AppDynamics Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature is giving end-to-end, about the business transactions, specifically, which is an area everybody struggles with. What they are looking for, basically, is how customers are viewing the transaction, from the end-user perspective, which is useful for the business people. They can streamline where they want improvement, but it also gives you the details down to the nitty-gritty that the developer teams are responsible for. Along the way, it's also showing you the overall performance for the infrastructure that you have for the application.

A benefit is ease of use, compared to other products that we have seen before, such as Wily. You get to the information a lot quicker, instead of spending an hour trying to get to the point that you're looking for, especially with the workflow maps that they have. It's really very easy and intuitive also. Looking at snapshots, you can quickly pinpoint where you want to look at.

Specific to what our experience is, because we're using Cloud Foundry, we're using an extension to monitor the infrastructure for that; that's probably the weakest point for it, because it basically collects JMX metrics. One of the things that we see missing when compared to Wily Introscope is the concept of calculators. You get a group of metrics and you make calculations based on it. That's something I've seen people require. It's something they want to see on their dashboard. They have the metric browser; it's not capable of doing such a thing. That's one thing that people would like to see.

Dashboards, at least the basic ones that we have, because we are not licensed for Analytics, as of yet; it seems basic and not the best area of the product. The dashboards could use some improvement.

So far, it is pretty stable; no downtime. Our implementation is high availability also, so it's a clustered environment. So far, we haven’t had any issues that I am aware of.

So far, we haven’t had any no scalability problems; we size it properly, as far as hardware. Maybe we even oversize it sometimes. So far, we haven’t had any issues.

So far, personally, I opened three tickets so far and I got what I wanted to get. I was pleased with the resolution.

The only complication with initial setup was the PCF, the Cloud Foundry monitoring. I guess it wasn’t something AppDynamics had planned for before. I don't know. It's a new area to everybody. They rolled it out because it's microservices; there were a lot of teams involved, just to get the tiers and nodes in check. That took a lot of work. Also, we have multiple data centers that are sharing the same application, so we needed to take steps to distinguish the data centers from each other as well.

Take the training; take the time to learn it; explore it. That's my advice.

It provides great tools for monitoring and managing all the different environments of Dev, QA, and Prod with different needs but from a common interface.

It's very light and monitoring overhead is minimal.

And because it's also a SaaS-based application, it can be accessed by all team members from anywhere at any time.

Now application monitoring has become much easier.

Transaction identification and locking it for monitoring is much easier now, with lots of flexibility to change things on the run.

AppDynamics can identify and segregate unique transactions based on parameters, URL, data value, etc., which makes things very easy and organized.

The tool also has a nice feature for monitoring end-user experience. This provides us with browser-rendering and client-side info (OS, browser, network time, etc.). Getting all this information on a common platform has been of great value and use to us.

It could be integrated with more performance-testing tools for more intensive use.

6 months +

There is nothing very complex in the deployment, but we may face some connectivity and configuring issues. However, it all depends on the environment in which we install the tool (security policy, certificates required, etc). But all the issues have been one-time occurrences, and maintaining and upgrading it is quite simple once the certificates and the network requirements were identified.

No

No

The customer service is quite good and prompt.

9

The initial setup is very simple and not complex. It is quite straightforward, but we faced some initial issues with certificates, network, and firewall. The support team, however, is always available for setup and troubleshooting.

But for small and simple environments, it's quite simple. Just 3-4 steps.

This solution is worth the price, which is based on the number of servers you want to monitor. So if you want a good and complete monitoring solution, the cost is worth it.

Site Scope, Introscope, CEM and a few more. But AppDynamics met our dynamic and varied requirements.

It is primarily on-premises. We've been evaluating cloud, and I've got one application that's using a cloud-based solution, but the bulk of it is on-premises.

The business transaction that stands between multiple applications is proving to be most valuable.

Its resiliency can be improved. We're told that the best we can do with an on-prem solution is to have a hot standby that requires a manual switchover. So, it is a do-it-yourself Ikea model of maintaining data consistency between two servers, without having low balance or failover considerations for an on-prem solution.

There are a lot of capabilities and features that I need on a day-to-day basis that just are not included in the product. I have seen these capabilities and features in multiple other solutions. For number one, it has to be FedRAMP certified. We've been working around that with security and everything else. So, we need a solution that is fully supported in a secure federal environment.

I have been using it heavily for about two and a half years.

It was complex. There is nothing simple about this type of instrumentation.

We had professional services from AppDynamics or Cisco for mostly on-prem expertise.

I would advise others to take a higher systems-level approach to understand exactly what is needed in the way of instrumentation and monitoring within your enterprise. You can have a point solution like AppDynamics, and this is the big picture of the entire data flow throughout the system.

I would rate AppDynamics a six out of 10.

We use multiple APMs, but for smaller projects AppDynamics is too cost-prohibitive. It is a more expensive APM among the competitors, which is fine because it also does a lot more on the auto-detection and the AI side. It also supports a lot more languages. So whenever we hit a project that has the budget and the need, we look to use AppDynamics, especially if the technologies are complicated.

If somebody has a very simple two-tier Python or Node, we can use almost any APM. When we're dealing with somebody who has 50 or 60 tiers, some traditional stuff, some microservices; some stuff is in containers, some stuff is in real instances; there's Node and there's PHP, and there's a bit of C code in there somewhere. This is where we hit a complex case. It's usually a larger app, an app that has existed and evolved over time with many modules at play, making it almost different products, but it's all one big product. This is the type of case where we look towards AppDynamics because we can just drop it in and have it work.

We can't do that with the other APMs that we work with because they just wouldn't work. They'll do this little silo or that little silo, but they won't work with everything. With few exceptions, we have not found any production code that we couldn't make work with AppDynamics.

I can't compare how it makes things better within my company. That would be like asking someone how air makes their life better.

I don't say that lightly. I've been in other companies in the past without APM. Some of our projects don't have budget for APM at all. They're smaller projects, or they're from a smaller client who can't afford it, or in some cases, they don't want APM. Comparing it to that would be the easiest thing. In those cases, if the project is going right and there are no problems that are noticed, it's fine. But we've had a few carrier projects where there are unknown performance issues or unknown crashes or we're seeing, at 3 p.m., when it's not even a high-traffic period, that everything falls apart all of a sudden: The database is not good on connections; or we see the connections, but we don't easily understand why they're there. In those situations, the projects that don't have APM usually spend more on people hours than the APM product would have cost.

In that case, it's made things better by making it faster to troubleshoot and easier to troubleshoot. We don't want our most skilled people spending 40 hours to find one hotspot, when it could take them 30 minutes. It's not a value-add to let them do that manual, old-school troubleshooting. In fact, even on the projects that have, in some cases, not had the budget to buy the agents that we need, sometimes it has boiled down to using a PoC license, with their permission, to try to prove the value. Some of those clients went ahead and bought it. They understood it was, "Look guys, we can charge you 80 hours of troubleshooting, or you can just buy this license." I don't want to claim that that's every case, but there have been a couple cases where we've converted people and the client has accepted APM - where they might have been hostile toward it - after seeing the value of it.

In every APM tool, and this is true in AppDynamics as well, it's that waterfall view where I can see my code hotspots. In APM, it always comes back to that. It's great to have reporting. It's great to have that alerting: Tell me when something deviates from my normal conditions. All the analytic functionality is good for telling me what code to look at. But ultimately, I can't live without that code-level trace. I have to know where things are hot so that I can help the developer with what they actually need to fix. I can't just tell them the app is slow. That's always been the most important thing. In AppDynamics, they make that easier.

There are other products I won't name where you go in and you're looking at 50,000 traces. There's no way to sort and organize those particular traces. In AppDynamics, everywhere I go, there's some sort of grouping and aggregation function, or there's some sort of timeline that lets me zero in more quickly on the traces that I need. They go to more pains to aggregate and bubble the important ones to the top. That removes a lot of manual work; for example, sorting by the ones that took more than a second. I don't have to do that in AppDynamics. Sometimes I do so, in the course of troubleshooting, but for the most part, it tells me. I click on a trace. It's usually a trace that matters, that I can take action on, and that I can have a real impact on.

All those millions and, in some cases billions, of traces, over the course of a couple months, get aggregated into one view that's manageable. The other APMs are good if we don't have millions of requests. As soon as I get into that threshold, I can't look at that many traces anymore, they don't have great ways of looking at the traces in aggregate.

What I would like to see might exist, but if it does I haven't seen it. I would like to see something that lets me set real dollar figures, not just to outages, but to the solutions as well. It seems like a gimmicky feature, but for anyone who has to justify their budget within a larger area of the company, or to a client, it would be helpful. I don't want to have it in my face constantly, but I want to be able to access it when I'm looking at problems and have found a problem that I know I need to address. I could flag it off and have AppDynamics estimate how long a person would have taken to find that without it. That would give me a lot of leverage for justifying the existence of APM, which I really need.

Also, I know this is a holdout, we saw this ten years ago, where APM products were starting to crosstalk between each other. I would like to see a return to that because we do use multiple products. I understand that some of the information is in silos, but some of it isn't. If some of this exists, I might have missed it, but I would love to have an integration where I'm looking through logs in Elasticsearch and I could click on my AppDynamics link, because they have a little module, type in the credentials and be logged into AppDynamics. And similarly with the AppDynamics interface: "Oh, look. This server is having an issue. Okay. All this is good info, but maybe I want to take a look in Grafana." I would click over and it would take me to that spot in Grafana: the same time frame, the same filters and place to get me to that particular server, or instance, or container, etc. I would like to see that cross-functionality with some of the more common tools.

Most people run Elasticsearch or Kibana or similar things. Most people run a Grafana or something like that. I'm not expecting them to integrate with their competitors - that might be a hairy situation, although a nice one for us, on the consumer side - but if that type of integration was possible with some of the major, open-source, complementary products, that would be nice, and some of the commercial ones too.

We saw that in the APM space ten years ago, a little bit. There were a couple movements towards that, but I haven't seen that since as much.

I've been using AppDynamics for almost a decade. In that time, I've seen it run on literally hundreds of applications in that time, and I can quite honestly think of only one situation where it introduced stability problems. I pegged a little of the blame on AppDynamics but a little bit on the app as well. That's pretty good.

There are a lot of products in the APM space, and I've used a lot of them, that have very consistent performance problems, stability problems, or crashing that they'll introduce into the app. The fact that we've only encountered that once, and it was almost a decade ago and it was an exceptional case, is pretty good.

I've never really heard of stability problems and we've used it in some pretty highly important, high-volume apps.

The scalability is excellent. We've never encountered a situation, under loads that we've seen, where we could not scale to meet the needs. We're not running the world's top-ten websites, but we are doing some very high transactions on some very large properties, with a lot of calls. There are very few applications I can imagine that would have scalability issues using AppDynamics. We've seen that across technologies: Some of them are PHP apps, some of them are .NET apps, some of them are a mixture of all of the above. We have yet to see it cap out or not be able to scale.

We've received technical support in two areas.

On the pre-sales side, it's always been extremely professional, really great, even in smaller license situations. If there's somebody available and within a radius that can realistically come to a meeting, they often will. They've worked through some very peculiar application setups with us, where we're not sure how we're going to approach it. We've always been very pleased on that side.

On the post-sales side, as well, once it's deployed, we haven't had to use them a lot. There haven't been a lot of things we've had to contact them about, but where we have, the issues have mostly been around things like training, or understanding. We just haven't seen that many problems. We've always found the training material to be very descriptive. They've always taken the time to hand-hold us through: "Okay, this is what you're seeing, and this is why you're seeing it. Why don't you go look at this in the app." They've always taken the time.

I can't comment on the troubleshooting side because we haven't needed to do it. We may have had a minor case where we needed a quick answer to a license issue or we couldn't figure out why an agent wasn't connecting. They've always been excellent there, but we haven't encountered an "Oh my God," big issue, where it wasn't just something stupid, that we were overlooking. They've been great on that. They've been able to identify those things, but we haven't had to use them a lot on the post-sales side of things.

In terms of the integration and configuration of AppDynamics in our AWS environment, it's been pretty seamless. It doesn't matter if we've been using real instances or if we're using a Kubernetes environment or a docker environment - we've got quite a few different environments. We've never encountered an integration problem, or any issues deploying either manually or via our automation scripts. It's always packaged in very nicely with them.

I can't think of any problems we've encountered that I could critique.

The Kubernetes deployment is three lines of code or one command. They've made it amazingly simple. We just put in into a config file and everything pretty much just goes in a modern environment.

The only one that's been hard is some of the compiled apps on C, but that's such a rare case and it's only hard because it's been a non-.NET compiled app. Everything else has been seamless and just one click. The C apps are rare and we know they're going to be hard, that's just the nature of the way they're designed.

All of our database endpoints were connected, all of our third-party endpoints. Anytime we've had to use the JavaScript on the app it's been seamless. They don't break our sub-calls by accidentally putting them in there.

All of the integration from browser JavaScript to code, through to the database proxy have been seamless for us.

With very few exceptions, we can justify the cost per project and definitely, in the wash of things, it saves money, overall. The only problem that we've had with this is sometimes trying to show that justification.

It's really easy sometimes, where we spend 30 minutes or an hour on the interface and we find a laundry list of problems that we've got to address; big problems. Somebody who's not familiar with APM on the client side will look into and say, "That's it. Why did we need that product for that?" You needed that product because it took 30 minutes instead of weeks and customer complaints, etc.

The product has always been worth it, but trying to bubble up the value has not, I admit, been easy, because there's no value attached to a problem that we find. That's the only problem we've encountered around cost. We have always been able to justify it.

We actively use Instana for some cases as well, and sometimes we use Instana and AppDynamics side-by-side. We do use Dynatrace and have used Dynatrace in the past. Those are the ones that we're using today.

We've used and evaluated, at some point in time over the last ten years, another dozen vendors. The choice is not made lightly. We've actually tested all the other ones.

There is some stuff that everyone supports. Every APM supports Java. If somebody has a simple Java app, any APM is usually going to work. It's not going to be as stable, sometimes, but when we get into the real-world apps where you have a heterogeneous network of different technologies at play on a mixture of platforms, that's where a lot of the APM tools stop working as well as AppDynamics works.

Through our history, AppDynamics has always been the one on top of making sure that it continues to work. It works from the database through to the browser, whether it's a mobile or a desktop. I can see that full interaction. I don't get that out of any other APM with as many platforms.

I see a lot of people migrate towards one product in particular in the market and they never really try the other APM vendors. They'll look at the page and they'll look at the price, but sometimes you just have to pay a little more. Importantly, it's the features that you get that make it worth it. I won't name the new products, the ones people migrate towards a lot - especially developers, it seems like that cohort instantly likes them - but AppDynamics and a couple of the other ones as well are really good for production. AppDynamics, in particular, excels on that. Don't just install AppDynamics, install a couple of them. Pick four or five and run them in production, pick a couple nodes even, and compare the interfaces and the ability to use the interfaces. Most people will quickly find that there is a real difference between them. Some people will gravitate, still, towards certain products rather than others, but I haven't seen a person yet, who has not loved the AppDynamics features and portal and how it does things.

You can't just look at the feature list, spend five minutes on their web page, and then dismiss it. You have to run it on your app, see how easy it is and how much time it saves you.

I have not used the marketplace version. I've used the traditional, agent-based licensing. The reason for that is partly to do with the affordability. I can take the same license for the on-prem and put it on AWS as well. We always use the same license, because we don't know where it's going to end up.

In terms of integrating AppDynamics with other products within our AWS environment, the way to describe that is that we're using it to watch certain services. Obviously, if our database is using endpoints within AWS, which a majority of the apps are, such as Redis or RDS nodes, AppDynamics has seen those. All of the integrations that I can think of, except for the database, are web-based. We see the database integration and we see all the web-based integration. So we have integrated with other products.

We haven't seen a case where we haven't been able to see the interaction between our app and the service. Just to be clear, I have seen other APM products that miss those integrations. You plug them in and you don't see your SNS calls. Usually, it's solvable, but you've got to troubleshoot and set up some special code and it becomes painful. I can't think of a case in AppDynamics where we just didn't plug it in and start seeing those calls right away.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. I've been using it for so long, and have used so many other APM vendors, and it really is the most stable one. It works with the most conditions that we encounter. The only reason I take off one point is the cost. I can't give it a ten because it is not a cheap product. None of them are. The price is fair, but I could use it on more projects if they had a lower price.

A couple of things that it's done is that it's allowed us to become a bit more proactive as opposed to reactive. We can see from the dashboards when a problem is happening before it becomes too serious. It allows us to react much quicker than we had in the past, so our mean time to resolution is improved.

For example, we know that there's a particular report in our system that whenever it's executed, it can cause some performance issues. So, we have created a specific business transaction that looks for that specific call in our application. Whenever that call happens, it issues out an alert to let us know that somebody is running that report. We can then make sure that it's not consuming too many resources.

What I like about the APM is that it allows us to quickly identify where there are issues. It allows us to configure health rules so that we can, based on our own experience, determine when an application is behaving incorrectly. It's very configurable, but also has a lot of functionality right out of the box.

It has become a very integrated tool in our company, to share with developers, as well, some of the information that AppDynamics APM is showing us. It's becoming a bit of a cultural change for us to really look at AppDynamics and to leverage its full capabilities.

If you look at, for example, the two big updates that are coming out, as mentioned in the keynote address at a recent conference, I think those are two really big ones. For example, the ability to automate the deployment of the agents and the updates of the agents.

Licensing, as well, is very key. Again, we have many types of agents across different segments of our corporation; being able to manage those license keys in one central location.

We've encountered the business transaction limit. We didn't even know, but when we encountered that, a lot of business transactions were actually being lost because they couldn't be captured any more. Again, we're making tweaks to the system and constantly learning about it. It's a very complex application, and requires almost a full-time person to be in there working on it all the time.

I think training would probably be a good idea, as well. One thing that I found is that when we purchased the Application Performance Management solution and we purchased the agents, when we finished a sales thing, "Okay, great. Well, good luck." It would have been nice for them to recommended to us, “With this, we're going to provide training for your team. And we're going to also include, let's say, two or three days, or a week, of professional services. We can help not just install it and show you the best practices, we'll also start to tweak it for you so you can start to see what you can do with it. Then, we'll let you go on your own. Then, of course, if you want more help, you can always come back.” Just to give us a little bit of a head start.

These tweaks are the reason why I have not given it a perfect rating. I feel like there's a lot of configuration and a lot of work that needs to go into it. I feel that there is still a lot to learn.

With some of the problems that we've had so far – the business transactions, the deploying of the agents - if they can finish that, as the new versions come out and whatnot, I think that they're going to get there. It's a constantly evolving space, constantly evolving product. They're going to get there.

We have had stability issues. One thing that we found very nice about AppDynamics is that they are very quick to respond to issues. We've opened tickets in the past. For example, one of the collectors, for the .NET agent, was causing our IIS service to crash intermittently. That was a bug that we raised to AppDynamics. They did a deep-dive investigation and their recommendation was to lower the frequency with which it takes snapshots. That was one issue that we ran into. It was a production issue, so it did cause a little bit of a problem. We were able to resolve it with AppDynamics, though.

Scalability is also something that we brought up with AppDynamics. Again, they're very helpful and quick to respond. When you have an environment where you have deployed multiple agents, different types of agents, SQL agents and .NET agents, for example, and a new version comes out, how do you update all those agents? How do you go about doing it? We've had a lot of talks with them. Right now, it's a manual process to update the 50-odd agents. We have to go and uninstall, and reinstall the new one.

From the keynote address at a recent conference, I think that there's going to be a way now to automate the deployments of the agents.

Moving to APM was an initiative from the ops team. We knew that we needed visibility into the application. We already have very good visibility into the infrastructure, but the application was always something that we didn't have.

I was the project manager working on the project to deploy it. I didn't do the actual deploying itself; it was our senior network engineer who did it.

I think it's pretty straightforward to install. Installing the agents themselves, that's really fast; simple configuration. So, the initial setup was pretty fast. You get a lot of value right from the initial setup.

I think the one part that requires a little bit more thought and a little bit more time is how to now take it from the initial install, in that vanilla sort of setup, to really fine tune it for your own application. That's a lot of back and forth with dev, with the performance team, with the ops team, with the devops team, the CM team, and a lot of iterations to get it right. That's a constantly evolving and learning process.

We looked at a few competitors. We looked at Dynatrace. We looked at New Relic, as well. Then, we saw AppDynamics.

When we first purchased it about three years ago, our sense was they were still kind of new to the market, but we wanted to give them a chance, as well. They had a pretty compelling vision, an idea, and a story; then, a good personal touch; the sales team, as well. So, we decided to go with them to give us that visibility, but we knew we needed it.

In general, one thing that we look for in a vendor is completeness of vision. I think that's important; being able to understand the needs, our needs, as well; expertise in the space.

It's a fantastic product. Just make sure that you take the time to really understand it. Know what you're getting into. It's not just, "Let's purchase it, let's install it. Okay, it's great. Now it's working, let's put it up on the dashboard."

There's so much to it; you can just scratch the surface or you can really dive into it and it can do a lot. Look at those extra features and spend the time to do it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we also use AppDynamics SQL and EUM. We are very happy with them. The EUM, End User Monitoring, is really, really cool. The database one, as well, for SQL, it's also something that we've just started using. We're not fully leveraging it yet. We've just purchased it and we're starting to deploy it, so it's something that we're still learning. I know that we're right now in a PoC, proof of concept, with Log Analytics, as well. And we may be looking at the Synthetics module, as well, in the future.

The most valuable feature is primarily the ability to do business transaction analysis in real time; for us to be able to use it for multiple areas. We use it for our cloud services, as well as our in-house application stack. Pretty soon, we're going to go into the analytics side; that's one of the next big ones for me.

It has improved the speed at which we are able to respond to issues. Typically, production issues for us in the past used to take hours and several people to resolve. Now, it's a matter of minutes and a couple of people to isolate, do a root-cause analysis and quickly to solve the problem.

The turnaround time is the biggest benefit for me.

The analytics is definitely one good one; the federated services would be great; and hopefully something that will give us a little more integration with some of our log and event management tools, such as Splunk, etc. That would be the big one.

I had this implemented about 16-18 months ago.

We use the SaaS model. I wouldn't say I'm really, really comfortable with it yet. We seem to have a lot of issues, with the agents going down repeatedly. We're still finding some issues with the SaaS model, from the controller. I wish it would get a little more stable; hopefully, in the next release.

Scalability-wise, so far, so good. The next big one is the cloud services. That's where I'm really interested in the scalability, but everything I've heard so far and what I've seen, I've been very happy.

Technical support is great. We’ve got great resources on that team, both on the delivery side, as well as on the support side.

We weren’t previously using any solution, and that was the problem. Everything was a manual effort. My team would spend hours trying to figure out the root cause of an issue and it was not helping our customers, because any time lost in our e-commerce environment is money lost. We needed to get a tool that would help us turn this around really quickly. That was when we started looking at this. I had this implemented about 16-18 months ago. Since then, it's been great.

Initial setup was relatively straightforward. There was some nuances but I guess a lot of that has to do with the company and the way we've set up our application stack; dictates how the agent is installed. By and large, it was pretty straightforward.

There were other vendors on our shortlist. We actually got a couple of others that I'm trying to migrate away from.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor like AppDynamics are ease of use, good support, really good stability, ability to extend easily, and native integration to a lot of application stacks.

It's a great tool. I definitely recommend looking at it. At least go to a conference and attend one of the sessions; see what the tool can do. It's definitely valuable.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating because of stability, the SaaS controller. If it's as stable as I hope it'll be in the next release or two, I'll probably give it a perfect rating.

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.