AppDynamics Server Monitoring Reviews

It’s great that APM monitors in real-time. When we have an issue, we find out fairly quickly if there's a problem with our hardware.

For example, we were in crisis calls all last week. So, that's the first tool we look at to see what's going on and where the problem is. Then we start to troubleshoot from that point on.

One of the big things was the license management. It was just something I've been asking for over a long time, because we have several groups that use it so it get very clustered. The new feature with license management coming out, I've been waiting for it. That's going to be great for us. Should help us with a lot of problems.

We have had some stability issues for a few sites. I'm on the supply chain side so there have been a few. At distribution centers, we've had a few issues, but not as a whole. Only for a few pieces here and there we do.

We solve these by just looking at our code, see if the hardware is kind of lined up to see if it's a hardware issue or if it's networking. We look at the bigger picture basically.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have used technical support a few times. They have been great. Last time we had to actually have them join our crisis call and they were able to join within the next 5 minutes, which was great.

We had several tools, but we never used them properly. Mainly because we had five different tools and were working five different things. We were trying to bring everything together, is basically where I think everybody came together with that balance.

Initial setup was very straightforward. The documentation is very clear. It's a matter of reading through it, but it's very straightforward.

I don't have the names on top of my head, but we looked at several other companies. I wasn't the one who made the decision, but again, mainly because the multiple pieces that you can look at with AppDynamics, that's what helped us the most.

When looking at a vendor, first of course is money and the features to see how valuable it's going to be. Our main requirement is, is it going to actually get us some revenue? The value of it versus the cost. That's the main thing.

I would give AppDynamics an 8/10. I guess we're not using it fully to what it's capable of and that's mainly on us. We're working with AppDynamics support to take it to the next step; actually properly fully using all aspects of it. That includes the server, utility, the infrastructure presets coming out, and basically using it for what it's supposed to be and not parts of it. Our rating is mainly because of us.

I would advise others to automate early on. Streamline a lot of it before getting started. That's going to save you a lot of time later on if you have thousands of JVMs running.

I have a B2B eCommerce website and we have some business transactions. For that, we have configured the business transactions in AppDynamics. Apart from that, we have a list of servers that we have configured in AppDynamics, to send us some sort of alert if there's something bad or the servers are in disguise or something.  

First, we use it to handle the business transactions alerting, and then the servers alerting. And second, we use it to create the dashboard so that we can get real-time updates on how the system is performing at around runtime.

I like Business iQ the most, so far. It has great analytics configurations and I can get real-time updates. We have eCommerce releases every week. So the one use case that I use Business iQ is to compare before and after release performance using AppDynamics.

In terms of improvement, we have experienced bugs. I think the AppDynamics team is already aware of that and we follow up with them. They said that in the next release, they're going to cater to all those bugs.

I have been using AppDynamics for two years. 

I find it pretty comfortable and pretty stable. Obviously, there are always some sort of bugs that any product needs to handle, but otherwise, it is quite stable.

We have ten to fifteen employees who manage this solution.

Since we are an eCommerce B2B website and we do need the scalability at times, to scale down or scale up, AppDynamics really does not create trouble for us in such scalability possibilities. It's not that difficult in terms of scalability.

We use it daily. Since we are on eCommerce products and support roles, we need to check the performance of the website on a daily basis, even on an hourly basis.

I am quite satisfied with their support. Things are in shape. Things are good.

We use AppDynamics and Pingdom but then we are using both of the software to cater to different purposes. I really don't want to compare those two products, because those are serving different functionalities for us. They are both NPM, network performance monitoring systems, but then they are totally different from each other, and they serve different purposes.

It is easy to set up. We got help from AppDynamics, they initially helped us set up the configuration, and then we took it forward from there.

The entire setup has been completed for my website in a week.

I would advise that instead of generic metric business usage of this, instead, use a generic metric business transaction configuration, and go for the Business iQ part of AppDynamics. It's really powerful and it is in real-time. It gives output on real-time things.

I would recommend AppDynamics. It's a very powerful tool for any organization to implement.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. The one thing that I find it difficult in using AppDynamics is, for any new user, it's not easy for him or her to configure the transactions in AppDynamics because the UI is pretty complex. The configuration is pretty complex for a new, fresh user. They can make the UI simpler, that'll be very helpful for anyone to configure their website in AppDynamics.

We use the product to monitor servers and CPUs and the amount of storage through VPN connection for 55 branches of our customers distributed across countries.

The platform is reliable in identifying the core system issues. It is easy to use with a simple GUI and has efficient CPU monitoring features.

The product’s dashboard could be more easy to implement.

We have been using AppDynamics Server Monitoring for six months.

It is a stable product.

We have six AppDynamics Server Monitoring users across different countries. It is a scalable product.

I encountered system issues regarding integration between AppDynamics Server Monitoring and cloud for the initial setup. It took us 48 hours to complete. It is easy to maintain as it is a software-as-a-service tool.

The project manager from the company we purchased, AppDynamics Server Monitoring, helps our team implement the product.

The product generates a return on investment for us. It was the right decision taken at the right time to implement it.

I advise others to work with AppDynamics Server Monitoring. I rate it an eight out of ten.

Performance is the most valuable feature, especially the tag and follow, which has to do with multiple JVMs and diaries. Also, getting to know when you hop into different segments and trying to figure out where this is actually happening, and then that too, if it is happening to the backend. That is the key and that helps.

Server Monitoring has saved us time. We have issues that previously took days to solve, become resolved quickly. Once you know what's your normal, you know your anomaly. That's the key.

We have our own challenges because the amount of JVMs we are dealing with. But still, this is really helpful in trying to analyze a lot of our issues with certain types of JVMs. Not necessarily out-of-memory errors, but a few memory leaks, and a few applications that had third party JVMs that got leaked. Had I not known this, it would have taken a long time to solve these issues. There are ways to find them, but it takes more time.

One area that needs improvement is application integration. They do have it now, but that has to be improved. What happens is, right now, we cannot deep-dive into it. Four years back, I requested application integration. It took four years get it. At least it is there. The thing is that it has to improve. That's it.

Stability is good. I mean, we had issues. I have been using APM for four years, so I know where it was, and now where I am I know, so I'm so happy with it. It's much improved.

Scalability, it's good. It has challenges too, because I'm dealing with a very large setup. Scalability is definitely there, but now with the new features that are coming out, with a backend, it definitely will be better.

I am happy with technical support.

There were initial setup issues on both sides. I don't want to complain and it's not fair to do that, but now, if you look at it, it's reasonably stable, but every upgrade is a challenge. I mean, software is like that. Especially with the amount of changes they are making. The only thing about AppDynamics is they release quickly. Hopefully, they know you cannot keep up with this pace. A big enterprise, cannot handle that many releases like that. It requires a lot of coordination to upgrade to a new release.

And the biggest thing I wanted them to do, is to not require agent upgrades. That means every agent must be recycled. Someday they will push the agent from the controller with automatic upgrades. Something has to happen like that. Hopefully that will happen. That is my next ticket.

Use it, and when you use it, use it regularly. If not, don't use it at all. You won't get the benefit unless you use it properly on a regular basis, so you know what normal looks like. You need to know how this thing looks, so that you know your anomalies and can resolve issues quicker.

It's real time; you get data back as quick as the tool can process it. It's a very good tool for real time getting to things quick and fixing them.

Our mean time to resolution has been reduced drastically, I think, within the last year. I've only been there like six months, but I've heard since they got this application, that things have really gotten a lot better.

We have hundreds of services and multiple shared health rules for alerting for each of them, AppD has no easy way to pull up all the health rules for a particular service to send off the each app owner to validate alerting thresholds.

AppD can currently extract all the health rules into one XML file but dissecting that into something easy for an app owner to review would be very time intensive.

I think we've had a few blips but it’s been fairly stable.

It has scaled well. We're growing really, really big time this year. It's managing the new inputs.

Set up your processes first and make sure everybody knows what they're doing. I recommend basic training of what it looks like.

I think the big thing is, if you're alerting on something, you want somebody to fix it right away. If you don't have a plan in place there, then everything else is kind of meaningless; for example, if you only see it an hour later.

It's the best thing out there. Something can always be better; nothing's perfect.

Our company uses the solution to track abnormalities and check connections for critical applications.

We had the solution on-premises but recently moved it to the SaaS platform. 

The solution offers great visibility that allows you to track where errors originated. 

The solution's features could be more mobile friendly.

I have been using the solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is very scalable. 

I have used technical support and rate it an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The setup was easy. 

It is difficult to quantify the amount of time needed for setup because ours depended on the development team's plans. 

We implemented the solution in-house. 

Although the solution is expensive, the ROI makes it more cost effective. 

The solution has a high cost. 

I recommend the solution because it is good for observability and drilling down to find the cause of issues. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. My rating would go up if the solution were more mobile friendly and cost effective. 

We use the on-premise deployment model of this solution. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for monitoring our critical applications. The automated data dynamics enables us to monitor the performance of an application and unknowns.

A way that it has improved my organization is from its notifications. We can get notified on our mobile app. We get notified spontaneously for mission-critical applications. It notifies us that the incident is going to happen in the near future, it's a predictive notification. The notifications have been on target for us and have improved my organization. 

The auto-discovery of the logs is the most valuable feature. It requires minimal configuration, we just need to set up on once and it automatically detects through the code. 

The solution should be coupled with its own analytic elastic search analytic model. It should push that data to other data models so the organization does not have to spend separately or to spend more on the analytics part. If a bank or any organization has its own dashboarding solution it should be able to push the data to that dashboarding solution. This is not available right now.

In the next release, I would like to see the configuration of the data and more support for new applications. It should support new languages.

I have been using AppDynamics for two years.

It's a fairly stable product and I would say that they are longer lived than new applications that have been on boarded. 

Our entire command center is using this solution which is around 15 to 20 users.

Their technical support isn't great. The geographical distance and the response time it takes to respond to emails from the technical team is very slow. 

For the setup, you need a good understanding of the solution and how it works so I would say it's not that simple. It's not that complex either but if you have the right people in place, it should have a medium level of complexity. For banks, it can be a little more complex because it needs to comply with a lot of security guidelines. If you're not in a banking environment, it should be more straightforward.

The setup took us around two to three weeks. 

We consulted directly with AppDynamics for the implementation. The experience was good but the geographical distance was always an issue because we don't have local support available in the area. Otherwise, when the people were on the floor it was okay but when the people were not on the floor then definitely there were some problems there. 

We have definitely seen an ROI. If you have a critical application that needs to be monitored you will see your indirect ROI within two to three years and you'll have the happy customers, not usual complaints.

You don't have to pay. You only pay for the implementation partners if you choose to get help. 

I would say be cautious on the licensing model. You should understand your exact needs. If your needs are in line with what this solution offers then I would genuinely recommend going for this solution, otherwise, if not, it might be too costly. 

I think from the product perspective it's fine but on the implementation descriptions there are a lot of issues. It's challenging without support. If someone is looking into it they need to look for any local organization partners in their area.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

We use AppDynmaics Server Monitoring to monitor and gain insight into what is happening in our infrastructure.

This solution gives us quite good insights that we might otherwise overlook, or it might take a really long time to debug those issues. In our environment, we don't have visibility across multiple systems. They are all independently managed by different teams and it takes a very long time to contact each team, then get details about each different layer of the architecture. With AppDynamics, we have application transaction monitoring and database monitoring, which are quite good features.

The user interface is quite good and it is easy to navigate.

The insights and metrics that the system provides are very useful.

I would like the ability to choose from some pre-defined dashboards and reports because as it is now, you have to define them separately for each implementation.

The configuration of user monitoring is a bit complex and should be made easier.

In our virtualized environment, we have visibility only up to the database. It would be helpful if we had more visibility beyond this point.

We have been using this product for almost six months.

This solution is quite stable.

In terms of scalability, it is quite easy to expand.

We have more than 150 servers that we are monitoring right now. There are three teams including development, operations, and implementation, and between them, we have more than 100 people using it.

The technical support is quite good.

This is the first enterprise-level tool that we have implemented for this purpose. Prior to AppDynamics, different departments and different teams were using other products for monitoring.

The initial set up is quite easy. It requires the deployment of a monitoring agent and it can be done in a couple of minutes.

My understanding is that the price of this solution is quite high, compared to other products. As such, pricing may be a concern for smaller organizations.

This is a good product and one that I definitely recommend.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.