Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

Being able to quickly diagnose customer issues and their performance problems.

It lets us quickly diagnose customer problems that occurred in production, but also lets us look at our system and load test in the quality assurance period so we find problems before they go to production.

The stability is generally pretty good. Sometimes you get anomalies which are hard to explain and sometimes data seems to disappear, but except for that it is generally pretty good.

Scalability has been fine. I have not had any problems.

The support that we received was pretty good. Around July, we had some technical resources come on site and help train us and the team on how to use it. We asked them a couple of questions but generally we figure stuff out using the help system.

We had built our own login and diagnostic tools but it was hard to add features to that, while at the same time try and diagnose any problems quickly. So it is nice to have something which is already done, which you just learn how to use and have a quick turnaround without having to worry about it. And if we have problems, we just phone technical support.

We looked at about three or four different vendors, one of which was Dynatrace. We talked to Dynatrace a lot, and even had it installed, but decided to go to AppDynamics as it seemed to work better for us.

AppDynamics does exactly what I want it to do. It diagnoses problems quickly so if one of our customers is having problems, we can tell him what's slow and maybe find a solution within a couple of hours. Customers don't mind if you have occasional problems, as long as you can fix them quickly. If it goes on for weeks and weeks, then they start getting annoyed. It is nice to be able to tell them, "This is what happened. This is why it happened. And this is what we did to fix it."

If a colleague of mine was researching AppDynamics I would get them to install it; use the evaluation copy and see if it works for them. It is pretty easy to use.

AppDynamics monitors the ICT environment by just installing a Java or .NET agent and machine agent on the server. It shows how all the components in the infrastructure work together to run an application. You can pinpoint easily where the performance issues for your application are.

We once installed an agent on an IIS server and then noticed that there was a memory issue on this server. Also, we once had performance issues on a Websphere application server, which was caused by memory leaks in the JVM. The IBM tooling did not warn for this, but AppDynamics showed it was a problem, because you can look at the data over a longer period.

We solved one issue with performance on our online application, which was caused by a slow batch application running on the same server/database.

One thing that can be improved is the license structure. It is not easy to see which agent is included in the license and which is not.

We have been using AppDynamics for about four years now.

The controller and the agents are easy to deploy; 30 minutes at the most.

In the years that we have used AppDynamics, we never encountered stability problems.

We only encountered scalability issues when switching agents over servers related to the license structure.

Customer Service:

The level of customer service is very good.

Technical Support:

Questions are answered within 24 hours. When there is an issue, real effort is made to help.

Previously, we used the hardware monitoring and logging tools of the hardware vendors. This meant several different views on our environment.

We used IBM tooling and Oracle monitoring tools. For Java applications, we used the monitoring tools of the JVM.

It was very easy to install and setup. If the environment is complex, AppDynamics will help to make the best suitable setup.

We made an in-house implementation and configuration with help of technical support.

Configuration in the IT environment is very important. It has to be done with the vendor, our development teams, our infra support teams and the business.

Right now, we are using it for monitoring our mobile and user interfaces. We monitor the application in terms of the business transactions. We monitor end-user responses and then we track how many calls we are making from the balancer, which is impossible to track with any other applications.

We have moved our application from on premise to Azure. After we moved to Azure, we don't have an on-premise monitoring tool, for what we are supposed to be using it. AppDynamics has come in handy. We are able to monitor all of the cloud services, we are able to monitor all the VMs on it, and we are able to monitor the Azure services, too.

There are many features we’d like to see in upcoming releases, which we have already mentioned to the accounts team. They're working on it; we expect to get some kind of releases from them.

We have been using it for the past two-and-a-half years. We migrated from the older version to the current version. We feel like it's better, it's improving. Initially, we had stability issues but now it's fine.

We are using the HA version of it and we find scalability to be good.

Technical support is pretty good. They're very at you; we get the response immediately.

We are no longer using the previous solution. We were using it for on premise. When we moved from on premise to Azure, we started using AppDynamics. We evaluated some other tools, but we found AppDynamics to be very good.

When we did the initial setup, for the Windows platform, it was straightforward, but the Linux version was a little complicated, but it's not that hard.

We evaluated Logility; some other tools, such as Log Analytics, as well; and then even some related to Splunk. We do use Splunk, as well, with AppDynamics; both are currently used.

As far as the most important criteria when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics, it's not my selection. The management finds out what AppDynamics can do and then looks at their business relationship with them. It's more like a business partner, as opposed to being just a customer that is using a product and not knowing what the product is going to come out with. In those terms, I think the AppDynamics team is very helpful to us and they have been like a part of our external organization.

We became 100% dependent on AppDynamics after we started using it. Apart from some performance issues, we haven’t found any major issues with AppDynamics. Some of the services are not available with Azure, such as IoT and so on, but other than that, 90% of our monitoring depends on AppDynamics.

We also use AppDynamics’ End User Monitoring and Mobile User Monitoring.

The most valuable feature of this product is figuring out problems before the customers find out.

This APM tool has helped our organization to find problems before customers find them.

We are able to see how our application scales under load. We are able to simulate that in the load environment and then prepare for the expected volume.

Specific to our environment here, we use .NET and they have more features for the Java platform. So I would like to see all the features that are currently in Java translated to .NET.

The stability of this product is very good. We have experienced no issues with downtime.

This product has scaled well.

Everything was carried out in a timely manner with technical support.

Our sales manager has constantly been in touch with us and given us the resources we need. Even when we do not follow up on certain issues, their engineers get us on the right track and they are really helpful.

We started off with a Microsoft product. We looked at a product called Microsoft Azure Application Insights.

Since our parent company has partnered with AppDynamics, they referred this product to us. Once we found about it, we installed and tested it and realized it performs all the features of the other competitive product we looked at; it may even have more features. Thus, the selection process was quite straightforward.

I was involved in the initial setup along with our team of engineers. It was mostly straightforward. We experienced some hurdles here and there in regards to the mission level monitoring agents. However, we were able to contact support and get that figured out; the mission agents are really straightforward.

In my opinion, training definitely helps if you are looking to choose a similar solution. You should start off with some initial training.

There are a lot of nuances and you have to know how to use this product in a manner where it is going to be most useful to you and this is where the training will help. After that, everything is straightforward.

The application interrogation and business transaction mapping are the most valuable features.

It allows us to quickly get to a mean time to repair by identifying the problem a lot faster.

I would like to see better dashboarding and an easier way to redefine transaction names.

Stability’s fine; it’s pretty stable.

It definitely is scalable over many different applications.

AppDynamics technical support is top notch.

We were not previously using any solution. We knew that we needed to find some way to do some application interrogation.

I'm not sure what my current company looked at before they brought it in.

At previous companies, I've looked at AppDynamics competitors including New Relic, Dynatrace and BMC APM.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics is functionality and ease of implementation.

Do your homework and make sure that AppDynamics is right for you. I'm pretty sure it would be.

It works really well. It does its job, as far as digging into the Java and finding out what the problems are when they occur in real time.

We are not using APM with other AppDynamics products.

AppDynamics is a complete tool for server and usability monitoring.

I've been working with AppDynamics for the past two years.

Once you get past installation, AppDynamics is highly stable and we get good results.

AppDynamics is scalable.

AppDynamics technical support is good.

AppDynamics is easy to use overall, but the installation part is a battle. Installation and configuration can be very tough. An average user without specialized knowledge can't do this. You need to have DevOps and QA teams handle it. During installation, a lot of customers get stuck trying to track the database or the API part, and they have to contact customer support.

AppDynamics is a bit costly for an APM tool. The cheapest is New Relic. 
AppDynamics and Dynatrace are about the same. 

I also use Dynatrace with some of my customers' companies. It's a much better product than AppDynamics in terms of features and ease of installation. 

I rate AppDynamics five out of 10. 

Java application instrumentation across a microservices architecture build.

When adopting / implementing a micro services application stack, you have to get all of the services to move / upgrade at the same time. This has led to a disjointed implementation of AppD. Disjointed implementations of tools do not lead to home run capabilities to build / run / operate.

Insights outside of the code we write. We find some of our adopted libraries perform sub-optimally. Sub-optimal performance leads to a search for alternate libraries to help us scale.

Transactions are not collected across the board. Your application needs to fail before AppD starts collecting deep metrics.

Three to five years.

Once all the metrics are collated during the analysis phase, the troubleshooting section is very important to me. It provides the entire overview of the performance bottlenecks at different layers of the application landscape.

It helps me to prioritize my activities in solving or fine-tuning the application. It helps me in my interactions with the development, infrastructure, and operations teams.

This solution helps us conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of critical performance issues. We can communicate clearly with detailed insights. This saves time and prevents ambiguities.

As a performance engineering architect and a practice evangelist for performance engineering practice, this has enabled our performance tester to provide more engineering value-based solutions/deep dives. These showed how the applications fared during the load conditions and linked the performance bottleneck to the exact line of code.

This practice has transitioned our testers to “engineers”. AppDynamics solutions complement performance testing.

I would like to see the following:

• A better way to export data to reports.
• A better way of distributing the AppDynamics reports with deep dive details.
• Better integration with load testing tools such as NeoLoad and JMeter. The current integration is very cumbersome.

I have been using APM tools since 2004. I have been implementing this solution across different industries for the past year and a half.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

Technical support is very good. We have a good team working with Wipro and AppDynamics.

The auto-discovery was good. It was a straightforward configuration of agents on web and app servers.

I truly appreciated the SaaS license mode that provides the AppDynamics controller on the cloud. There are bits and pieces of licenses that need to be procured in order to have a complete APM. This includes application, server health, browser-level monitoring, UEM, and DB monitoring.

When you add this all up, the price is not appealing. The procurement of AppDynamics licenses is a bit tricky. You need to be careful with it.

AppDynamics has come a long way in terms of user friendliness with day-to-day use. This solution has an edge over others in terms of adaptability between team members with different roles and responsibilities.

You should start off with application monitoring licenses which provide very user-friendly functionality. You need to spend more time to generate the reports with deeper insights.