AppDynamics Other Advice

Venus Yaker Dalton - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Specialist at 3M

I'd advise users to make sure they dedicate enough time and resources to properly configure and customize the tool. This includes defining relevant metrics and thresholds, setting effective alerts, and customizing dashboards to reflect specific needs and goals. 

A proper setup will ensure that companies get the most value from AppDynamics and can take full advantage of its application monitoring and management capabilities.

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PM
Senior consultant specialist-ITID at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The maintenance of AppDynamics is very easy since you can easily implement the patches and upgrade the solution. Around 20 people in my company are involved in the maintenance of AppDynamics.

AppDynamics is an excellent tool for any data center operations or services to monitor while providing good features like alerting capabilities. I recommend the solution to those planning to use it.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

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AJ
Officer IT data processing at Stanbic Bank Ghana, Ltd.

Since it is an excellent application, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. I would suggest others use the products and just make sure that they get in touch with the administrator of AppDynamics so that they can devote their time and energy to learning about it so that they can at least administer the platform properly.

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Buyer's Guide
AppDynamics
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about AppDynamics. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Siva Jp - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle Architecture at LTIMINDTREE

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.

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Mahesh Deshpande - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technology Architect at Infosys

I rate AppDynamics seven out of 10. In the modern world, Dynatrace is moving toward helping the companies in the current landscape, but AppDynamics is a second-generation company. It needs to adopt more of a lifecycle perspective rather than limiting itself to triage, tracing, etc.

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OA
Operation Manager at Totalplay

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

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Yacin  HATTAB - PeerSpot reviewer
Responsable Commercial at Zen Networks

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.

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Sylvain Germe - PeerSpot reviewer
Application and Network Performance Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

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.

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CB
Engineer at United Airlines

RUM, synthetics, mobile, network, and browser analytics make this a well-rounded tool.

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JP
Sr. Production Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

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

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MM
Senior Performance Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

AppDynamics is primarily an APM tool, and if you're looking for end-to-end monitoring and AI ops capabilities, it may not be the best fit. For instance, if you want to analyze transitions, pinpoint failures, and view logs all in the same tool, AppDynamics may not provide a complete solution.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

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CK
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We're just an end-user of the product.

We're using the latest version of the solution. 

The deployment model depends on the solution or the size of the product which we are using, as the banks do have private and public clouds. In public clouds, we don't have much of the production instances. It's mainly the development. The free cloud and the cloud environment are completely on a private or in-house, on-premises solution with different ecosystems.

If a proper study has been done, and the solution makes sense for the company, I would recommend the solution. 

I would like to rate the solution at a seven out of ten. That consideration is mainly due to the fact that it covers a large portfolio of the product. It does have support for many other ERP tools. A lot of open customization is available and the product support team can help to customize the product. I've found this tool very useful and helpful on that.

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Muhammad Zeeshan Siddiqui - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Technology and Services at Arwen Technologies

I rate AppDynamics eight out of 10. It's on the high end of the Gartner quadrant, but it's lacking some features. 

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SK
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

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DG
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

I would advise others wanting to purchase this solution it is well worth the money. If you look at the quantity of time it takes you to track down a problem versus doing it the old-fashioned way, the amount of time saved by using a solution like this helps you move forward more quickly. 

I rate AppDynamics a ten out of ten.

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it_user858033 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manger Sr, IT Program Mgmt. at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

Look at the whole picture. Take into consideration what you get for specific pricing models and how much it costs to add on things you may need later.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: cost.

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SK
IT Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Give it a shot. If you want to do a PoC, definitely do it. You should definitely have AppDynamics in there. I have no qualms about recommending the tool outright, but I think for your use case, you should probably PoC it on your own because you will really see the value add. If you don't, of course, then it is what it is, but I think most people will see the value add very, very quickly. They have a very competent team. They have the right people in the right places. Once they decide to commit to something, they actually do it and do it well. That's definitely a good plus.

I have not given it a perfect rating because I would like to see the heap analysis and the connection leak. There are some hiccups, I feel. I probably have to keep visiting the new feature sets that are coming with the leak analysis. Those minor things, those problems, the heap analysis and the connection leaks, are pretty time consuming, but in the grand scheme of things, the rest of the feature set is really, really great.

I haven’t even mentioned elsewhere the vast set of metrics that we have available to us, which is very helpful. I can create my own metrics if I want, if I choose to.
It definitely ticks a lot of checkboxes and there are a lot plus marks.

We also use AppDynamics End User Monitoring a little bit; not as much as APM. APM is used by a lot more of our internal clients. End User Monitoring is used and that's also helpful. There's a feature where you can actually see the traffic going from the End User snapshot down to the APM snapshot. That correlation is very, very helpful because then I don't have to do it manually. If you have to do it manually, a lot of it is a bit of guessing game, unless you have other ways of doing the manual correlation, which is a lot tougher, especially when it comes to production, where you want to really get things moving faster rather than slower. That can be very helpful.

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Paolo Sala - PeerSpot reviewer
Application performance and System monitoring at Agos

AppDynamics is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

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Kachi Nnamdi - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Converge G. C. T.

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.

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SR
Consultant at a financial services firm with self employed

I rate AppDynamics eight out of 10. 

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JG
Senior Director : Database Infrastructure and Site Reliability at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would advise those considering the solution to be patient and stick with it. A lot of these tools are pretty simple, however, they're simply used. For instance, they measure CPU and network and memory and stuff like that. The graphics may be pretty flashy, however, it doesn't provide the hardcore data that AppDynamics does. That's why you need to kind of just relax and stay with it a bit and you'll be successful. If you're just looking for something flashy to give you back immediate results that you can use today or tomorrow, it's probably not the right fit.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

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KV
Systems Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

I would advise others to take a higher systems-level approach to understand exactly what is needed in the way of instrumentation and monitoring within your enterprise. You can have a point solution like AppDynamics, and this is the big picture of the entire data flow throughout the system.

I would rate AppDynamics a six out of 10.

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it_user560460 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability Development Manager - Monitoring at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Think about what it is you're doing beforehand. Plan it a little bit. One of the slightly strange problems that some of the early teams ran into was fundamentally misunderstanding the application tier and node hierarchy in AppDynamics. You ended up with some very strangely named applications. Read that one paragraph on each of those. Work out what it is you're doing, and then it all springs to life. Also, talk to other teams who've done it.

We also use AppDynamics database monitoring. We use the machine agents. I think that's pretty much everything we've got. I’m generally happy with them. Every tool has its limitations and you want more.

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it_user118995 - PeerSpot reviewer
User Experience Solution Director at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The model that we used to do the POC and prototype to test it out first helped to get us familiar with the tool, familiar with it and trained on it. AppDynamics suggested it and said they could come in and help - we accepted! View full review »
Indu Sri Jasti - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
It is a wonderful monitoring tool that manages various aspects such as system resources (CPU, RAM), mobile performance, and infrastructure monitoring. It provides ease of use, alerting capabilities, integration support, and scalability. Thus, it is already maintained. It doesn't provide log management services; we have to install different types of agents for business processes. It is not a cloud-native platform like AWS, GCP, etc. I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten. View full review »
CD
Software Engineer at Apmosys Technology Pvt. Ltd.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

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SS
Monitoring Specialist at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

The maintenance is not difficult. We follow an auto-release process and most of the maintenance is completed by our central team.

I recommend the solution as long as it meets the organization's requirements.

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MM
Senior Performance Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

If you implement AppDynamics, all members of the team should be aware of what it does and how to use it. If only one or two people are aware of this, the solution will not serve the purpose of improving application performance or in finding and fixing the issues.

I would rate AppDynamics a 7 out of 10.

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WS
IT Operations Executive at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

We are an IT company. We are selling this to the market as well. We have a strong relationship with AppDynamics through Cisco. We're a reseller of the product. We have a stronger relationship with AppDynamics, both currently and over the years, to the exclusion of all alternatives. We're using AppDynamics from an application performance monitoring point of view.

I'm not sure if we are currently on the latest version of the solution, however, it's my understanding that we're either are or will be moving to the latest version of the solution.

We bought the Dynamics cloud instance. It's likely based around Europe. I'm not entirely sure. Certainly, from our perspective, I believe it's in Europe in terms of where the controllers sit. We've been on there for the last two years or so. 

The controllers would be in the cloud, yet, certainly, from a historical point of view, we have migrated to the cloud recently. I'm not a hundred percent sure if we're done with that process. We may have some on-premises instances still. As a service that we sell to external customers, there are on-prem instances as well.

In general, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

There are things that they can do to improve the product. We are working with them on that front. We are talking to them on an almost daily basis. Certainly, my team is talking to them daily. Obviously, pricing is a concern - certainly from out geographical point of view. Working the exchange rate differences between the different currencies makes local consumption seriously expensive. 

Dynatrace seems to be gaining momentum in the local market. If you look at Gartner's latest report that I saw fairly recently, Dynatrace is, even from a technical capability point of view, doing more, or better, than AppDynamics. I'm not entirely sure what they use as a basis to plot an application on those quadrants from a Gartner point of view, however, Dynatrace certainly looked as if it went past AppDynamics fairly recently.

I need to better understand the alternative products. It's a question of time until our current anchor customers start asking this very question. Why should we not consider going Dynatrace as opposed to AppDynamics? I don't yet have the ability to have an informed discussion on it.

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SR
Vice President - Operations & Client Support at Scicom Infrastructure Services

Basically, you can't over-speak importance of deployment, configuration and infrastructure footprint because what happens is that people get excited when they see the output of various products (such as Dynatrace or CA Wiley). They say, "wow, it's very powerful, we've never had visibility, we're going to implement at all costs." Then they buy the solution and they realize they need 5X the amount of servers, a lot of storage, experts to manage it, etc.

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CM
Senior Computer Performance Specialist at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Take a test drive of the demo.

I’ve given it a high rating because of the initial dashboards that are being built and the way that they can be built. I haven't seen anything like that. Especially with the flow management that's literally there in real time.

For right now, we are not using any other AppDynamics products. We are only using AppDynamics APM, but the new one they introduced at a recent conference, Business iQ, that seems very appealing too.

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it_user420528 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

One piece of advice I would like to give others is that you need to first identify how you want to map your business application in the AppDynamics flow map. If there are multiple pieces in an application talking to each other, then best practice is to put everything together in one business application to see how those pieces talk to each other. Secondly, you need to identify the most important business transactions that you would like to monitor. Just include those and exclude everything else, as this way you can reduce the traffic and the amount of noise. Troubleshooting is easy when only key transactions are being monitored and not everything.

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SM
Performance Test Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

The product's installation process is a bit difficult. Users need to thoroughly understand the documentation and take care of the setup phase to be able to use certain features offered by the tool, which, technically, is something that users should be able to use. Generating heap dump for Java usage and Java application monitoring are areas that can be pretty difficult with the product.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

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Wathek Belhaj Amor - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Perform IT

I would rate AppDynamics nine out of ten.

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GR
Manager- Projects at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

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it_user560529 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. App Analytics DevOps Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user560427 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems & Network Administration Manager at Jack Henry & Associates

The best advice would probably be to make sure that you know what your requirements are and that you're analyzing the tools to your requirements. Look at things such as capital and time to roll out. That makes a big difference in the ROI for a product.

Overall, it's a very strong product. It has most of the features that I think we need. There are a few things that could be improved, like the ability to exclude stuff from the baseline. It's not quite perfect, but other than some usability improvements, I think it's a very great product.

We use AppDynamics APM, as well AppDynamics EUM.

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AS
Associate Director, Application Performance Management Solution Design & Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I would recommend this solution depending on what the use case is. If you want the latest, state of the art, including cloud-native monitoring and docker containers, I would recommend Kubernetes.

I would rate AppDynamics a six out of ten.

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AJ
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

This is absolutely a product that I would recommend to other users. I can see a lot of people are interested in using AppDynamics.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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it_user501966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user560499 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Support Lead at ASRC Federal Data Solutions

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.

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it_user277401 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Operations Manager at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user560487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Enterprise Network Planner at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user560484 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Manager at Arbonne international

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.

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it_user420570 - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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.

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Mehmet Arpa - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Destel Bilişim Çözümleri A.Ş.

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

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MN
Manager, Enterprise Service at Hang Seng Bank

There are no minimum or maximum sizes; you can use AppDymaics regardless of your company's size. It is appropriate for small, medium, and large enterprises.

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

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UA
Head Of Information Technology at a mining and metals company with 11-50 employees

We are customers and end-users.

We're always using the latest version of the solution. It's SaaS-based and therefore it is consistently updated immediately as new versions are ready for release. We don't need to manually handle the process. We use AppDynamics' own cloud. We don't use a third-party cloud.

The one area of concern for me is the cost. There are other options - including open-source options.

Overall, I'd rate the solution at a serve out of ten. I'd rate it higher if the solution's price was better.

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it_user72771 - PeerSpot reviewer
Info Sec Consultant at Size 41 Digital

We chose to procure this solution via the AWS Marketplace because you don’t need to buy physical hardware to use it.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten because you can edit the config files easily and make the reports your own. Also, it supports loads of AWS products: S3, Elastic MapReduce, EC2, DynamoDB, ELB, RDS, Route 53, etc.

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NS
Global Lead Architect at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

In terms of advice, I would ask you to have criteria. Most of the time there will be some general aspects that are pretty common, that are covered by the various third-parties that provide industry ratings. But within that, you have to have customization of the features to match to your own infrastructure, the technical stack you have: mainframes, ICDs, modern platforms, cloud, etc. You need to compare the tools that work with your technical stack.

The most important criteria, for me, when selecting a vendor are 

  • flexible pricing
  • full coverage of monitoring of our technical stack, both on-cloud and on-prem
  • customer service.

I would rate this solution at eight out of 10. I took away the two points for the two reasons I mentioned: being able to monitor both cloud and on-prem with a single dashboard and flexible pricing.

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it_user560505 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The main point is every company is a software company. Invariably, you talk about it. Every button click is important. What if a customer shares feedback with his colleagues, friends or family? Every button click is important. Having said that, you should know what is happening out in your environment, out on your machines, out on your applications. So, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and end-user monitoring are definitely very important.

We have our own use cases. According to those use cases, we chose AppDynamics. But whatever the product, don't get married to any product; whether it is CA APM, Dynatrace or AppDynamics. Even now, we're not married to any tool. We will always go with a tool which is going to fit in to our model. That's our message to anybody who's researching this case.

One important thing to note is that my rating doesn't mean AppDynamics is not great. AppDynamics is great. It is going in the right direction. At the conference, the CEO or somebody mentioned that they can't shove this product and develop everything that people are expecting for release by 2020. It's being done in a phased manner, in iterations. So far, whatever they have release to us, that's what the rating is for. That will probably be higher in the coming years. With the features that it has and with the expectations that we have, that's the rating we can say. And on top of that, AppDynamics gets the highest rating of any vendor in the APM space. If I rated the other tools, I'd rate them lower.

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it_user560478 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead Gestion des évènements at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

APM probably applied more to us than others perhaps. This is an application monitoring tool so you need to really understand it and implement it properly. The application team needs to know about its features and capabilities to get the most out of it. We're new at this, so it's a new paradigm that we have to bring in our company. Being on the event team, I'm not looking at the application for the app team. Sometimes we're looking at the dashboard and we see something wrong. We feel that they're not really taking action. Sometimes we just call them, "Hey, by the way, can you have a look at it?" So, integration with the actual application team could be an improvement.

I think a vendor should be available, have deep product knowledge, and be helpful.

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it_user560391 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Performance Test Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Try using the trial version which AppD provides. Their customer support is very good. If you have questions specific to your applications, you can reach out to customer support. They'll come on site and help you with all the questions and they can do the set up.

We also use AppDynamics Real User Monitoring, where we get end user performance. We also use AppDynamics Database Monitoring, so we can tidy up if there is a DB issue; what is causing the database issue. They're all integrated with each other.

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it_user560442 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

My overall advice is, if you don’t have it yet, then get it.

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it_user560373 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Take the training; take the time to learn it; explore it. That's my advice.

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OM
Sr. Devops Engineer at a media company with 201-500 employees

I recommend doing a central configuration for agent installation. It is really easy to run when we are upgrading our agents. The standard installation is good in my opinion.

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

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DD
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I see a lot of people migrate towards one product in particular in the market and they never really try the other APM vendors. They'll look at the page and they'll look at the price, but sometimes you just have to pay a little more. Importantly, it's the features that you get that make it worth it. I won't name the new products, the ones people migrate towards a lot - especially developers, it seems like that cohort instantly likes them - but AppDynamics and a couple of the other ones as well are really good for production. AppDynamics, in particular, excels on that. Don't just install AppDynamics, install a couple of them. Pick four or five and run them in production, pick a couple nodes even, and compare the interfaces and the ability to use the interfaces. Most people will quickly find that there is a real difference between them. Some people will gravitate, still, towards certain products rather than others, but I haven't seen a person yet, who has not loved the AppDynamics features and portal and how it does things.

You can't just look at the feature list, spend five minutes on their web page, and then dismiss it. You have to run it on your app, see how easy it is and how much time it saves you.

I have not used the marketplace version. I've used the traditional, agent-based licensing. The reason for that is partly to do with the affordability. I can take the same license for the on-prem and put it on AWS as well. We always use the same license, because we don't know where it's going to end up.

In terms of integrating AppDynamics with other products within our AWS environment, the way to describe that is that we're using it to watch certain services. Obviously, if our database is using endpoints within AWS, which a majority of the apps are, such as Redis or RDS nodes, AppDynamics has seen those. All of the integrations that I can think of, except for the database, are web-based. We see the database integration and we see all the web-based integration. So we have integrated with other products.

We haven't seen a case where we haven't been able to see the interaction between our app and the service. Just to be clear, I have seen other APM products that miss those integrations. You plug them in and you don't see your SNS calls. Usually, it's solvable, but you've got to troubleshoot and set up some special code and it becomes painful. I can't think of a case in AppDynamics where we just didn't plug it in and start seeing those calls right away.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. I've been using it for so long, and have used so many other APM vendors, and it really is the most stable one. It works with the most conditions that we encounter. The only reason I take off one point is the cost. I can't give it a ten because it is not a cheap product. None of them are. The price is fair, but I could use it on more projects if they had a lower price.

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it_user560520 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Project Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

It's a fantastic product. Just make sure that you take the time to really understand it. Know what you're getting into. It's not just, "Let's purchase it, let's install it. Okay, it's great. Now it's working, let's put it up on the dashboard."

There's so much to it; you can just scratch the surface or you can really dive into it and it can do a lot. Look at those extra features and spend the time to do it.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we also use AppDynamics SQL and EUM. We are very happy with them. The EUM, End User Monitoring, is really, really cool. The database one, as well, for SQL, it's also something that we've just started using. We're not fully leveraging it yet. We've just purchased it and we're starting to deploy it, so it's something that we're still learning. I know that we're right now in a PoC, proof of concept, with Log Analytics, as well. And we may be looking at the Synthetics module, as well, in the future.

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it_user560412 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - Application Operations at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's a great tool. I definitely recommend looking at it. At least go to a conference and attend one of the sessions; see what the tool can do. It's definitely valuable.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating because of stability, the SaaS controller. If it's as stable as I hope it'll be in the next release or two, I'll probably give it a perfect rating.

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it_user560361 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Architect at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

As with just about anything else I'd recommend: start small, make sure you understand how the system works, what it's doing, what it's telling you. Then, once you get a level of comfort with it, which shouldn't take too long, then you can spread it out and start looking.

One of the nice things is the auto-discovery feature. You can install an agent in one place and it will show you the things that it's talking to. That way, you can follow it and say, "I recognize this IP address that it's talking to here. That's another critical system. I'm going to put an agent on there." Then, start building up a better, more complete picture as you go.

We're starting to use the real user monitoring components. It's a little limited right now because our web browser application is a single-page app. Single-page apps have some quirks that make managing your view of what's going on inside them a little bit more involved. How to make that work a little better was one of the things that I was hoping to learn at a recent AppDynamics conference.

I'm very happy with it.

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BS
Engineer at Sirius XM Radio Inc.

I would highly recommend it.

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it_user584115 - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability/Dev Ops Strategist Digital Transformation at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It is an up-and-coming company that operates like a startup. They’re fast to find ways to implement changes for their customers.

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it_user560508 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think price and scalability are important when choosing an APM vendor. If it's a third party solution, is it going to be able to keep up with the solution you're using? How is the technical support, and how cutting edge is the solution. Are they keeping up with their competitors? So far, we have found all these things in AppDynamics.

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it_user560385 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst Production Application Support at a leisure / travel company with 10,001+ employees

Reach out anytime you have questions, because they're very responsive to answer.

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SK
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Definitely, I would recommend this solution for others who are interested in using it for the alerting mechanism. Also, if they wanted to have more clarity regarding the application and the transactions that are stored, this product works well.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

View full review »
AM
Vice President at Works Applications Co., Ltd.

Depending on your use case, this is only a monitoring solution. If you don't have an in-house logging solution, or if your primary use case is to debug, you should consider choosing other alternatives. If only you want monitoring, AppDynamics will do.

We are only using the AWS version.

View full review »
SP
Consultant at Sepas Holding | هلدینگ سپاس

AppDynamics forces you to depend on the company to do what you want, which may be a negative if you prefer to work independently. I would rate AppDynamics as seven out of ten.

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LM
Technical Team Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

View full review »
it_user560430 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Engineer at PHE inc

Take time to get into the forums. That wasn't something we did right away. The forums, the online AppDynamics University, all of them are really, really helpful.
I've been really happy with it and everything we want it to do, it's done. If it was something we thought couldn't be done when we reached out to support, we got help to the ends we needed it.

We will be using other AppDynamics products. We just started, actually; we signed a contract a few months ago. A lot of that stuff is new to us. We're mainly skilled in APM. We're learning the synthetics and the transaction analytics now, which look to be really promising. I'm excited about the demos we've seen. We've had some professional time with a couple of consultants, who showed us how to use them. It looks really, really valuable.

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it_user560493 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Information Systems at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I definitely recommend it. It's a pretty robust tool. For monitoring APM, all the DevOps and whatever they want to use it for, it's a pretty robust tool. It has all of the features; whatever is needed. I recommend it without thinking twice.

We do have licenses for AppDynamics EUM, but we cannot implement it yet because our system is a little more complex and it's a little older technology, the UI part of it. We'll roll it out at some point, when we get the chance.

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it_user560538 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Configuration Manager at IHG

There are so many tools in the market, depending upon the criteria and what you want, I would definitely suggest AppDynamics, because of the REST things and all of that. You can deep dive into data and get to the granular level.

We are pretty much a satisfied customer.

We are not really using APM with any other AppDynamics products at this time.

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it_user560358 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Health Operations Analyst at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees

If you're not getting the support or if you're not getting the answers when they are trying to troubleshoot, then this is a definitely a really good solution and it will save you time in the long run.

With the benefits of pinpointing the issue quickly, we can get either our servers or our application up and running better. We've pinpointed a lot of long transaction times and were able to fix that. Not knowing that, because we fixed that, it also fixed three or four different applications.

It’s also nice to see the mapping. Once you start building all these things and its building on top of each other, AppDynamics does a very good job of showing, “Holy cow, we actually are talking to all these other different servers.”

As I’ve mentioned, we were flying blind and now we are starting to see. It's been a lot better.

In addition to AppDynamics APM, we use EUM as well. We are trying to get our company off of Google Analytics and go straight AppDynamics, but it’s a slow boat.

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it_user560382 - PeerSpot reviewer
Programmer/Analyst at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

As always, do your homework. Know everything about the industry that you’re playing in. Know who all of your options are and pick the solution that's best for you.

It's providing massive value for a relatively massive investment, as well, but it is proving itself to be easier to use and therefore more widely adopted than previous solutions. That has been a huge relief to all of us who have been doing APM for years and have wanted to spread that around the company wider than just a small set of analysts.

We are using a little bit of AppDynamics EUM and Analytics.

View full review »
it_user509844 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Administrator at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

They offer a free trial. If you are struggling with finding the root cause of a reoccurring issue, then give it a shot. We got immediate, actionable results.

My rating reflects its ease of use as well as the scope of solutions that it can monitor, including MongoDB.

View full review »
JL
IT Manager at PRIVALIA

AppDynamics is doing a very good job.

We used it on-premise, then moved to AWS. On-premise is very similar to using AWS.

View full review »
it_user560406 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Make use of all of the training material and the university. There's some really useful information in there. Also, the two other things that I’ve mentioned elsewhere:

  • Ensure the person who is deploying AppDynamics in your environment is among the top-most performers of your team, someone who knows your application in and out.
  • Combine that with good, strong consultation by the AppDynamics team. Get these two in place and you've got a winner on your hands.

The reason why I have not rated it higher is the lack of support for HHPM and Ruby; bring them both and I would rate it higher.

View full review »
it_user560355 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer III at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It's definitely worth using. The overall impact the tool has had in our environment has been very positive. Some of the best success stories we have got from the product have actually come from VPs over those different product areas, when they find out how AppDynamics scored a critical win. My advice to the other teams would be to involve all the other product teams, everybody who's going to be involved with it. Get them involved early on into the adoption, on what it can do. You don't want to have management overseeing it and not know what the product is.

You want that buy-in early on in the process, especially with a high number of applications. We have over 2,000 applications on our radar that we're going to instrument into it. Getting buy-in for cooperation, not only to schedule and prioritize, but which ones are getting in, on whose orders, and who's getting disrupted on it. The competition among senior management for who was going to get it first became quite intense later on.

We’re pretty happy, except for the web agent. That's the only part where we have some angst over the product. We've had discussions about that with AppDynamics.

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it_user506304 - PeerSpot reviewer
PROJECT MANAGER, JEE AND SOA ARCHITECT, EXPERT at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

This product facilitates load testing and visibility of their results and facilitates diagnosis and analysis for code optimization (SQL queries, instructions and inefficient code).

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it_user560367 - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring Lead at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user560517 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Core Business Solutions at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I really don't have any negative things to mention about it. It's been all positive. Depending on how the environment is, it can be a bit pricier than other products. The benefits that you get out of it seem to outweigh the costs, from what we've seen so far.

We've also got AppDynamics’ End User Monitoring piece, and we're evaluating the database agents.

View full review »
it_user560496 - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Test Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

When I look for a vendor I want them to deliver on what they say. A lot of times they will say they can do stuff and you bring them in for a proof of concept and they can't do it. But they always guarantee that they will. And they can never actually get it working.

I would advise a colleague to sit down with one of the senior architects and map out what their needs are, and the best way to do it. What you need is based on the individual technologies you have and you might need more of a custom split for what you're actually looking to get out of it.

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it_user560379 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Project Lead, Systems Architect at Bodhtree

In choosing a vendor, one issue is the business impact should be minimized. Because of AppDynamics, we came to know where the bottlenecks are in the infrastructure by using the system agent, as well as the JVM agent. We code mostly with Java. That really helped us to know where to concentrate, and where to troubleshoot, and where to take action to minimize the impact on business.

I would go with the AppDynamics, because they have new analytics and new features coming, which will really helpful. Log analytics allow you see the performance metrics and at the same time, what is happening. The data is in the logs. It really helps and minimizes troubleshooting and the release cycle is minimized.

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it_user560451 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Operations Engineer at a individual & family service with 10,001+ employees

If you asked me about it, I would provide our experiences, what we're seeing and that would be it. I would say, “Here are some of the things we were having problems with. Here are some of the things that AppDynamics was the solution, where we have seen improvements.” I would probably steer towards that and then have them talk to a rep, who would be able to tell them, for their business, what they could do to help them.

In general, when I’m looking at vendors to work with, I look for a company that's willing to partner up with us, and not only through the sale of an application, but through installation and then ongoing development; really partner with them to say, "Here are the issues we're having. Talk to us about your roadmap. In three months, six months, one year, where are you going to be in that time? What can we do to help you improve the tool?" That's very important.

So far, I've been happy with the vendor itself, with AppDynamics, with the developers that are constantly asking what can they do to help us and looking for feedback of what are the things that we'd like to see. They're doing that very well.

We do not use any other AppDynamics solutions; just this one.

View full review »
it_user121719 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would say the best thing people could do is to monitor as much as possible. By this I mean don't just monitor the app your team/group is building, but also everything it interacts with. I found the most use out of this tool when we could see the whole picture not just our small slice. View full review »
HI
Senior Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

I rate AppDynamics a five out of ten.

View full review »
YS
IT Specialist​ at IT Specialist LLC

My advice to others that want to implement this solution is to have a test environment, and then go to production. Sometimes it requires tuning of the software and restarting services a couple of times,  it's better to make all of these changes on a test environment, and then to move to production.

I have been using AppDynamics for approximately eight out of ten.

View full review »
CY
Service Delivery Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We are just a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with AppDynamics. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been happy with its capabilities over the time we have used it. 

I would recommend the solution, even with all of the complexity that it brings. However, I would advise new users or companies considering the product to make sure they have local support.

View full review »
AF
Test Specialist at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I would recommend Dynatrace, it's better than AppDynamics.

I would rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

View full review »
it_user522015 - PeerSpot reviewer
DBA at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

It is a good product and I would highly recommend it.

Whilst looking for a vendor, the most important criteria is honesty. I don't want to waste time, so I want honest feedback. We don't want any lame excuses such as, there is no patch or that they are still working on it and so on. Thus, honesty is most important.

View full review »
it_user560454 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Director Software Development

Buy it. Buy AppDynamics, but you have to invest in your team too. It has to be someone's job to be setting the system up; to watching the system; making configuration changes. It has to be someone's job to report on the data that AppDynamics is coming with.

I have given it a perfect rating because of how quickly we can go in and see what's going on, diagnose issues before they become issues, but also respond. When we haven't got there first, when someone's reporting a fault, how quickly we can go in and see exactly what's going on, pull up the error message, see the red line on the errors, and so on. We're so much faster in responding to issues than we've ever been before.

We are not using APM with any other AppDynamics products at this time.

View full review »
it_user560418 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Engineer II at Expedia

One of our sister organizations has a WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus instance. They were using the good old stare-and-compare method of making sure that their services were up. They would start their Java application and go stare at the log file. That was how they knew it was running. They didn't have any visibility into how much traffic it was taking, whether that was normal, what their normal call profile looked like. As part of our own evaluation of WSO2 and their Enterprise Service Bus, we asked this team to install AppDynamics on their servers. They came back and said, "How do we get our own?"

Basically, my advice – to people who are looking at better visibility for their applications; better knowledge of how their customers are using their product; knowing whether your application is up or down is one thing but knowing how it gets used can be something else entirely – is, "See if you can get yourself a trial of the controller and some help installing your agents the first time, and then you'll wonder where you've been your whole life without it."

As a general rule, though, AppDynamics is something that we really can't operate without; even in the case of when we had a pretty big network outage earlier this year, where we weren't able to see the controller from our desks. That was sort of like operating with a big, black blindfold on. It's amazing how much we have come to rely on that instant, up-to-the-minute visibility that we have for our applications.

We have other tools like Splunk to help us dig through the logs, but even that doesn't provide the same level of detail that AppDynamics does. I don't really know if there is another product that does. For me, it's a pretty easy win to say that AppDynamics is certainly one of the most important components for us in supporting production environments.

We are not currently using any other AppDynamics products. We're researching how to implement that. Unfortunately, a lot of our applications are legacy. We've got some classic ASP that we haven't moved to .NET. There's a little bit of upgrade hurdle cost with regards to getting the EUM integrated with these classic ASP and related applications. As we start moving towards upgrading and replacing these products, that's something that we're looking at; making sure that we integrate the EUM with it. It's not something we've done yet.

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it_user560526 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It works great, especially if you don't have anything that's currently doing that type of monitoring. It works great for doing what you need, when you want to track response times and error rates; and especially being able to dig down to individual transactions and see the actual call methods. That's amazing when you’re trying to debug issues and figure out what's causing slowness. So, we love it. It works well.

We’re not using any other AppDynamics products; just the APM right now. We've looked into a few of the other products, but the way our environment is laid out, it doesn't really make financial sense for the time being.

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it_user560421 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Systems Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

It looks very powerful, and it looks like you really need to spend some time with it to get to know it, so don't just expect results right out of the box. Spend some time with it and get to know how to use it.

I believe we are using APM with AppDynamics reporting service.
My rating reflects the fact that I'm kind of a tough sell, I guess.

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it_user560490 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Platform Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

When choosing a vendor to work with, I want to know how truthful is he with me when he's talking. I don't want him to be a sales guy coming up and trying to sell me something. He should be honest in his opinion. He should be truthful when he says that, "yes this tool will solve your problem". I don't want a person who comes and says that AppDynamics is the gold and he will solve world hunger and poverty. I don't want to hear that. Tell me the benefits, tell me the drawbacks, and leave it up to me to decide whether these drawbacks are something that I can live with or not.

That's one. Second, I would like my partner to understand that he should understand our environment first. He should not come on day one and say, "here I am, I have 20 years of experience, I will solve your problem". 20 years, yes you do have, but you have an [outer world experience, not with my company. So come sit here for seven days and look into the environment. I will get you the meetings that you need, but first understand us and then give me a pitch. So I want him to be careful with what he wants to say; don't jump the gun.

Third, help with the technical aspects. I've faced a lot of problems with other tools. Everyone says that, "yes, I am the champion, I can solve the problem", and I don't want to hear that. Tell me how much you know, as simple as that. I'm learning, you are learning, everyone keeps on learning everyday. So just put how much you know on the table. I need that honest opinion, honest answer, from my vendor or my partner. If you keep bluffing me, or you keep making me a fool, that will last for a week, a month, or a year, but not more than that.

With the limited features that we have used so far, I would rate APM an 8/10. The reason I don't want to rate them a 10 is that I've not used the tool to full capacity. So far, I have no issues. It has all the features that I need. But, there are some areas that they are lacking. If I have to get into technical details, I would say more on the JBoss, web server side, they are lacking some functionality.

I will definitely recommend AppDynamics. Look into APM and see if it fits in your environment. We know there are many APM software competitors. Go for it and at least give a try. Set it up to use in your environment. If you don't have a server, AppDynamics has a SaaS portal, and they can immediately install one controller for you. I would recommend that you understand the difficult areas you have in your environment. Just because it's a fancy tool, don't go for it.

Understand the difficult areas. Where are the areas that you get the most hit from the customers? It can be customer service complaining that your websites are slow. But that's a very subjective statement. What does the slow mean? So try to understand those areas. If you have more clarity, you can talk more intelligently to the AppDynamics team. But give it a try.

View full review »
it_user560514 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Applications Sr. Software Developer/Project Leader at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Do it right from the beginning. Do a lot of planning. Everything flows from getting it setup correctly originally. And in a lot of ways, if you go and change something, if you need to kind of go back and re-do some things, you're going lose all your data historically. So do it right from the beginning.

I give APM an 8/10 because nothing's perfect. There are times where we had a couple of outages over the past couple of weeks. Just an hour or two where it was not available. We had to increase memory twice on the database monitoring agent. And when that dies, it doesn't respond. It doesn't report and it doesn't notify. So we go in a week later, look at our database information, and just don't have a week's worth of data. And that's an artifact of Java taking way too much memory. It's just little things. Nothing major.

View full review »
it_user560388 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Atg Developer at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Start digging and do it. There are a lot of things that initially we didn't know. So once I started digging into it, I found out more about it. They have good webcast sessions on the site, so go to the sessions and reach out to them. It's as simple as that. Their support response is very good. So they will let you know right of the end.

View full review »
it_user121725 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Application Support Specialist - ITIL® at AsianLogic

Scale the product properly within your system’s architecture to get better results in order to analyze your app's performance properly.

View full review »
MM
Senior Performance Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

View full review »
AY
Sr Technical Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

It is a very much recommended tool. It is a really good and helpful tool for productivity.

I would rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten. I love this tool, and I don't have any issues with this tool.

View full review »
CC
Director at a program development consultancy with 51-200 employees

AppDynamics provides a complete online document. Everyone can learn by him/herself through the instructions provided in that document.

View full review »
it_user269436 - PeerSpot reviewer
Quality Assurance Expert at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

The simplicity of usage implies that you need not get a decent course on how to use this product. But if you go to a course, you can learn different approaches and you can get into contact with people to whom you might ask questions at a later time.

View full review »
it_user560511 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Support Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I definitely recommend it. When I was at my previous company I had no idea about AppDynamics. I got introduced to it when I came to my current company and I realized that this could solve so many problems.

The reason why I have not rated the product higher is mostly not a reflection on APM. It's just that I am new and I'm still trying to figure things out. The documentation is pretty good. I get to learn a lot from that. Still, I think it can improve a bit more when I have to find answers. There is the AppDynamics community. You can ask questions on that, but there have been times when I haven't got answers to my questions or my ticket is still pending. They are responding, and it's not like they don't help. Sometimes, I just feel that it could have been better. There have been some answers that I have been looking for and I haven't gotten for quite a long time. That's one reason.

I’m only using APM at this time. I’m not using any other AppDynamics product.

View full review »
it_user560439 - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Test Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Adoption: It's hard to do with just one person driving it. If you have that adoption, the team doing it, that definitely makes it a lot easier. Start on a couple small things. Work your way up. Don't try to do one "big bang" and get it all in there. At least for us, that's the way it's worked well.

In general, when I’m looking to work with a vendor, the most important criteria are definitely reliability, where they sit in the industry, responsiveness. They have to be responsive. They have to be cutting edge. Those are basically the main points.

As far as using other AppDynamics solutions, we started to get into the database monitoring side, so we can see some query performance, and not have to bug the DBAs; we can look at that ourselves. We’re enjoying that.

View full review »
it_user560394 - PeerSpot reviewer
Web Engineer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

My advice is just to play with it. It has so many dashboards and it's very intuitive and easy to understand. The visualization is also very good.

Regarding choosing a vendor, I think the most important thing is that they keep updating and improving the product. They also need to have great customer support. We want to have very precise data regarding real time data on the server.

View full review »
it_user521979 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead | Manager,Software Engineering at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Go through the features it has; it has many of them. If you just buy it and use it for small things, it's not worth it. It has many features and capabilities; it is capable of doing many things. Go through the features in detail, or even go through training to get an idea of what it can do. It's a big product.

View full review »
it_user560448 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Performance Management Intern at Choice Hotels International

I would recommend others who are looking out for a similar solution to try this product. However, it does depend on each business individually and what suits its needs; so I won’t be able to get into any specifics.

I personally don’t use any other solution besides APM but there are people on my team using End User Monitoring.

There's always room for improvement in this product.

View full review »
it_user534495 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Performance Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

is more effective in terms of business insights- Connect the dots between application performance and business outcomes with custom dashboards.

Get visibility into the business impact of customer experience quality

Breaks the Silos and create the common language IT and the business.

Can see business results in real-time

View full review »
it_user126369 - PeerSpot reviewer
Gateway Systems Administrator with 51-200 employees
AppDynamics does exactly what it says it can do. It's well readable and easy to navigate. Configuration and changing things around is easy enough. View full review »
it_user112605 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer with 51-200 employees
AppDynamics has a lot of information it can give you. Be sure to take the time and understand all the data. There may be critical information that can help improve your application performance. View full review »
it_user112179 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Software Developer with 501-1,000 employees
Learn as much as you can about it. It can do more than you think. Make use of the enthusiasm of the AppDynamics employees to help you learn. View full review »
ES
Regional Director (CEER) at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

View full review »
RY
DevOps Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would definitely recommend AppDynamics.

View full review »
SS
Principal Engineer at Wyndham Hotel Group

It provides all the features that we need for on-premise applications.

The product integrates with all of our applications, because it has be deployed on all the servers so it can collect data.

AWS has not provided us the code. They will be moving it to their AWS services later. Right now, it is providing us a framework, like with Java. The AWS agents are able to capture all the information related at the code label, which is a benefit for us.

Right now, this tool is very good for on-premise applications, but there might be an issue with cloud applications.

View full review »
it_user560535 - PeerSpot reviewer
Programmer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

My criteria when choosing a vendor would be the reputation behind them, the product they bring to the table, and of course the pricing. I wasn't involved in selecting AppDynamics but I know that these criteria always play a role in everything.

I would recommend AppDynamics to my colleagues, because the solution works. It really comes down to whether or not the price point works for them.

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it_user560481 - PeerSpot reviewer
DB Admin at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's very easy. It's been easy. The dashboard that comes automatically, the mapping with all the services, the externals; those are all pretty good.

I do not use any other AppDynamics solution.

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it_user17262 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Development Mansger at Garmin

Get your developers trained as soon as possible. They're going to be the ones who need to utilize it.

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RS
IT Executive at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

If you are managing more than 1,000 servers, it is good to purchase the AppDynamics tool. From the monitoring perspective, it is a very good tool.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

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VK
Associate QA Manager at Xcel Serv Solution

I rate AppDynamics five out of 10. 

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it_user560403 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Architect at T2 systems

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.

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it_user560502 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

I want a vendor to be honest. I've never been involved in those kind of conversations. But I'd expect them to tell me what exactly it does and what it exactly doesn't do. Nobody expects a product to be perfect. Nobody expects the product should have every single bell and whistle. But if you sell it that way, you're going to be disappointed. I'd rather know that upfront. And probably setup a roadmap and say, look, we are getting these features in the pipeline, which is a much more realistic conversation.

My advice is that just before you turn on APM, think about what's important to you. Just don't go ballistic on putting everything under the sun under the AppDynamics. The danger of doing so, the side effect of that is you're looking at way too much information and it gets foggy. Start with a subset that is critical to your business. Understand it from a customer perspective. Don't look at it from an operational perspective. Where do the customers feel the pain the most? Start with that and then start instrumenting those. Try and get as specific as possible because that way, whatever you're looking for in APM is important to you. If I'm an operations person and I'm dealing with hundreds of incidents every day, I'd like to see an incident that I'm absolutely working on. So try and reduce the noise ratio as much as possible. And try and look at the important ones that you should be straight away looking into and action on. I think that's probably the key advice that I would give anybody who wants to implement not just AppDynamics, but any APM into their products.

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it_user560376 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user76911 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Account Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Just go for it.

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it_user516924 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Operations Systems Admininistrator III at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Take the time to plan what exactly it is you are looking to get out of the software; it will pay dividends after implementation.

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it_user257253 - PeerSpot reviewer
Spanish Language Specialist at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user560364 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Support Analyst III/ Enterprise Monitoring at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user112185 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Read up on documentation, and play around with the config settings, there is a vast wealth of information that can be retrieved if you know how to look for it.

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it_user112596 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Support Engineer with 51-200 employees

I rate the AppDynamics Pro usability, stability and customer experience as the best. This solution is very advanced and they keep on improving the features that make it great. Once you use AppDynamics it feels like you were standing in the dark before. Implementing it is a breeze even if you never used it before, and out of the box it gives you so much useful information that you only need to fine-tune it. I never heard of any other product that is up and running this fast.

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it_user305178 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Consultant at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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GH
Solutions Architect and Community Leader at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Just try it. AppDynamics has a free, 14-day trial. If you don't have the needed staff or knowledge, talk to one of AppDynamics’ partners.

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it_user877233 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT FrontOffice & QA Manager at VENCA

This tool is so good to work with.

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it_user532590 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Performance Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Take some time to train technicians and development personal who will use the tool. Make sure you design the correct Business Applications and Business Transactions.

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it_user324879 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Architect-Product Development with 5,001-10,000 employees

This is purely an application instrumentation and monitoring tool with good features for business analytics.

It is probably more integrated and works well with Java application, as some features for .NET don't work.

Host the AppDynamics controller on a Linux machine with a medium or high profile. A Windows server machine would show symptoms of disliking it within 2 to 3 weeks of setup.

It is not comparable with infrastructure tools. The plug-in available to track infrastructure-related activities are not stable and not robust.

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AK
Presales Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

AppDynamics is a good product and I totally recommend it. Once you feel that you have the full journey for your end-users and you are tracking them, it's awesome. Overall, I am very happy with this product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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it_user509022 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Performance Engineer Consultant with 501-1,000 employees

Properly identify your needs, and allocate the required resources. Otherwise, you might face some scalability issues.

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it_user560475 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Configuration Management Specialist at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would recommend to my colleagues that they start using it as soon as possible for their applications.

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it_user112602 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer with 51-200 employees
Sizing of the product in term of the server to run it or architecture is the secret to success. View full review »
Buyer's Guide
AppDynamics
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about AppDynamics. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.