We performed a comparison between Accedian Skylight, AppDynamics, and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability."The feature I used to like the most was its ability to decode layer seven protocols, although this is becoming less useful now that encryption is so widespread."
"Capturing traffic [is very interesting]. Currently, with our configuration, we don't capture the payload of the packets, just the header. But when we want the body, the payload of the packets, we can do a PCAP, and then analyze it within Wireshark."
"For us, the most valuable feature is something called TWAMP that allows for real-time traffic in a way that is 10 times lighter than things like SolarWinds. It's in the sub-milliseconds of accuracy, and you can divide tasks so that you can literally see things like the tagging for Quality of Service. That had been incorrect with the carrier, but there was no way on this planet you'd be able to tell a carrier that they're wrong. I have dozens of scenarios where we found "No, that's not right," and got it resolved instantly."
"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
"If [the problem] is something related to HTTP or VoIP, then I can have a quick look into the protocols, a process which gives me some good ideas..."
"What I like most about Accedian Skylight is that it's a UI application, so using it is easy. I also like that the support for Accedian Skylight is helpful."
"The performance of Accedian Skylight is better than other vendors."
"I always have the Skylight dashboard on one of my screens... Now you can create your own dashboard, specific to an application, specific to a server, or to something else."
"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."
"The most valuable features of AppDynamics is the scalability and monitoring."
"The most valuable feature is the flow map."
"The features that I like best are the dashboard and Business Journey."
"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is Proactive Monitoring and Alerting."
"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 AppDyniamics technical support is good. We haven't had any problems with them. They answer very quickly."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to take a report, and in particular, a visual, and link it to actual application performance and then the consequences. This means you can show how an incident or action has an effect on the business."
"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."
"The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up."
"The product integrates with Remedy."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"The initial setup was relatively easy, and we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"It needs the possibility to export data because it is not easy to see larger data sets, e.g., for one month. It would be interesting to export data into a PDF or dashboard to keep a history of the situation."
"Because of the policies in Vietnam, we cannot connect the system to the Accedian cloud. It would be good if Accedian could provide a local cloud. In the next release, I would like them to focus on improving and adding more reporting features. This will help the operations teams."
"If you want a new version, you go to the website. The hardest part is finding the link, where is that .bin file? Sometimes it's pretty hidden in a document... it's hidden in the release notes or in another file somewhere. And it's usually not on the first page either."
"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"There should be an option to update and upgrade the solution to the new version without having to re-buy it. I have clients switching to other solutions. The old solution is great, but if you change your license to a new one, you have to almost re-buy it completely."
"It's a bit slow. When I execute a query, something general with a short timeframe that covers one month, for instance, and I do not specify the IP source or IP destination, it can take ages because it has to query the whole database."
"Some of the Skylight applications are a little newer, and they're still moving through initial revs. There are certain bugs, but nothing is insurmountable... It will just take a little bit of time for their user interface to get a little bit better."
"AppDynamics lacks integration with cloud technology. It probably isn't a good fit for emerging enterprises because it's an on-premise solution, and many newer companies are moving to the cloud. AppDynamics' on-premise technology works reasonably well, but it doesn't have cloud features."
"I would like to see something that lets me set real dollar figures, not just to outages, but to the solutions as well... when I'm looking at problems and have found a problem that I know I need to address. I could flag it off and have AppDynamics estimate how long a person would have taken to find that without it. That would give me a lot of leverage for justifying the existence of APM, which I really need."
"There could log management features included in the product."
"An area that has room for improvement on the CR and ERP would be the addition of monitoring of the internal solution. For example, you can monitor the day-to-day and everything in the transactions with AppDynamics, but there's also a lot going on in the kernel itself that you cannot monitor. The automation needs to improve as well. As it stands, a lot of customization needs to happen before you can use AppDynamics."
"AppDynamics scaled well up to around 3,000 agents. The performance deteriorated after that, while Dynatrace could support more than 10,000 agents. We were surprised that AppDynamics' scalability is not so good."
"Needs more integration with applications suites, like Oracle Enterprise Server or BMC Remedy."
"AppDynamics is agent-based, so some customers are reluctant to install the agents in all their production environments. It would be helpful if they had an agentless version. It covers applications on the server, but the solution is weak on the network side. The agent is not deployed on the network components, so it cannot provide complete information about issues on the network layer."
"If AppDynamics could do a one-agent function with their actual monitoring effectiveness, it will be the greatest tool."
"There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
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