AppDynamics Reviews

We use AppDynamics mainly to monitor the application performance.

The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is its ability to track the transactions between different applications.

AppDynamics should improve its ability to track all the transactions.

We have been using AppDynamics for approximately three years.

AppDynamics is a stable product. We rarely had any issues with the solution.

I rate AppDynamics ten out of ten for scalability.

Getting a response from the solution's technical support team is harder and takes longer. Since the solution has a structural support model, it requires some layers of escalation to get the correct response.

Neutral

The solution's initial setup is easy. However, it is harder than Checkmk because it needs to install the agent.

The solution's initial deployment takes about three to four months. However, it's a work in progress because new applications are added every time.

AppDynamics is an expensive solution.

AppDynamics is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

We use AppDynamics for monitoring purposes to check up on CPU health and application health status.

AppDynamics is used to monitor the health of our applications. If any application is down and linked up with AppDynamics, we can see it on the AppDynamics console. We can identify when a specific process went slow and the exact issue. Additionally, if there is any high CPU utilization or other issues, we can figure it out using AppDynamics.

It is very helpful as we can also make custom alerts in our system for specific issues like high CPU utilization or application downtime. We can even customize the alerts to be sent to a particular email domain for automatic notification, so there's no need to monitor it 24/7.

The monitoring feature is very useful. If you have multiple applications and systems with high CPU utilization or other issues, you don't need to monitor them individually. With AppDynamics, you can get all the information from the dashboard. It's very convenient.

There is room for improvement in the customer support team because finding a solution consumes a lot of time. When there's any issue, we need to reach out to the AppDynamic support team to get some idea of what the issue is. If anything is out of scope, we need to escalate the availability. It can be more dynamic because we need to go to the support portal to raise an incident, and it's time-consuming. Also, the resolution time takes longer than expected. If there were live support from AppDynamic's point of view, it would be really helpful.

I have been using this solution for the last three months. I am using the latest version.

AppDynamics is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have some support guys, admin guys, and other people using AppDynamics. In our organization, we have around 15 members using it.

The initial setup is not that complex. It is easy. I would give it a four out of ten. The deployment took two to three days.

An in-house team did the deployment.

I used some other tools, like Sterling Integrator, for EDI solutions.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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.

The dynamic baselining is a big plus; being able to get rolling baselines for different times of the day, different days of the week, days of the month. Alerting is a big feature; being able to receive alerts when we have things that kind of go out of bounds. Dashboarding is also a pretty big one that we use a lot, along with the API; being able to put in our own data and add that to dashboards related to what AppDynamics itself is finding.

It's led to a very big decrease in MTTR when issues are encountered, as well as helped us to be a lot more proactive to be able to identify issues and customer degradation before customers start complaining about it.

The biggest complaint that we have at this point is the ability to exclude certain time frames from the dynamic baselining. If we have an event or something like that that we know performance goes significantly outside of the baseline, that ends up being part of the dynamic baseline, so you don't have the ability to alert and stuff on that going forward.

Overall, stability is very good.

I haven't had any issues with availability or scalability.

I did not previously use a different solution; no APM kind of tools.

We realized we needed an APM solution mostly because of the growing complexity of the application. It's a lot easier to monitor an application, per se, if you have good control and you know what all the application is doing. I think most people would agree that as applications are growing, and becoming more and more complex, you have less and less people that actually understand what's going on. You need something like AppDynamics that will help bridge that gap between the people's understanding and what the application is actually doing.

The overall setup of the application is extremely straight forward. We had a little added complexity, due to the size of our deployment, but really, it is far more straightforward than all the competitors’ products that we looked at.

We also primarily looked at CA Wily Introscope and Dynatrace.

The biggest reason we chose AppDynamics was their ROI. AppDynamics was by far the quickest and easiest to get good results out of. The other two products required a lot more investment both as far as capital for purchasing systems to handle the load, as well as time to get the systems to really have useful data in them.

The best advice would probably be to make sure that you know what your requirements are and that you're analyzing the tools to your requirements. Look at things such as capital and time to roll out. That makes a big difference in the ROI for a product.

Overall, it's a very strong product. It has most of the features that I think we need. There are a few things that could be improved, like the ability to exclude stuff from the baseline. It's not quite perfect, but other than some usability improvements, I think it's a very great product.

We use AppDynamics APM, as well AppDynamics EUM.

Extensive use cases, dozens of primary and secondary use cases ranging from core application monitoring at the global level to micro level performance analysis at the transaction level. AppD provides the ability to also manage total interactions at the web/mobile browser level, the database and core infrastructure including server level and L4 network.

We are a services organization, so we use AppDynamics with our customers. It has allowed us to expand our footprint in the application management business with virtually all of our major accounts. We were able to expand and go into other applications that we weren't in or offering previously. We have a new value proposition for our customers- enhanced visibility, enhanced stability, and we can reduce our costs to them because our cost structure is reduced by using AppDynamics. We have other examples like this as well where AppDynamics has improved the way we function and operate. As of date of this article, our company has in excess of 30,000 AppDynamics agents deployed globally and we are monitoring billions of annual page views for major customers.

Furthermore, AppDynamics is a key toolset and drives tremendous value and efficiency in our remote performance management center which supports over 10,000 retail locations on behalf of our retail customers.

I have been using this solution for more than five years.

We didn't have any issues with stability. Highly stable with extremely light impact- negligible.

We didn't have any issues with scalability. Unbelievably scalable - we selected this solution for its ability to aggregate thousands and thousand of end point monitoring.

Customer Service:

AppDynamics redefines customer services, especially in post sales support- maybe one of the most responsive service desk teams in the industry.

Technical Support:

They have done a superb job of getting some obscenely bright software people with a passion for customer services and unleashed them in the market. Some of the finest technical support in the industry.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward- we can have an enterprise deployment with several dozen end points being monitored in less than 3 hours.

Our first few implementations we did ourselves and then for our first major customer implementation we got AppDynamics to assist. We currently support all of our internal and external deployments.

We're regularly looking at various options. Even before we made the decision to standardize on AppDynamics, we already had experience with BMC Appsight. We also had experience using Dynatrace, CA and Gomez at some of our customer's environments. We also heard our customers talking about their experiences with these other products.

You can't over-speak importance of deployment, configuration and infrastructure footprint because what happens is that people get excited when they see the output of various products (such as Dynatrace or CA Wiley). They say, "wow, it's very powerful, we've never had visibility, we're going to implement at all costs." Then they buy the solution and they realize they need 5X the amount of servers, a lot of storage, experts to manage it, etc.

AppDynamics is an APM tool. We use it for application performance monitoring for a financial company. It is an end-to-end monitoring solution for any application and works with different technologies, such as Java and .NET.

The company was able to monitor their transactions with the financial institution to determine where the problems were in a particular brand. The company was satisfied with the performance of the solution.

This solution has reduced our customer's time to resolve issues.

The most valuable features of AppDynamics is the scalability and monitoring.

AppDynamics is new to the cloud and could improve its cloud services, they are following a monolithic monitoring approach.

It's an agent-based software that must be deployed multiple times whereas competitors have one agent that can deploy everywhere.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately six years.

AppDynamics is a stable solution, but sometimes the analytics goes down and does not work or customers' addresses do not get collected. However, overall it is stable.

All of the IT and business staff are using the solution.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The support could improve.

I used Dynatrace prior to AppDynamics. The switch was a business decision.

The process of implementing AppDynamics is straightforward, but it ultimately depends on your specific use case. You can easily implement an agent if you have a simple use case.

There is an agent that needs to be copied into the project and actioned to start.

Using it can be somewhat complex as it requires manual configuration, such as when creating a dashboard. If you have a more complex use case, the manual configuration can take a considerable amount of time. Additionally, there is a learning curve associated with this tool, and it takes time to gain expertise. It is not something that anyone can easily configure without investing the necessary time and effort.

It takes three to four months to become an expert in the tool to be able to use it effectively.

To complete the implementation of the solution the staff that have access to production are involved. There are a few people that are needed.

There is a license needed to use the solution and it is expensive. The licensing model needs to improve.

There are other solutions that are better at APM than AppDynamics.

AppDynamics is primarily an APM tool, and if you're looking for end-to-end monitoring and AI ops capabilities, it may not be the best fit. For instance, if you want to analyze transitions, pinpoint failures, and view logs all in the same tool, AppDynamics may not provide a complete solution.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

We're a bank. We do use the predictive tools for the different products of the bank and the application which the bank utilizes.

AppD improves the productivity of Application Engineers, development teams, and other integrated items. Slowness or leak issue is a nut for the team now. Also, the team resolves or understands the network and query path every easy and resolves efficiently.

Our application uptime, increased by 10%, and overall productivity up by 30%.

Ticket or issue down by 12% over five years of use and experience.

Open to be applied and test any area and suite.

The tracing is the most important aspect of the solution. The way it traces the information within the particular application or within the particular infrastructure is great. That actually helps. Apart from that, all of the data that's in the production APM is good.  

Technical support is helpful.

The solution scales well.

The stability is good. 

We do have a combination of areas that need improvement. We do have the integration, such as end-user integration and experience that could be better. It is not just from the response point of view; it is more from the error and error detection point of view. This is due to the fact that these are all the banking applications as used by the banking staff, not by the end-user directly. Based on the banking staff feedback, based on the staff security or maybe dealing with the capital market, there needs to be some improvement.

They do provide the input growth on a daily basis in terms of what is coming in and how we receive the applications and how many we have. We've now started looking for a particular product that can make sure that it should connect with files and statements inside the product. 

The IO ratio, which we are looking for in terms of a report, is one of the concerns. We do monitor those details from AppDynamics, however, reporting and monitoring could be better.

There needs to be more analytics. That is what we are missing from the tool point of view. We need more information geared more towards helping us in making better decisions. When you do the coding that's for a banking situation or maybe in the incidents or capital market, it becomes very important that how much time I'm investing inside the transaction. A transaction which needs to be carried out for either confirming the payments or maybe either releasing the payments - these kinds of things. What I have seen with the use, as of now, is a bit of a lag when we are running on the global cloud or the public clouds, like Azure or the Google platform. 

Right now, we are fighting between three different stakeholders. With the networks, we have a different chat, with the vendors we have a different chat, and with the application team, we have a different chat. This approach doesn't provide a holistic view. Everyone has their own excuses and everyone has their own reasoning and conditions. 

If it can be able to intelligently provide all the things we need to look at, from a data point of view, that would be very useful.

I would say that I have between seven and eight years of experience, hands-on. However, later on in the time frame, over the last four or five years, I have not has as much hands-on experience with the tool. I'm more involved in various solution discussions and strategy building with the platform on top of the tool.

I would say it's very steady and for now, it's very reliable as well. It's stable. We don't have issues with bugs or crashes. 

The solution is very scalable so far in any testing scenario. It performs very well and gives us the expected output which we are looking to improve. 

We are using the solution for more than 600 small and big applications. We have around 78,000 people, including the back-end staff and the development team, that use the solution.

Overall, technical support has been very good. We're very satisfied with their level of support. So far, it's been very good for the bank.

Positive

We have used HPE BSM (now called MF APM). 

Due to these factors, we switch:

1. Costly

2. Implementation complexity

3. Multiple products and Integration

4. Not end-user friendly. 

I was not involved in the initial implementation. Nowadays, the way we approach the teams, sometimes it's very easy when it's an application with a known language like Python or maybe with Ruby or a kind of Java application. In terms of gateways inside the product, sometimes it is very tough, and sometimes it is very easy to get deployed. We're not using any out-of-the-box security. 

We have used model Train for the trainers and enforced all employees with operational training.

We achieve a great number, in terms of applications user availability increase by 30%. In treading, and agents, needs a smooth performance before the market starts. AppD provide a depth to measure any performances challenges, leak issue or even a chain linked issue story.

The pricing is a mixed bag. In some areas they are reasonably priced, however, in others, it's a bit expensive. 

We look for ease of implementation, diagnostics information shared, and controls to the team for working.

We're just an end-user of the product.

We're using the latest version of the solution. 

The deployment model depends on the solution or the size of the product which we are using, as the banks do have private and public clouds. In public clouds, we don't have much of the production instances. It's mainly the development. The free cloud and the cloud environment are completely on a private or in-house, on-premises solution with different ecosystems.

If a proper study has been done, and the solution makes sense for the company, I would recommend the solution. 

I would like to rate the solution at a seven out of ten. That consideration is mainly due to the fact that it covers a large portfolio of the product. It does have support for many other ERP tools. A lot of open customization is available and the product support team can help to customize the product. I've found this tool very useful and helpful on that.

We have an application that we have made which is the core of our business. In many cases, new code comes out or there is older code that gets mixed with newer code and you will see slowdowns or problems that can happen. This solution gatherings all this different pertinent information about how long a particular piece of code sits in what stack of the application. When you have a slowdown or an issue is happening, you can look through the application processes step by step. You can find out where the application was lagging behind.

Most recently, we had a problem with some SQL queries that were not optimized in our application. It was taking approximately 30 seconds for the code to get a return. We were able to narrow down where the problem was by using this solution to find out what was taking a long time on that particular query, it turned out to be the DVAs. The DVAs were able to be fine-tuned to make the query a little bit more efficient because we were returning much more data than what was actually needed for that part. We were able to simplify it and it went from 30 seconds down half a second.

I have found the main feature of the solution to be its ability to analyze an application's code to see where there are issues. Additionally, it is easy to use and configure.

There are too many installers available for this solution. There is a separate installer for many things, for example, .net. There should be one installer for each operating system, such as Windows and Linux. They then can let you choose what options that you want for that particular operating system because trying to find all the different pieces separately is more complicated than it needs to be.

In an upcoming release, there could be better integration with the infrastructure. Currently, the solution is able to tell you where the problem is but it is not narrow enough. For example, it can show that the issue is in the data server and it took a certain time to process, but that does not necessarily narrow it down to the query where it actually was. You just know that the problem is within the database server. Sometimes it is very obvious it was the query, but other times it could be just that the server is light on resources. It would be beneficial if it could integrate more with some of the infrastructures to have the ability to correlate between the two to see whether the problem is actually with the code or it is a problem with the underlying infrastructure.

I have been using the solution for approximately one year.

The solution is stable.

The scalability of this solution is fantastic. We have approximately 50 developers and six infrastructure engineers using this solution and our parent company has over 400 employees. I have found it to be a very good enterprise solution. 

If we hire more staff I think there could be in increase usage of this solution.

The customer support is good. We have not had many big problems, the application just works. The solution has never taken down any of our servers. Other than calling support to figure out where a particular installer is and how to configure it properly, I have not needed to call them.

The installation was straightforward. There were initial issues with licenses and we had to move some licenses around to give more to their lower environment systems to allow us to put all our information into one place. This took a while, they did not make this part very easy.

Our parent company set up all the backend for this solution and I did all the client configurations on the actual servers. 

You save time by using this solution allowing you to utilize that saved time towards developing new features for your customers versus trying to troubleshoot the ones that are not working properly. The return on investment is instant.

There is a license required for each system that we use the solution on.

This solution is not the cheapest but it works well. You will end up doing more work with a cheaper solution than if you just spent the extra money on a better solution like this one. 

I would advise others wanting to purchase this solution it is well worth the money. If you look at the quantity of time it takes you to track down a problem versus doing it the old-fashioned way, the amount of time saved by using a solution like this helps you move forward more quickly. 

I rate AppDynamics a ten out of ten.