Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

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.

All the features are useful. When it comes to application monitoring, AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring provides smooth connectivity to different applications. There is an EEM module that is highly visible and ensures a good user experience when customers access their applications on the cloud for a long time. In general, the features are a good fit for our operations.

In user monitoring, AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring should provide a better user experience. It needs to offer an end-to-end experience, including the internet layer and third-party elements that come into play on websites. Instead of focusing solely on the performance of the application web layer, it should have the inclusion of other domains like the internet, DNS, third parties, and caches that affect the user experience.

There should be more options for more options for customizations to third-party visibilities.

Another area of improvement is faster support. The response time could be faster. 

I've been using AppDynamics for five years. However, we do not use the very latest version.

Even in terms of stability, AppDynamics have fine-tuned features. They provide frequent updates, twice a year. So the product is pretty stable. 

I would say the stability of AppDynamics is an eight out of ten. 

You can easily scale it. So I would say the scalability of AppDynamics is an eight out of ten. 

AppDynamics is quite a mature product. You can even increase the scalability without affecting your environment.

Customer service and support are pretty good. The aligned support and customer support experience is quite good. If you raise an issue or a request, they will get back to you within the estimated time and resolve it for us. 

Neutral

I have explored other options. There are other solutions in the market, like CatchPoint. But the problem is we wanted an end-to-end solution that integrates well with our existing systems, and AppDynamics fits that requirement.

The initial setup depends on the environment. For example, if a customer wants a secure setup, I would say it's moderate, not overly complex. 

If a customer doesn't prioritize security policies based on the security architecture and they don't care much about it, then it's an efficient tool. 

I would rate the initial setup a five out of ten for the average user, where one being difficult and ten being easy. Five is the highest rating I would give. It's more towards excellent, I would say.

We have it on-premises because that's where we can slice and dice and offer to the customer. That's what I suggest. If it's ISPs or CSPs, it should be on-premises. If the customers want, they can go with SaaS.

The deployment time varies from company to company. If it's fast, it probably takes a week to get it up and running. But if it's on-premises, it takes around four weeks.

Just two people are required for the deployment. If it's not an existing timeline, then it may require more people. If it's an existing timeline, then it may require more people.

The implementation does matter based on how many applications you want to monitor and how complex those applications are. If it's an on-premises setup you want to pursue, or if it's a SaaS version you want to pursue. All these factors contribute to the overall resourcing. So, how do you want to add into it? If we take a simple scenario, like a single application with two tiers, I would say two resources are more than enough. But if it's on-premises and you have twenty-five applications and a timeline to achieve it within three months, then more resources are required. That's how it works.

AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is costly. If I have to rate the pricing, I would say seven because it's really expensive, with one being low and ten being high.

The pricing needs to come down. Many customers find it expensive, so that's why I'm rating it a seven.

If you want to have end-to-end visibility into your applications, from users to endpoints, I would recommend using AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring. It's also a good choice if you want visibility into customer conversations.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

AppDynamics is an APM tool. We use it for application performance monitoring for a financial company. It is an end-to-end monitoring solution for any application and works with different technologies, such as Java and .NET.

The company was able to monitor their transactions with the financial institution to determine where the problems were in a particular brand. The company was satisfied with the performance of the solution.

This solution has reduced our customer's time to resolve issues.

The most valuable features of AppDynamics is the scalability and monitoring.

AppDynamics is new to the cloud and could improve its cloud services, they are following a monolithic monitoring approach.

It's an agent-based software that must be deployed multiple times whereas competitors have one agent that can deploy everywhere.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately six years.

AppDynamics is a stable solution, but sometimes the analytics goes down and does not work or customers' addresses do not get collected. However, overall it is stable.

All of the IT and business staff are using the solution.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The support could improve.

I used Dynatrace prior to AppDynamics. The switch was a business decision.

The process of implementing AppDynamics is straightforward, but it ultimately depends on your specific use case. You can easily implement an agent if you have a simple use case.

There is an agent that needs to be copied into the project and actioned to start.

Using it can be somewhat complex as it requires manual configuration, such as when creating a dashboard. If you have a more complex use case, the manual configuration can take a considerable amount of time. Additionally, there is a learning curve associated with this tool, and it takes time to gain expertise. It is not something that anyone can easily configure without investing the necessary time and effort.

It takes three to four months to become an expert in the tool to be able to use it effectively.

To complete the implementation of the solution the staff that have access to production are involved. There are a few people that are needed.

There is a license needed to use the solution and it is expensive. The licensing model needs to improve.

There are other solutions that are better at APM than AppDynamics.

AppDynamics is primarily an APM tool, and if you're looking for end-to-end monitoring and AI ops capabilities, it may not be the best fit. For instance, if you want to analyze transitions, pinpoint failures, and view logs all in the same tool, AppDynamics may not provide a complete solution.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

We use AppDynamics for monitoring purposes to check up on CPU health and application health status.

AppDynamics is used to monitor the health of our applications. If any application is down and linked up with AppDynamics, we can see it on the AppDynamics console. We can identify when a specific process went slow and the exact issue. Additionally, if there is any high CPU utilization or other issues, we can figure it out using AppDynamics.

It is very helpful as we can also make custom alerts in our system for specific issues like high CPU utilization or application downtime. We can even customize the alerts to be sent to a particular email domain for automatic notification, so there's no need to monitor it 24/7.

The monitoring feature is very useful. If you have multiple applications and systems with high CPU utilization or other issues, you don't need to monitor them individually. With AppDynamics, you can get all the information from the dashboard. It's very convenient.

There is room for improvement in the customer support team because finding a solution consumes a lot of time. When there's any issue, we need to reach out to the AppDynamic support team to get some idea of what the issue is. If anything is out of scope, we need to escalate the availability. It can be more dynamic because we need to go to the support portal to raise an incident, and it's time-consuming. Also, the resolution time takes longer than expected. If there were live support from AppDynamic's point of view, it would be really helpful.

I have been using this solution for the last three months. I am using the latest version.

AppDynamics is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have some support guys, admin guys, and other people using AppDynamics. In our organization, we have around 15 members using it.

The initial setup is not that complex. It is easy. I would give it a four out of ten. The deployment took two to three days.

An in-house team did the deployment.

I used some other tools, like Sterling Integrator, for EDI solutions.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The big problem we've always had is connecting the dots, so to speak. We've never been able to say that the application is having an issue before somebody calls us and tells us, and that's extremely embarrassing. Plus we're a little late to the table. With AppDynamics, you can be able to tell whether they're having errors or whether they're having a slow response time. 

We're able to detect issues now before the customer calls us. Another thing that this helps us with is the fact that there are some conditions we see in the database, for instance, locking and blocking and high CPU, that we've always had been trying to correlate this high CPU and high blocking. We were always wondering: is that necessarily bad or is it just kind of a warning sign or what is that? With this product, we're able to correlate everything with what the application is saying and saying, "we've got blocking, we've got high errors, we've got high response time, therefore it's probably a database and therefore it's probably an issue." Before we had this product, we weren't able to do that.

This solution is great at alerting us to issues and letting us know if anything is correlated.

The release management capabilities are great. If you do a new release, you have to ask: how's will it perform? Is it going to have problems? Before it was hard to actually measure. Now we're able to precisely measure the performance and also the error rate. That's very helpful.

It's also helpful with building dashboards. You can build dashboards for different parts of the company, for the operations, for the application, for the infrastructure, all the above.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The stability has been good.

At first, I thought it had a high learning curve. However, it's not so much. It's just different. It's different from all the other tools and it's just not as intuitive as it could be. I'm not sure how you fix that. For instance, the training on the dashboards that is provided could be a little bit better, as could the use cases. They should have some good examples out there. As it is right now, I had to scour YouTube to find some stuff.

I've been using the solution for a few years. I started using it around 2015.

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable.

I'm relatively new at this company, and we're doing a POC on it right now. We have it on about 75 machines. In terms of scalability, my guess is the architecture will allow it, is t's in the cloud. It should scale. However, I really don't know here in the company where I use it. I know other companies have scaled thousands. I personally haven't experienced that myself, however.

As it is going well, we're likely to expand it. That said, we're still just in the POC phase.

The initial setup is pretty simple. It's not overly complex. Implementing it shouldn't be a problem.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, the team is pretty much my team. It's a site reliability engineering team, and it's pretty small. The people who'll actually be maintaining it will not only be implementing, so to speak, but utilizing it and customizing it. That will ultimately also include a lot of other teams, like your operation, application, and infrastructure teams.

I can't speak to the exact cost of the solution. It's not a part of the product I handle.

I would advise those considering the solution to be patient and stick with it. A lot of these tools are pretty simple, however, they're simply used. For instance, they measure CPU and network and memory and stuff like that. The graphics may be pretty flashy, however, it doesn't provide the hardcore data that AppDynamics does. That's why you need to kind of just relax and stay with it a bit and you'll be successful. If you're just looking for something flashy to give you back immediate results that you can use today or tomorrow, it's probably not the right fit.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We use the product heavily in our ecosystem. The prime focus for our consumption is for Telkom - a telco and also the mother company. Telkom bought Business Connexion, the company that I fall into. The IT company, BCX, belongs to Telkom. The current real estate that we're responsible for, in Telkom, that we support and maintain on their behalf, is using AppDynamics. We use it for application performance monitoring alongside Foglight, which we would like to replace. 

Everything that AppDynamics yields we use in some way. 

We are a rather big user of AppDynamics. We use synthetic monitoring. 

From an application perspective, all the elements that come stock standard with the product, we are heavily invested in. We built a long list of dashboards and auto-alerts that goes through our call center to resolution groups, to fix issues, as and when they occur. 

The SAP monitoring element is very helpful. Historically, three or four years ago, AppDynamics couldn't tool an SAP instance. Now, there's a specific agent that you can deploy to SAP. We've invested in that element. There seems to be a market requirement for that element. Fairly recently, however, Dynatrace also added that to the inherent product capabilities, in order to monitor SAP ecosystems.

From an AppDynamics point of view, and possibly based on the fact that it's now part of Cisco, is that Cisco may fundamentally have a different view of the world. If you compare AppDynamics with Foglight, as an example, Foglight's got the ability (even the old versions of the product that we currently work with) to offer visibility within the inherent infrastructure which is certainly lacking on the AppDynamics side. I know that there're other products on the Cisco side that can do similar things as Foglight. If it would be able to give you more infrastructure visibility in this solution, it would certainly make the product stronger.

The cost element is an issue. I can't expect the company to change its way of work. However, given the fact that we earn and do all our business in South African Rand, I would prefer to buy in Rand as opposed to the American dollar or British pound. In our case, dollars are preferable. The exchange rate between our currency and the international currency makes planning much more difficult, and socio-economic changes heavily impact our commercial planning and budgets. From my perspective, that would be a step in the right direction. 

Quite often we are asked to do a POC or POV, proof of value, or show that the technology works, and we are given licenses to do that. However, the current commercial model with AppDynamics is that you buy a year or three years. There's nothing more and nothing less available. Some of our customers would prefer a five-year engagement. Some of our other customers would prefer a shorter duration. I would propose, and we actually asked AppDynamics, a dispensation where you have the licenses available in a set timeframe and you can use it as and when you require. The concept of a true-up at the end of some period, may make our lives easier with reference to having to scale up and down our ecosystem. Basically, they need to offer just a bit more flexibility on the commercial model.

If it's possible to buy in Rand, or at least keep the price points for a year the same, or even over three years, that would help with currency fluctuations. We've recently sold to one of the big banks, a sizable chunk of AppDynamics. We can give them the dollar quote now for year one, certainly. That's no problem, as we know what the current exchange rate is, however, neither us nor the bank has any idea of what the exchange rate will be next year. It becomes a bit of a moving target. What do you plan for? It becomes a bit of a crystal ball exercise with reference to what the exchange rate is going to do, and therefore, what you need to do from a planning point of view, budget-wise. There must be a more elegant way to handle this challenge, although it's certainly not in our domain to do something about it. That's the OEM's prerogative.

I've been using the solution for many years.

The product is quite stable. We don't have a problem with the stability of the product. Now that we are in the cloud, it is even better. Historically, the underlying infrastructure and database that support everything was under our own personal management, inside our data centers. Now that it's in the cloud, it's even better, from that perspective. I don't have a problem with the stability. We certainly haven't experienced challenges that can be attributed to AppDynamics with reference to stability. It's a quite stable product.

Based on the rate or price for this, I would argue, certainly from a South African point of view, very seldom would a small company be able to afford the price. Based on the ecosystem that the customer starts off with, they may have different price points or different scales in order to make it more compelling for smaller and medium-sized business. Certainly, our experience is that the smaller companies, although they love the product and can certainly benefit from the product, find it a bit expensive for them. And this is where the Dynatrace model, possibly, becomes more appealing to them.

Aside from the cost, scalability is quite easy. We regularly add, edit, and delete elements off of our real estate. Scalability isn't much of a challenge. It takes a bit of time to implement and then add additional dashboards and relate the different elements to each other. Once you've done that, it's not that big a challenge.

I'm not technically responsible for technical support. Historically, we would ping the OEM, and ask them to assist us on something. There's always a scenario where you would want bigger or quicker turnaround or a quicker response to these things. That said, it's not a major challenge, though. Like any other company, if they can improve on their turnaround time on technical queries, it may assist all of us, all of their respective customers. However, that said, it's certainly not a major challenge. We do get feedback in a reasonable time. You always want it to be quicker. It's reasonable and I don't think you can necessarily expect quicker turnaround.

They do not have, for example, the concept of following the sun, where you have people on standby 24/7, to really support clients. 

In terms of the setup, you need experienced people with strong skill sets to handle it. If you try and Google your way through it, it's not going to cut it. You will not get the return on investment if you try and do it yourself. It's important to use capable, experienced people to do it. Unfortunately, that comes at a cost as well. 

It depends on how you deploy it and what do you need to do, however. We have a smallish team with the capabilities to implement. We have quite strong skills, and yet, not a big team. That said, the stock standard implementation is not that difficult. When it becomes integrated into a bigger landscape, it will get more complex. You will need to apply your mind seriously to what you display from a dashboard point of view, to effectively translate what happens from a monitoring point of view. Integration into things like a CMDB, as an example, will need to be addressed. 

For example, in our case, we need to have an HP server that needs to read as a CMDB and display it in a stock standard visible dashboard. 

The cost for AppDynamics is becoming a challenge, as well as the apparent AppDynamics move from a Magic Quadrant point of view. We're looking at Dynatrace, which we need to understand. The product is cheaper, however, we are trying to determine if the functionality is the same.

We are heavily invested in AppDynamics, however, in the latest Gartner report, it looks as if Dynatrace did quite well. I believe the Dynatrace product in ESER is slightly cheaper than the AppDynamics one. 

We were looking at potentially diversifying our offer to market through inclusion. We are not proposing dropping AppDynamics. We have a strong relationship with AppDynamics and Cisco, however, it is certainly clear, from a South African point of view, the markets seem to be requiring Dynatrace as opposed to AppDynamics.

In order for us to make an informed decision, I would want to understand the difference between the two products. I haven't worked personally with Dynatrace, historically, and we haven't invested in that product, although they're certainly relevant in the South African market. We need to understand what's the difference between the two, what's the ups and downs. I know AppDynamics quite well and have very little information on Dynatrace. I'd like to attempt at trying to gain some more information in order for us to make a decision on it.

We are an IT company. We are selling this to the market as well. We have a strong relationship with AppDynamics through Cisco. We're a reseller of the product. We have a stronger relationship with AppDynamics, both currently and over the years, to the exclusion of all alternatives. We're using AppDynamics from an application performance monitoring point of view.

I'm not sure if we are currently on the latest version of the solution, however, it's my understanding that we're either are or will be moving to the latest version of the solution.

We bought the Dynamics cloud instance. It's likely based around Europe. I'm not entirely sure. Certainly, from our perspective, I believe it's in Europe in terms of where the controllers sit. We've been on there for the last two years or so. 

The controllers would be in the cloud, yet, certainly, from a historical point of view, we have migrated to the cloud recently. I'm not a hundred percent sure if we're done with that process. We may have some on-premises instances still. As a service that we sell to external customers, there are on-prem instances as well.

In general, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

There are things that they can do to improve the product. We are working with them on that front. We are talking to them on an almost daily basis. Certainly, my team is talking to them daily. Obviously, pricing is a concern - certainly from out geographical point of view. Working the exchange rate differences between the different currencies makes local consumption seriously expensive. 

Dynatrace seems to be gaining momentum in the local market. If you look at Gartner's latest report that I saw fairly recently, Dynatrace is, even from a technical capability point of view, doing more, or better, than AppDynamics. I'm not entirely sure what they use as a basis to plot an application on those quadrants from a Gartner point of view, however, Dynatrace certainly looked as if it went past AppDynamics fairly recently.

I need to better understand the alternative products. It's a question of time until our current anchor customers start asking this very question. Why should we not consider going Dynatrace as opposed to AppDynamics? I don't yet have the ability to have an informed discussion on it.

The primary use case is to monitor our applications and get a handle on any issues ahead of time, such as memory leaks, complete utilization of CPU, and the need to spin up a new server. Being able to know all of these things ahead of time and act on them is a primary requirement. And once an application is placed on top of that, we would also like to monitor what's happening with the application

The solution is doing great.

The key benefits it offers us are that it helps us know the infrastructure and performance issues, as well as if a customer is experiencing latency issues. It helps us know about them ahead of time so we can act on them, proactively, and improve the customer experience. That's important for us as we transform ourselves and call ourselves a digital company.

Being able to install it on-prem and monitor our on-prem infrastructure is important for us. We are in the process of migrating to cloud, but most of our infrastructure is on-prem. We have highly scalable systems and AppDynamics will help us monitor our load on-prem. Our systems range from simple to the most complex and it gives us the visibility across transactions, in one dashboard.

I would like to be able to monitor both cloud an on-prem infrastructures, displayed in one dashboard.

I would also like more flexible pricing: A pay-per-use model, rather than just a fixed-price model.

I'm not aware of any stability issues. We have deployed it in MEA, a few countries in Asia, and in the US. I haven't heard negative comments. People are happy.

We do use their technical support and they are very responsive.

In terms of advice, I would ask you to have criteria. Most of the time there will be some general aspects that are pretty common, that are covered by the various third-parties that provide industry ratings. But within that, you have to have customization of the features to match to your own infrastructure, the technical stack you have: mainframes, ICDs, modern platforms, cloud, etc. You need to compare the tools that work with your technical stack.

The most important criteria, for me, when selecting a vendor are 

• flexible pricing
• full coverage of monitoring of our technical stack, both on-cloud and on-prem
• customer service.

I would rate this solution at eight out of 10. I took away the two points for the two reasons I mentioned: being able to monitor both cloud and on-prem with a single dashboard and flexible pricing.

The primary use case is application performance monitoring. It performs well.

It has improved my organization because we are able to proactively and reactively look at performance issues.

• Looking at every tier in the application's path. 
• Being able to correlate performance between tiers. 
• Being able to drill down within the individual tiers for metrics.

It needs strengthening in the database tiers.

It seems stable.

The scalability is very good.

We have used the technical support, and it is very good.

The previous solution seemed to be stagnated, in terms of its ability to monitor new technologies and its ability to move into a cloud/SaaS environment.

It was both straightforward and complex to set up, like any tool. General configuration is usually straightforward, and when you start to look for integration or enhanced capabilities, that is when things start to get complex.

Cost and licensing will constantly go up, so there are some cost opportunities there. 

The way it is structured in terms of price could be better. You pay for individual modules and that adds on to the cost, which detracts you from implementing those modules and slows you down. It would be better if there were more solutions incorporated into the base price. 

We evaluated AppDynamics vs New Relic APM and Precise. It was really a customer-driven mandate at the time, so I do not know if it was a fair comparison end-to-end of capabilities and cost. 

Look at the whole picture. Take into consideration what you get for specific pricing models and how much it costs to add on things you may need later.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: cost.