AppDynamics Reviews

We use it for break fail detection.

AppDynamics makes it much easier for us to detect problems or issues before they become problems. We have alerting on all of our business transactions. Therefore, it makes it very easy for us to keep our applications stable.

The drill down feature is the most useful.

The UI could use a little help.

One to three years.

Our AppDynamics application tracks a large number of business transactions and is able to keep up with our demands.

Our environment scales from several hundred nodes to thousands of nodes per day, so the scalability of AppDynamics with our environment works perfectly.

We contact technical support regularly. We have a dedicated rep who works with us. It is very good support.

Integration with AWS is a time consuming process. You cannot just plug it in and point it at your workloads. You have to go though all of your work spaces to determine what you want to monitor and how you want to monitor it. However, part of the onboarding process is that they provide you with a dedicated resource.

Our purchasing experience through the AWS Marketplace has been pretty painless.

We also considered Dynatrace. We chose AppDynamics because of its feature set.

I would highly recommend it.

The main benefit we get from that is it's a quicker time to know what's wrong. It does help us to have a better mean time to resolution, but the cool thing is, it lets us get to the root cause faster.

My favorite part of the solution is the ability to drill into the transaction snapshots. The transaction snapshots let you find out where the application broke; it pinpoints where in the call stack, and then how long it took to resolve. If there is a known error code there, it gives you some great information about what happened to the transaction. We can see what the hot spots were, not just the core error that was found. You can also see how long you're spending in the different modules, how long you're spending in your longest running database files, and so on.

We have a lot of mainframe technology in our business. They're just barely getting into Java-based z/OS agents. They have just started to appear inside AppDynamics now. We would love to see support for more types of agents in the mainframe world. We're a very heavy financial transaction company. A lot of our largest platforms still have a significant number of mainframes, and it's not just one type. We've got Tandem, Stratus, HP; we run the whole gamut for both what we have or what some of our clients might be running.

We are only having trouble with one aspect of the solution. The rest of the solution has actually been quite solid. We're actually quite pleased with it.

We’re having difficulty with the Apache web agent. It seems to be consuming too many resources of AppDynamics. One of their core philosophies is that they don't want to cause any harm in the application that they are monitoring. In this case, this is their only agent that does misbehave, and consumes a little more resources than you would like.

Luckily, we haven't had to add more resources to it. Before we went into our AppDynamics installation, we brought in AppDynamics consulting, their professional services group. We looked at the number of transactions we were going to be doing. When they sized our environment, they guided us to the right amount.

Technical support is better than in most of my experiences with most companies. They don't solve tickets as fast as we would like, but hey, who does? They are responsive; they will work with you; they make you feel like they are paying attention to the problem. Our sales engineers, especially; our local sales teams, they're fantastic for the support we get from them. They are definitely above par from what I have experienced from other vendors.

We previously used a competitor's product. The company was OpTier, which was going bankrupt at the time. When they announced their bankruptcy, we started an RFP. We brought in, actually, 14 different companies who responded to our initial proposal. There were four finalists that came in and did demos, and then we whittled that down to just two companies that we put into a head-to-head competition. Then we had different people from different product teams throughout the company score the process along the whole way. We had people from the support side, app devs, database guys, system admins, system devs. Everybody gave their scores and when it came down to it, the two companies and their scores were nearly neck and neck.

What pulled us in, what won it for AppD, was pricing, at that point.

Initial setup wasn't complex. We were involved from the start on it. Our team is still on track for how we first architected the product versus how it's been deployed today. It's the same folks. For getting the controllers up and running, getting the product up and running, there weren’t any technical challenges that were unexpected, whatsoever.

It's definitely worth using. The overall impact the tool has had in our environment has been very positive. Some of the best success stories we have got from the product have actually come from VPs over those different product areas, when they find out how AppDynamics scored a critical win. My advice to the other teams would be to involve all the other product teams, everybody who's going to be involved with it. Get them involved early on into the adoption, on what it can do. You don't want to have management overseeing it and not know what the product is.

You want that buy-in early on in the process, especially with a high number of applications. We have over 2,000 applications on our radar that we're going to instrument into it. Getting buy-in for cooperation, not only to schedule and prioritize, but which ones are getting in, on whose orders, and who's getting disrupted on it. The competition among senior management for who was going to get it first became quite intense later on.

We’re pretty happy, except for the web agent. That's the only part where we have some angst over the product. We've had discussions about that with AppDynamics.

Transactional awareness. The team really enjoyed being able to track a transaction from start to finish. Not really a feature but I find the interface easy to use.

Gave us a tool to track down slow transactions quickly.

LDAP integration.

1 year

Just LDAP integration.

We haven't seen any stability issues.

We haven't seen any scalability issues.

Customer Service: 8 out of 10 - I felt that the AppDynamics team was very engaged and more than willing to help but we never really got to a reasonable solution within the timeframe I had.Technical Support: 7 out of 10 - same reasoning as above.

AppDynamics setup was straightforward.

In-house

I mainly use AppDynamics to detect issues and bugs and monitor our enterprise database module.

AppDynamics' most valuable features are the response time of the business transaction modules, the ability to monitor multiple services, and testing and developing environments.

AppDynamics's agent management could be improved. They could also manage their licenses by host count rather than CPU core counts and on independent container count instead of for five containers. In the next release, AppDynamics should include AI modules in the on-prem environment.

I've been using AppDynamics for five years.

AppDynamics is stable.

Generally, the initial setup is easy, but it's harder for Java applications because you have to do some manual customization in agent configuration. Deployment took around a month.

We used a partner team.

AppDynamics' licensing scheme is confusing because all of its domains require different licenses. AppDynamics is priced on the higher side. 

I would recommend AppDynamics to other users and would rate it eight out of ten.

On-premises

We use AppDynamics to evaluate an application we were using. The name of the application was called Liferay and it is an open-source portal, and we wanted to evaluate the performance of our application.

AppDynamics is a solution that requires extra learning and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, automated reports would helpful similar to have they have in Google Analytics.

I have been using AppDynamics for one week.

AppDynamics is scalable.

I have not contacted support from AppDynamics.

I was evaluating AppDynamics and applications inside Microsoft Azure.

I rate AppDynamics a five out of ten.

On-premises

AppDynamics is used for performance management. It monitors the application's performance on a monthly basis.

I assist in the configuration of AppDynamics, which is used to measure the performance of the application.

AppDynamics will assist the company in managing its overall systems, capabilities, and performance. It will also assist the company in projecting the system's capacity.

Capacity planning is, in my opinion, the most useful.

While it is scalable, it could be better.

AppDynamics has been in place for a couple of years, but we only started using it this year.

AppDynamics is stable in terms of product features, but the core is a major concern.

AppDynamics is a scalable product.

I have not contacted technical support.

The initial setup is easier for the client.

In our environment, we already have the standard procedure in place to set up AppDynamics, to make it simpler.

I was not involved with the procurement of AppDynamic, but I believe it's expensive.

There are no minimum or maximum sizes; you can use AppDymaics regardless of your company's size. It is appropriate for small, medium, and large enterprises.

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We primarily use the solution for effective application monitoring. 

It helps us to find out where the bottlenecks are. Once you know, you can go and try to fix that issue. One of the challenges, when you use an ERP system, is the performance and the experience. Whenever we had issues, it was an opportunity for us to find out where the problem is and try to figure it out. It's been helpful in terms of improving system response, in terms of trying to look at that. When there's a problem, we can always go and try to find out. AppDynamics gives synopsis information so we're able to at least find out where exactly the problem is. So that's been very, very helpful on that.

Even though we do not have an end-user experience or database agent, at least on the application side, we still are able to get the information. Otherwise, finding it, trying to find this information, or having a manual process could take some time. It's a time-saving solution for us for sure.

The dashboards of the solution are excellent. They can be customized very easily.

The stability is good.

The solution helps us save a lot of time on certain tasks.

I have not been able to really spend time on the product itself. Developers are more likely to discuss if there are any shortcomings. My usage is quite limited. It would be unfair for me to comment on missing features. I don't spend enough time with the solution, exploring its capabilities. 

Nothing comes to mind in terms of lack of features. I haven't witnessed any aspect that I felt was lacking.

The cost is an area of concern to me on that one. The cloud licensing needs to be improved. It's quite pricey. There are cheaper options other there - including open-source options. 

I've been using the solution for about four years or so. It's been a while. 

The stability of the solution is good. I haven't witnessed any issues that would make me worry about its capabilities. It doesn't crash or freeze and there are no bugs or glitches. The performance has been reliable.

We have two users on the solution currently.

I can't speak to how scalable the solution would be as I've never tried to scale the solution myself. I have no knowledge of how easy or hard it would be to scale.

I haven't worked on other tools personally.

I can't speak to the implementation process. I did not help set anything up. Therefore, I don't have any experience.

The initial setup was done by our application service provider, an ERP application service provider. They configured it, and therefore we never ran into any kind of setup issues in that respect. 

They were fine. We had a good experience with them overall.

There are other options that are open source that wouldn't cost the company any money.

There are many other open-source tools available. When it comes to price comparison, maybe it falls into different categories. It seems to be an expensive product overall, and with other cheaper options on the market, such as DataDog, companies may prefer to pay less or nothing at all.

At some point, we had decided to look for an alternate. Unfortunately, our hands were full and continue to be. We have so many other projects on that, we don't have time to do anything as time-consuming as switching to something else. If I had three months of free time, I would probably go and pick up an alternate, an open-source solution, and maybe implement that due to the fact that the AppDynamics cost is very, very high.

From time to time I do look at some other things, New Relic and some of the other things out there. However, I haven't properly evaluated anything per se. 

We are customers and end-users.

We're always using the latest version of the solution. It's SaaS-based and therefore it is consistently updated immediately as new versions are ready for release. We don't need to manually handle the process. We use AppDynamics' own cloud. We don't use a third-party cloud.

The one area of concern for me is the cost. There are other options - including open-source options.

Overall, I'd rate the solution at a serve out of ten. I'd rate it higher if the solution's price was better.

Public Cloud

Other

I am using this product to monitor all microservice environments. I check all services and performance issues and implement some alerts and dashboards. We are also monitoring all applications that are not in a microservices environment. They are in a WebLogic environment. So, we use it to monitor WebLogic applications, Tomcat applications, and microservice applications that are running in the OpenShift environment or Kubernetes environment.

AppDynamics is in the middle of our monitoring environment. It is connected with all other monitoring applications. It helps us to check all the errors and performance issues because all our alerts, related to the performance of our website or backend applications, are implemented through this. So, it is one of the most important monitoring applications.

The ability to check parameters for microservice applications is most valuable. It is important for me. I can manually create new business transactions for applications and individually monitor business transactions. 

I can also use a lot of extensions. It has a lot of extensions to monitor other third-party applications, such as NoSQL applications, memory cache applications, Kafka applications, and Couchbase applications. It is very useful. We are also using the end-user monitoring site to follow all end-user activities. It is important for us to check the errors on the customer site.

We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is good when you constantly check it. In our company, we use AppDynamics a lot. We are monitoring all applications with AppDynamics. Therefore, all the time, we need to check if there is something that needs to be improved and all related applications are okay. For example, our database might be getting bigger and bigger. If you are used to checking frequently, it is okay. I have prepared some procedures for checking all AppDynamics components. It is not hard for us.

In terms of the users, mostly the DevOps team is using this solution. On the development site, we have more than 100 users because all developers on the test system are checking all the processes.

It depends on the issue. It is mostly good. Sometimes, we had really difficult issues, and the support team was really trying to solve the problem, but it took a bit more time.

Its initial setup is easy. We are installing all the components on the same server. We don't need to install another database. It is included in its own database, so all the configurations are on just one server site.

As compared to other applications, its price is moderate. Its price is neither very high nor very low.

I recommend doing a central configuration for agent installation. It is really easy to run when we are upgrading our agents. The standard installation is good in my opinion.

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud