Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

The solution effectively detects anomalies in the system.

The solution's most valuable features are its end-user monitoring and AI functionalities.

The solution's pricing could be improved and made more competitive.

I have been using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for four years.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

The solution is more suitable for enterprise businesses. Around 2,000 users use the solution in our organization.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The solution provides good and helpful technical support.

Positive

The solution's initial setup depends on the environment. Our deployment was challenging and took a while because our environment is a bit complex.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is an expensive solution. The solution costs 5,000 per user.

Dynatrace is the solution's main competitor. We chose AppDynamics Server Monitoring because of its flexibility and ease of deployment.

The solution was deployed on the cloud for our organization. We use the solution's alerting system for server management, and it works fine. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

System monitoring and real user monitoring were the two domains in which the product was used in my company.

AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring was a tool directly used by my company's client. I have no answer if you ask me why my company's client decided to use the tool. My company's client used the tool to monitor servers in their entire business process, including some servers, databases, clusters, mobile users, and for different services.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its GUI. With the product's GUI, one doesn't have to check for details since one can see the entire business flow in one go. At a glance, you can understand where your business flow breaks since the tool's entire GUI is pretty good. Apart from that, the auto-remediation in the tool helps if the CPU or server is getting exhausted by indicating the files that should be deleted. Auto-remediation and GUI are two good features of the product.

Though I haven't explored AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring a lot, considering the way the setup of the product, I did not understand certain concepts. The way the agentless monitoring and agent monitoring get used is to be decided by the user, but there is no clarification on the setup phase or on how and why to use the aforementioned options. When it comes to complex environments, the best thing you would like is that the setup should be fairly easy. The product's setup phase is a bit tricky and needs improvement, especially depending on the server environment since the product has a specific file format and a specific configuration form.

I have been using AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring for six months. I am just an end-user of the solution.

It is a stable solution.

Adding users directly to the solution was okay, and I did not face any issues with it.

For one of my projects, less than 150 employees in the company were using AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring.

The solution's technical support was good. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten. I assume the solution's technical support was expensive. In my company, we were recommended not to reach out to support teams in a very quick or frequent manner.

Positive

The product's setup phase is a bit tricky.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

I believe there was probably an extra charge whenever I wanted to contact the support team.

I would say that if you have a good budget and want a good and interactive tool where you don't have to do a lot of integrations, then you can go ahead with AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring. If you are tight on budget, considering before buying it is important since the number of users who can use it depends on the licenses. It takes quite a lot to exchange the license and all regarding the tool.

I like the product's GUI since you don't have to put in much effort to see where exactly my process is broken, and you can easily see how many users are using it in real time. The product allows you to check the way it works. Providing alerts to users is really fast in the product, and you have multiple options to receive alerts, like email, mobile messages, or automated voice calls. I can't give the product a ten out of ten rating because if you are stuck somewhere, then getting support to assist you with configuration or with other situations can be a little tricky.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

AppDynamics is primarily used in our enterprise system management for application monitoring. We extensively use it to monitor end-user experience, including mobile applications. We want to ensure that our users have a seamless experience on our website and mobile app. We use AppDynamics to monitor all applications end to end, and it has been a valuable tool in our environment for identifying and resolving issues quickly.

The best features of AppDynamics would be the code application monitoring capabilities. There are no limitations to any specific application, and their support extends to all levels, including mainframe and custom applications. AppDynamics can also be used as a SaaS model, which is a key advantage.

One area for improvement is the MST model. It would be more helpful if it could be offered as a managed service provider model with more multi-tenancy and features.

The focus is still limited to application monitoring. However, in the next release, I want to see if it could be integrated with any other infrastructure monitoring tool or provide better deliverables in terms of absorbency layers; that would be a great option. I'm not sure how AppDynamics delivers that, and it's an approval delay. That use case will integrate with any monitoring tool to provide the absorbent layer; that is the better option, which I look forward to.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

I would rate stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate scalability an eight out of ten.

We used Dynatrace, which is also a performance monitoring solution. Dynatrace is similar to AppDynamics in terms of its capabilities. But Dynatrace is an expensive affair as compared to AppDynamics.

The initial setup is not complex. I would rate it a nine out of ten. The deployment depends on the use case. For example, taking one application will take hardly a week to cover the end to end.

The pricing of AppDynamics is a nine, with one being low and ten being high. It is high.

I would recommend using AppDynamics integrated with an infrastructure monitoring tool, and it will provide a better benefit.

Overall, I would rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten. From an overall product standpoint, AppDynamics has better sustainability in the market with continued support. They also have a roadmap for upcoming releases that aligns with all the monthly activities.

We analyze data for performance and availability, which is produced by servers, infrastructure and cloud. However, it's not sufficient to only use Dynatrace because it makes a lot of data. This data is interpreted by AppDynamics automatically with technical data to understand the business impact, thus improving productivity. In Europe, enterprises widely use SAP, and AppDynamics effectively supports this by monitoring the core IT environment and the services around SAP, like CRM, Salesforce, and logistics systems.

The alert mechanism in AppDynamics enhances server management tasks by using agents installed on each server. These agents capture numerous metrics, collaborate to describe specific transactions, and allow us to monitor each transaction based on user interactions. We can see where any transaction might falter in the SAP server, application server, or presentation database, helping us identify the exact point of failure or degradation in transaction time, extract anomaly detection, or pinpoint real failures in SAP or other applications. This mechanism is very similar to Dynatrace, but AppDynamics is currently the best option for SAP.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring lacks investment in new technologies like Kubernetes and cloud solutions. Dynatrace has received significant investment in these areas and is better suited for cloud-native applications. However, AppDynamics still holds value for traditional applications used in banks or larger companies.

I've worked with AppDynamics Server Monitoring for five to six years. My experience in monitoring systems started around 2020-2022, focusing on serviceability for SAP ERP environments.

Regarding stability, I would also rate it at nine out of ten as it is highly stable.

I'd rate the scalability of AppDynamics Server Monitoring at nine out of ten, indicating it's highly scalable.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is deployed based on the organization's needs. For instance, installing it on a single server is better for a few clients for on-premises deployment. On the other hand, different solutions are available for cloud monitoring applications. The trend is shifting towards new paradigms like DevOps. AppDynamics adheres to these standards and can be used for both on-premises and cloud environments, depending on the specific requirements and business model of the organization. Maintenance requires a dedicated team, which can be extensive, especially in large organizations like banks.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup of AppDynamics as seven out of ten.

The return on investment with AppDynamics Server Monitoring has been significant in certain areas, especially for SAP environments. However, there hasn't been as much focus on the broader market due to their emphasis on cloud messaging applications. It ultimately depends on the customer's specific needs and how well the solution aligns with them.

The pricing for AppDynamics is expensive, but it is possible to negotiate special pricing through bids.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is integrated into the infrastructure through agents installed on the servers, and it utilizes REST APIs for process control and integration with other solutions. In terms of AI usage, AppDynamics uses AI for anomaly detection and resource forecasting.

AppDynamics Server Monitoring is recommended, especially for SAP environments or cloud-native applications. However, the recommendation depends on the specific needs of the organization.

Overall, I would rate AppDynamics Server Monitoring as seven out of ten.

We use the product to monitor some of our critical systems. We started using the solution for application performance monitoring.

The product has the ability to drill down to the errors whenever we have issues.

The solution has performance issues after we deploy the agent.

I have been using the solution for about three years.

The product is stable.

The initial setup was easy.

The tool is expensive.

I recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

We were using an ID integration, and we were monitoring and using the EPM, et cetera. AppDynamics is able to provide us with in-depth insight into the bottlenecks in the system.

It allows us to understand what is causing latency in the system. Using AppDynamics, we can drill down to the code on which the bottleneck is seen, and the developers can fix the issues, increasing the overall application's performance.

The tag and follow aspects are very good. Basically, how the transaction is moving through various servers. We can see everything via a dashboard, a visual dashboard, that can showcase transactions.

It's pretty stable.

We can scale the solution as needed. 

We'd like to see features that could support IBM's Integration Bus. AppDynamics is unable to provide the details for all the flows in the system transaction flow. That component needs work.

The initial setup is a bit complex.

It was quite expensive.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

We only really run into issues during the upgrade process. Other than that, it is stable and reliable. the performance is good, and there are no bugs or glitches. 

It's a scalable product. If a company wants to expand, it can do so. 

We have between 150 and 200 users right now. We do not have plans to increase usage. 

Technical support has been helpful in general. 

Positive

We were using DynaRisk. However, it did not meet the needs of our use cases. 

We found the initial setup to be a bit difficult. It's not perfectly straightforward. 

There are two or three people on hand that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks.

We handled the setup ourselves in-house. We did not need any outside assistance.

We have not really noted any ROI.

It's a very expensive product. Each of the licenses after this month for one server is around $9,000 or $10,000. Therefore, monitoring one server concerning analytics or server monitoring is pretty expensive.

Before beginning, a new user should take time to understand the product. They need to analyze a few options and see which best fits their use case and go with that. There are many on the market to look at, including DynaRisk and DataDog.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

The most valuable feature is the one that enables you to have visibility into the end-users journey.

I also like the session monitoring feature. 

After 4.4 to 4.5, there were huge improvements in the interface.

AppD is really cool and a unified solution for both APM and APM centric Analytics side. We can show almost all business data within the APM context from the end-user perspetive. But this process is a little bit manual. If they catch and map business journeys based on customer interaction on the browser automatically, it should be really fine.

I have been using it for five years. 

It's very stable. I have used AppyDyanics for around five years and I installed it for around 100 customers and I never had any issues. It's very stable. 

One of the biggest finance companies in Turkey has around 4.5 million end-users. There are around 100,000 users who use their mobile application and there's no negative effect on the controller and customer app side. 

I have contacted technical support, level three. We also contacted their development team.

The main difference between this solution and Dynatrace is that Dynatrace uses web server agents. AppDyanmics we don't need to install any agents to collect browser metrics.

Some customers would say that it's hard to deploy the AppyDynamics site but AppDynamics is more flexible and configurable. Most of customer browser apps can crash or facing issue with Automatic injection method which is provided by DT web server agents 

We work with around 20 different banks. We deploy the browser solution with manual injection but for some well-known products, we use an automatic injection. We use three different methodologies for the deployment injection because we have big customers.

The initial setup is very easy, not complex. 

We currently only count the pages. We measured around 10 million pages in a year which is equal to one agent, one license. But nowadays a single page application is very popular. So AppDynamics has some kind of iframe where we counted 50 million pages which we can say equals one agent, one license.

It could be a disadvantage between this and Dynatrace because it has session-based counting. It gives the customers an advantage.

You should focus on the simplicity. Products should be simple and flexible. AppDyanamics is flexible to configure a user's monitoring site. If you want it to be plug and play, then you should go with Dynatrace or New Relic but if you want a flexible solution with good configuration options with "Business IQ" then go with AppDynamics. You can measure the business data at the beginning of the end-user transaction.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. No solution is perfect. It has room for improvement. Every product needs to improve 

It helps us find the root cause quicker, so it's helped us with MTTI and MTTR. In fact, just last week, we had an issue. They used our other tools to try to find the solution, and they said, “This is the root cause.” Then, we were analyzing it in AppDynamics, and we said, “You know what? We're seeing something different.” They doubled back and realized that what AppDynamics had shown was actually the root cause, not what they were initially thinking was the root cause.

AppDynamics is very easy to use, and easy to deploy in our environment, especially because we're a central organization that helps other application teams with their APM solution. For me, that flow map makes all the difference for the customers. You show them the flow map. You tell them, “OK, green is good, yellow is a problem, and red is warning. Where do you see your problem?” They're like, “Right there.” That makes life a lot easier, compared to all the other tools that I've used in the past.

That visual representation’s been really good, also the overhead that AppDynamics creates is quite small. We've tried Dynatrace in the past. Some of the applications didn't work as well with Dynatrace. Those are two of the things that makes AppDynamics different.

Get me Blitz; basically, their next generation architecture, which they're actually running in their SaaS environment. Instead of having just one, big controller with a gigantic database behind it, they're moving towards a more distributed storage, which would be horizontally scalable. We've been looking for it for almost a year now.

I would be willing to pilot it in my non-prod environment, just to see how it works, because ultimately that's going to give us the same visibility that we're getting right now, but we can just keep scaling; just keep pumping more and more applications. As the controller gets bogged down, we just add more hardware. That's going to be key for us.

We've had some growing pains with AppDynamics but overall, the products been very stable. Their support’s awesome, so whenever we have issues, we open a support ticket. They jump on and they come up with a solution to help us. Even with the few minor hiccups that we've had, I would say overall, it’s very stable.

Scalability is excellent. In the last year, we've gone from a few hundred metrics to close to 10,000 metrics per minute injestion.

I haven't seen any other vendor even come close to AppDynamics’ support. I've been raving about them. I have told the guy that runs their support organization, how great he's doing the job.

The thing that sets them apart is, if I have an issue, I open a ticket with them. Within 2-4 hours, I have the solution. I don't get an email saying, "We're looking into it.", and then not hear from them for two days or for a week, which I've had with other APM providers.

With AppDynamics, they're on it. If they can't find a solution, they're going to get on a GoToMeeting to duplicate the problem. They'll get their engineers involved. We've had multiple times when they got the developers involved on the GoToMeeting because the support guy couldn't get beyond that. He just got the developer for that product involved to come up with a solution.

It’s a funny story. The PoV was done before I joined the company. I was a Dynatrace user, Intrascope, New Relic. I've done pretty much all the major APM providers in my career. At my previous job, I was using Dynatrace and my entire interview was, “Why are you guys using AppDynamics instead of Dynatrace?” I'd done a PoC of AppDynamics about five years ago. At that time, the product was in its infancy and it didn't really provide what we were looking for. There were a lot of issues; they were at version 2 or something like that at that time. When I joined the company, it had already been decided that AppDynamics was what we were going to use, so I didn't have a say in that.

Very quickly, my impression of the product changed. As I used it, I was like, "Whoa!" Between version whatever that I PoV'd with in the past compared to version 4, there was a night-and-day difference. Very quickly, I became a proponent of AppDynamics.

Our setup was quite complex. Our leadership decided that we were going to use one controller for everything, and we've got thousands of applications. Now, they're reaching the point where they’re realizing that it's not feasible to have just one controller for our huge infrastructure.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, until we started pushing some really heavy applications, and then we started seeing problems. We got involved with some of their tuning experts. They're basically getting every ounce of power out of the machine that they can. It's been an excellent journey.

Dynatrace was on the short list. My predecessor did a comparison between the two tools. One of the issues that we saw with Dynatrace was scalability. Dynatrace itself pushes so much information. It's capturing every single transaction, compared to AppDynamics, which captures a subset of the transactions. For Dynatrace, you just need massive hardware and you have to have multiple servers because you run out of space very quickly. That was one of the issues with Dynatrace.

The other issue was it didn't play nicely with some of our applications. We actually saw problems with one of our critical business applications that we were doing a PoV with. When we put AppDynamics on that same application, we didn't see any issues. Dynatrace was creating quite a large memory overhead; AppDynamics, under 1%.

When I'm looking for a vendor, before, the most important criteria used to be, what does the tool provide, but after working with AppDynamics, it's support. It doesn't matter how great the tool is; if the support isn't that good, you can't get the most out of the tool.

Do a PoV of AppDynamics on a critical application. Get that initial win, and use that win to drive adoption throughout the organization.

I haven’t rated it higher because of the comparison between AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Dynatrace does give you more, richer information, but it's not scalable. There are certain things that I kind of miss with AppDynamics but it's not something that I'm going to cry about because of the other overall value that it provides, and the ease of use of it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we're also using RUM and Mobile UM.