AppDynamics Reviews

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.

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 a good monitoring tool. Its stability is very good.

Their support should be improved. Clusters and monitoring can also be improved.

I have been using this solution for around three years.

It is very good.

Its scalability is fine. It is not bad, and it is 60% to 70%. Sometimes, the containerization service and scalability take time.

We have seen an ROI.

If you are managing more than 1,000 servers, it is good to purchase the AppDynamics tool. From the monitoring perspective, it is a very good tool.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

We use AppDynamics mainly for troubleshooting the database side. If there is any issue that is happening, we go through layer by layer from the start of the application, for example, the UI layer. We go all the way to the database layer to show where the exact problems are. Additionally, we use it for other monitoring and alerting purposes.

The solution could be more user-friendly for diagnostic purposes. Anyone who is using the solution should be able to infer what that error is about, they should be able to troubleshoot it better.

I have been using AppDynamics for a year and a half.

AppDynamics has been stable.

I have found AppDynamics to be scalable.

We have 25 users using this solution in my organization.

We have previously used HP OpenView and Dynatrace. The client wanted to move from Dynatrace to AppDynamics and this is why we are using AppDynamics.

AppDynamics is easier to install compared to other solutions.

We have our own IT team that can support the installation. We have partners that can assist with the installation if needed.

There is a license to use this solution. However, the clients pay for the licenses we are the service provider.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

We use it for service level monitoring.

Currently, we use AWS. Recently, we started using Serverless AWS as we use communities for all our other services. For containers, we use Serverless AWS, and we use databases, like Cassandra Aurora. The product integrates well with all of them.

We previously had an operations team continuously monitoring applications. Now, they just have set things up and our developers can monitor, view, and act on them, accordingly. Also, we set up alerts recently so we can fix any issues more quickly in production.

It shows inter-service activities very easily. We were having issues with this primarily, so this was one of the most important areas for us. 

We have been using Cassandra. So, it has agents specific for each middleware, helping us check this application.

They are using Flash for their website, which is very slow. We had hoped the website would be much faster to use, and that is definitely what we want to see. 

Their agents sometimes claim to be very lightweight, especially with databases, but they are very heavy. They can take up more compute than the actual work that we need to do. I do hope that they can improve on this.

There is no issue with stability. However, most of the time, it is just slow.

Currently, scalability is not that great. We are a B2B company, so we have currently enabled it for about ten customers. We would like to proceed and have it more customer environments as well. However, we see with just ten customers that the dashboard is very slow. We would like them to improve on this.

We have had many AppDynamics engineers come to our office and explain us how to use it and set it up. They have come onsite many times and explained to the developers different topics.

The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment was not trivial. We needed experts to come onboard and explain it to us. With their help, it was easy.

We have partially seen ROI.

We checked out Datadog, but we just wanted a monitoring solution. We already had a logging solution and other relevant solutions, so we narrowed it down to AppDynamics.

It was easy to jump onto AppDynamics's limited licensing plan, so we easily could evaluate it. Later, we received good customer support and could interact with them easily. That is how we finally decided.

Depending on your use case, this is only a monitoring solution. If you don't have an in-house logging solution, or if your primary use case is to debug, you should consider choosing other alternatives. If only you want monitoring, AppDynamics will do.

We are only using the AWS version.

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.

Now, my team is not that close to the APM information. Using AppDynamics, it was possible to delegate how to read information on the client side because of how easy that is.

The most valuable features are:

• Error analysis in the troubleshooting sections go straight to the point.
• Autodiscovery of transactions.

If you are analyzing real time dashboard or metrics, AppDynamics will give you a refresh each minute, no matter what number you are watching.

This is a real situation when you are facing the screen during a load test or a the "hot" midnight of cybermonday for instance. When you have high stress of visits I do not know if you are more stress because of the amount of visits or because you have to wait eternal 60 seconds to find out it things are going well or you already have mess. And is even worse when you see suddenly a worse number but you do not know if this is a an spike or meanwhile your system is already "down", You just think in other tools with high "resolution" like CA (every 15 seconds.

Once you reach the limit of sizing in resources, the application becomes unstable.

We did not really encounter any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is 3/10.

Technical Support:

Technical support is 6/10.

We previously used Introscope, which was difficult to use and not intuitive at all

Initial setup was easy going with a wizard.

A local vendor with a very good level of expertise implemented it for us.

I have never calculated ROI, but I need to do that.

It is not a cheap tool, but you also save in manpower to setup because it is easy and fast. At the end of the day, I think the revenue is much better.

BUT, they have an awful co-term mode of licensing.

Two years ago, we evaluated Dynatrace and New Relic.