Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

We use the on-premise deployment model of this solution. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for monitoring our critical applications. The automated data dynamics enables us to monitor the performance of an application and unknowns.

A way that it has improved my organization is from its notifications. We can get notified on our mobile app. We get notified spontaneously for mission-critical applications. It notifies us that the incident is going to happen in the near future, it's a predictive notification. The notifications have been on target for us and have improved my organization. 

The auto-discovery of the logs is the most valuable feature. It requires minimal configuration, we just need to set up on once and it automatically detects through the code. 

The solution should be coupled with its own analytic elastic search analytic model. It should push that data to other data models so the organization does not have to spend separately or to spend more on the analytics part. If a bank or any organization has its own dashboarding solution it should be able to push the data to that dashboarding solution. This is not available right now.

In the next release, I would like to see the configuration of the data and more support for new applications. It should support new languages.

I have been using AppDynamics for two years.

It's a fairly stable product and I would say that they are longer lived than new applications that have been on boarded. 

Our entire command center is using this solution which is around 15 to 20 users.

Their technical support isn't great. The geographical distance and the response time it takes to respond to emails from the technical team is very slow. 

For the setup, you need a good understanding of the solution and how it works so I would say it's not that simple. It's not that complex either but if you have the right people in place, it should have a medium level of complexity. For banks, it can be a little more complex because it needs to comply with a lot of security guidelines. If you're not in a banking environment, it should be more straightforward.

The setup took us around two to three weeks. 

We consulted directly with AppDynamics for the implementation. The experience was good but the geographical distance was always an issue because we don't have local support available in the area. Otherwise, when the people were on the floor it was okay but when the people were not on the floor then definitely there were some problems there. 

We have definitely seen an ROI. If you have a critical application that needs to be monitored you will see your indirect ROI within two to three years and you'll have the happy customers, not usual complaints.

You don't have to pay. You only pay for the implementation partners if you choose to get help. 

I would say be cautious on the licensing model. You should understand your exact needs. If your needs are in line with what this solution offers then I would genuinely recommend going for this solution, otherwise, if not, it might be too costly. 

I think from the product perspective it's fine but on the implementation descriptions there are a lot of issues. It's challenging without support. If someone is looking into it they need to look for any local organization partners in their area.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

Application Analytics is mainly used to get full visibility into the SAP stack in order to detect performance problems.

Application Analytics reduces the average time it takes to repair performance problems and improves cooperation between different IT departments.

Application Analytics' most valuable features are the real-user monitoring and the agents installed in the software stack on the application server.

Application Analytics' performance in pure and native cloud environments could be improved. It could also be more intuitive to use, especially regarding business IQ functionality, and the dashboard programming needs some manual intrusion. In the next release, I would like to see better integration with OpenTelemetry.

I've been working with Application Analytics for three years. 

Application Analytics is really stable.

Application Analytics is scalable.

AppDynamics' technical support is okay, though there's quite a lot of self-service.

Positive

The initial setup was pretty straightforward and took a couple of days, though installing the SAP agent takes a little longer in SAP environments.

We used an in-house team and an AppDynamics team.

The license fee for Application Analytics is in the range of 2.5 million over three years, with extra fees for service contingencies.

I would recommend Application Analytics to others as a professional tool and rate it eight out of ten.

We are using AppDynamics Database Monitoring is used as a performance monitoring tool for any application. 

The most valuable features of AppDynamics Database Monitoring are you can configure the performance and see in real-time what is exactly happening with the applications. Additionally, the dashboards are good.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring could improve the price of the solution, it is costly.

I have been using AppDynamics Database Monitoring for approximately four years.

AppDynamics Database Monitoring is stable.

We have approximately 30 to 40 end-users using AppDynamics Database Monitoring. We do not have plans to increase the number of end-users.

I have not contacted the support from AppDynamics Database Monitoring.

We have purchased a few licenses for AppDynamics Database Monitoring and the price is high.

My advice to others is that AppDynamics Database Monitoring is a very good monitoring tool. It would be a good choice.

I rate AppDynamics Database Monitoring an eight out of ten.

AppDynamics can be used for understanding where the bottlenecks are in your environment, and where your applications are struggling. For example, when you have major data collections, you can easily see in AppDynamics, when you have slow responses.

The most valuable feature in AppDynamics is the identifying of the slow responses. Additionally, it is easy to use.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately six years.

AppDynamics is a stable solution.

The scalable of this solution is relative. I have an issue with the fact that when having a hundred servers, for instance, that's a hundred licenses. Sometimes, from a cost perspective, you might need to decide which 50 do you want to monitor, and not monitor.

We have approximately 5,000 using the solution.

The technical support is great. After you have spent a certain amount with AppDynamics they provide you with dedicated support for your company.

The installation was simple, and it took approximately one hour.

The application owner can install it on their own if they follow the documentation.

There is an annual cost to use this solution. The licensing model could be improved by making it more cost-effective.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

Our use case for AppDynamics is helping customers with performance problems and applications.

What I found is that there is a lot of room to develop things in it and to connect to other tools like IBM.

An area that has room for improvement on the CR and ERP would be the addition of monitoring of the internal solution. For example, you can monitor the day-to-day and everything in the transactions with AppDynamics, but there's also a lot going on in the kernel itself that you cannot monitor. The automation needs to improve as well. As it stands, a lot of customization needs to happen before you can use AppDynamics.

We have been using AppDynamics for four years. 

AppDynamics is scalable for medium-sized companies, but it is more difficult for enterprise companies.

The AppDyniamics technical support is good. We haven't had any problems with them. They answer very quickly.

The initial setup was not really straightforward, but it was also not complex.

We handled the implementation in-house. The installation is not really an issue. You can install AppDynamics in an hour, but the configuration takes a long time before you have everything configured.

Return on investment for most tools takes a long time. Even then, I don't know if it's really the tools giving you a return on investment. Tools point to a problem, but they don't point to a solution. Your engineer needs to come up with a solution.

When deciding whether or not to go with AppDynamics, first take a look at what you need to monitor and what the value of the monitoring is. There are a lot of things that an organization may need to monitor, like, for example, if I have the power system on, I may need to monitor the microcode and the window system. However, AppDynanics doesn't monitor these kinds of things. There still need to be a lot of patches implemented in order to improve performance. Also, these tools give a false positive that the performance is wrong, but then only adjust one parameter in the microcode.

Yes, IBM APM, and Dynatrace

If we have an issue, it is useful for finding the root cause of incidences. So, we use it for troubleshooting.

When we have a large issue, we bring our teams together, working with AppDynamics. This has allowed us to reduce the time to recover applications (for example).

• Performance monitoring
• The real user monitoring: It helps us evaluate our customers' real experiences, which is valuable as an eCommerce company. We can look into their detail, one by one. It is helpful because it is deterministic.  
  

I would like them to change their business model for scalability to accommodate growing companies. The business model should be more flexible.

I am okay with the stability. 

The scalability is good. However, the issue is you need to know in advance how many agents that you will use. With companies similar to ours (in growth mode), this is difficult to forecast. 

They have a very good customer service team that checks in with customers, asking about our experiences.

It took about two weeks to complete the entire implementation and integration of the product. It was easy.

With some training, we were able to implement and configure AWS with a little help.

It is expensive. However, our time to recover has been reduced, and this product has helped recuperate costs and provided us with ROI.

We did not originally evaluate any other solutions.

It is an interesting application. We have tried others: New Relic and Dynatrace. Finally, we decided to stay with AppDynamics because its graphical configuration is very intuitive for our teams to work on.

AppDynamics is doing a very good job.

We used it on-premise, then moved to AWS. On-premise is very similar to using AWS.

The most valuable feature is real-time performance monitoring of my production applications; being able to determine within just a couple of minutes, whether or not my applications are having a problem; and being able to correlate that with issues that my customers report on.

We use it pretty widely across the company. In my particular group, where we've been able to get it situated for all of our .NET and related applications, we've been able to really improve our time to resolution on incidents. We've been able to better institute root-cause analysis for these incidents that we've been having. Whereas before, we were essentially a black box. Customers could say that they were having issues and we would not be able to independently correlate those reports with actual production problems. Now, we have much greater visibility from top to bottom, in terms of the web page and the server level.

We have the database monitoring component, as well. We can take a look and see whether we were having blocking on our database at the time, without needing to engage our database administrator. That also improves our time to resolution.

One of the things that I would like to see is a little bit more ease of use with regards to the analytics component. I know that's new. At a recent conference, there was a session for hands on with analytics that I signed up for. I planned to look at that a little bit. Otherwise, it's been a little bit of a black box to try and get started with our existing infrastructure.

I know that they're moving towards a lot of the things that I would like to see. For example, slightly deeper integration of the database monitoring that's already in place and being able to, a little bit more easily, correlate that to the calls that my web service is making. My applications, in particular, are very, very, very database heavy. Being able to see that more closely linked would be nice. The latest version of the controller has already started moving in that direction.

Being able to use analytics in the way that it's advertised; there's still a gap for me personally, in terms of where we are now and what the capabilities of analytics are. I would really like to see that made a little bit more transparent.

These are small, quality-of-life issues.

The stability of the product, generally speaking, is good. The worst problem that we have with it has to do with firewall rules and making sure that our agents can reach out to our SaaS controller. Once we get that taken care of, we have that data within just a couple of minutes. The stability incidents that we have on the controller level are very rare; it's available most all of the time.

Scalability is pretty good. We're able to on-board new applications and make sure that we get those correlated up very, very quickly. We are actually moving to a full CI/CD stack, which will be integrating our ability to install and upgrade AppDynamics agents seamlessly, without us having to do it manually, like we do right now.

I use technical support all the time. Usually it's user error, stupid user tricks; I'm pretty good at those. There are definitely a couple of times where we've discovered that there's a bug in the agent or the controller.

We also have bi-weekly calls with our technical contacts, as well as our sales contacts. If we're having a problem, that can be escalated up, very quickly as well.

We were not previously using a different solution. It was actually one of my manager’s directives. I actually was with a separate team at Expedia called The Global Customer Operations Center. They had it set up for all of the call centers. If you call 1-800-Expedia, you'll get routed to one of our call centers and they use a set of applications that is supported by this team. It was a situation where users would call up and say that they were having problems, and we weren't able to repro it. They got AppDynamics set up and there was actually a session at that conference that they gave about all of the ways that they're using AppDynamics.

My manager moved to this rather old team at Expedia and one of the things she brought with her was AppDynamics. She was already in the process of getting that set up for that team when I followed her to this other team.

I was not involved of the initial setup of the controller, but we do have several applications that we're on-boarding at this time. Essentially, that is part of our go-live for any of our applications now: “We have this new component coming up. Do we have AppDynamics? Is it reporting?” We refuse to go live on any application until we know that we're reporting that data up through AppDynamics. That is a critical component of our ability to go live on any of our applications.

There weren’t any other vendors on the shortlist at the time. We were pretty much sold on AppDynamics. My manager, Diana, is a very, very big fan of AppDynamics. I feel like it really fits well into that niche of real-time, usable, easy-to-learn application performance monitoring. When I got started in GCO to begin with, it was already there and I knew I couldn't screw it up by going in and poking around. So, I went in, poked around and learned a lot about the application we were supporting; where the problems were; and what we could do about it very, very quickly, within a couple of weeks of my coming onto the team. Things like that all add up into us being pretty dedicated AppDynamics customers. They've got a really good relationship with Expedia, in general. We're very happy with them overall.

In general, the most important criterial when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is ease of use, both with regards to setup and expansion; for example, on-boarding new applications. For me, personally, that low barrier to entry, in terms of becoming familiarized with the product, understanding how it works, seeing where the benefits are for us and our use-case; I think it was extremely compelling.

One of our sister organizations has a WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus instance. They were using the good old stare-and-compare method of making sure that their services were up. They would start their Java application and go stare at the log file. That was how they knew it was running. They didn't have any visibility into how much traffic it was taking, whether that was normal, what their normal call profile looked like. As part of our own evaluation of WSO2 and their Enterprise Service Bus, we asked this team to install AppDynamics on their servers. They came back and said, "How do we get our own?"

Basically, my advice – to people who are looking at better visibility for their applications; better knowledge of how their customers are using their product; knowing whether your application is up or down is one thing but knowing how it gets used can be something else entirely – is, "See if you can get yourself a trial of the controller and some help installing your agents the first time, and then you'll wonder where you've been your whole life without it."

As a general rule, though, AppDynamics is something that we really can't operate without; even in the case of when we had a pretty big network outage earlier this year, where we weren't able to see the controller from our desks. That was sort of like operating with a big, black blindfold on. It's amazing how much we have come to rely on that instant, up-to-the-minute visibility that we have for our applications.

We have other tools like Splunk to help us dig through the logs, but even that doesn't provide the same level of detail that AppDynamics does. I don't really know if there is another product that does. For me, it's a pretty easy win to say that AppDynamics is certainly one of the most important components for us in supporting production environments.

We are not currently using any other AppDynamics products. We're researching how to implement that. Unfortunately, a lot of our applications are legacy. We've got some classic ASP that we haven't moved to .NET. There's a little bit of upgrade hurdle cost with regards to getting the EUM integrated with these classic ASP and related applications. As we start moving towards upgrading and replacing these products, that's something that we're looking at; making sure that we integrate the EUM with it. It's not something we've done yet.

I think the most important thing is the end-to-end view that you get of all of your servers when you set it up. You can see where problems are without having to actually experience them or tell they're experiencing the problems. You can be preemptive.

I think it allows you to go down and get real data about what's wrong, instead of having to email around screenshots. It let's you actually get the depth that you need, even the code level and code lines and that kind of thing.

I think a little more control over which transactions get that depth attached to them would be good. Right now, it seems like there's certain thresholds that you can set, but it would be nice if there was a more dynamic way to archive transactions, or keep around certain transaction types.

Stability and scalability look pretty good, from what I can tell; especially the cloud SaaS APM solution.

We have not needed technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We are currently moving from a monolithic application to a more service-oriented model where we're going to do micro-services. Spring Boot was the choice for that, because it has actuator support which provides some of the same features. We're looking at that, and weighing this because we already have it. We want to see if we can use of both, or maybe just use AppDynamics going forward.

I think price and scalability are important when choosing an APM vendor. If it's a third party solution, is it going to be able to keep up with the solution you're using? How is the technical support, and how cutting edge is the solution. Are they keeping up with their competitors? So far, we have found all these things in AppDynamics.