Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

• End-to-end business transaction breakdown: clear picture of where the application is taking time
• Easy user interface to work on

In a critical project where, along with the monitoring solution, RUM is also deployed, it gives you complete clarity why my business transaction failed and what is technically causing that to occur. Instead of wasting time mugging up in logs, fighting with server logs, and manually capturing CPU resource statistics, AppDynamics does it a lot easier without a lot of installation effort, in a single dashboard. On top of that, if you also have RUM, life gets easy from the end-user perspective too.

This product still has to evolve with the latest technologies for which support is available. A lot of new technologies are being developed, such as Node.js, Docker, Play framework, Redis/Couchbase. Instead of just exposing the count number, average response time, and errors/sec, AppDynamics should dig deep into the request response of the transaction and offer a deep-sensing option like Dynatrace Ruxit.

Also, in my opinion, sometimes the values that appear in AppDynamics are skewed.

I have been using it for four years.

Nowadays, CI is very much in demand and because of that, Docker compatibility is increasing. However, to install AppDynamics on Docker is still a challenge. I have done it, but only after lot of consultation with AppDynamics support. Also, if the txn DB size increases, AppDynamics gets a bit tired and performance slows down.

Technical support is 7/10. There is still a lot to improve. If you contact them regarding a specific technology, then that person becomes the only person aware of the issue, which should not be the case.

We previously used Dynatrace. The AppDynamics interface was intuitive and more easy to understand. Also, deployment is easy.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Well, if it is a simple application, go with your in-house team for implementation. On the other hand, if there is a complex e-commerce app and you want to exploit every functionality of AppDynamics and integrate all of the interfaces, then go for external consultant implementation.

I cannot discuss ROI in terms of money, but, yes, RCA became easy, which ultimately saves time/cost/efforts and which becomes large with time-critical applications.

Have a look on all three solutions: AppDynamics, Dynatrace and New Relic.

The dynamic baselining is a big plus; being able to get rolling baselines for different times of the day, different days of the week, days of the month. Alerting is a big feature; being able to receive alerts when we have things that kind of go out of bounds. Dashboarding is also a pretty big one that we use a lot, along with the API; being able to put in our own data and add that to dashboards related to what AppDynamics itself is finding.

It's led to a very big decrease in MTTR when issues are encountered, as well as helped us to be a lot more proactive to be able to identify issues and customer degradation before customers start complaining about it.

The biggest complaint that we have at this point is the ability to exclude certain time frames from the dynamic baselining. If we have an event or something like that that we know performance goes significantly outside of the baseline, that ends up being part of the dynamic baseline, so you don't have the ability to alert and stuff on that going forward.

Overall, stability is very good.

I haven't had any issues with availability or scalability.

I did not previously use a different solution; no APM kind of tools.

We realized we needed an APM solution mostly because of the growing complexity of the application. It's a lot easier to monitor an application, per se, if you have good control and you know what all the application is doing. I think most people would agree that as applications are growing, and becoming more and more complex, you have less and less people that actually understand what's going on. You need something like AppDynamics that will help bridge that gap between the people's understanding and what the application is actually doing.

The overall setup of the application is extremely straight forward. We had a little added complexity, due to the size of our deployment, but really, it is far more straightforward than all the competitors’ products that we looked at.

We also primarily looked at CA Wily Introscope and Dynatrace.

The biggest reason we chose AppDynamics was their ROI. AppDynamics was by far the quickest and easiest to get good results out of. The other two products required a lot more investment both as far as capital for purchasing systems to handle the load, as well as time to get the systems to really have useful data in them.

The best advice would probably be to make sure that you know what your requirements are and that you're analyzing the tools to your requirements. Look at things such as capital and time to roll out. That makes a big difference in the ROI for a product.

Overall, it's a very strong product. It has most of the features that I think we need. There are a few things that could be improved, like the ability to exclude stuff from the baseline. It's not quite perfect, but other than some usability improvements, I think it's a very great product.

We use AppDynamics APM, as well AppDynamics EUM.

The business transaction tier of management is the most valuable feature; the fact that we can go into multiple tiers and monitor the transactions from the end-user point of view. That's very important to what we're doing.

It brings everything to the forefront. It helps the application staff plus the executive staff understand what's going on with the end-user performance because, obviously, that's one of the most important issues today.

I’d like to see something more towards a merger between the dev and the production. This is where big data comes in; the portion that's in there, moving things from installation and dev, moving them, managing them and transitioning between dev to production for new applications.

I haven't seen any problems with stability with any of the AppDynamics products that we're utilizing.

Right now, it's scaled for what we have to do in terms of what we have to add. I think we've already allowed it, in the planning, for adequate scaling. Obviously, you have to put these guys on, various agents, but we've allowed for that.

The professional services that we actually use, we did need their assistance in standing up this product. They were very helpful. They're still behind us even after they left the facility. They check in and log in to make sure that we're on track with what we need to do. Any problems that we did face, they addressed.

We were previously using something else and that company didn't stay current with the times.

Before choosing this product, we did evaluate other options.

Take a test drive of the demo.

I’ve given it a high rating because of the initial dashboards that are being built and the way that they can be built. I haven't seen anything like that. Especially with the flow management that's literally there in real time.

For right now, we are not using any other AppDynamics products. We are only using AppDynamics APM, but the new one they introduced at a recent conference, Business iQ, that seems very appealing too.

The flow map is very valuable to us. Before we installed APM, we had no idea how our application looked. If the developer who designed it decided to leave the company, we would be in dead waters. We had no idea what the application looked like. To understand the architecture, we would have to literally go back to the developers and ask them if they can at least put some blocks on paper. That was like, "okay, help me out, please. Let's go for dinner, let's go for lunch. You have to do something."

After installation of APM, we realized the value within five or ten minutes. We could see what our application looked like and this created value for upper management. They better understood that our single point of failure is a database connected to 10 or 15 servers. This is the only single point of failure. AppDynamics became our risk management tool. Now the senior management comes in, has a look, and says, "If you have a single point of failure, who is looking into this? Do we have a plan to make another database, a standby?" This is the key value that I see in this tool, and for which everyone is loving the company.

I would like to see more of a unified platform. They're very, very new on the server side, machine agents. I want them to be more mature in this area. The approach I understand they're taking is that we connect between an application and the server, but that's it.

That's the point where, if you have to describe the value of this tool in front of a super–techie Windows administrator, he will not appreciate the tool, because he's not getting the metrics that he wants to see. He wants to see message queue size. He wants to see how his virtual memory looks. He wants to see packets incoming, outgoing, what's the packet drop rate. He wants to see many, many technical details, which is not what we want.

Since I want to keep happy both sides of the board, I cannot live with just one application side being happy in the company.

We have used APM for about a year.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not reached a stage where we can talk about scalability, so I'm not the right one who can answer.

I have used technical support. They jump on right in. If the individual is not able to understand my question, or if he thinks that he is not the right technical fit for this case, he will not hesitate to say so. Whereas I've worked with so many vendors and nobody says that they don't know something. They all say that they’re the best. So, support is good. It's a very stable application, no issues so far.

We have other monitoring tools, so I can easily compare them.

We were not using anything previously. They were relying on custom scripts and manual actions.

Unfortunately I was not involved in the initial setup, but I'm expanding AppDynamics to a larger audience now. I am implementing it in other parts of our office.

The implementation is very straightforward. They have done a good job understanding the difficult areas of installation and configuration. They have just one agent that you have to just use as a start option for a program. So when you start an application, you have to tell the application that when you start, use this agent. You don't have to make any changes in your application. You don't have to make any changes on the server. You don't have to make any changes on your web server. So they've done an intelligent job in not putting pressure on the application team to redesign. It's very simple, straightforward.

They have to look into the money aspect. It becomes difficult on the people who are advocating for the tool in their organization. I have to go and literally convince my upper management to give me more funds because it's beyond my budget capacity. It becomes so difficult for me and my upper management to get convinced that, yes, this is the right tool.

As a technical person, and as an application development team, they all understand that this is the right tool for us. But when it comes to budget and financial matters, it takes days and weeks to convince upper management to buy this tool. So they should do something more on licensing costs.

When choosing a vendor to work with, I want to know how truthful is he with me when he's talking. I don't want him to be a sales guy coming up and trying to sell me something. He should be honest in his opinion. He should be truthful when he says that, "yes this tool will solve your problem". I don't want a person who comes and says that AppDynamics is the gold and he will solve world hunger and poverty. I don't want to hear that. Tell me the benefits, tell me the drawbacks, and leave it up to me to decide whether these drawbacks are something that I can live with or not.

That's one. Second, I would like my partner to understand that he should understand our environment first. He should not come on day one and say, "here I am, I have 20 years of experience, I will solve your problem". 20 years, yes you do have, but you have an [outer world experience, not with my company. So come sit here for seven days and look into the environment. I will get you the meetings that you need, but first understand us and then give me a pitch. So I want him to be careful with what he wants to say; don't jump the gun.

Third, help with the technical aspects. I've faced a lot of problems with other tools. Everyone says that, "yes, I am the champion, I can solve the problem", and I don't want to hear that. Tell me how much you know, as simple as that. I'm learning, you are learning, everyone keeps on learning everyday. So just put how much you know on the table. I need that honest opinion, honest answer, from my vendor or my partner. If you keep bluffing me, or you keep making me a fool, that will last for a week, a month, or a year, but not more than that.

With the limited features that we have used so far, I would rate APM an 8/10. The reason I don't want to rate them a 10 is that I've not used the tool to full capacity. So far, I have no issues. It has all the features that I need. But, there are some areas that they are lacking. If I have to get into technical details, I would say more on the JBoss, web server side, they are lacking some functionality.

I will definitely recommend AppDynamics. Look into APM and see if it fits in your environment. We know there are many APM software competitors. Go for it and at least give a try. Set it up to use in your environment. If you don't have a server, AppDynamics has a SaaS portal, and they can immediately install one controller for you. I would recommend that you understand the difficult areas you have in your environment. Just because it's a fancy tool, don't go for it.

Understand the difficult areas. Where are the areas that you get the most hit from the customers? It can be customer service complaining that your websites are slow. But that's a very subjective statement. What does the slow mean? So try to understand those areas. If you have more clarity, you can talk more intelligently to the AppDynamics team. But give it a try.

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.

We are using many business applications, and the backend databases are very critical for them. So, everybody's using AppDynamics Database Monitoring.

The good thing with AppDynamics Databases is that it will give you a pretty good overview of the data, all the database-like tables, long-running queries, jobs running on the databases, and the queries that are taking more time. So, it's at a deeper level with all the database functionalities, and you will get that information. So, it's a pretty good tool in that sense.

It could be more user-friendly for beginners.

I have been using AppDynamics Database Monitoring for six months.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is relatively stable.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is a scalable solution. We are monitoring over 200 applications.

Technical support is okay. 

On a scale from one to five, I would give technical support a four.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. The thing is, it has some prerequisites. That means you need to get some prerequisite access. Once the database team is done, it's pretty easy to configure. You can deploy this solution within an hour or two.

We have a license-based solution. That means you need a license for each server you monitor.

I would tell potential users that AppDynamics Database Monitoring is not just for database monitoring. If you need to monitor your entire application stack, for example, you need to monitor how that website is performing at the backend or how applications are performing. Infrastructure monitoring means everything has to be monitored and is offered in the bundles. 

That's what AppDynamics does. It's like an application performance monitoring solution. If you need to monitor all this and use all these capabilities, then AppDynamics is a very good solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give AppDynamics Database Monitoring an eight.

The main uses of this solution are dependent on our clients needs. They are mainly in the banking sector, and use the product to measure user experience, or for analytical, business IQ purposes.

The feature we find most valuable, is that the solution creates a unified platform making it really easy to pinpoint a problem, and then drill down into a transaction to resolve the issue.

We would like to be able to easily use this solution to monitor our Java script based browsers, which are currently blocked by the security settings.

We have been working with this solution for more than 10 years.

We have found this to be a very stable solution.

This solution is very easily scalable.

The global technical support for this solution is really good. They have two different service types; standard and premier. The premier level of support has a higher cost, but better SLA's for fixing issues. We have found both of them to be good quality, and customer focused.

Positive

We found the initial setup of this solution to be very easy, and the deployment only took 10 minutes. The deployment can be carried out automatically as long as it is suitable for your client's application.

We implemented the solution using our in-house team.

We have two different licensing models for this solution. One of them is the agent based model, which requires payment per agent. The other is an infrastructure based model, where the price is based on the CPU core. For the infrastructure model wholesale level pricing applies. All of the up to date licensing prices for this product are available on the manufacturers website.

We would recommend that organizations looking at this solution ensure that the hosting version meets their countries regulations. The product is available as both cloud-based and on-premises, but this choice may be geographically limited.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.