AppDynamics Server Monitoring Reviews

We analyze data for performance and availability, which is produced by servers, infrastructure and cloud. However, it's not sufficient to only use Dynatrace because it makes a lot of data. This data is interpreted by AppDynamics automatically with technical data to understand the business impact, thus improving productivity. In Europe, enterprises widely use SAP, and AppDynamics effectively supports this by monitoring the core IT environment and the services around SAP, like CRM, Salesforce, and logistics systems.

The alert mechanism in AppDynamics enhances server management tasks by using agents installed on each server. These agents capture numerous metrics, collaborate to describe specific transactions, and allow us to monitor each transaction based on user interactions. We can see where any transaction might falter in the SAP server, application server, or presentation database, helping us identify the exact point of failure or degradation in transaction time, extract anomaly detection, or pinpoint real failures in SAP or other applications. This mechanism is very similar to Dynatrace, but AppDynamics is currently the best option for SAP.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring lacks investment in new technologies like Kubernetes and cloud solutions. Dynatrace has received significant investment in these areas and is better suited for cloud-native applications. However, AppDynamics still holds value for traditional applications used in banks or larger companies.

I've worked with AppDynamics Server Monitoring for five to six years. My experience in monitoring systems started around 2020-2022, focusing on serviceability for SAP ERP environments.

Regarding stability, I would also rate it at nine out of ten as it is highly stable.

I'd rate the scalability of AppDynamics Server Monitoring at nine out of ten, indicating it's highly scalable.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is deployed based on the organization's needs. For instance, installing it on a single server is better for a few clients for on-premises deployment. On the other hand, different solutions are available for cloud monitoring applications. The trend is shifting towards new paradigms like DevOps. AppDynamics adheres to these standards and can be used for both on-premises and cloud environments, depending on the specific requirements and business model of the organization. Maintenance requires a dedicated team, which can be extensive, especially in large organizations like banks.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup of AppDynamics as seven out of ten.

The return on investment with AppDynamics Server Monitoring has been significant in certain areas, especially for SAP environments. However, there hasn't been as much focus on the broader market due to their emphasis on cloud messaging applications. It ultimately depends on the customer's specific needs and how well the solution aligns with them.

The pricing for AppDynamics is expensive, but it is possible to negotiate special pricing through bids.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is integrated into the infrastructure through agents installed on the servers, and it utilizes REST APIs for process control and integration with other solutions. In terms of AI usage, AppDynamics uses AI for anomaly detection and resource forecasting.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is recommended, especially for SAP environments or cloud-native applications. However, the recommendation depends on the specific needs of the organization.

Overall, I would rate AppDynamics Server Monitoring as seven out of ten.

There are certain limitations with the agents in the solution. For some applications, AppDynamics Server Monitoring provides agents only for Linux-based machines.

When our organization deals with environments where only Windows-based applications are running, we face challenges using AppDynamics Server Monitoring. Some community-based agents are available with a solution that utilizes the CPU and memory of the hardware devices in excess. 

The vendor should make changes to support Windows-based applications or develop single agents to support all applications. Recently, a single agent feature was announced; if it's easy to use, then the solution will have an edge over others and simplify the deployment process. 

I have been using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for one or two years. 

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

There are about 15 users of AppDynamics Server Monitoring in our organization. At our company, we try to avoid frequent or regular maintenance of the solution as it can disturb daily operations. I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. If the deployed environment grows, there are no challenges in increasing the resources in the solution, hence the solution can be easily scaled. 

The tech support from the vendor is satisfying. I would rate the tech support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

There are some complexities in the initial deployment process of AppDynamics Server Monitoring. It's an agent-based solution, so there are different agents for varying apps, the compatibility of the agent with the app is not straightforward. When our company's team is installing the agents, they are facing some challenges related to agent compatibility and product performance. The main controller setup of the solution is comprehensible. 

The installation of AppDynamics Server Monitoring takes more than a week in total. The main controller can be installed within a day, but the agent installation for different applications takes around a week.  

The licensing cost is fairly high. I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees for AppDynamics Server Monitoring. 

Customers of our company use the solution to monitor servers in digital banking, online banking applications and other financial entities. AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a user-friendly solution. The dashboard, flow providing maps of varying applications and the back-end calls are easy to understand in the solution. 

The alerting mechanism works satisfactorily and efficiently as other solutions. Notifications are provided in the dashboard, or they can also be sent to users via email or SMS by AppDynamics Server Monitoring, other solution don't have multiple alerting options. 

After implementing the solution, we haven't witnessed any operational cost reduction, but performance improvements have been identified. The solution has provided exceptional root cause analysis and technical solutions for problem identification and resolution. 

The correlation feature available with AppDynamics Server Monitoring is absent in other competitive solutions. The aforementioned feature helps evaluate the impact of one application's issues on the other, pinpoint the error location, and check the dependency between applications. Compared to the NMS, the APM can provide more information on user monitoring. 

Some security features and threat loophole identification features can be included in AppDynamics Server Monitoring by the vendor. As the solution also maintains baselining, it can take a proactive approach based on historical data to gain AI capabilities. If AI features are included, then AppDynamics Server Monitoring will probably be able to predict upcoming application failure by analyzing some metrics that have gone down. 

I would recommend AppDynamics Server Monitoring to other users due to its user-friendliness. A Competitor solution from Dynatrace provides almost the same features as AppDynamics Server Monitoring, but their dashboards and overall usability are quite complex. Many financial sector companies and government organizations often prefer an on-prem version, which is provided by AppDynamics Server Monitoring, but other solutions like Datadog are available as SaaS. I would rate AppDynamics Server Monitoring as nine out of ten. 

My company uses AppDynamics Server Monitoring for server monitoring and end-to-end monitoring. The tool has an event alerting mechanism that lets people within the company know when any server is down so that you can raise a ticket, and the support team can work on that ticket.

The event alerting feature or the trigger system is what I like most about AppDynamics Server Monitoring. Whenever an issue occurs, the tool automatically generates an even trigger that tells engineers in the company to take action, so it's an essential feature of AppDynamics Server Monitoring.

Another valuable feature of the tool is end-to-end monitoring, which means if you need to debug, you can go transaction by transaction, where the issue lies, and how it's linked. For example, if it's a low-performance issue, you can look into it more through AppDynamics Server Monitoring in terms of which area takes too much time to execute. You can also see the SQL queries and the kind of query going on through the tool.

An area for improvement in AppDynamics Server Monitoring is integration; in particular, it needs a better way to integrate with custom applications such as Siebel CRM. Right now, it's challenging to integrate AppDynamics Server Monitoring with Siebel CRM because it sometimes gives an error and cannot integrate properly.

I'd like to see more details about each issue in the next release of AppDynamics Server Monitoring. For example, there's a server issue, and my team wants to identify the response time over SQL, but that detail is lacking. If AppDynamics could add slow query logs to AppDynamics Server Monitoring, that would be good.

Another feature I'd like the tool to have is the segregation of requests based on user sessions, for example, having a session ID, so it's easier to identify which session has an issue and needs solving and information on any transaction performed for that particular session. This feature would make integration in AppDynamics Server Monitoring easier.

I've been using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for almost eight years now.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a stable product.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a scalable product.

The technical support team for AppDynamics Server Monitoring is responsive and knowledgeable, so I like the support provided. Sometimes, it just takes time for the support team to solve custom application issues because that requires looking into the custom application details, the error behind the application, where's the plug to integrate, how to use the interface, etc.

My team contacts support every day. My team is happy with the support, but the only room for improvement is the time it takes for the AppDynamics Server Monitoring technical support team to resolve the issue. It could be faster because my team has set deadlines for integrating and making custom applications work.

I'd give AppDynamics Server Monitoring technical support a four out of five. The response time is good, but the resolution time needs improvement.

My team did a POC with Datadog. AppDynamics Server Monitoring is one of the best tools because it instantly gives you integration details, and you can integrate it more quickly than other solutions. For example, integrating Datadog took a lot longer because it required more steps and more levels to reach to complete the integration.

Initially, the setup process for AppDynamics Server Monitoring was straightforward. It was pretty easy, but when you go deeper into end-to-end monitoring, for example, it gets a little complicated because you need to integrate with your JDK and Java applications and pass on the logs. Setting up the RAM and the initial setup of AppDynamics Server Monitoring, it's easy, but as you go deeper, then it becomes complex.

I'm rating the initial setup for AppDynamics Server Monitoring as five on a scale of one to five because it was pretty easy.

We set up AppDynamics Server Monitoring in-house.

I cannot give information on the pricing for AppDynamics Server Monitoring because I'm not involved. I'm on the integration and technical side.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring has a lot of competitors in the market, but I evaluated Datadog.

I'm using a cloud product from AppDynamics for end-to-end monitoring called AppDynamics Server Monitoring.

Maintenance for AppDynamics Server Monitoring happens monthly. A team of five people does the patching for it.

A team of eight people works on AppDynamics Server Monitoring in terms of the initial integration, then another team will take charge, so I'm unable to give the exact number of users of the tool within the company.

My rating for AppDynamics Server Monitoring is nine out of ten because it's a good tool and only has minor areas for improvement.

We use AppDynamics Server Monitoring to keep track of live errors, loads, calls per minute, etc.

We can view the server activities, including issues in the process, with a single click. In the case of a script, we can create one branch to learn about function failure and the reasons behind it.

The product's initial setup process needs improvement.

We have been using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for six months.

It is a stable platform.

We have 150 AppDynamics Server Monitoring users.

Every organization has different requirements to set up servers. The configuration is tricky and requires a lot of tools. In such cases, getting assistance from the product's support team is easy.

The initial setup is complicated.

I rate AppDynamics Server Monitoring a seven out of ten. Its setup process is tricky. It is very different for every server. I recommend using Microsoft, Linux, and VMware as they have their monitoring tools.

It’s great that APM monitors in real-time. When we have an issue, we find out fairly quickly if there's a problem with our hardware.

For example, we were in crisis calls all last week. So, that's the first tool we look at to see what's going on and where the problem is. Then we start to troubleshoot from that point on.

One of the big things was the license management. It was just something I've been asking for over a long time, because we have several groups that use it so it get very clustered. The new feature with license management coming out, I've been waiting for it. That's going to be great for us. Should help us with a lot of problems.

We have had some stability issues for a few sites. I'm on the supply chain side so there have been a few. At distribution centers, we've had a few issues, but not as a whole. Only for a few pieces here and there we do.

We solve these by just looking at our code, see if the hardware is kind of lined up to see if it's a hardware issue or if it's networking. We look at the bigger picture basically.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have used technical support a few times. They have been great. Last time we had to actually have them join our crisis call and they were able to join within the next 5 minutes, which was great.

We had several tools, but we never used them properly. Mainly because we had five different tools and were working five different things. We were trying to bring everything together, is basically where I think everybody came together with that balance.

Initial setup was very straightforward. The documentation is very clear. It's a matter of reading through it, but it's very straightforward.

I don't have the names on top of my head, but we looked at several other companies. I wasn't the one who made the decision, but again, mainly because the multiple pieces that you can look at with AppDynamics, that's what helped us the most.

When looking at a vendor, first of course is money and the features to see how valuable it's going to be. Our main requirement is, is it going to actually get us some revenue? The value of it versus the cost. That's the main thing.

I would give AppDynamics an 8/10. I guess we're not using it fully to what it's capable of and that's mainly on us. We're working with AppDynamics support to take it to the next step; actually properly fully using all aspects of it. That includes the server, utility, the infrastructure presets coming out, and basically using it for what it's supposed to be and not parts of it. Our rating is mainly because of us.

I would advise others to automate early on. Streamline a lot of it before getting started. That's going to save you a lot of time later on if you have thousands of JVMs running.

I have a B2B eCommerce website and we have some business transactions. For that, we have configured the business transactions in AppDynamics. Apart from that, we have a list of servers that we have configured in AppDynamics, to send us some sort of alert if there's something bad or the servers are in disguise or something.  

First, we use it to handle the business transactions alerting, and then the servers alerting. And second, we use it to create the dashboard so that we can get real-time updates on how the system is performing at around runtime.

I like Business iQ the most, so far. It has great analytics configurations and I can get real-time updates. We have eCommerce releases every week. So the one use case that I use Business iQ is to compare before and after release performance using AppDynamics.

In terms of improvement, we have experienced bugs. I think the AppDynamics team is already aware of that and we follow up with them. They said that in the next release, they're going to cater to all those bugs.

I have been using AppDynamics for two years. 

I find it pretty comfortable and pretty stable. Obviously, there are always some sort of bugs that any product needs to handle, but otherwise, it is quite stable.

We have ten to fifteen employees who manage this solution.

Since we are an eCommerce B2B website and we do need the scalability at times, to scale down or scale up, AppDynamics really does not create trouble for us in such scalability possibilities. It's not that difficult in terms of scalability.

We use it daily. Since we are on eCommerce products and support roles, we need to check the performance of the website on a daily basis, even on an hourly basis.

I am quite satisfied with their support. Things are in shape. Things are good.

We use AppDynamics and Pingdom but then we are using both of the software to cater to different purposes. I really don't want to compare those two products, because those are serving different functionalities for us. They are both NPM, network performance monitoring systems, but then they are totally different from each other, and they serve different purposes.

It is easy to set up. We got help from AppDynamics, they initially helped us set up the configuration, and then we took it forward from there.

The entire setup has been completed for my website in a week.

I would advise that instead of generic metric business usage of this, instead, use a generic metric business transaction configuration, and go for the Business iQ part of AppDynamics. It's really powerful and it is in real-time. It gives output on real-time things.

I would recommend AppDynamics. It's a very powerful tool for any organization to implement.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. The one thing that I find it difficult in using AppDynamics is, for any new user, it's not easy for him or her to configure the transactions in AppDynamics because the UI is pretty complex. The configuration is pretty complex for a new, fresh user. They can make the UI simpler, that'll be very helpful for anyone to configure their website in AppDynamics.

Performance is the most valuable feature, especially the tag and follow, which has to do with multiple JVMs and diaries. Also, getting to know when you hop into different segments and trying to figure out where this is actually happening, and then that too, if it is happening to the backend. That is the key and that helps.

Server Monitoring has saved us time. We have issues that previously took days to solve, become resolved quickly. Once you know what's your normal, you know your anomaly. That's the key.

We have our own challenges because the amount of JVMs we are dealing with. But still, this is really helpful in trying to analyze a lot of our issues with certain types of JVMs. Not necessarily out-of-memory errors, but a few memory leaks, and a few applications that had third party JVMs that got leaked. Had I not known this, it would have taken a long time to solve these issues. There are ways to find them, but it takes more time.

One area that needs improvement is application integration. They do have it now, but that has to be improved. What happens is, right now, we cannot deep-dive into it. Four years back, I requested application integration. It took four years get it. At least it is there. The thing is that it has to improve. That's it.

Stability is good. I mean, we had issues. I have been using APM for four years, so I know where it was, and now where I am I know, so I'm so happy with it. It's much improved.

Scalability, it's good. It has challenges too, because I'm dealing with a very large setup. Scalability is definitely there, but now with the new features that are coming out, with a backend, it definitely will be better.

I am happy with technical support.

There were initial setup issues on both sides. I don't want to complain and it's not fair to do that, but now, if you look at it, it's reasonably stable, but every upgrade is a challenge. I mean, software is like that. Especially with the amount of changes they are making. The only thing about AppDynamics is they release quickly. Hopefully, they know you cannot keep up with this pace. A big enterprise, cannot handle that many releases like that. It requires a lot of coordination to upgrade to a new release.

And the biggest thing I wanted them to do, is to not require agent upgrades. That means every agent must be recycled. Someday they will push the agent from the controller with automatic upgrades. Something has to happen like that. Hopefully that will happen. That is my next ticket.

Use it, and when you use it, use it regularly. If not, don't use it at all. You won't get the benefit unless you use it properly on a regular basis, so you know what normal looks like. You need to know how this thing looks, so that you know your anomalies and can resolve issues quicker.

It's real time; you get data back as quick as the tool can process it. It's a very good tool for real time getting to things quick and fixing them.

Our mean time to resolution has been reduced drastically, I think, within the last year. I've only been there like six months, but I've heard since they got this application, that things have really gotten a lot better.

We have hundreds of services and multiple shared health rules for alerting for each of them, AppD has no easy way to pull up all the health rules for a particular service to send off the each app owner to validate alerting thresholds.

AppD can currently extract all the health rules into one XML file but dissecting that into something easy for an app owner to review would be very time intensive.

I think we've had a few blips but it’s been fairly stable.

It has scaled well. We're growing really, really big time this year. It's managing the new inputs.

Set up your processes first and make sure everybody knows what they're doing. I recommend basic training of what it looks like.

I think the big thing is, if you're alerting on something, you want somebody to fix it right away. If you don't have a plan in place there, then everything else is kind of meaningless; for example, if you only see it an hour later.

It's the best thing out there. Something can always be better; nothing's perfect.