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AppDynamics vs Grafana comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

AppDynamics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
156
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (3rd), Container Monitoring (3rd)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AppDynamics is 5.2%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 7.1%, up from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Noorul Mustafa Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Widely used by most financial services sectors, such as banking and insurance sectors
Currently, the solution is on the cloud as well. You can have your cloud applications onboarded to AppDynamics without any issues. AppDynamics has its own SaaS environment and SaaS controller on which you can onboard your application. You will need to install some of the AppDynamics agents. I used to contact the tools team, and they used to answer our queries mostly. If not, they used to take it to the support and then come back with their solution. Users need to list all the servers related to their application on which they want the AppDynamics agents installed. Depending on whether your application is cloud-based or non-cloud, you need to list all your servers. Then, a further installation process would be recommended. To use AppDynamics, you need to understand the different flows. If an issue is currently ongoing, you need to check which GUI flow is being used. If you want previous data, it will be in the history, and that's a different flow. Working with the tool is tricky, but two to three weeks of continuous work on it should bring you up to date. Suppose you are working in a bank. For your application, you can configure everything regarding the business transaction. For balance transfers, you can have one business transaction that will monitor balance transfers. There can be another business transaction that can monitor credit cards. You can configure different flows and transactions within the flows in terms of business transactions. Wherever there is an issue, that exact business transaction will start developing. The integration of AppDynamics within our CI/CD pipeline has positively affected our deployment frequency and application quality. Whenever there is a deployment or release, we see some hiccups in AppDynamics. There will be some things going on on that server, which we can easily identify in AppDynamics. Only after we validate that do we give the next go. Overall, I rate the solution eight and a half out of ten.
AbhishekGupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Beneficial operational excellence, reliable, and scalable
We are using Grafana for observability dashboards Grafana has helped our organization with observability and operational excellence. Operational excellence is a key part of any organization from a data platform perspective and setting the alerts and monitoring policies on Grafana was easy. The…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic."
"In 2014 and 2015, AppDynamics was one of the best products on the market."
"Capacity planning is, in my opinion, the most useful."
"The solution helps us save a lot of time on certain tasks."
"The monitoring is similar to Dynatrace."
"Despite dozens of deployments across hundreds of applications- we have yet to see a case where AD is negatively impacting application execution or functionality."
"It reduces the time to resolve issues and requires less manpower."
"The most valuable feature is having our services being available and healthy."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"Grafana's best features are live monitoring and alerts."
"We like the alert features."
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
"It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports."
"Grafana is stable and has great engineers."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
 

Cons

"I would like to be able to monitor both cloud an on-prem infrastructures, displayed in one dashboard."
"AppDynamics scaled well up to around 3,000 agents. The performance deteriorated after that, while Dynatrace could support more than 10,000 agents. We were surprised that AppDynamics' scalability is not so good."
"At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot. In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring. When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software."
"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."
"There could log management features included in the product."
"It needs strengthening in the database tiers."
"The infrastructure is not as good as other solutions."
"The documentation and training material have room for improvement."
"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"There are some areas of network drives that are not showing as expected based on server usage."
"It would be helpful if they simplified the data source."
"Multiple dashboards combined into one dashboard has slowed things down for us."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"Its interface could be more accessible."
"Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license to use this solution. However, the clients pay for the licenses we are the service provider."
"It is expensive. However, our time to recover has been reduced, and this product has helped recuperate costs and provided us with ROI."
"You are required to purchase licenses whether you use it or not. It is not pay-as-you-use."
"For those who appreciate the value and had issues with the visibility of the performance of their applications, then the pricing is good. For somebody who does not need it, it can be pricey, but overall, it is worth the money which it costs."
"AppDynamics is what I would consider an enterprise-level solution. This means that it's a solution that is intended for use by larger organizations, while small or medium-sized businesses may find it difficult to afford. The number of agents required will also impact the pricing, and smaller companies may only be able to afford a limited number of agents. Essentially, the cost of the solution is not within the reach of every organization, and only some may be able to afford it."
"As compared to other applications, its price is moderate. Its price is neither very high nor very low."
"The solution is highly expensive"
"The tool is expensive."
"I am using an open-source version"
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
49%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
What do you like most about Grafana?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution. I don't know if there are different paid versions of the product.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
The features are complicated and not intuitive. It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation. The dashboard interface is too wide, and ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AppD, AppDynamics APM
No data available
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about AppDynamics vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.