AppDynamics Reviews

• End-to-end business transaction breakdown: clear picture of where the application is taking time
• Easy user interface to work on

In a critical project where, along with the monitoring solution, RUM is also deployed, it gives you complete clarity why my business transaction failed and what is technically causing that to occur. Instead of wasting time mugging up in logs, fighting with server logs, and manually capturing CPU resource statistics, AppDynamics does it a lot easier without a lot of installation effort, in a single dashboard. On top of that, if you also have RUM, life gets easy from the end-user perspective too.

This product still has to evolve with the latest technologies for which support is available. A lot of new technologies are being developed, such as Node.js, Docker, Play framework, Redis/Couchbase. Instead of just exposing the count number, average response time, and errors/sec, AppDynamics should dig deep into the request response of the transaction and offer a deep-sensing option like Dynatrace Ruxit.

Also, in my opinion, sometimes the values that appear in AppDynamics are skewed.

I have been using it for four years.

Nowadays, CI is very much in demand and because of that, Docker compatibility is increasing. However, to install AppDynamics on Docker is still a challenge. I have done it, but only after lot of consultation with AppDynamics support. Also, if the txn DB size increases, AppDynamics gets a bit tired and performance slows down.

Technical support is 7/10. There is still a lot to improve. If you contact them regarding a specific technology, then that person becomes the only person aware of the issue, which should not be the case.

We previously used Dynatrace. The AppDynamics interface was intuitive and more easy to understand. Also, deployment is easy.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Well, if it is a simple application, go with your in-house team for implementation. On the other hand, if there is a complex e-commerce app and you want to exploit every functionality of AppDynamics and integrate all of the interfaces, then go for external consultant implementation.

I cannot discuss ROI in terms of money, but, yes, RCA became easy, which ultimately saves time/cost/efforts and which becomes large with time-critical applications.

Have a look on all three solutions: AppDynamics, Dynatrace and New Relic.

The benefits are less man hours, less downtime, and faster resolutions. In the past, it was, "Oh no. The application isn't working. Let's fix it." It might get fixed within 24 hours because we did not have any idea what the issue was. It always came down to, “Well, reboot the servers. That usually works.” It worked, but we never knew what the root cause was.

Once we got AppDynamics, we could see that this part of the application is where the issue is. When they're trying to process these certain files, something's wrong in this sector. We may still have to reboot the servers to get the customers up and running immediately, but then we can circle back around that day and address the actual issue.

The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application: Are all of our transactions going smoothly? Are we having a bottleneck somewhere? Identifying problems before they impact the users. The live reporting and dashboard(s) allow us, at a quick glance, to see the overall health of our nationwide (US) application. We can see the health of our individual office locations (cities) and the individual users (PCs). At any given time we can tell which specific city and\or user is experiencing poor application performance. It even helps us determine if the issue is application, network, or user specific. Before we had AppDynamics APM, we were reactive. We’d wait for a phone call or email to tell us there was a problem and then go looking for it, find it, and resolve it. Now, after installing AppDynamics APM, we’re proactive. We can see the problems developing in real time. We can identify a problem and be half way to resolving it before we’ve even received a phone call or email. We’ve even discovered and resolved problems without the end users or management even realizing there was a problem.

A year earlier, if someone had asked me about room for improvement, I would've said end-user monitoring, which they have now. Analytics was great. I didn't even think that we would need that.

I think I would like to see a better way to deploy and upgrade the machine agents that we use. Currently, we have to use SCCM, and that might just be our environment with the customer. Personally, I am not the best with Linux commands; I'm learning. I'm a GUI person. Give me a button to click on with a mouse pointer, and that's just me.

I personally don't have anything I think they need to add. They're the great minds. They're the leaders of technology, so they'll think of what I need before I do.

I’ve never had a stability problem with it. It's always working; it's always operational. I’ve never had a glitch; never had the server just stop working. It's spot on.

I can't address scalability because we haven't been able to scale yet. As I’ve mentioned, the way the customer works, it's just one little group that wanted it, and everybody wants it now. Again, we have to go through the process of approval and funding. We haven't been able to touch on the scalability yet.

We have it on 400 servers and machines.

We use technical support all the time. They were great when we finally acquired it. They came in and they helped set it up in our environment; made sure everything was discovered, reporting was working; explained the transactions, reports, the dashboard, all of that to us. We had some more questions at the 2015 AppSphere, and it is great because you can see the guys. We got in touch with someone else and they helped us with licensing issues. There was a couple of extensions we were trying to get working that we couldn't. They got all that squared away.

Recently, we had some consultant hours we needed to use. One of their guys spent three days with us on WebEx, fully customizing even more on the dashboards and the reporting center; and explained baselines to us better.
Technical support is excellent.

We did previously did not use an APM at all. It was just, applications would stop working; there would be bottlenecks; they'd be real slow; and complaints. You'd have the network guys saying, "No, everything's good on our end." You’d have the middle-tier guys saying, "Nope, my servers are online and running." You have the devs for the application saying, "No, no, no, no, it's not my code." It was just, point the finger, pass the buck.

With AppDynamics, we're able to say, "No, it is the network. Something's going on in this city.”, or “No, it is the middle-tier servers because of this." We can tell where the issue is and what the issue is.

I do know that they tested with CA. There was a third one because with our customer, we have to have three competitors. We have to have three products and say, "This is why we're picking AppDynamics. This is why these two will not fit the bill." I don't remember who the third person was.

I think they ended up going with AppDynamics because of the personality of the marketing reps and the engineers that we talked to. It was pricing. It was the capabilities of AppDynamics versus CA and the third company. AppDynamics just brought more to the table.

Personality is quite big when selecting a vendor like AppDynamics. If you come in, and you're snotty, and high and mighty, you go down the list. That's just what it is; that's business.

Pricing: We don't want the cheapest; we don't want the most expensive; we want somewhere in the middle, like when you're buying a TV; you don't want something that's going to break in six months.

The historic background of the company: If you've only been around for six months, it's a bit of a gamble. If you've been around for six years, you're not going to have IBM, HPE, or Xerox buy you. We've had problems with that before. You are your company; you're not going anywhere. In five years, you'll still be there to support us.

Ongoing support: Can we give you a call on a Tuesday at 3:00 PM and get an answer? Or, do we have to submit a ticket, wait a week, maybe get a phone call back and then get a guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about, doesn't want to be at work that day?

It's the overall package.

Give them a call. Check out the field. I know that AppDynamics was more than willing to give us temporary licenses; come in and help us set it up in a dev environment; and show us how it works in our environment, not just the canned demo: “Here's the little website we made and this is how it works.” Of course, it works perfectly because we've made it work perfectly.

They will do a demo in your environment, on your servers, so you can see, “Yes, this is our data. This is what we will see. This is how it will help us.”

The only reason I did not give it a perfect rating is because I don't think anything is 100% perfect. Nothing is the best ever. There's always room for improvement. There's always room to grow. This is the highest I can give because I don't believe in giving that perfect rating.

We’re not yet using any other AppDynamics products. Due to our customer, we can't just buy the newest and greatest, and implement it. There is a long process for testing, approval, and funding; and then more testing and implementation. We're usually about a year and a half behind the latest and greatest.

The most valuable feature is the ease of just putting it in right out of the box and its being able to traverse our environment and bring those problem areas to light. That's basically it.

One of the applications that we use was having some very bad slowdowns. We were able to throw AppDynamics in there. We were able to identify the root cause within probably 45 minutes, which took our process time from 33 days down to 18 days. Then, eventually, a few more efficiencies were actually found a few hours later, which brought it down to three days. It was pretty awesome.

Because we didn't have anything before, this is like the Taj Mahal, compared to what we didn’t have.

The only thing is that maybe it collects too much right away. There's a lot of noise. You need to have those people that know the application very well in order to tune it down. Maybe that would be an area with room for improvement.

Beyond that, I don't know yet. Give me some more time in it and let me figure it out a little more but I can't think of anything else.

Stability is excellent; no worries at all with that.

Scalability is excellent; no worries at all.

We haven’t used technical support because we are still in the PoV. Our sales guy is beside us. He's been awesome with everything.

We weren't using something like this before. We were using an NPM, network performance monitoring, tool called Truview. It wasn't giving us our application insight. It did everything for the network but not the application itself. We've had a lot of slowdowns on our website and things like that. Through our homegrown tools, we couldn’t figure out what those slowdowns were until we threw AppDynamics in and those kind of started floating to the top.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It was basically just downloading an agent, recycling, and you're up and running. That was how easy it was.

New Relic as well as CA were also on the shortlist at the time. New Relic couldn't actually give me the breadth of what we wanted, as AppDynamics could. CA was kind of very intrusive to our network and we wanted something that didn't have a whole lot of resource dependencies out there.

My rating is because of the top three that we looked at. I also had our developers look into it, as well as our release management and our systems engineers. All of us came together and we were able to put the pros and cons together on what AppDynamics gave us or didn't give us over the other ones. AppDynamics just came in head over heels above everybody else. Unfortunately for the others, it was just the writing on the paper, as well as the proof in the trial period and what we saw in our environment.

Be patient. They do things very procedurally. Usually, I'm used to downloading an application and trying it on my own. If I would have done that on my own, I probably would have thought, I can't do this; there's too much there. But, they kept coming back, saying, “No, we want to show you. We want to make sure you're doing this right.” Even though I wanted to say, “No. Just leave us alone and let us do it”, I'm glad I did take their advice and bring them in, so they could teach us a little more about it.

We're doing APM but we also are right now evaluating the Analytics side of it. That's been pretty awesome but we haven't really gotten very deep into that one. We’re basically just using APM.

One of the most valuable features has been the ease of use that really fuels adoption in our organization. Other solutions that we have used for APM were not as user friendly, and frankly it was just really difficult to get people to use the tools.

The dashboards have been straightforward; easy to set up, really, for the most part.

It's made it easier to collaborate across teams; be able to have the same data immediately in front of you just by sharing a URL.

It could be a little more flexible in configuration on the back end. The design is geared towards specific goals, and they've done a great job with those. A lot of times when I'll ask a question, "Can we make it do this? Can we make it do that?", the answer is just, "No. Sorry, we don't support that at this time." And I get it, that's a good model for them to have, but I always have a wish list of things as I'm working with the tool.

I come across little things all the time, and I just file a ticket with AppDynamics to raise a feature request. So, I don't keep track of them, I just document it, and fire and forget.

I’ve been impressed with the features that they're adding and the direction that they've been working, a lot of which I wasn't aware of. License management, for example; being able to just give a certain number of licenses to an arm of the organization and say, "Here. Here's your licenses, do whatever you want with them." That really pushes the ultimate administration of the product out without having to "micromanage", if you will, and worry about giving them the key to the server. We are not currently using that. As far as I know, it's not released yet, but I was excited to see that. That was one that I brought up with support along the way.

I am impressed that they continue to develop and improve, and it's not a stagnant product by any means.

We have a controller that's pretty overloaded. We haven't run into any issues, though, with the AppDynamics.

Their technical support's been very responsive. They don't always have the answers that I want, but they're responsive, and help us find solutions where they can.

We didn't know that we needed a new solution. We had a solution. Another department wanted to look at AppDynamics. We looked at it and said, "We're already doing that, but if you want to bring it in and test their claims of greatness against what we have, go for it". We brought them in, and we said, "Let's buy that.”

Initial setup was very straight forward. We didn't even use technical services for our implementation.

It could be cheaper. It's a little cost prohibitive. There are so many features that also show a lot of value, but it’s not always easy to justify the cost.

We did not look at any other vendors. We weren't shopping, really.

In general, when I look at solutions, first of all, the product has to be top shelf. It has to be number one. That really drives us: "What is the product going to do for us?" In the vendor, we look for a vendor that's going to be around for a while; that we feel is going to be stable enough to support us into the foreseeable future. And then the support model, technical support; the ability to get into the technical details with us when we have questions. All of those things.

Having implemented without the help of professional services, we were capable of doing that; it went very smoothly. Involve, even indulge, AppDynamics in being a part of the implementation process, and having the planning and discussion around it. We wanted to go more rapidly than that would allow. Therefore, we kind of short-circuited that process, and jumped right in, which was good, but I think that there's value in having folks who have done it a lot look at where you're going with it, and give you some pointers. We've had to "course correct" a little bit on a few points as we went, and they might have been smoother along the way, had we just gone through the enablement and initial process.

It’s a great product. We're happy with it.

Nothing is perfect, so a perfect rating would be unattainable, but they’re pretty close to that. They're really great.

Auto-integration with applications and how easy it is to identify errors/issues are the most valuable features for this product.

Along with APM, we use End User Monitoring; I personally use it. We have a unique business model where at the end of the month there is a peak in usage. This product helps us to monitor that usage and makes sure that we target issues even before they occur.

We were using the New Relic solution before AppDynamics and had a lot of issues for configuring it and making it suitable for our use. However, AppDynamics was very easy to configure. We were able to deploy it within a month and get real benefits from this product just within a 6 week to 2 month span of time. So that was the main reason we went for AppDynamics.

For example if I remember correctly, the end of every month is like a war zone for us. Since we have implemented this solution, it is going smooth and we are getting positive feedback from customers, consultants and everybody else. It has changed our life.

Further integrations with other monitoring systems would be very helpful. I want to see it interacting more with the infrastructure, to get more statistics and details from our infrastructure environment and not only applications.

It's fairly stable. I don't think I have seen any issues occur since we have implemented this product.

However, my team needs more training and familiarization with how to setup custom features.

Now we are using the Auto Scaling functionality with AWS. It was very easy to install again. We are not using it for all our applications and AWS but we are in the process of applying it.

We haven't used any technical support yet; we use a partner who helps us to deploy and stabilize the system. We haven't used this tool for a long time to need actual technical support.

We are all part of the community where we post questions, get answers and have access to a lot of resources there so support would be great.

I wasn't part of the selection of this tool but as soon as I came to know that this is the solution our organization had picked, I supported this decision a hundred percent.

I was managing the team that deploys it. I wasn't involved in the selection of the solution but as soon as I came to know that this is the tool we are selecting, I supported it.

We implemented it and had no issues since we have a vendor that supports us in the initial deployment efforts.

AppDynamics is a unique system. It depends on the environment that you are in. It is probably applicable to any kind of company but if you don't know how to configure it correctly or how to use it and get all the details that you want from it, it may not be your best solution. You might go with a much smaller scale solution but for any enterprise organization, this is the best solution you can implement.

We still haven’t implemented this APM tool completely in all our applications.

Integrated and aggregated performance analytics traces transactions across multiple tiers in which web services deployed in separate data centers call each other. It tracks the time spent from the beginning to the end across multiple layers (web, servlet, JMS, EJB) and forked threads. It tells the full story about a transaction in addition to resource utilization. It tells you if one of many servers ran a major GC (garbage collection) in the last five minutes, or if one of the transactions took more than 10 seconds. It also drills down to its components.

It provides full visibility of what’s happening in complex transactions which involve services running in our NJ, AR, and CO data centers. It provides data beyond standard monitoring, including method invocation-level insights.

It could understand more invocation protocols. Some custom-built web service processors are not recognized. As a result, the requests are identified as plain servlet calls. For example, it does not recognize Pega’s customized web service calls. I hope the vendor will accumulate experiences and exceptions, and provide guidance to customers on how to handle them.

I have been using AppDynamics for four years.

It was involved in resource utilization issue in one of many of applications that is based on Oracle Fusion.

I did not have any scalability issues. It is well designed for good scalability. Even with 1000s of servers, it is easy to identify a few that are suspicious by sorting the metrics by latency, CPU utilization, garbage collection time, and so on.

Technical support was excellent. They are very responsive. I usually get responses the same day.

We used HP Diagnostics. It could only analyze resource utilization without correlating this to transactions.

As far as the customer is concerned, it was easy. But the vendor needs to do the bulk of the work setting up the SaaS.

Get bulk pricing. The volume will be higher than you think.

We looked at most competitive products on the market, including Dynatrace and HP lines.

Don’t treat it as a monitoring tool. Use it as a troubleshooting tool. It helps you understand how the apps run in much more detail than good or bad. You can see where you need to improve.

My clients use AppDynamics for monitoring the performance and behavior of applications, as well as detecting any signs of potential overload. It also allows them to identify when certain applications are not functioning as expected. Essentially, its primary purpose is to monitor and evaluate the behavior and performance of applications.

AppDynamics is aiding us with achieving full stack availability, which entails obtaining a comprehensive or holistic overview of the application's performance, sales, and behavior. In essence, the purpose of full stack availability is to provide a complete picture of what is happening with the application.

The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is Proactive Monitoring and Alerting.

The price of the solution could improve.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately six years.

The solution is stable.

I rate the stability of AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

The scalability of AppDynamics is good.

I rate the scalability of AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

The support from the vendor is good.

I rate the support of AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

Positive

AppDynamics is what I would consider an enterprise-level solution. This means that it's a solution that is intended for use by larger organizations, while small or medium-sized businesses may find it difficult to afford. The number of agents required will also impact the pricing, and smaller companies may only be able to afford a limited number of agents. Essentially, the cost of the solution is not within the reach of every organization, and only some may be able to afford it.

My advice to others is this solution is fantastic if your business can afford it. It will help boost your business and IT.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

From the perspective of the customer experience, the solution has been quite helpful for our company. Positive comments have been given, and no clients have opted out of our services for any reason. This has given us the option to think about including more agents in the remedy. Also, the capability that alerts users in advance of potential problems has improved the effectiveness of our IT employees. Despite hiring more employees, we haven't had any client abandonment, which proves that the solution is of the highest caliber and performing remarkably well. Also, it has helped us monitor apps more efficiently and fix any problems before they have an impact on end users.

I mainly use AppDynamics to detect issues and bugs and monitor our enterprise database module.

AppDynamics' most valuable features are the response time of the business transaction modules, the ability to monitor multiple services, and testing and developing environments.

AppDynamics's agent management could be improved. They could also manage their licenses by host count rather than CPU core counts and on independent container count instead of for five containers. In the next release, AppDynamics should include AI modules in the on-prem environment.

I've been using AppDynamics for five years.

AppDynamics is stable.

Generally, the initial setup is easy, but it's harder for Java applications because you have to do some manual customization in agent configuration. Deployment took around a month.

We used a partner team.

AppDynamics' licensing scheme is confusing because all of its domains require different licenses. AppDynamics is priced on the higher side. 

I would recommend AppDynamics to other users and would rate it eight out of ten.