Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

We use the platform for infrastructure monitoring purposes.

There could log management features included in the product.

We have been using AppDynamics for one month.

AppDynamics is a stable product. It doesn't have a lot of bugs. We can fix the bugs at a code level whenever we encounter them with our expertise. It provides an ease of installation as well.

I rate the platform's scalability an eight out of ten.

Dynatrace works better compared to AppDynamics. While using AppDynamics, we have to install different external agents for managing, customizing, and monitoring logs. In comparison, we must install only one agent to carry out the processes while using Dynatrace.

The initial setup process is easy once learned. At the moment, I am a new AppDynamics user and am exploring more ways to make the process easier.

The product is more expensive than Datadog but lower than Dynatrace.

It is a wonderful monitoring tool that manages various aspects such as system resources (CPU, RAM), mobile performance, and infrastructure monitoring. It provides ease of use, alerting capabilities, integration support, and scalability. Thus, it is already maintained. It doesn't provide log management services; we have to install different types of agents for business processes. It is not a cloud-native platform like AWS, GCP, etc. I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

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.

On-premises

We were testing this solution and wanted to do application monitoring for our websites. 

The user experience is quite confusing. There are too many different development stages. The UI is not very intuitive.

The solution can be improved with more AI as well as more automatic warnings and updates.

We have been testing the solution for one month.

The solution is very stable.

We had no issues with scalability. It was very good for us. At the time we were using it, we had about 30 users on the solution.

We only had a consultant that helped us during deployment and they were okay. Other than that, we never have had to reach out to technical support.

Compared to competitors, the initial setup was complex, but overall it was easy. Deployment took about eight hours.

We had a consultant from AppDynamics help us. They helped from time to time to fix any technical issues we faced.

We did market research and looked at many different options. We found that this solution wasn't available for permanent installation, which was something that we required. In the end, we decided to go with Dynatrace, a competitor of AppDynamics. It has the same features and from what I have seen, it is a lot better in general.

We used the on-premises version of the solution.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. Although we've decided against AppDynamics, I would still recommend the product.

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.

It helps me monitor how well the front end of our application is working.

I think it has improved the way my organization functions, because for me, I think this application is more like the front end application where the user is the agent. The user is more like a real user. I think it does make an impact, because, right now, we already have that monitor in production. Actually, since I'm an engineer, they already have it deployed in production for that particular application, to see how the end user behaves in that production environment.

Stability might be something a system engineer might know more; they use it every day in production.

I just use it. For me, I think there is still room for improvement. I want to track it when I run it. I use LoadRunner to generate traffic to the environment. A lot of times, I know it's slow, but I need to know how it maps with the tracking I use with LoadRunner on the AppDynamics.

There is a workaround for that, and I did implement that. Based on documentation, the AppDynamics team recommended we just put a header in there and we use it. Whatever tracking we have in LoadRunner, it will show the name exactly in AppDynamics. So, there is a workaround, but it's not really official implementation. That's extra work that I have to do, and I don't really like that. I just wish we could just run it so whatever we see in LoadRunner, we can also see in the AppDyanamics EUM module.

Right now, it's just one application. I'm not sure how it will grow in the future. I don't have the roadmap to see how it will scale in the future. I do not know.

I have not used technical support. The system engineer is the guy who's in touch with technical support, but I heard it is not good. They do not provide a quick response. That is only what I heard. Do not take my word for it. We had a meeting where they said something like, “That is something we need to setup, something we need to get out.” Then they said, “Oh it's there, but it's not resolved yet.’" That's just what I overheard in the meeting.

I got invited to a meeting. There were people from AppDynamics that came to my company and talked about a new version upgrade. They talked about, "OK, these are the benefits the upgrade." I happened to be there. Before I came to the meeting, I tried to do research on my own about what AppDynamics is about.

One of the things I think I achieved this year is the mapping and matching the LoadRunner tracking with AppDynamic, the workaround and then the EUM. That's the thing that really helped me a lot with this year’s projects.

Normally, for me, I only look at free stuff. That's why I use Google Chrome. It just happened that they already bought it and the license was there. I just used the license without paying for it.

At a recent conference, I saw Business iQ, which I think is very interesting. We talk a lot about the transaction level for IT, but for business people, this is something that makes sense. We’re not just for IT, but we talk for the business group, too. This is what it is about. There's a mapping between business and how well the system behaves. So, we would normally only look at the back end. Everything is about the back end, but not really about the end user. However, the end user really makes the difference.

Right now, for me, if I go into an application and it is slow, I get frustrated and I don't want to use it. So, this product shifts the direction; it should streamline, maybe get more meaningful information to business. I think it's going in the right direction.

My rating of the product is because I haven't gotten a chance to try all the different devices. I haven't gotten the opportunity. I just ran a test with LoadRunner, but I haven't run tests with real devices; how a iOS device, how an Android device, how a Windows Phone device will send traffic to see how well they capture the information. I haven't gotten a chance, so I cannot give it a perfect rating.

Unless, after I do all of that, I can say, "Oh really, it does capture what I'm looking for." Then, I would maybe give it a perfect rating, but I have rated it based on what I need right now. I just haven't gotten a chance to explore to different areas.

What we are looking at is the real-time user experience. We are a retail business and the customer walks in, he places an order for the material. We would like that to be efficient, the order to be processed, and it should immediately get delivered. The performance is a key factor for us. We are a franchising business and the application is deployed in the cloud. Most of the time, the users complain about the slow performance. For us, it's very important to track down where exactly the problem is; for example, in which geographical region is there a problem. Then, we nail it down and find out what session is causing a problem there. That's the whole idea. That's where we're seeing that AppDynamics is able to help us.

We have been able to identify the application issues or the user experience issues. We are able to address that. If the user has been complaining that they are experiencing a problem, we get to know that proactively. We are able to find out which geographic region, what store is having an issue with it so that we can monitor it; it comes as an alert, we try to diagnose it, and try to fix the issue.

We've not been able to get one answer to all of our problems; for example, if there is anything else happening on the networking side. I'm pretty excited to learn about the infrastructure monitoring.

One thing that is missing is the desktop monitoring. The desktop monitoring is not there. A lot of times, the problems are created or caused by some other applications, which is blocking or causing an issue with the application.

These kinds of things I still see as missing pieces in AppDynamics, and that’s the reason for my rating.

I just started using the database side. I haven't gone through that. At a recent conference, I was looking forward to participating in one of the sessions so that I could learn more about the product. I started to see some valuable things. I was especially excited to see Business iQ. I need to learn about that. I see there is potential for being more productive and helpful to the business. But, it's too early for me to comment on that.

We haven't used AppDynamics very extensively. If I had to rate its stability, I would say that AppDynamics is about 8/10. There is a little room for improvement. Sometimes, we do have performance issues on AppDynamics. The metrics take a long time to load. I raised this point when I was in one of the sessions at the conference.

It is scalable. The good part is that we can add as many nodes as needed. We can do that. We can add as many clients as we need; we can do that. I don't see an issue with scalability. That seems to be good.

They have been pretty good with technical support. In fact, one of the technical support persons helped me in terms of doing the proof of concept. I've been able to get that support. They're very good. In fact, the day before I provided this review I pointed out a problem and I see some communication going on there; they're pretty good. They're very good.

The ERP system that we have used has partnered with AppDynamics. They suggested this. We weren’t really looking for evaluating solutions; it just came along with that. Then, as we started to use that ERP application more and more, we encountered performance issues. The need arose to find one tool that can help us and that could give us end-to-end monitoring.

There are many tools available, but they cover only one segment of that. The good part with AppDynamics is that you get all three layers, even though there still are some missing links. Looking at the vision and listening to them at the conference, I'm very positive and optimistic that AppDynamics is going to come forward with new ideas and new solutions that can help us.

We had some initial setup challenges because our application is different than regular web-based applications. I had to engage with our application vendor to have that issue resolved. After some initial hiccups, everything went smooth. The support has been very active. Whenever I needed it, I want to have a call, a joint session, it was there. That was support.

There are some other monitoring tools, such as SolarWinds, ExtraHop, and so on, but they are for different verticals. There are also open-source database monitoring tools out there. There are many tools out there. It becomes really hard to focus.

We already had the AppDynamics license, which we got when we acquired the ERP system. We got a license with that because AppDynamics was partnered with our ERP system. That basically gave us an advantage, and it's a good tool. I did some reviews on it, and found that they're doing very well.

As I started looking into other products, such as end-user monitoring, AppDynamics was really good with that and the database side. If there is an application available which basically gives you end-to-end visibility, why not go with that one?

Performance is a real challenge for any application. It's very hard to get a single solution that gives us complete visibility. I would certainly recommend looking at AppDynamics, that kind of a tool, that basically provides complete visibility.

I use Browser Real-User Monitoring with AppDynamics’ Database Monitoring and Java Application Monitoring products.

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