Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

I am satisfied with the product. The most beneficial features are the ones that give us full visibility for the API integration. The real-time analytics is good. It enhances our operational decision-making. Before using the tool, we had issues between the network and application teams. The solution saves time and cost.

The infrastructure is not as good as other solutions. AppDynamics is designed for application performance. Some solutions also cover infrastructure and server performance. AppDynamics specializes only in application performance. The product is not easy to use.

I have been using the solution for eight months.

The technical support is amazing.

Positive

The tool is not easy to deploy. It needs some experience. It is not difficult, but it is not easy. The time taken for deployment depends on the applications and the size of the environment.

It takes one year to get a return on investment.

The product is a bit expensive compared to other tools.

AppDynamics has the needed features, but it is not as good as NETSCOUT.

I am a partner and reseller. I will recommend the tool to other businesses that manage complex applications. It aids a little bit in AI-driven initiatives. Overall, I rate the product an eight and a half out of ten.

The solution is used for observability, AIOps, monitoring microservices, SAP monitoring, and application performance monitoring.

AppDynamics is predominantly marketed and sold as an APM solution. Customers use it for both database and application monitoring. I have not seen a customer buying AppDynamics only for database monitoring. The product is good at database monitoring, availability and performance monitoring. I have always used it as a holistic product.

The product requires high maintenance. We need a dedicated resource to manage it because the solution manages a complex environment.

I’ve been using the solution as a system integrator for eight years.

The tool is stable, but our clients are not using its features to the fullest due to a lack of knowledge of APM. The customers are not very clear on what features an APM product offers. Customers have a limited understanding of APM and its use cases.

The tool’s scalability is good. Our customers are enterprise-level businesses such as large hospitals, manufacturers, and banks.

Technical support is good. Support must provide faster responses for production-related issues.

Positive

We have used ManageEngine before. AppDynamics is better than the other products we have used. The tool provides a pretty good user experience. The dashboards are very well-defined. Business-related data is very well projected on the dashboards. The technical team also gets good information on their dashboards.

AppDynamics monitors pretty much all the applications, though the applications are built on various technologies. ManageEngine has a limitation. It cannot monitor various technologies. The most important factor is security. Security is very well defined in AppDynamics, whereas ManageEngine's security is not up to the mark.

The initial setup is neither easy nor very difficult. It requires specific knowledge of the infrastructure. When installing the product, we must be aware of how it will be configured at the database, application, and infrastructure levels. Earlier, the tool was deployed on-premises. Nowadays, customers are willing to deploy it on the cloud.

Typically, to install the product, we take help from infrastructure experts. We need to be aware of the infrastructure before installing the product. The deployment takes seven to ten days. We need one architect and two engineers to deploy the product. The number of resources required to maintain the solution depends on the environment. We need two resources for medium-sized environments, but we may need four to five resources for larger environments.

One of the main downsides to the solution is its cost. We pay a yearly licensing fee for the product. AppDynamics and Dynatrace have almost the same pricing. Compared to ManageEngine, AppDynamics is relatively higher in cost. For cloud-based solutions, users only pay for licenses if they opt for a subscription. However, for on-premises solutions, they must buy support separately.

The application layer in AppDynamics performs fairly well. However, network monitoring is not at an advanced level. It is mediocre.

People wanting to use the solution must not use it only for database monitoring. It should be used for end-to-end application performance monitoring. If someone has requirements involving applications, observability, and AIOps, they must consider the product. If they need only database monitoring, several other tools are available in the market that are lower in cost and offer a lot of capabilities.

When it comes to end-to-end monitoring, network monitoring also plays a crucial role. It is an area of improvement for AppDynamics. Network monitoring could be better. AppDynamics has acquired a product called ThousandEyes. How well the product grows in the network monitoring space is yet to be seen.

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

We use AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring to monitor the performance of applications. We use the solution to see the errors, snapshots, and exceptions in the backend and front end of our applications. We also use AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring for frontend monitoring, end-user monitoring, checking the response time, and other frontend metrics. We also use the dashboard in AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring and also use the solution for sending error or issue alerts to our clients.

The best feature of AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is that it lets you find errors in synthetic jobs ahead of the users. The solution shows you all front-end metrics. You can also see JavaScript errors and jQuery errors through AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring. You can also do a correlation between the front end and the backend, or from the user to the navigator, to the backend through the solution.

What could be improved in AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is for the synthetic jobs or synthetic agents, in particular, you can't do a lot of tests with just one agent. You have to install a lot of agents if you want to do more tests, so this is an area for improvement in the solution.

Another area for improvement in AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is that you're only able to see basic metrics in the absence of server or database visibility.

For the SaaS version of AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring, my team just downloaded then installed the extension in an application in Azure to see the application on the controller, so if this can be done in the on-premise version of the solution as well, without needing to install the agent on the machine, then it would make AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring better. Currently, the .NET agent consumes the CPU or memory and clients usually raise this issue with my team, so it would be good if the on-premises version doesn't require agent installation on the machine.

Another functionality I'd like to see in the next release of AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is for it to receive updates from the file config without needing to reset IIS because right now when you do a modification in IIS, you have to restart IIS. When you add a service to the agent config, you have to restart IIS. For the product server, it's not possible to reset IIS after you make changes to the config file, so if this could be improved, then it would make AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring a better solution.

I have about two years of experience with AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring.

AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is a stable solution.

AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring has good scalability.

Support for AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is always available. My team does a lot of Webex with support. Whenever you have a problem with the solution, you can always contact support.

As a developer, I have no idea about the pricing for AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring. Another team is in charge of the licensing for the solution.

Currently, AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is deployed on-premises, but my team is also testing its SaaS version.

My advice to anyone considering AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is that it's a very important product because you can use it to troubleshoot and detect errors in your applications.

I'm rating AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring as ten out of ten.

We use this product for the public sector and for really big data centers and infrastructure.

We implemented it for a big bank in Morocco and it monitors all the web interface interfaces. It also monitors solutions like Salesforce, SAP, these kinds of solutions, and it describes the problem really from the root.

You can use one module for each server, for each application, and for each API.

It can monitor the income and the outcome. For example, when you have a website that has online payments, if there are bugs in the online payment for the provider, it will check it, see the problem, and send you an alert.

If the development team makes a mistake with this tool, it points really the mistake and sends it to the manager and it provides also a solution too, as it monitors the code. It provides solutions to make the code more effective.

The initial setup is simple. 

With the solution you can put add-ons on it and it's very customizable. You can customize it easily. If you want something that the tool doesn't have, you can add it easily.

It is stable.

The solution can scale. 

Compared to Dynatrace, which is the biggest competitor to AppDynamics, Dynatrace is a one-agent tool. You don't have to put an agent in every single server or app. However, the monitoring is less effective in Dynatrace. If AppDynamics could do a one-agent function with their actual monitoring effectiveness, it will be the greatest tool.

I've been dealing with the solution for two years now. 

The solution is stable. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product is scalable. 30% of our team uses the solution. They are IT experts and they are DevOps. You have to know how to code and you have to know how to deal with infrastructure servers, et cetera, and you have to know how to put KPIs and everything that the client needs into place.

I'm not sure if clients have any plans to increase usage at this time. 

Technical support is very, very good. 

I'm also familiar with Dynatrace.

The implementation is straightforward. There may be a bit of complexity here and there. You just have to buy the license with the number of agents that you want to install. It's more complex than the Dynatrace setup. It's complex in terms of the fact that you have to know the tool and you have to know how to code. If you want to customize it, you have to know development also, those parts can be very complex, or more complex than Dynatrace, for example.

The deployment takes from one to six months. 

The implementation strategy is, first, we take notice of the entire IT infrastructure, the entire digital environment. When the audit is complete, then we proceed to the tool installation.

We have ten people that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. 

Most of the implementation was handled in-house. We have a delivery center in Tunisia that can handle the setup. We provide assistance to our clients. 

Clients have seen an ROI. For example, we had a client who had to troubleshoot a website and its banking application, and it was buggy all the time. It was not working. I was a client of this bank. Since we implemented this solution, it's been one of the best banking apps in Morocco.

They had great ROI in terms of client satisfaction. For the user, the banking administration processes are easier. You do everything on the app, which now works well.

The return on investment is huge.

The licensing is paid yearly. It depends on the size of the environment, and the number of apps or IT infrastructure that is monitored. It can cost from $30,000 to $500,000. Larger companies, like, for example, Facebook or Amazon, would likely one million dollars. It really depends on the size of the company.

There are some add-ons to put back robots that make tests on the website on something, to see if there is some risk, bugs, or whatever could damage the website.

We didn't evaluate other options.

We're resellers. 

We deal with various versions of the product. The on-premises deployment we had we stopped using a few months ago. Now, we only deal with SaaS deployments. 

In this digital era, this tool is not nice to have, it's a must have. If a company works 100% on digital and they have websites to make SaaS solutions, everything which is on internet can be hacked, can have bugs, et cetera. This tool is really the tool that you must have to prevent this type of risk.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use this solution to help reduce incidents in our production environment by providing usage and performance metrics, application dependencies like databases, .net services, caching, and much more.

This solution has helped us to reduce the number of incidents in our Production environment and improve the performance of applications.

The uptime of our critical applications went up, and it has enabled us to set new SLA metrics.

This solution makes it fast and easy to diagnose performance issues and exceptions/errors in application coding.

After a major incident, root cause analysis is conducted and, most of the time, we understand what caused the incident and how it can be prevented from happening again.

The Web Dashboards are also very useful and sometimes can really prevent incidents before they happen.

Upgrading application and machine agents on a large scale is a nightmare; we cannot push upgrades through the platform, meaning, manual upgrades each time a new major release is out. Each time we have a new major release, we need to do a Rollout.

The Mobile AppDynamics app is a "Thing of the Past". AppDynamics should evolve the features presented by it; redesign it. Dashboards are impossible to read, and drilling down issues through it is impossible.

The worst part is that the AppDynamics SaaS Environment has a lot of downtimes, and AppDynamics, despite our efforts, does not give us any feedback on these downtimes/incidents.

Update: 04/2021 (4 years using AppD)

We still face outages in out SaaS controller... The feedback we get about each outage is really limited, and especially without sharing any improvement plan.

We have been using this solution for more than two years.

04/2021 Update (four years using AppD)

Poor stability of the SaaS environment.

Scaling this solution is fast and user-friendly.

Support for agent problems is accurate and fast.

Support for SaaS solution stability is very poor.

Setup was fast and straightforward.

We used a vendor partner team for our deployment, and we found them to be very skilled.

We have seen ROI in less than twelve months.

We are using the solution to improve the performance of our application transactions.

This solution is easy to use and very powerful, it is a complete tool for us.

There could be some improvement in the constructions of the diagrams, it is too difficult currently.

I have been using the solution for four months.

We have used in the past Wily and Dyatrace. We switched to this solution because of economics and we have found there is more information available to help us improve.

The installation was simple.

We used a partner to help us do the implementation of the solution. The full deployment was approximately one week and we use a three-person technical team for maintenance.

There is a license for the solution and we paid approximately $2,000. There is also an additional cost above the standard license which cost us approximately $3,000.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

We implemented AppDynamics to have a clear, real-time monitoring solution for our critical business systems. 

We have two tenants; one for production and the other for our quality control environment. We are using more than fifty probes, including application and database probes.

Our company is worldwide, across geography. We are using the public cloud deployment model.

We have gained a lot from this solution because it helps us to check what is there in terms of exceptions, and so on. We were able to correct problems, which led to an increase in availability, time savings, and performance for our solutions.

We are having a problem where one of our tenants has had issues with availability over the past two months. There is a lot of downtime for the SaaS tenant. Based on the user experience feedback that we have had, I think that the most important thing to improve is the availability of the SaaS, the cloud environment.

The mobile application needs to be improved.

We are evaluating a solution from SAP, and we are interested in is seeing the integration or the interface, and what we can get out of these new probes. We had a conference call with AppDynamics and challenged them to resolve the SAP solution monitoring so that it works side-by-side with our critical applications.

We are having availability issues with the SaaS.

In terms of scalability, this solution is good and has worked for us. With our licensing model, each time we have a need or requirement, we have our probes available for new solutions in less than forty-eight hours.

Technical support for this solution is mixed. We are using a local outsourcing company in Portugal as our contact for AppDynamics. They keep in touch with us every week, so we don't have any problem.

The problem has to do with reaching out to our account manager. Sometimes, we simply receive no response from them. For instance, we have sent them emails related to the cloud environment stability issues two weeks ago, and we still have not received a response from AppDynamics. This is a little bit of a struggle for us.

We are working with an outsourcing company, and have used products from Micro Focus.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

In terms of pricing, I feel that when you compare the benefits that we get to the price that we paid, it is reasonable.

We did a proof of concept with the AppDynamics and also with the Dynatrace. The feedback that we received from our users, and from the IT department, was that the AppDynamics interface was more user-friendly than that of Dynatrace.

We collect user experience feedback from many countries, all over the world.

We have already recommended this product to some of our partners, and they have implemented it based on our advice.

This is a good product, but we still have issues with the cloud and stability.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten, due to stability issues and no feedback from EMEA AppDynamics.

I use AppDynamics when there's a performance issue with an application, but if it's a network-related performance issue, I use Accedian Skylight.

What I like best about AppDynamics is that it's functional, particularly in APM in Java and .NET.

What needs improvement in AppDynamics is installation. The installation process needs to be more straightforward. Deploying the product is also tricky, so this is an area for improvement.

Pricing is another area for improvement in AppDynamics because its current pricing model is no longer suited to containers and technologies.

The product used to be the best in the market ten years ago, but it now needs to regain its position as the leading product in its niche.

I've been using AppDynamics for ten years. I started my job ten years ago and remained in this area.

In terms of stability, AppDynamics is a four out of ten.

Scalability is the product's performance when you scale, and because the company is a SaaS company, it's not a very big deal. However, AppDynamics uses a MySQL database behind the engine, which is not the best for keeping metrics.

The solution could be more scalable and dynamic in terms of installation and configuration. Scalability-wise, AppDynamics is a four out of ten.

The support for AppDynamics used to be very good, and now it could be better. The support team could be more knowledgeable.

The technical support for AppDynamics is a four out of ten for me.

Neutral

I'm using AppDynamics, Datadog, and Dynatrace simultaneously.

Setting up and configuring AppDynamics is challenging because you need to give specific names to every container and server you deploy. Each name has to be unique, so it isn't easy to think of names in terms of dynamic environments. This means that when you move to microservices, AppDynamics has a very complex setup.

I'd rate the setup for the product as two out of ten.

The pricing model for AppDynamics isn't good. You have to subscribe to a yearly or a three-year licensing, which isn't very handy.

You buy a license for five hundred containers for a very large application, and you only need the containers for a limited time in that domain. For example, you only need five hundred containers once in that specific year, but you must buy five hundred licenses.

The current AppDynamics pricing model isn't fair. It's one out of ten pricing-wise. The solution is one of the most expensive in the market today.

I've switched to solutions such as Dynatrace, Datadog, and AppDynamics.

My rating for AppDynamics is four out of ten because it has a lot of room for improvement.