Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

From a reporting and dashboarding perspective, their API, which is what I deal with the most, is unmatched by any company that I've come across.

We're able to get a single view into applications and their performance; the way they run, errors, and trends. We're able to turn that around back to the developers and help them tweak their code and applications.

Coordinating upgrades across systems would absolutely be a huge benefit. I don't deal with a lot of the upgrades. I just get the emails saying that there have been upgrades. We're on the SaaS platform, so I don't see the platform upgrades, either. Nonetheless, that would actually be a huge benefit.

I haven't seen any downtime myself.

I haven't seen a whole lot of limitations from an input perspective. It’s been pretty good so far. The performance actually blows the competition away, from what I've seen.

When I open a ticket, it is resolved quickly. They are very responsive; very fast to get back to us and very thorough with their answers. I’m happy with the resolution.

I was involved in the setup of the single sign-on integration for our company, as well as getting the users set up and trying to get permissions set up. That required a little finessing and conversations with AppDynamics, but for the most part, it was pretty simple.

Reach out anytime you have questions, because they're very responsive to answer.

My favorite part of the application is that it auto-baselines the application that you instrument with it. I work with other monitoring tools such as SCOM and Splunk. These tools are great, but the automatic baselining offered by AppDynamics is like an easy button.

Products like SCOM and Splunk require you to have to know exactly what you want to alert on. From a Splunk perspective, that is generally a very specific log entry such as an error. SCOM deals with hard thresholds and there is work to tune those to be meaningful for an organization. What make sense for organization A might be completely different for organization B. For example, when to alert on a drive filling up. Does 80% make sense and give enough proactive warning to get the issue resolved?

With AppDynamics, the product keeps track of how your application is performing and rolls that into an aggregated value that is compared against how the application is performing right now. It then lets you alert on a deviation away from what is considered normal. This creates immediate value in the alerts it provides without any real interaction from a tuning standpoint.

With its automatic flow maps, as well as its ability to automatically baseline key metrics out of the box, it allows support individuals to quickly focus in on the exact location of the application problem reducing MTTR. It also has enabled us to be more devops focused, creating stable releases in a faster, more efficient manner.

As an administrator, I would love to be able to manage the update of agents from the controller itself. This would allow for enhanced version control, as well as eliminate the need to target various applications and their corresponding servers individually due to their unique configurations.

I would also like to see better license management from an auditing standpoint. Knowing how many licenses are being consumed by an application would be a great feature. Being a large organization, it would assist with understanding total cost of ownership, as well as growth predictions on a per-application basis.

We have been using the product for the last three years for numerous applications.

While I wouldn’t consider this an issue, when the business originally brought AppDynamics in, a centralized support structure had not been identified. We ended up with a controller for each application, which is not the ideal enterprise solution. When I took on support of the product with my team, we consolidated to an on-premise enterprise controller. That process was extremely easy to perform so, for us, it was really more of a bad design problem that my team had to fix.

Technical support and customer service have been amazing. I have been able to get support both through the portal, and from our sales support extremely fast. They have a great customer service focus. This is one of the reasons that deployment of the product is also so easy.

AppDynamics setup is very easy from an installation process. The best part is, when you decide to go with the product, they work directly with you to assist in the initial implementation to ensure you get the most of the product.

AppDynamics helped with the initial implementation. That was very focused with the support teams of the applications. I would absolutely recommend getting your development teams involved ASAP, so they begin to use the tool and see its immediate value to them.

We also evaluated New Relic. In the end, the features, ease of use, and customer service provided by AppDynamics was what tipped the scale towards them.

They offer a free trial. If you are struggling with finding the root cause of a reoccurring issue, then give it a shot. We got immediate, actionable results.

My rating reflects its ease of use as well as the scope of solutions that it can monitor, including MongoDB.

We primarily use the solution for database monitoring. We also have defense solutions available to monitor the database performance. We use AppDynamics in our pipeline.

The feature that is most valuable to us is the snapshot feature. It allows us to get a snapshot of different SQL scripts that are being executed simultaneously and we can identify everything we need on them.

The solution offers good monitoring.

I'm only working as an administrator on the solution, so I'm not in a position to really discuss too many technical aspects of it. 

The application monitoring needs improvement. It needs to be easier for someone who isn't a proficient developer. 

For example, if we use Java for monitoring events to gather history-based data in regards to the application, it should provide a better core-controller. When we monitor any Java application, the approach for us is to identify a set of classes as part of Java programming. These particular classes needs to be executed so any end-user using AppDynamics would be able to see the culprit class. There shouldn't be a need for a final report. Yet, we don't have a feature like that at this time. A person who is monitoring everything needs to have very good knowledge about the solution and not everyone is a proficient programmer.

I've been using the solution for two years.

I haven't personally faced any issues with scaling. However, we have a limited number of licenses available. We've been allocated four licenses to monitor four different items. Therefore, I don't have the availability to scale currently.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The initial implementation is quite simple. It takes about one day to fully set everything up. However, sometimes we have compatibility issues. For example, AppDynamics is compatible with the C language.

Our sales team initiates the AppDynamics license and then an internal team handles the events around implementation. We have a good team available from Citrix as well.

The solution we are using is SaaS-based. The controller is deployed on the cloud, and we have integrated different Linux environments with it. There are a couple of Java agents as well as machine engines and a DB agent that we utilize.

I don't have too much interaction with the teams that handle the solution, so I don't know if I have any advice to give other companies in relation to implementation. I don't have too much exposure when it comes to database monitoring and am not overly familiar with the application itself.

I'd rate it at least a six out of ten based on my experience with the solution so far. I only use limited features for Oracle database monitoring. 

The transaction snapshots are probably by far the most used feature because it gives a lot of details. It adds a lot of value. You can really get to the details really, really quick. You can drill down very, very quick. When you show it to somebody who's a stakeholder, they typically get it right away. You don't have to explain. You don't have to “translate.” That really helps with the communication. That really gets people focused on the task at hand, rather than trying to pass the buck around. That really helps quite a bit.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere about correlation, it's really helpful because I don't have to spend time with multiple teams. A lot of times, what might have happened in the past was where, if there was a problem, we would call like six, seven, or eight different SMEs from different domains: network, storage, compute; not on all problems, but at least some of the ones that we suspected. Application; if you have multiple applications, sometimes you have a different person who owns each of the different applications; maybe the database guy. You can really start adding more people in there. If you think about it from a productivity point of view, it's a waste of a lot of time, if you have to keep doing that for every single problem day in and day out.

Whereas, when you have AppDynamics, it's actually tracing the call. So, if three out of four services are functioning fine, for the most part, I don't even have to worry about them. It is common to call the networking guy because nobody really knows where the problem is. Now, he's or she’s out of the picture. I'm sure he's or she’s a lot happier about it, too. Same with the storage and compute: You start leaving these people out of the conversation that don't need to be there, which is a good thing for the company, and us. We don’t also have to spend that time explaining and hearing what they have to say. That’s not to say they don't have value to add, but if there's really nothing there, we're wasting their time, as well. So, it's really helpful.

AppDynamics helps me not just rule in the areas, but rule out where I don't have to talk. More often than not, the rule-out gets hidden away, but it's a really good add-on because I'm only focusing on the problems.

I can think of 2-3 complex problems that probably would be helpful to most customers. Heap analysis is one; memory leaks. That's already there, so maybe that does not count at this point. The second one I would probably call out is connection leaks. So, heap analysis and connection leaks; those would be very helpful.

I think they've already started working on the next version of license management. That should be pretty helpful.

Stability’s very good. Once in a while, we've had some hiccups around the UI being slow, but that typically gets resolved pretty quickly. A lot of times, we don't even have to talk about it. Once in a while, we've had to raise a couple of tickets. I think one time it was us using the environment a little more aggressively than maybe we should have been, and we could have been, for that matter. Most of the time, stability’s not an issue. Once in a while, you do get the spinning circles. I've experienced worse. This is nowhere near that bad. It's very good for the most part.

We're a fairly large install. It scaled well, but then again, it's a SaaS solution. They've got their magic sauce working, of course, really well for us.

We use technical support quite a bit. We've got a team of engineers and there are at least five or six of them that have the capability to open up tickets. We typically get really good responses. Every time I've opened a ticket, I usually get a response in good time. Not just a response; it's usually a good response; it's a meaningful response; it's something that helps you solve the problem that you have.

Once in a while, as you can imagine with any product, they get dragged out because maybe it needs a longer-term solution. I don't think I've seen anything that would cause concern.

We were using a tool prior to this that was not doing any of the stitching; the correlation. We tried another one that was doing some of it, but we found AppDynamics was doing it better.

We went through the PoC because we had our fingers twisted the wrong way a few times with our old tools. It was using up a lot of our time. Of course, when we heard that they could do it, we really wanted to see what they had to offer. The PoC was very helpful. We actually used it on live projects – testing projects not production – to figure out if it would be able to help. We were able to do a lot of it, without much overhead. It was a game changer right out the door.

I was involved in the PoC, as well as the initial setup. The initial engagement is a little complex, but when you look back – hindsight, they say, is 20/20 – but in this case, it really made good sense on how it's structured. Initially, it felt a little limited but then, as you see it over and over and over again, you realize that there's good thought process that's gone into it. It was pretty smooth sailing for the most part.

There were hiccups that we had with an arrival tool that tool's vendor was not able to resolve. This was during the PoC stage. With AppDynamics, we went through the technical support team. They really had the right answers in the right places. They knew how to solve it.

We did a PoC with New Relic for about eight months, in 2014. We haven't really gone back since then to look at New Relic, to really be able to compare in a meaningful manner, but we looked at them at that time.

There were other areas where New Relic wasn't planning on supporting; some of our legacy footprint, such as WebSphere 6 and Oracle E-Business Suite. AppDynamics was doing that, as well. It was another add-on that really mattered a lot because that was a very large footprint of our agents.

In general, ease of use was definitely one of the most important criteria when we selected the vendor; ability to correlate in an automated matter; and be able to gather diagnostic data or just even transaction data. We'd already seen how transaction data is helpful with Dynatrace, for which we just had a limited on-prem set of licenses. We were really happy with the PurePath and so on, but we didn't want to take Dynatrace into production for a variety of reasons. A prime one was that they capture all the snapshots, which we know would've added a lot of overhead. That's probably another really good criteria: added overhead. Then, of course, breadth of coverage, when it comes to different technologies because, if you have to buy a different license or a different tool for everyone, you’re kind of setting yourself up for other problems down the line. Those are some of the key points.

Give it a shot. If you want to do a PoC, definitely do it. You should definitely have AppDynamics in there. I have no qualms about recommending the tool outright, but I think for your use case, you should probably PoC it on your own because you will really see the value add. If you don't, of course, then it is what it is, but I think most people will see the value add very, very quickly. They have a very competent team. They have the right people in the right places. Once they decide to commit to something, they actually do it and do it well. That's definitely a good plus.

I have not given it a perfect rating because I would like to see the heap analysis and the connection leak. There are some hiccups, I feel. I probably have to keep visiting the new feature sets that are coming with the leak analysis. Those minor things, those problems, the heap analysis and the connection leaks, are pretty time consuming, but in the grand scheme of things, the rest of the feature set is really, really great.

I haven’t even mentioned elsewhere the vast set of metrics that we have available to us, which is very helpful. I can create my own metrics if I want, if I choose to.
It definitely ticks a lot of checkboxes and there are a lot plus marks.

We also use AppDynamics End User Monitoring a little bit; not as much as APM. APM is used by a lot more of our internal clients. End User Monitoring is used and that's also helpful. There's a feature where you can actually see the traffic going from the End User snapshot down to the APM snapshot. That correlation is very, very helpful because then I don't have to do it manually. If you have to do it manually, a lot of it is a bit of guessing game, unless you have other ways of doing the manual correlation, which is a lot tougher, especially when it comes to production, where you want to really get things moving faster rather than slower. That can be very helpful.

We have a complex application. We do payments which are highly transactional in nature. With different kinds of workloads that you see in the production environment, how do you really track down specific issues which your lab testing environment can't really reproduce? Your production environment gives you certain workloads, which basically enable you to look at your application more closely. No lab test could really simulate that sort of a load. APM really helps us in getting down to the bottom of these sorts of workloads; how code responds to these sorts of workloads and how we can make our application deliver better latency and a better end-user experience.

Given an extremely transactional, highly complex workload, you just cannot use your testing lab to stress all of your code parts. First of all, it has made us very agile. What happens is, now, you can actually take any one of your deployments or releases, roll it out into production into a very limited set of servers, look at how the APM works, and it gives you insights onto the how the code that you just pushed out is performing.

If everything is fine over a period of a few minutes or a few hours, you can actually roll your deployment out very quickly. You don't have to have an extremely complicated test harness in your preproduction environment. You don't have to go through extensive testing cycles before releasing something into production. It really makes us agile in terms of releasing to market quicker.

For me, the single largest area with room for improvement that I've been requesting the AppDynamics team to deliver for us is APM support for Ruby on Rails and for HHPM. These are the two language environments that we use quite heavily in production. That's something that I'd like to see support for.

Stability depends on the configuration. We work very closely with our solution architects, with AppDynamics, because there's always this question in the minds of consumers: A tool which can do so much as AppDynamics, how do you ensure that it runs with minimal overhead? You've really got to work with the AppDynamics team to size out your environments; that makes it stable for you. That's been our experience.

I can't comment on scalability because our infra is fairly small. We have a total of around 150 nodes that we could probably end up instrumenting. Right now, we do far less than that, so I can't really comment.

Technical support has been pretty good. In our case, we use a few programming languages which are still not supported by AppDynamics, so we've reached out to them to help us with road map information. They've been pretty transparent about when support could get rolled out to these sorts of languages that we use.

For the more run-of-the-mill sort of tickets, where we have issues with the configuration or using the product, it's been pretty good. We've liked our experience with the tech support team.

We had been using a mix of proprietary tools that we developed in house, along with third-party solutions. We were able to get the job done, no doubt about that, but the problem is never having an integrated view of how your application performs. We have uptime alerting running differently; we have business KPI monitoring being done differently; and we have end-user behavior being tracked differently. It was very hard to find a correlated view across all of these four. To debug specific sessions or to debug specific instances, I think that's where AppDynamics really comes in. The integrated view that it gives of your application.

I was not directly involved in the initial setup but my team was. It's pretty straightforward. I think it's really important that whoever is setting up the application first fundamentally understands what the application does. I think that's critical. The tool is fairly complex and powerful. The setup needs to be handled by someone who, on this side, really knows what the application being monitored can do. If you put a rookie on the job, it's going to be really tough.

We did consider other vendors. We were looking at New Relic. As a developer and as someone who builds and has a team who builds stuff, I feel New Relic is actually a very powerful option. However, as I mentioned, we wanted something that could work on-premise.

We went with AppDynamics because we are in the payments industry and from a compliance perspective, we needed an on-premise solution and AppDynamics was, I think, the best solution that also worked on-premise.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics for us is, first of all, from the product perspective. As I mentioned, we had a mix of various proprietary and third-party solutions that we were using earlier. We needed a product that could provide end-to-end visibility into the infrastructure and the application. That was a high priority for us. Beyond that, what we really needed was a global presence with enough strong local support. That was something that AppDynamics brought to the table.

Make use of all of the training material and the university. There's some really useful information in there. Also, the two other things that I’ve mentioned elsewhere:

• Ensure the person who is deploying AppDynamics in your environment is among the top-most performers of your team, someone who knows your application in and out.
• Combine that with good, strong consultation by the AppDynamics team. Get these two in place and you've got a winner on your hands.

The reason why I have not rated it higher is the lack of support for HHPM and Ruby; bring them both and I would rate it higher.

We have analyzed so many of our APIs and web services. It showed how much data and how many times each and every API and web service is used. We didn’t know how much they cost; we are paying thousands of dollars for our web services. If we can save on those costs and enhance the performance, that's priceless.

I think the performance and interface are the most important features.

The way we execute it, it takes a bit of time, like every tool. If they can improve that; instead of taking 10 seconds, say it takes 5 seconds or 3 seconds, that would be great. Maybe some more CPU power or something like that could be an area to improve.

It's pretty stable; there has been no down time, and it does not hang.

It scales very well for our needs.

The support is awesome, so whenever we get something, we call them. We get 24-hour support, which is great.

Initial setup was straightforward; that's awesome.

We looked at many other products at a few conferences. We saw a couple of more products and then we came back to AppDynamics; we are working with them for the last two years.

We decided to go with AppDynamics based first of all on performance, features, and the benefits we would get; whether the product was being offered per instance, per developer or for the whole team. The price, is it per instance or per year? We decided, based on all of these, that we should go for AppDynamics.

Go through the features it has; it has many of them. If you just buy it and use it for small things, it's not worth it. It has many features and capabilities; it is capable of doing many things. Go through the features in detail, or even go through training to get an idea of what it can do. It's a big product.

Line-level tracing: This helped massively with identifying and eliminating performance bottlenecks. We had a significant slowdown in our app that we were struggling to identify. Using AppDynamics to trace hosted code to bottlenecks proved invaluable. This however only got us so far. When we reached the limit with AppDynamics, we sought advice from their technical team. After all, we were using a very expensive product that didn’t get us all the way. Under NDA, AppDynamics took a working branch of our code and investigated the bottleneck internally. They did this using other tools besides AppDynamics. This was beneficial to them to identify things that could not be achieved with AppDynamics. Later, they were able to discover a way to make this easier within AppDynamics.

AppDynamics has become the go-to tool for issue identification. The DevOps team was able to take more ownership for defect detection to improve discovery time and reduce risk of issues becoming known to end users. It also reduced the involvement of third-line support in issue detection.

The UI is clumsy and slow. The AppDynamics portal had an Adobe Flash UI, a bit dated for a modern SaaS. It had an old feel to it; unusual for a company with advanced technology. It would often take a while for the portal (controller) to load, making it a little tedious to use at times. I’m not sure why it took so long, maybe it was doing real-time processing of data, which, if so, I’m more forgiving.

I used it for three years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Techccial support is 10/10. See a case study from my previous company here: https://www.appdynamics.com/case-study/the-test-factory/.

We previously used New Relic. We switched because AppDynamics offered a broader and deeper range of functionality.

Initial setup was straightforward for Azure virtual machines, but not so easy for cloud services. The installable was difficult to get running in cloud services, but the AppDynamics technical team were supportive.

AppDynamics is a premium tool. You’ll soon realise this expense would’ve been greater without AppDynamics.

Before choosing this product, I personally did not evaluate other options.

I primarily use AppDynamics for my servers.

AppDynamics' best feature is automation - for example, when I add a note, it can understand the data automatically.

AppDynamics' modules and hardware resources are very high.

I've been using AppDynamics for a year.

AppDynamics is stable and reliable.

AppDynamics' scalability is good.

I didn't have a good experience with AppDynamics' technical support. Its knowledge base is locked up and unavailable.

I also work with Zabbix, which has better education and hardware specification, though AppDynamics is more user-friendly.

The initial setup was complex because we had to configure every agent and module, use a specific server for every module, and manage every visual and virtual machine.

I used an outsourced company.

AppDynamics is really pricey as it requires licenses for every feature.

AppDynamics forces you to depend on the company to do what you want, which may be a negative if you prefer to work independently. I would rate AppDynamics as seven out of ten.