AppDynamics Reviews

Integrated and aggregated performance analytics traces transactions across multiple tiers in which web services deployed in separate data centers call each other. It tracks the time spent from the beginning to the end across multiple layers (web, servlet, JMS, EJB) and forked threads. It tells the full story about a transaction in addition to resource utilization. It tells you if one of many servers ran a major GC (garbage collection) in the last five minutes, or if one of the transactions took more than 10 seconds. It also drills down to its components.

It provides full visibility of what’s happening in complex transactions which involve services running in our NJ, AR, and CO data centers. It provides data beyond standard monitoring, including method invocation-level insights.

It could understand more invocation protocols. Some custom-built web service processors are not recognized. As a result, the requests are identified as plain servlet calls. For example, it does not recognize Pega’s customized web service calls. I hope the vendor will accumulate experiences and exceptions, and provide guidance to customers on how to handle them.

I have been using AppDynamics for four years.

It was involved in resource utilization issue in one of many of applications that is based on Oracle Fusion.

I did not have any scalability issues. It is well designed for good scalability. Even with 1000s of servers, it is easy to identify a few that are suspicious by sorting the metrics by latency, CPU utilization, garbage collection time, and so on.

Technical support was excellent. They are very responsive. I usually get responses the same day.

We used HP Diagnostics. It could only analyze resource utilization without correlating this to transactions.

As far as the customer is concerned, it was easy. But the vendor needs to do the bulk of the work setting up the SaaS.

Get bulk pricing. The volume will be higher than you think.

We looked at most competitive products on the market, including Dynatrace and HP lines.

Don’t treat it as a monitoring tool. Use it as a troubleshooting tool. It helps you understand how the apps run in much more detail than good or bad. You can see where you need to improve.

My clients use AppDynamics for monitoring the performance and behavior of applications, as well as detecting any signs of potential overload. It also allows them to identify when certain applications are not functioning as expected. Essentially, its primary purpose is to monitor and evaluate the behavior and performance of applications.

AppDynamics is aiding us with achieving full stack availability, which entails obtaining a comprehensive or holistic overview of the application's performance, sales, and behavior. In essence, the purpose of full stack availability is to provide a complete picture of what is happening with the application.

The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is Proactive Monitoring and Alerting.

The price of the solution could improve.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately six years.

The solution is stable.

I rate the stability of AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

The scalability of AppDynamics is good.

I rate the scalability of AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

The support from the vendor is good.

I rate the support of AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

Positive

AppDynamics is what I would consider an enterprise-level solution. This means that it's a solution that is intended for use by larger organizations, while small or medium-sized businesses may find it difficult to afford. The number of agents required will also impact the pricing, and smaller companies may only be able to afford a limited number of agents. Essentially, the cost of the solution is not within the reach of every organization, and only some may be able to afford it.

My advice to others is this solution is fantastic if your business can afford it. It will help boost your business and IT.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

From the perspective of the customer experience, the solution has been quite helpful for our company. Positive comments have been given, and no clients have opted out of our services for any reason. This has given us the option to think about including more agents in the remedy. Also, the capability that alerts users in advance of potential problems has improved the effectiveness of our IT employees. Despite hiring more employees, we haven't had any client abandonment, which proves that the solution is of the highest caliber and performing remarkably well. Also, it has helped us monitor apps more efficiently and fix any problems before they have an impact on end users.

The big problem we've always had is connecting the dots, so to speak. We've never been able to say that the application is having an issue before somebody calls us and tells us, and that's extremely embarrassing. Plus we're a little late to the table. With AppDynamics, you can be able to tell whether they're having errors or whether they're having a slow response time. 

We're able to detect issues now before the customer calls us. Another thing that this helps us with is the fact that there are some conditions we see in the database, for instance, locking and blocking and high CPU, that we've always had been trying to correlate this high CPU and high blocking. We were always wondering: is that necessarily bad or is it just kind of a warning sign or what is that? With this product, we're able to correlate everything with what the application is saying and saying, "we've got blocking, we've got high errors, we've got high response time, therefore it's probably a database and therefore it's probably an issue." Before we had this product, we weren't able to do that.

This solution is great at alerting us to issues and letting us know if anything is correlated.

The release management capabilities are great. If you do a new release, you have to ask: how's will it perform? Is it going to have problems? Before it was hard to actually measure. Now we're able to precisely measure the performance and also the error rate. That's very helpful.

It's also helpful with building dashboards. You can build dashboards for different parts of the company, for the operations, for the application, for the infrastructure, all the above.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The stability has been good.

At first, I thought it had a high learning curve. However, it's not so much. It's just different. It's different from all the other tools and it's just not as intuitive as it could be. I'm not sure how you fix that. For instance, the training on the dashboards that is provided could be a little bit better, as could the use cases. They should have some good examples out there. As it is right now, I had to scour YouTube to find some stuff.

I've been using the solution for a few years. I started using it around 2015.

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable.

I'm relatively new at this company, and we're doing a POC on it right now. We have it on about 75 machines. In terms of scalability, my guess is the architecture will allow it, is t's in the cloud. It should scale. However, I really don't know here in the company where I use it. I know other companies have scaled thousands. I personally haven't experienced that myself, however.

As it is going well, we're likely to expand it. That said, we're still just in the POC phase.

The initial setup is pretty simple. It's not overly complex. Implementing it shouldn't be a problem.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, the team is pretty much my team. It's a site reliability engineering team, and it's pretty small. The people who'll actually be maintaining it will not only be implementing, so to speak, but utilizing it and customizing it. That will ultimately also include a lot of other teams, like your operation, application, and infrastructure teams.

I can't speak to the exact cost of the solution. It's not a part of the product I handle.

I would advise those considering the solution to be patient and stick with it. A lot of these tools are pretty simple, however, they're simply used. For instance, they measure CPU and network and memory and stuff like that. The graphics may be pretty flashy, however, it doesn't provide the hardcore data that AppDynamics does. That's why you need to kind of just relax and stay with it a bit and you'll be successful. If you're just looking for something flashy to give you back immediate results that you can use today or tomorrow, it's probably not the right fit.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

When you have a lot of AWS products running (and integrations connected to them) the only way you can monitor them is to have a system or automatic reporting. Cisco AppDynamics gives lots of "extensions" that collect metrics and feed them back to an AD controller so you can get a picture of health, usage, rules, and reporting.

It also works across environments from cloud to traditional, which means you don’t need something for AWS and then something for in-house products.

AWS was a new environment for a client and they used a series of extensions to show how the installation was performing and how changes impacted their setup, down the line. With sprawling cloud processes, it can be hard to see how your changes impact integrations, but AD really helps out with this.

Specifically, with the use of Cisco AD extensions, we were able to prove that a move from MySQL to Amazon Aurora sped up data retrieval. This meant a trial of Aurora was proven to be a success and led to a gradual phasing out of MySQL DBs.

The most valuable feature is the ability to take a report, and in particular, a visual, and link it to actual application performance and then the consequences. This means you can show how an incident or action has an effect on the business. This is invaluable for executive meetings, where it can sometimes be hard to link an event to an outcome, a month down the line. The bottom line is that it helps protect your bottom line.

The extensions can be edited in a simple config file so you can sculpt what you are getting.

It could do with more than one data centre/multiple AWS accounts in a pane of glass. Also, improved scalability to large environments would be helpful.

For me, it’s always support and training that need improvement, as both of these are crucial to using a product effectively. When there are so many features it would seem to be a benefit, but in reality that can be daunting.

We chose to procure this solution via the AWS Marketplace because you don’t need to buy physical hardware to use it.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten because you can edit the config files easily and make the reports your own. Also, it supports loads of AWS products: S3, Elastic MapReduce, EC2, DynamoDB, ELB, RDS, Route 53, etc.

The primary use case is to monitor our applications and get a handle on any issues ahead of time, such as memory leaks, complete utilization of CPU, and the need to spin up a new server. Being able to know all of these things ahead of time and act on them is a primary requirement. And once an application is placed on top of that, we would also like to monitor what's happening with the application

The solution is doing great.

The key benefits it offers us are that it helps us know the infrastructure and performance issues, as well as if a customer is experiencing latency issues. It helps us know about them ahead of time so we can act on them, proactively, and improve the customer experience. That's important for us as we transform ourselves and call ourselves a digital company.

Being able to install it on-prem and monitor our on-prem infrastructure is important for us. We are in the process of migrating to cloud, but most of our infrastructure is on-prem. We have highly scalable systems and AppDynamics will help us monitor our load on-prem. Our systems range from simple to the most complex and it gives us the visibility across transactions, in one dashboard.

I would like to be able to monitor both cloud an on-prem infrastructures, displayed in one dashboard.

I would also like more flexible pricing: A pay-per-use model, rather than just a fixed-price model.

I'm not aware of any stability issues. We have deployed it in MEA, a few countries in Asia, and in the US. I haven't heard negative comments. People are happy.

We do use their technical support and they are very responsive.

In terms of advice, I would ask you to have criteria. Most of the time there will be some general aspects that are pretty common, that are covered by the various third-parties that provide industry ratings. But within that, you have to have customization of the features to match to your own infrastructure, the technical stack you have: mainframes, ICDs, modern platforms, cloud, etc. You need to compare the tools that work with your technical stack.

The most important criteria, for me, when selecting a vendor are 

• flexible pricing
• full coverage of monitoring of our technical stack, both on-cloud and on-prem
• customer service.

I would rate this solution at eight out of 10. I took away the two points for the two reasons I mentioned: being able to monitor both cloud and on-prem with a single dashboard and flexible pricing.

The most valuable features are transaction correlation, application flow map, business transactions, and the key metrics that are displayed on the dashboard.

It gives a complete, end-to-end visualization of an environment. That's where it is a little easier to analyze any issue in production compared to the other APM tools. That's the key difference between the other tools and AppDynamics.

The first thing is that they are going in the right direction. That's the great thing because they're linking IT with business. That's why we mostly like it because the other APM tools are just talking about your IT. They're not linking that context to the business. You have your monitoring; your instrumenting; you're doing a byte-code instrumentation; you're doing a threat analysis. You have enough information. All you need to do is just play around with the data and give the visualization of business. What other APM tools are not giving, AppDynamics is great on that point.

As far as the features that we're expecting, the main thing is the universal agent that I’ve mentioned. They're not clear on what month or what year. I think next year, but they're not clear on the release date. That's one killer that we're really expecting. Because that will save a lot of time for an enterprise like us to go for a massive deployment. That's one of the key features I can say that we're looking forward to.

Stability is good so far. We haven't experienced any issues. But after a recent controller upgrade, we experienced a couple of downtimes of the controller, which is not good. On the agent side, not much. We do not see agents stop all of the sudden. We haven't experienced any such things. But in the APM space, the agent is a little tricky, so we have to be a little careful with the agent. With the previous experience around the Dynatrace agent we had, that killed the entire box. The box was completely down.

With this tool, we are taking a few more precautions; meaning, we're not going to production with the agent as of right now. We're putting enough load, enough applications, enough boxes and testing it for 2-3 months. Once we get confident, only then are we planning to go for the production.

Apart from the stability side – as I mentioned, the controller was down a couple of times recently, and the agent is working fine – the agent overhead is not good. It's taking a minimum of 200-300 MB per JVM or per CLR, which is the case with any of the APM tools in the current market. But we expect the overhead to come down. Then, it'll benefit us a lot. For an enterprise like us, we have a lot of shared environments. A box has 50-60 JVMs. A box has 300, 400, 500 virtual machines. In that case, if the overhead is 2-3 personned, we end up killing the box because we have the VM environments.

How we look at scalability is in the controller's scalability. I think AppDynamics is not really there yet. The scalability should be very easy. I think that's what our expectation is. I think it's not even there yet. Controllers won't talk to each other. In a keynote session at a recent NetApp conference, someone was talking about or mentioned controller-to-controller communication. Once that is there, as long as controllers talk to each other, the scalability will become a little easier. That's on the controller side.

On the agent side, the scalability is the main focus area for us now, because we have 100,000 boxes, and we can't really deploy agents app-by-app, machine-by-machine, or manually. We can't really do that. Our approach is automated deployment. But with AppDynamics, the really tricky part is, they expect the application to be modeled in a certain way. They want us to define the app name, tier name, and node name, which is a little tricky.

I can just do mass deployment of agents, but then I have to do configuration also. That is where I think we're a little lagging, so we're working closely with them. We end up developing our own automation scripts to achieve that stage. Again, at that keynote session, people were talking about a universal agent. I think that might really solve the problems from both the deployment and licensing angles.

With their support, if you raise a ticket, the response is very good. But the concern is the consulting days. I think they're offering some consulting days. In the first year of a contract, they offer a certain number of consulting days. After that, the consulting days are free. But to book a consultant, I think we need to book the consultant at least one or two weeks in advance. We can't really do that in the enterprise. A lot of things will happen. All of a sudden, we need support. That's a little tricky. We shared the feedback with AppDynamics. One or two days is what we can spend, but one or two weeks is really a problem.

For us, a large enterprise, the audits and the compliance issues; these things are serious concerns. We have 6,000 applications. We have 100,000-plus boxes. If management asks us, "Hey. Can you tell me what happened with a certain number of the boxes? Why did they go down?” Or “Why did certain applications go down? Can you please pull up the reason? Or can you tell me all of the applications a X person has accessed? Which boxes did he touch? Which routers did he touch?" We have no clue in a large enterprise like us. That's where instrumentation is key for us.

Our model is, we're shifting towards platform. Once we shift towards the platform, we want to offer instrumentation as a built-in stack in it. For that, there are two key things. One is explicit instrumentation, and the other is implicit instrumentation. For the explicit instrumentation, we already developed a solution last year. We’re now planning the implicit instrumentation. That's where we did a lot of market research. Our technology labs did a lot of market research. That's when we also went to the Gartner Report. Then, we finally chose AppDynamics.

Initial setup was straightforward. There are two angles to it. The controller setup is pretty straightforward. The agent setup is also straightforward, but only if you are a simple tech startup or you have only one e-commerce application. For those kinds of companies, I think it makes sense. All they need to do is spend 2-3 days to set up everything. But in our case, we have 6,000 applications. I think AppDynamics is expecting the application to be modeled in certain way. I think we were asking them about this as well. I was expecting to get an update at that conference that they are moving away from that application modeling to something else. Once they move to that, I think that is also going to speed up the initial setup process.

There weren’t really any other vendors on our shortlist at the time. We are using Introscope extensively in production and we are using Dynatrace extensively in the lower-end environments. If this tool works out well, we're probably going to replace the other two.

As far as the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, we have different stakeholders. Each stakeholder has their own use cases. The development team expects certain use cases. The support team expects certain use cases. The SWAT team expects certain use cases. Engineering expects certain things. TA expects certain things. We evaluated the tools from all the angles. On top of that, the future is cloud. The future is platform as a service. So, we want a tool that supports that era. That's where AppDynamics is the winner.

The main point is every company is a software company. Invariably, you talk about it. Every button click is important. What if a customer shares feedback with his colleagues, friends or family? Every button click is important. Having said that, you should know what is happening out in your environment, out on your machines, out on your applications. So, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and end-user monitoring are definitely very important.

We have our own use cases. According to those use cases, we chose AppDynamics. But whatever the product, don't get married to any product; whether it is CA APM, Dynatrace or AppDynamics. Even now, we're not married to any tool. We will always go with a tool which is going to fit in to our model. That's our message to anybody who's researching this case.

One important thing to note is that my rating doesn't mean AppDynamics is not great. AppDynamics is great. It is going in the right direction. At the conference, the CEO or somebody mentioned that they can't shove this product and develop everything that people are expecting for release by 2020. It's being done in a phased manner, in iterations. So far, whatever they have release to us, that's what the rating is for. That will probably be higher in the coming years. With the features that it has and with the expectations that we have, that's the rating we can say. And on top of that, AppDynamics gets the highest rating of any vendor in the APM space. If I rated the other tools, I'd rate them lower.

The features we find most valuable are real-time monitoring, seeing transactions, being proactive and easy to focus on the real problem.

I remember a case that would have taken maybe four or five days to find the cause. Now, we find it in two or three hours. APM has really made it more efficient. It really helps.

Well, it's not really about APM, but the network monitoring I'm really interested by that.

We're basically starting so we're not yet very good at it. Again, we still have a good support to help us.

We have not had any stability problems.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have used technical support a few times and we found it to be very good. Response time is good and their tips are good; very helpful.

We did not have any previous solutions.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup.

We compared AppDynamics with the IBM Tivoli IT. They failed so that's why we went to AppDynamics.

APM probably applied more to us than others perhaps. This is an application monitoring tool so you need to really understand it and implement it properly. The application team needs to know about its features and capabilities to get the most out of it. We're new at this, so it's a new paradigm that we have to bring in our company. Being on the event team, I'm not looking at the application for the app team. Sometimes we're looking at the dashboard and we see something wrong. We feel that they're not really taking action. Sometimes we just call them, "Hey, by the way, can you have a look at it?" So, integration with the actual application team could be an improvement.

I think a vendor should be available, have deep product knowledge, and be helpful.

The performance issue identifying feature with the transaction snapshots is the best feature I see.

Before it goes to production, it's easy to identify the performance issues. It's one of the good performance engineering tools with minimal overhead. I know there are other APM tools on the market but I like the features it provides and the way it pulls metrics. It doesn't pull all the data; it just takes some of the data, whatever it needs. That helps to reduce overhead in performance.

In the transaction naming features, for business transactions, we are not always able to tie a business transaction to a real user transaction. Even though we have some options to do that, it's not done 100%. If a user submits a transaction and it in turn triggers 4-5 different URLs, tying all of them together to a single user transaction doesn't happen well.

It's very stable.

We have used it for very high volume applications and it works fine.

Technical support is the best thing with AppD. I'm very happy with the tech support they do. They're very quick in responding to the request.

Initial setup was straightforward. I'm doing administration for AppD today. It is straightforward.

AppDynamics provided all the features we were looking for in an APM tool. We had a list of things that we wanted to have in-house; it did provide the pricing; and especially the overhead was minimal because it doesn't capture all the data. The other tools on the market, unless we tell it to reduce the amount of data to capture, it does capture all of the data by default.

Try using the trial version which AppD provides. Their customer support is very good. If you have questions specific to your applications, you can reach out to customer support. They'll come on site and help you with all the questions and they can do the set up.

We also use AppDynamics Real User Monitoring, where we get end user performance. We also use AppDynamics Database Monitoring, so we can tidy up if there is a DB issue; what is causing the database issue. They're all integrated with each other.