AppDynamics Reviews

I am satisfied with the product. The most beneficial features are the ones that give us full visibility for the API integration. The real-time analytics is good. It enhances our operational decision-making. Before using the tool, we had issues between the network and application teams. The solution saves time and cost.

The infrastructure is not as good as other solutions. AppDynamics is designed for application performance. Some solutions also cover infrastructure and server performance. AppDynamics specializes only in application performance. The product is not easy to use.

I have been using the solution for eight months.

The technical support is amazing.

Positive

The tool is not easy to deploy. It needs some experience. It is not difficult, but it is not easy. The time taken for deployment depends on the applications and the size of the environment.

It takes one year to get a return on investment.

The product is a bit expensive compared to other tools.

AppDynamics has the needed features, but it is not as good as NETSCOUT.

I am a partner and reseller. I will recommend the tool to other businesses that manage complex applications. It aids a little bit in AI-driven initiatives. Overall, I rate the product an eight and a half out of ten.

We use this solution to monitor the response time in CPU and usage and for URL monitoring.

I find troubleshooting is quicker because we can drill down into the end points and see which endpoints are getting critical. Visibility-wise, the micro details are easy to find. 

I have been using this solution for four years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

Support for this solution is good but communication could be improved.

I have previously used SolarWinds. Compared to that, I find AppDynamics better.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

This solution is expensive.

On-premises

We use AppDynamics for monitoring application performance, end-users, and infrastructure. The product has analytics covering all these areas. 

We're a large organization, so we appreciate AppDynamics' wide coverage. It may not work great in all areas, but it has broad coverage. We use the same dataset for different use case aspects. That is the beauty of AppDynamics. You can coordinate APM, EUM, and infrastructure through one dataset. 

AppDynamics not so great with cloud technology. AppDynamics works very well with the on-premise technologies, but it is behind the curve in the emerging cloud features. 

The cloud is one area where I think AppD is not that great.

Basic monitoring is the main thing, but nowadays, everybody talks about observability. I'm not sure how well AppD fits into the so-called observability trend. The track-and-trace mechanism works very well with on-premises technologies but not so great with the cloud.

Cloud monitoring is becoming more critical. Competitors can pose a big challenge. AppDynamics is a top product, but they need to maintain the same trend in the cloud area, where it's not that great.

We have been using AppDynamics for four to five years.

AppDynamics works reasonably good.

AppDynamics is scalable.

We use the SaaS model, which is the most common way to deploy AppDynamics. Infrastructure setup was not an issue as we chose the SaaS model. We don't have any concerns in terms of infrastructure. 

We only needed to deploy the agent, which was relatively straightforward. I wouldn't say it was effortless, but it wasn't complicated, either. We made a package to automate the deployment, which worked pretty well for us.

I don't know the details about the pricing.

I rate AppDynamics eight out of 10. 

Public Cloud

Part of it is the ease of adoption. We were a big CA house beforehand. We had a massive implementation of CA APM, but nobody uses it. We ditched CA in favor of AppDynamics. We compared New Relic and AppDynamics. AppDynamics is, in my opinion, far superior.

The ease of adoption has already picked up in my company. Bear in mind, we're probably about nine months into the project; it's probably more widely used than CA was after three years. So, that is, for me, the prime benefit. We are actually getting people to use the tool and get value out of it; it's not just shelf ware.

As any APM tool should, it provides root cause analysis. It enables you to reduce your mean time to resolution. It enables you to identify performance bottlenecks, even in pre-production environments. It generally helps provide better applications, better code, to customers; things we weren't really getting out of CA. The 2 or 3 teams who were using it got some of that value, but the rest of the organization just didn't. Now, we've got teams who had never picked up an APM product already getting value out of it, literally in a matter of days after installation.

I think it's because of the ease of use. It provides useful information straight away, quite deliberately so. It's much easier to navigate, it's much easier to understand the data that's being returned to you, and I think that really helped teams and individuals not be afraid of it.

Part of it is support for more modern languages. Node is lagging behind. And I think clarity on exactly where they intend to go, as well, because the relationship with other vendors like Splunk is a little bit grey at the moment. I'm curious as to where they're going with that and whether they intend to work as partners with them, or actually impose on their space.

To get a higher rating, they'd have to fix the Node issues, they'd have to fix some framework issues; it doesn’t work very well with Vertex 3, for instance. Tweaks like that. In any case, nothing's ever perfect.

We haven’t really had any stability or scalability issues. We're using the SaaS offering rather than on-premise, which obviously takes away a lot of that headache. The SaaS operations team are pretty good. The SaaS Operations team isn't somebody you directly interact with, but through the account management team and through the support teams.

I’m very happy with the technical support. There have been a couple of incidents – there are always a couple of incidents – but actually they've been very responsive, they've been very easy to work with, and happy to take feedback, both positive and negative.

I did the original CA APM installation four years ago; and then was involved in the RFP process, the initial commercial negotiations with AppD, and therefore the initial set up, as well, for the first few applications.

AppDynamics initial setup was very easy. There are some niggles. Some of the modern languages are less easy to use. Node is a bit of a sticking point with us at the moment, but installing it on a JVM, for instance, is absolutely a piece of cake.

As I’ve mentioned, we've looked at New Relic. Previously, a few years ago, we looked at Dynatrace. We've had a relationship with CA for 10 years, something like that.

We definitely wanted to move away from the CA legacy. Of the three main tools that are modern and out there for APM, you’ve got New Relic, Dynatrace and AppDynamics. Dynatrace isn't really in the same space, in my opinion; that's much more pre-production, code-level stuff. Between New Relic and AppDynamics, it was quite close. There are still teams in my organization who prefer New Relic, but as a whole solution, as a whole suite, I think AppDynamics gives you more flexibility, more in-depth visibility, and I think it has a brighter future.

Think about what it is you're doing beforehand. Plan it a little bit. One of the slightly strange problems that some of the early teams ran into was fundamentally misunderstanding the application tier and node hierarchy in AppDynamics. You ended up with some very strangely named applications. Read that one paragraph on each of those. Work out what it is you're doing, and then it all springs to life. Also, talk to other teams who've done it.

We also use AppDynamics database monitoring. We use the machine agents. I think that's pretty much everything we've got. I’m generally happy with them. Every tool has its limitations and you want more.

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!

We use the platform for infrastructure monitoring purposes.

There could log management features included in the product.

We have been using AppDynamics for one month.

AppDynamics is a stable product. It doesn't have a lot of bugs. We can fix the bugs at a code level whenever we encounter them with our expertise. It provides an ease of installation as well.

I rate the platform's scalability an eight out of ten.

Dynatrace works better compared to AppDynamics. While using AppDynamics, we have to install different external agents for managing, customizing, and monitoring logs. In comparison, we must install only one agent to carry out the processes while using Dynatrace.

The initial setup process is easy once learned. At the moment, I am a new AppDynamics user and am exploring more ways to make the process easier.

The product is more expensive than Datadog but lower than Dynatrace.

It is a wonderful monitoring tool that manages various aspects such as system resources (CPU, RAM), mobile performance, and infrastructure monitoring. It provides ease of use, alerting capabilities, integration support, and scalability. Thus, it is already maintained. It doesn't provide log management services; we have to install different types of agents for business processes. It is not a cloud-native platform like AWS, GCP, etc. I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

The business transaction tier of management is the most valuable feature; the fact that we can go into multiple tiers and monitor the transactions from the end-user point of view. That's very important to what we're doing.

It brings everything to the forefront. It helps the application staff plus the executive staff understand what's going on with the end-user performance because, obviously, that's one of the most important issues today.

I’d like to see something more towards a merger between the dev and the production. This is where big data comes in; the portion that's in there, moving things from installation and dev, moving them, managing them and transitioning between dev to production for new applications.

I haven't seen any problems with stability with any of the AppDynamics products that we're utilizing.

Right now, it's scaled for what we have to do in terms of what we have to add. I think we've already allowed it, in the planning, for adequate scaling. Obviously, you have to put these guys on, various agents, but we've allowed for that.

The professional services that we actually use, we did need their assistance in standing up this product. They were very helpful. They're still behind us even after they left the facility. They check in and log in to make sure that we're on track with what we need to do. Any problems that we did face, they addressed.

We were previously using something else and that company didn't stay current with the times.

Before choosing this product, we did evaluate other options.

Take a test drive of the demo.

I’ve given it a high rating because of the initial dashboards that are being built and the way that they can be built. I haven't seen anything like that. Especially with the flow management that's literally there in real time.

For right now, we are not using any other AppDynamics products. We are only using AppDynamics APM, but the new one they introduced at a recent conference, Business iQ, that seems very appealing too.

We like the ability to drill down into the method level to identify where the real issue is, as other tools just show the slowness at the transaction level only. We also like its database monitoring which gives almost everything to us for identifying any performance issues with the database. It is certainly not a legacy monitoring tool to monitor the database, it should be looked at as a database performance monitoring tool.

We are still in the POC phase and are trying to implement it by adopting some of the best practices. I am sure if and when it is fully implemented, developers will love this tool as their life will be easier.

AppDynamics should add more features to identify in case if there is some thread waiting for something. We are keenly looking for this feature. We would like to see the traffic on F5 load balancers in the flow map which make the entry points in an application, Currently only custom exit points can be created for non-instrumented nodes. Also if AppDynamics are trying to be only a monitoring tool, then they really need to add lot of stuff to the infrastructure monitoring and heavy correlation features are required to identify the real issues within and outside of business app. We can't blame the code for slowness of the overall application every time, as the network and servers are all equally important. Other tools like HP BSM provide great features to map everything in a service map.

This tool is very easy to implement and setup when compared to other tools. Agent installations and instrumentation are also extremely easy.

It's very easy to scale when compared to other tools.

We have compared this product to Bluestripe APM. We like its mapping of the business application mapping which shows how each tier of the application talk to another ones and also to the backend-like database, MQ, external interfaces, etc. It’s a very easy to understand tool which could be easily understood by a newbie also.

One piece of advice I would like to give others is that you need to first identify how you want to map your business application in the AppDynamics flow map. If there are multiple pieces in an application talking to each other, then best practice is to put everything together in one business application to see how those pieces talk to each other. Secondly, you need to identify the most important business transactions that you would like to monitor. Just include those and exclude everything else, as this way you can reduce the traffic and the amount of noise. Troubleshooting is easy when only key transactions are being monitored and not everything.