. So, we have it in our DR and production environment. The deployment process didn't take long since it was done by AppDynamics' team, which is quite a big institution.

We did the implementation ourselves, but we had their support virtually.

I have experienced an ROI using the solution. So, AppDynamics provides us with details to have a live view of our transactions, especially whenever we're having failures, during which we have a live view of it provided by the monitoring guys. We link it to our MySQL so we can query what transactions are failing or what error they are getting. So we know what the customers are facing from the comfort of our offices. The solution was worth the money.

There were no added costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Since it is an excellent application, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. I would suggest others use the products and just make sure that they get in touch with the administrator of AppDynamics so that they can devote their time and energy to learning about it so that they can at least administer the platform properly.

On-premises

We use it for performance and transaction trace monitoring. We use it for .Net and the JVM-related work. We look at all the heat maps and the Garbage Collection to see if there are any failures. 

It gives me the ability to trace logs between transactions, for example, a DB transaction or JVM transaction from one hub to the other. I can easily find out where the problem is or where the bottleneck of the issues lies. 

The overall performance of this solution could be improved. The hot-hot infrastructure features could also be improved. If one goes down, the other should pick up automatically. When we patch one data center, the other primary or secondary center needs to be manually started. We need to do a manual sync between the database and the AppDynamics applications.

I have been using this solution for four years. 

This is a stable solution. The only drawback is that it is not a cluster environment and it doesn't have hot-hot features.

This is a scalable solution but we would like more options to hold more licenses. Right now we have 30,000 agents using this solution.

The technical support for this solution is good.

Positive

Before AppDynamics we used a product called BlueStripe that was acquired by Microsoft. 

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. The deployment is also straightforward because we used some of the provisioning tools to package the software and distribute it. Creating dashboards and fine-tuning JVMs took some time. 

This solution has really helped us to improve some of the performance of the JVMs at an early point in coding.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

On-premises

AppDynamics is primarily used in our enterprise system management for application monitoring. We extensively use it to monitor end-user experience, including mobile applications. We want to ensure that our users have a seamless experience on our website and mobile app. We use AppDynamics to monitor all applications end to end, and it has been a valuable tool in our environment for identifying and resolving issues quickly.

The best features of AppDynamics would be the code application monitoring capabilities. There are no limitations to any specific application, and their support extends to all levels, including mainframe and custom applications. AppDynamics can also be used as a SaaS model, which is a key advantage.

One area for improvement is the MST model. It would be more helpful if it could be offered as a managed service provider model with more multi-tenancy and features.

The focus is still limited to application monitoring. However, in the next release, I want to see if it could be integrated with any other infrastructure monitoring tool or provide better deliverables in terms of absorbency layers; that would be a great option. I'm not sure how AppDynamics delivers that, and it's an approval delay. That use case will integrate with any monitoring tool to provide the absorbent layer; that is the better option, which I look forward to.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

I would rate stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate scalability an eight out of ten.

We used Dynatrace, which is also a performance monitoring solution. Dynatrace is similar to AppDynamics in terms of its capabilities. But Dynatrace is an expensive affair as compared to AppDynamics.

The initial setup is not complex. I would rate it a nine out of ten. The deployment depends on the use case. For example, taking one application will take hardly a week to cover the end to end.

The pricing of AppDynamics is a nine, with one being low and ten being high. It is high.

I would recommend using AppDynamics integrated with an infrastructure monitoring tool, and it will provide a better benefit.

Overall, I would rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten. From an overall product standpoint, AppDynamics has better sustainability in the market with continued support. They also have a roadmap for upcoming releases that aligns with all the monthly activities.

It helps us find the root cause quicker, so it's helped us with MTTI and MTTR. In fact, just last week, we had an issue. They used our other tools to try to find the solution, and they said, “This is the root cause.” Then, we were analyzing it in AppDynamics, and we said, “You know what? We're seeing something different.” They doubled back and realized that what AppDynamics had shown was actually the root cause, not what they were initially thinking was the root cause.

AppDynamics is very easy to use, and easy to deploy in our environment, especially because we're a central organization that helps other application teams with their APM solution. For me, that flow map makes all the difference for the customers. You show them the flow map. You tell them, “OK, green is good, yellow is a problem, and red is warning. Where do you see your problem?” They're like, “Right there.” That makes life a lot easier, compared to all the other tools that I've used in the past.

That visual representation’s been really good, also the overhead that AppDynamics creates is quite small. We've tried Dynatrace in the past. Some of the applications didn't work as well with Dynatrace. Those are two of the things that makes AppDynamics different.

Get me Blitz; basically, their next generation architecture, which they're actually running in their SaaS environment. Instead of having just one, big controller with a gigantic database behind it, they're moving towards a more distributed storage, which would be horizontally scalable. We've been looking for it for almost a year now.

I would be willing to pilot it in my non-prod environment, just to see how it works, because ultimately that's going to give us the same visibility that we're getting right now, but we can just keep scaling; just keep pumping more and more applications. As the controller gets bogged down, we just add more hardware. That's going to be key for us.

We've had some growing pains with AppDynamics but overall, the products been very stable. Their support’s awesome, so whenever we have issues, we open a support ticket. They jump on and they come up with a solution to help us. Even with the few minor hiccups that we've had, I would say overall, it’s very stable.

Scalability is excellent. In the last year, we've gone from a few hundred metrics to close to 10,000 metrics per minute injestion.

I haven't seen any other vendor even come close to AppDynamics’ support. I've been raving about them. I have told the guy that runs their support organization, how great he's doing the job.

The thing that sets them apart is, if I have an issue, I open a ticket with them. Within 2-4 hours, I have the solution. I don't get an email saying, "We're looking into it.", and then not hear from them for two days or for a week, which I've had with other APM providers.

With AppDynamics, they're on it. If they can't find a solution, they're going to get on a GoToMeeting to duplicate the problem. They'll get their engineers involved. We've had multiple times when they got the developers involved on the GoToMeeting because the support guy couldn't get beyond that. He just got the developer for that product involved to come up with a solution.

It’s a funny story. The PoV was done before I joined the company. I was a Dynatrace user, Intrascope, New Relic. I've done pretty much all the major APM providers in my career. At my previous job, I was using Dynatrace and my entire interview was, “Why are you guys using AppDynamics instead of Dynatrace?” I'd done a PoC of AppDynamics about five years ago. At that time, the product was in its infancy and it didn't really provide what we were looking for. There were a lot of issues; they were at version 2 or something like that at that time. When I joined the company, it had already been decided that AppDynamics was what we were going to use, so I didn't have a say in that.

Very quickly, my impression of the product changed. As I used it, I was like, "Whoa!" Between version whatever that I PoV'd with in the past compared to version 4, there was a night-and-day difference. Very quickly, I became a proponent of AppDynamics.

Our setup was quite complex. Our leadership decided that we were going to use one controller for everything, and we've got thousands of applications. Now, they're reaching the point where they’re realizing that it's not feasible to have just one controller for our huge infrastructure.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, until we started pushing some really heavy applications, and then we started seeing problems. We got involved with some of their tuning experts. They're basically getting every ounce of power out of the machine that they can. It's been an excellent journey.

Dynatrace was on the short list. My predecessor did a comparison between the two tools. One of the issues that we saw with Dynatrace was scalability. Dynatrace itself pushes so much information. It's capturing every single transaction, compared to AppDynamics, which captures a subset of the transactions. For Dynatrace, you just need massive hardware and you have to have multiple servers because you run out of space very quickly. That was one of the issues with Dynatrace.

The other issue was it didn't play nicely with some of our applications. We actually saw problems with one of our critical business applications that we were doing a PoV with. When we put AppDynamics on that same application, we didn't see any issues. Dynatrace was creating quite a large memory overhead; AppDynamics, under 1%.

When I'm looking for a vendor, before, the most important criteria used to be, what does the tool provide, but after working with AppDynamics, it's support. It doesn't matter how great the tool is; if the support isn't that good, you can't get the most out of the tool.

Do a PoV of AppDynamics on a critical application. Get that initial win, and use that win to drive adoption throughout the organization.

I haven’t rated it higher because of the comparison between AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Dynatrace does give you more, richer information, but it's not scalable. There are certain things that I kind of miss with AppDynamics but it's not something that I'm going to cry about because of the other overall value that it provides, and the ease of use of it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we're also using RUM and Mobile UM.

We use AppDynamics to monitor application performance.

I like how the AppDynamics dashboard portrays the information flows. When a task is executed, various flows between different applications and databases happen in the background. The dashboard is intuitive and helps visualize the connections, the directions of the flow, and the information related to these specific sessions. 

AppDynamics is agent-based, so some customers are reluctant to install the agents in all their production environments. It would be helpful if they had an agentless version. It covers applications on the server, but the solution is weak on the network side. The agent is not deployed on the network components, so it cannot provide complete information about issues on the network layer.

I have used AppDynamics for about a year.

I rate AppDynamics six out of 10 for stability. The agent sometimes stops working when users perform upgrades on the application side. We have to restart it. 

I rate AppDynamics seven out of 10 for scalability. I haven't had any difficulty receiving information on the main controller and propagating it on the dashboard. It also has a high-availability option. 

I rate AppDynamics support nine out of 10. 

Positive

SolarWinds monitors the applications, but it only provides information within the system and does not tell you about information flows. 

We can roll it out in a week if everything goes smoothly. However, we sometimes have compatibility issues with the agent. If the agent is not working correctly and providing the information, we might need to develop a customized agent or get one from the user community. 

The customers are happy, and we hear positive feedback from the users. It helps the application team and the developers by providing an excellent tool for troubleshooting performance problems. 

I rate AppDynamics seven out of 10 for affordability. AppDynamics is an expensive solution. The price depends on the size of your environment. It's about $500,000 for a large enterprise. 

I rate AppDynamics eight out of 10. It's on the high end of the Gartner quadrant, but it's lacking some features. 

On-premises

Monitor 1000's of .NET, Java, Node.js, and Go applications using an auto-discovering agent-based tool.

We have cut our MTTR by half just by deploying agents. It significantly reduced the amount of time that we spend building synthetic monitors. To the point, we rarely have to build any monitors unless it is a vendor app or appliance we can't access to install an agent on.  

• Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic
• Baselining of every single metric that you throw at it.
• Easy to use API
• Customizable extensions
• Facilitates business, dev and ops communication
• Agents have low CPU overhead compared to other agent-based products we have tried.

The GUI can be overwhelming at first to a novice Dev or Ops support person, and the possible root causes of an issue do not bubble up to the first screen you see.  We usually walk everyone through a few simple steps: 

1. Click here to see errors and exceptions.
2. Click here to see what is causing response time problems.
3. Click here to view the timeframe of a past issue.
4. Click here to drill down into the root cause at the method level snapshot.   

One to three years.

Very rarely. Solid performance on our controllers.

None. The SaaS team worked with us on our rollout and expansion, making sure our controller is tuned for the metric and event loads.

• Great SaaS support, performance and uptime
• Responsive support team
• Responsive extension Dev team

The previous tool was:

• Clunky
• Had difficulty in configuring alerting.
• Did not use baselines.
• Required hard thresholds for each metric.
• Had a Java-based GUI, performed poorly.
• Nobody wanted to use it.

There is currently no automated agent management/upgrades for every agent type (currently the Universal Agent supports Java, expanding to .NET and machine agents in the future). So, if you do not have a solid automation tool already in use, deploying agents can be time consuming.   

We had an in-house team of two people, and a vendor team assisting. The team was a mix of beginner to expert, and it worked out great.

Dynatrace and HPE Diagnostics.

RUM, synthetics, mobile, network, and browser analytics make this a well-rounded tool.

The benefits are less man hours, less downtime, and faster resolutions. In the past, it was, "Oh no. The application isn't working. Let's fix it." It might get fixed within 24 hours because we did not have any idea what the issue was. It always came down to, “Well, reboot the servers. That usually works.” It worked, but we never knew what the root cause was.

Once we got AppDynamics, we could see that this part of the application is where the issue is. When they're trying to process these certain files, something's wrong in this sector. We may still have to reboot the servers to get the customers up and running immediately, but then we can circle back around that day and address the actual issue.

The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application: Are all of our transactions going smoothly? Are we having a bottleneck somewhere? Identifying problems before they impact the users. The live reporting and dashboard(s) allow us, at a quick glance, to see the overall health of our nationwide (US) application. We can see the health of our individual office locations (cities) and the individual users (PCs). At any given time we can tell which specific city and\or user is experiencing poor application performance. It even helps us determine if the issue is application, network, or user specific. Before we had AppDynamics APM, we were reactive. We’d wait for a phone call or email to tell us there was a problem and then go looking for it, find it, and resolve it. Now, after installing AppDynamics APM, we’re proactive. We can see the problems developing in real time. We can identify a problem and be half way to resolving it before we’ve even received a phone call or email. We’ve even discovered and resolved problems without the end users or management even realizing there was a problem.

A year earlier, if someone had asked me about room for improvement, I would've said end-user monitoring, which they have now. Analytics was great. I didn't even think that we would need that.

I think I would like to see a better way to deploy and upgrade the machine agents that we use. Currently, we have to use SCCM, and that might just be our environment with the customer. Personally, I am not the best with Linux commands; I'm learning. I'm a GUI person. Give me a button to click on with a mouse pointer, and that's just me.

I personally don't have anything I think they need to add. They're the great minds. They're the leaders of technology, so they'll think of what I need before I do.

I’ve never had a stability problem with it. It's always working; it's always operational. I’ve never had a glitch; never had the server just stop working. It's spot on.

I can't address scalability because we haven't been able to scale yet. As I’ve mentioned, the way the customer works, it's just one little group that wanted it, and everybody wants it now. Again, we have to go through the process of approval and funding. We haven't been able to touch on the scalability yet.

We have it on 400 servers and machines.

We use technical support all the time. They were great when we finally acquired it. They came in and they helped set it up in our environment; made sure everything was discovered, reporting was working; explained the transactions, reports, the dashboard, all of that to us. We had some more questions at the 2015 AppSphere, and it is great because you can see the guys. We got in touch with someone else and they helped us with licensing issues. There was a couple of extensions we were trying to get working that we couldn't. They got all that squared away.

Recently, we had some consultant hours we needed to use. One of their guys spent three days with us on WebEx, fully customizing even more on the dashboards and the reporting center; and explained baselines to us better.
Technical support is excellent.

We did previously did not use an APM at all. It was just, applications would stop working; there would be bottlenecks; they'd be real slow; and complaints. You'd have the network guys saying, "No, everything's good on our end." You’d have the middle-tier guys saying, "Nope, my servers are online and running." You have the devs for the application saying, "No, no, no, no, it's not my code." It was just, point the finger, pass the buck.

With AppDynamics, we're able to say, "No, it is the network. Something's going on in this city.”, or “No, it is the middle-tier servers because of this." We can tell where the issue is and what the issue is.

I do know that they tested with CA. There was a third one because with our customer, we have to have three competitors. We have to have three products and say, "This is why we're picking AppDynamics. This is why these two will not fit the bill." I don't remember who the third person was.

I think they ended up going with AppDynamics because of the personality of the marketing reps and the engineers that we talked to. It was pricing. It was the capabilities of AppDynamics versus CA and the third company. AppDynamics just brought more to the table.

Personality is quite big when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics. If you come in, and you're snotty, and high and mighty, you go down the list. That's just what it is; that's business.

Pricing: We don't want the cheapest; we don't want the most expensive; we want somewhere in the middle, like when you're buying a TV; you don't want something that's going to break in six months.

The historic background of the company: If you've only been around for six months, it's a bit of a gamble. If you've been around for six years, you're not going to have IBM, HPE, or Xerox buy you. We've had problems with that before. You are your company; you're not going anywhere. In five years, you'll still be there to support us.

Ongoing support: Can we give you a call on a Tuesday at 3:00 PM and get an answer? Or, do we have to submit a ticket, wait a week, maybe get a phone call back and then get a guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about, doesn't want to be at work that day?

It's the overall package.

Give them a call. Check out the field. I know that AppDynamics was more than willing to give us temporary licenses; come in and help us set it up in a dev environment; and show us how it works in our environment, not just the canned demo: “Here's the little website we made and this is how it works.” Of course, it works perfectly because we've made it work perfectly.

They will do a demo in your environment, on your servers, so you can see, “Yes, this is our data. This is what we will see. This is how it will help us.”

The only reason I did not give it a perfect rating is because I don't think anything is 100% perfect. Nothing is the best ever. There's always room for improvement. There's always room to grow. This is the highest I can give because I don't believe in giving that perfect rating.

We’re not yet using any other AppDynamics products. Due to our customer, we can't just buy the newest and greatest, and implement it. There is a long process for testing, approval, and funding; and then more testing and implementation. We're usually about a year and a half behind the latest and greatest.

I think the ability to quickly correlate and introspect into what's going on inside a Java container is the most valuable feature for us. We haven't fully leveraged it yet for monitoring and altering which was one of the main reason we wanted AppDynamics. These features are hooked up but we haven't seen a lot of action in production yet. We currently use it more for the pre-production performance troubleshooting and debugging. So far its been the majority of our usage.

In production we haven't had any serious issues which caused us to lean on it heavily but in pre-production we had a few big performance degradation problems. AppDynamics was crucial for us pinpointing root cause and fixing it. We probably wouldn't have been able to go live as swiftly as we did without AppDynamics.

I think the only feedback from my team has been that it's not an HTML based UI right now, so it's limited on mobile devices. An HTML 4 or 5 based interface would be great.

Part of why we chose AppDynamics was because we felt that they were above all other products. We have been using it in trial mode or pre-production mode for quite a while - almost a year now, and we've been using it heavily since January. We've been using it in production since the end of April.

Deployment was fairly easy. Our team learned how to use AppDynamics fairly quick. We're now proficient in it.

We haven't seen AppDynamics crash or have any problems so far.

We're currently running relatively low numbers, under 40 DBMS in production and pre-production and we haven't really scaled yet. So far AppDynamics has been great with what we have.

Customer Service: Customer service has been good. We've actually been less capable of keeping up with them then they have been with us. They've been great about reaching out and following up.Technical Support: Technical support has been just as great as their customer service. We've been able to get what we need when we need it.

This was our departments first jump in with an APM solution. Some of us have some experience with New Relic (from when we were in other departments which have 100's or 1000's of licenses). We started from scratch with an RFP and met everybody- we met many vendors and finally evaluated AppDynamics, dynaTrace and New Relic.

We didn't have any issues with the initial setup. The first time when we did our POC, AppDynamics came in and sat with us for a day and set it all up. This gave us a lot of experience with it. They came back later to help us set up the final version but at that point we were already trained.

We haven't quantitatively measured it yet. Qualitatively, for the helpful times that we've used it, we like it.

Day to day costs- vm's we pay for to run it and license costs. A little bit of administrative overhead but once it gets set up it's good to go.

The model that we used to do the POC and prototype to test it out first helped to get us familiar with the tool, familiar with it and trained on it. AppDynamics suggested it and said they could come in and help - we accepted!