AppDynamics Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature is the ability to pinpoint problems in our applications. We can find the problem quickly and fix it.

It definitely helps us speed up our troubleshooting. We are able to use it even during development and our beta testing to see the performance of our application and go back into development if we had issues. We can know when we need to start putting our beta customers in it. When our application starts slowing down, we can go back to developers immediately and tell them there is a problem, instead of having to hear it from the customers. It's actually helped me look better at my job. And so when I look good, I can make AppDynamics look good. And when I look good, I make my boss and his boss look good. Everybody's happier in the end.

Well they're adding in the Business iQ functionality and I will be really excited when that happens. But so far, it really has all the features that I need at this point. I mean there's always going to be more and more you can add to an application, but at this point, they've covered a lot of the ins and outs of what I need when I'm going through my application to figure out what's wrong.

So far I haven't had any problems with stability. It's been a 100% up time for us. We monitor it with a separate solution as well, just to make sure that it's up and running and we've never had a problem with it.

We initially installed it as a medium installation. When we determined that we were going to use the product more and more, we were able to just modify a couple of settings inside the configuration, enhance our hardware, and it scaled perfectly without the need to reinstall or anything.

We had a gentleman from technical support who came on site for about a week to do training with us. In that one week, I was able to learn almost all the functionality and the admin abilities that I had in the back end. And really I think I know the product in and out.

We had monitors, but when something goes down, we lose productivity and our business loses money. The question is, would you rather spend a little money up front to be able to have something that will have you save money down the road.

I was the primary person to install the software on the servers. It was a straightforward installation. We installed it in a Windows platform. The installer has a wizard that we just followed, put in our perimeters, and then it just basically plugged and played from there.

I'm not the business person, but we've seen an immediate ROI from purchasing AppDynamics.

The only other vendor we were looking at the time was New Relic. Unfortunately, New Relic just seemed pretty, but it lacked functionality. When it comes to telling me what's wrong with my application, I want facts, numbers, and graphs. I just can't just settle for “pretty”. I have to have concrete information. When selecting a product, the features were definitely the number one factor. The support and training seems topnotch and they were always willing to jump on board and help me if I had any problems, even though it was just our POC, when we were going through that process. Overall, we were looking for support and then the functionality. It's pretty cut and dry. I'm pretty good at what I do, so I want to make sure that they can support me and I've got the stuff I need.

My overall advice is, if you don’t have it yet, then get it.

I use it to solve issues that my clients encounter, such as application slowness. It helps me identify whether the issue is related to the database, server, or CPU memory management.

Moreover, I use it to find solutions and provide recommendations to my colleagues.

This solution not only provides answers but also provides sensor data. This allows us to quickly resolve issues that developers may take a long time to solve. In essence, it helps us address problems at an early stage. Moreover, it is especially useful in production servers where real users encounter numerous issues.

There are numerous issues that arise during peak times, and AppDynamics makes it easy for us to identify the problem areas and determine the appropriate resolutions. This is how it helps us find solutions effectively.

Regarding improvements, I believe the dashboard could be more optimized. Although it claims to be optimized, I think it should be even more convenient, especially for advanced users. 

Additionally, the documentation can be a bit challenging. It would be beneficial if the documentation provided clear solutions for every problem. In my opinion, the documentation could be improved.

I worked with AppDynamics for around three to four months. I have been working directly with it for the past year.

I use the latest version. 

It is stable, but the only downside is the licensing part. Other than that, it's a reliable product with no major issues.

It is highly scalable. There are no additional limitations in terms of scalability.

In my company, we have around 50 to 100 clients using this tool. Although it can be a bit expensive, it is still being used extensively to solve various problems.

It's straightforward, not too complex. However, it requires proper learning to effectively use it.

The deployment process typically takes around one to two hours, depending on the system. Once the setup is complete, we can proceed with the implementation process.

First, there's a need for basic knowledge of OS, especially for Windows and .NET. Additionally, understanding concepts like Dynatrace and AppDynamics, their functioning, and architecture is crucial. These are the key methods involved in the deployment process. If it's a cloud solution, then AWS or Azure are the recommended options. If it's on-premises, then using either Linux or Windows is ideal.

For deployment, we need to focus on event configuration, which involves learning about network events and configuration. Once we understand this, we can proceed with the deployment setup. There is no frequent deployment. In case the deployment is not satisfactory, we may need to learn about Linux and Windows concepts.

I have seen some ROI. 

It is an expensive solution. It's on a yearly basis. We need to pay for it annually.

I have used Dynatrace. The main difference between the two is that AppDynamics utilizes different data mechanisms, while Dynatrace uses a unified agent approach. This simplifies the complexity of Dynatrace, providing more visibility and root cause analysis. In terms of benefits, AppDynamics is more scalable than analytics.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

AppDynamics is an application performance management solution. We use it for application monitoring, database monitoring. 

The solution is deployed on public cloud, but the agents are on the servers with the controller on the cloud.

I am a Senior Performance Engineer.

The best feature of AppDynamics is the analytics, which gives us the business insights of the application. For example, if there are any failures, AppDynamics will give us the number of failures and the reason for those failures. 

The solution also allows us to deep-dive into the code by taking us to the line of code where it feels there is an issue.

The end-user monitoring needs improvement in this solution. There are many KPIs that are not available in AppDynamics.

The mobile apps also need improvement. The solution should have an option to aggregate the services based on the header values.

I have been using AppDynamics for 5 years.

The solution is stable. We have been using it for the last 5 years. At the beginning we had a few issues, but now it is serving its purpose.

There is a scope for improvement with respect to support. When you make a service call, they sometimes take time to respond. You then have to follow up or escalate to get them to react.

Neutral

Prior to AppDynamics we were using Dynatrace.

The initial set up of AppDynamics is easy.

You are required to purchase licenses whether you use it or not. It is not pay-as-you-use.

If you implement AppDynamics, all members of the team should be aware of what it does and how to use it. If only one or two people are aware of this, the solution will not serve the purpose of improving application performance or in finding and fixing the issues.

I would rate AppDynamics a 7 out of 10.

The transaction snapshots are probably by far the most used feature because it gives a lot of details. It adds a lot of value. You can really get to the details really, really quick. You can drill down very, very quick. When you show it to somebody who's a stakeholder, they typically get it right away. You don't have to explain. You don't have to “translate.” That really helps with the communication. That really gets people focused on the task at hand, rather than trying to pass the buck around. That really helps quite a bit.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere about correlation, it's really helpful because I don't have to spend time with multiple teams. A lot of times, what might have happened in the past was where, if there was a problem, we would call like six, seven, or eight different SMEs from different domains: network, storage, compute; not on all problems, but at least some of the ones that we suspected. Application; if you have multiple applications, sometimes you have a different person who owns each of the different applications; maybe the database guy. You can really start adding more people in there. If you think about it from a productivity point of view, it's a waste of a lot of time, if you have to keep doing that for every single problem day in and day out.

Whereas, when you have AppDynamics, it's actually tracing the call. So, if three out of four services are functioning fine, for the most part, I don't even have to worry about them. It is common to call the networking guy because nobody really knows where the problem is. Now, he's or she’s out of the picture. I'm sure he's or she’s a lot happier about it, too. Same with the storage and compute: You start leaving these people out of the conversation that don't need to be there, which is a good thing for the company, and us. We don’t also have to spend that time explaining and hearing what they have to say. That’s not to say they don't have value to add, but if there's really nothing there, we're wasting their time, as well. So, it's really helpful.

AppDynamics helps me not just rule in the areas, but rule out where I don't have to talk. More often than not, the rule-out gets hidden away, but it's a really good add-on because I'm only focusing on the problems.

I can think of 2-3 complex problems that probably would be helpful to most customers. Heap analysis is one; memory leaks. That's already there, so maybe that does not count at this point. The second one I would probably call out is connection leaks. So, heap analysis and connection leaks; those would be very helpful.

I think they've already started working on the next version of license management. That should be pretty helpful.

Stability’s very good. Once in a while, we've had some hiccups around the UI being slow, but that typically gets resolved pretty quickly. A lot of times, we don't even have to talk about it. Once in a while, we've had to raise a couple of tickets. I think one time it was us using the environment a little more aggressively than maybe we should have been, and we could have been, for that matter. Most of the time, stability’s not an issue. Once in a while, you do get the spinning circles. I've experienced worse. This is nowhere near that bad. It's very good for the most part.

We're a fairly large install. It scaled well, but then again, it's a SaaS solution. They've got their magic sauce working, of course, really well for us.

We use technical support quite a bit. We've got a team of engineers and there are at least five or six of them that have the capability to open up tickets. We typically get really good responses. Every time I've opened a ticket, I usually get a response in good time. Not just a response; it's usually a good response; it's a meaningful response; it's something that helps you solve the problem that you have.

Once in a while, as you can imagine with any product, they get dragged out because maybe it needs a longer-term solution. I don't think I've seen anything that would cause concern.

We were using a tool prior to this that was not doing any of the stitching; the correlation. We tried another one that was doing some of it, but we found AppDynamics was doing it better.

We went through the PoC because we had our fingers twisted the wrong way a few times with our old tools. It was using up a lot of our time. Of course, when we heard that they could do it, we really wanted to see what they had to offer. The PoC was very helpful. We actually used it on live projects – testing projects not production – to figure out if it would be able to help. We were able to do a lot of it, without much overhead. It was a game changer right out the door.

I was involved in the PoC, as well as the initial setup. The initial engagement is a little complex, but when you look back – hindsight, they say, is 20/20 – but in this case, it really made good sense on how it's structured. Initially, it felt a little limited but then, as you see it over and over and over again, you realize that there's good thought process that's gone into it. It was pretty smooth sailing for the most part.

There were hiccups that we had with an arrival tool that tool's vendor was not able to resolve. This was during the PoC stage. With AppDynamics, we went through the technical support team. They really had the right answers in the right places. They knew how to solve it.

We did a PoC with New Relic for about eight months, in 2014. We haven't really gone back since then to look at New Relic, to really be able to compare in a meaningful manner, but we looked at them at that time.

There were other areas where New Relic wasn't planning on supporting; some of our legacy footprint, such as WebSphere 6 and Oracle E-Business Suite. AppDynamics was doing that, as well. It was another add-on that really mattered a lot because that was a very large footprint of our agents.

In general, ease of use was definitely one of the most important criteria when we selected the vendor; ability to correlate in an automated matter; and be able to gather diagnostic data or just even transaction data. We'd already seen how transaction data is helpful with Dynatrace, for which we just had a limited on-prem set of licenses. We were really happy with the PurePath and so on, but we didn't want to take Dynatrace into production for a variety of reasons. A prime one was that they capture all the snapshots, which we know would've added a lot of overhead. That's probably another really good criteria: added overhead. Then, of course, breadth of coverage, when it comes to different technologies because, if you have to buy a different license or a different tool for everyone, you’re kind of setting yourself up for other problems down the line. Those are some of the key points.

Give it a shot. If you want to do a PoC, definitely do it. You should definitely have AppDynamics in there. I have no qualms about recommending the tool outright, but I think for your use case, you should probably PoC it on your own because you will really see the value add. If you don't, of course, then it is what it is, but I think most people will see the value add very, very quickly. They have a very competent team. They have the right people in the right places. Once they decide to commit to something, they actually do it and do it well. That's definitely a good plus.

I have not given it a perfect rating because I would like to see the heap analysis and the connection leak. There are some hiccups, I feel. I probably have to keep visiting the new feature sets that are coming with the leak analysis. Those minor things, those problems, the heap analysis and the connection leaks, are pretty time consuming, but in the grand scheme of things, the rest of the feature set is really, really great.

I haven’t even mentioned elsewhere the vast set of metrics that we have available to us, which is very helpful. I can create my own metrics if I want, if I choose to.
It definitely ticks a lot of checkboxes and there are a lot plus marks.

We also use AppDynamics End User Monitoring a little bit; not as much as APM. APM is used by a lot more of our internal clients. End User Monitoring is used and that's also helpful. There's a feature where you can actually see the traffic going from the End User snapshot down to the APM snapshot. That correlation is very, very helpful because then I don't have to do it manually. If you have to do it manually, a lot of it is a bit of guessing game, unless you have other ways of doing the manual correlation, which is a lot tougher, especially when it comes to production, where you want to really get things moving faster rather than slower. That can be very helpful.

The most valuable feature is the ease of just putting it in right out of the box and its being able to traverse our environment and bring those problem areas to light. That's basically it.

One of the applications that we use was having some very bad slowdowns. We were able to throw AppDynamics in there. We were able to identify the root cause within probably 45 minutes, which took our process time from 33 days down to 18 days. Then, eventually, a few more efficiencies were actually found a few hours later, which brought it down to three days. It was pretty awesome.

Because we didn't have anything before, this is like the Taj Mahal, compared to what we didn’t have.

The only thing is that maybe it collects too much right away. There's a lot of noise. You need to have those people that know the application very well in order to tune it down. Maybe that would be an area with room for improvement.

Beyond that, I don't know yet. Give me some more time in it and let me figure it out a little more but I can't think of anything else.

Stability is excellent; no worries at all with that.

Scalability is excellent; no worries at all.

We haven’t used technical support because we are still in the PoV. Our sales guy is beside us. He's been awesome with everything.

We weren't using something like this before. We were using an NPM, network performance monitoring, tool called Truview. It wasn't giving us our application insight. It did everything for the network but not the application itself. We've had a lot of slowdowns on our website and things like that. Through our homegrown tools, we couldn’t figure out what those slowdowns were until we threw AppDynamics in and those kind of started floating to the top.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It was basically just downloading an agent, recycling, and you're up and running. That was how easy it was.

New Relic as well as CA were also on the shortlist at the time. New Relic couldn't actually give me the breadth of what we wanted, as AppDynamics could. CA was kind of very intrusive to our network and we wanted something that didn't have a whole lot of resource dependencies out there.

My rating is because of the top three that we looked at. I also had our developers look into it, as well as our release management and our systems engineers. All of us came together and we were able to put the pros and cons together on what AppDynamics gave us or didn't give us over the other ones. AppDynamics just came in head over heels above everybody else. Unfortunately for the others, it was just the writing on the paper, as well as the proof in the trial period and what we saw in our environment.

Be patient. They do things very procedurally. Usually, I'm used to downloading an application and trying it on my own. If I would have done that on my own, I probably would have thought, I can't do this; there's too much there. But, they kept coming back, saying, “No, we want to show you. We want to make sure you're doing this right.” Even though I wanted to say, “No. Just leave us alone and let us do it”, I'm glad I did take their advice and bring them in, so they could teach us a little more about it.

We're doing APM but we also are right now evaluating the Analytics side of it. That's been pretty awesome but we haven't really gotten very deep into that one. We’re basically just using APM.

One of the most valuable features has been the ease of use that really fuels adoption in our organization. Other solutions that we have used for APM were not as user friendly, and frankly it was just really difficult to get people to use the tools.

The dashboards have been straightforward; easy to set up, really, for the most part.

It's made it easier to collaborate across teams; be able to have the same data immediately in front of you just by sharing a URL.

It could be a little more flexible in configuration on the back end. The design is geared towards specific goals, and they've done a great job with those. A lot of times when I'll ask a question, "Can we make it do this? Can we make it do that?", the answer is just, "No. Sorry, we don't support that at this time." And I get it, that's a good model for them to have, but I always have a wish list of things as I'm working with the tool.

I come across little things all the time, and I just file a ticket with AppDynamics to raise a feature request. So, I don't keep track of them, I just document it, and fire and forget.

I’ve been impressed with the features that they're adding and the direction that they've been working, a lot of which I wasn't aware of. License management, for example; being able to just give a certain number of licenses to an arm of the organization and say, "Here. Here's your licenses, do whatever you want with them." That really pushes the ultimate administration of the product out without having to "micromanage", if you will, and worry about giving them the key to the server. We are not currently using that. As far as I know, it's not released yet, but I was excited to see that. That was one that I brought up with support along the way.

I am impressed that they continue to develop and improve, and it's not a stagnant product by any means.

We have a controller that's pretty overloaded. We haven't run into any issues, though, with the AppDynamics.

Their technical support's been very responsive. They don't always have the answers that I want, but they're responsive, and help us find solutions where they can.

We didn't know that we needed a new solution. We had a solution. Another department wanted to look at AppDynamics. We looked at it and said, "We're already doing that, but if you want to bring it in and test their claims of greatness against what we have, go for it". We brought them in, and we said, "Let's buy that.”

Initial setup was very straight forward. We didn't even use technical services for our implementation.

It could be cheaper. It's a little cost prohibitive. There are so many features that also show a lot of value, but it’s not always easy to justify the cost.

We did not look at any other vendors. We weren't shopping, really.

In general, when I look at solutions, first of all, the product has to be top shelf. It has to be number one. That really drives us: "What is the product going to do for us?" In the vendor, we look for a vendor that's going to be around for a while; that we feel is going to be stable enough to support us into the foreseeable future. And then the support model, technical support; the ability to get into the technical details with us when we have questions. All of those things.

Having implemented without the help of professional services, we were capable of doing that; it went very smoothly. Involve, even indulge, AppDynamics in being a part of the implementation process, and having the planning and discussion around it. We wanted to go more rapidly than that would allow. Therefore, we kind of short-circuited that process, and jumped right in, which was good, but I think that there's value in having folks who have done it a lot look at where you're going with it, and give you some pointers. We've had to "course correct" a little bit on a few points as we went, and they might have been smoother along the way, had we just gone through the enablement and initial process.

It’s a great product. We're happy with it.

Nothing is perfect, so a perfect rating would be unattainable, but they’re pretty close to that. They're really great.

The most valuable feature is the ability to understand what's going on inside our application, not just what's going on in the hardware, in the network environment, and those sorts of things. We first started working with AppDynamics because of an operational incident we had with one of our systems, where the system had become unresponsive. Our other monitoring tools that were monitoring the network and so on, indicated that everything was fine – memory's fine, CPU's fine, disk is fine, everything's great – and our customers were complaining. It wasn't until we got a tool like AppDynamics that we could find out what was going on inside our applications.

We're able to have our developers work more closely with our operations support staff. We have a group called the Global Support Center, which is our 24 by 7 ops center. Allowing the developers and these guys to have a common view of what's going on within the system is one of the biggest benefits to it.

An area with room for improvement is the ease of managing the agents within our systems. Right now, for Java agents and things like that, if you want to upgrade the agent, you have to install the new version of it, then you have to shut down and restart your system. In a large enterprise, that means there's a lot of work involved in distributing all those things, and then scheduling the time to restart the system. A more seamless way of managing the agents would be very useful.

Other than occasional glitches that I think are more just growing pains on their part, we've had no problems with it.

It has scaled well for our needs.

Generally, technical support has been very, very quick. It's been refreshing that a company responds quickly to customer inquiries and things like that.

When we first had the system outage, I started looking around for solutions to the problem, did a little bit of Gartner research and found AppDynamics. They had their free 15-day trial, I think it was. I downloaded the little mini-controller, the agent, and dropped the agent onto a version of our app running in a VM that I had running on my laptop. I had it up and running in a couple of hours, was able to access the dashboard, and show it to people; had no problems.

I did look at another company called OPNET. It was one of those things where I literally could not tell what I needed from them. It was something like seven or eight different things, that you had to decide what you needed and downloaded, and things like that. I even had my boss at the time look at it and said, "Can you make heads or tails of this?" and he said, "No." Compared to that, AppDynamics looked pretty good.

We also looked at the HP product offering. It was also, likewise, very difficult to work with.

One of our groups has looked at New Relic also, and we've decided to continue with AppDynamics instead.

As with just about anything else I'd recommend: start small, make sure you understand how the system works, what it's doing, what it's telling you. Then, once you get a level of comfort with it, which shouldn't take too long, then you can spread it out and start looking.

One of the nice things is the auto-discovery feature. You can install an agent in one place and it will show you the things that it's talking to. That way, you can follow it and say, "I recognize this IP address that it's talking to here. That's another critical system. I'm going to put an agent on there." Then, start building up a better, more complete picture as you go.

We're starting to use the real user monitoring components. It's a little limited right now because our web browser application is a single-page app. Single-page apps have some quirks that make managing your view of what's going on inside them a little bit more involved. How to make that work a little better was one of the things that I was hoping to learn at a recent AppDynamics conference.

I'm very happy with it.