We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pricing and Cost Advice
"The product’s licencing policy is competitive. However, properly identify and size your needs to get the best rate."
"As a technical person, and as an application development team, they all understand that this is the right tool for us. But when it comes to budget and financial matters, it takes days and weeks to convince upper management to buy this tool. So they should do something more on licensing costs."
"It is not a cheap tool, but you also save in manpower to setup because it is easy and fast. At the end of the day, I think the revenue is much better.
BUT, they have an awful co-term mode of licensing."
"It could be cheaper. It's a little cost prohibitive. There are so many features that also show a lot of value, but it’s not always easy to justify the cost."
"Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools."
"It would be better if there were more solutions incorporated into the base price. "
"The way it is structured in terms of price could be better. You pay for individual modules and that adds on to the cost, which detracts you from implementing those modules and slows you down."
"Take into consideration what you get for specific pricing models and how much it costs to add on things you may need later."
Top Answer:There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra… more »
Top Answer:Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with… more »
What are the main differentiators of your solution?
AppDynamics automatically discovers and monitors every dependency and business transaction out of the box (no manual instrumentation required). AppDynamics proprietary Dynamic Baselining takes seasonality of your application into account and proactively alerts you on every slow transaction (not just the slowest) and does not require the disabling of monitoring functionality as a compromise to limit overhead. AppDynamics allows you to isolate and resolve issues all from one tightly integrated platform rather than stitched together products.
What are the most popular 3rd party integrations with your solution?
With AppDynamics companies have the ability to launch agents via an on-premises install or SaaS deployment,
depending on security and compliance needs.
Can be deployed on AWS
As a premier partner within the AWS Marketplace, AppDynamics provides end-to-end monitoring of cloud native
applications on AWS, real-time performance monitoring across on-premises and AWS environments and helps
accelerate and validate cloud migration.
Can be deployed on Azure
AppDynamics supports the following environments on Microsoft Azure: Azure Cloud Services (PaaS)(Including web
and worker roles),Virtual Machines (IaaS), Remote Service Detection (Microsoft Azure Service Bus),Microsoft
Azure Queue Microsoft Azure Remote Services (Azure Blob), Azure Queue (Microsoft Service Bus), Data Storage,
Microsoft Azure Blob Storage.
Can be deployed in a private cloud
AppDynamics can monitor applications in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.
Monitor on-premise applications in virtualized environments
AppDynamics can monitor applications in on-premises environments in virtualized environments. You simply need to
have access to place an agent on the VM, and have external access to the AppDynamics Controller.
Monitor applications running on AWS and Azure
AppDynamics has partnerships with both AWS and Azure. You can monitor applications running in either environment
and gather statistics specific to those environments.
Monitor applications running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Redhat OpenShift and Heroku
AppDynamics supports applications running on all major PAAS providers. For popular platforms like Pivotal we
have a tight integration providing end users with visibility and control into an application infrastructure.
Configuration and Infrastructure
Configuration and management through a single, web-based user interface
AppDynamics can be implemented and configured quickly and simply and provides visibility into your entire
application topology from a single intuitive web-based UI.
Automatically create a visualization of the entire application topology with all components.
The technology automatically determines what details should be shown and what details should be hidden as you
zoom in and out on application flow map. The flow map allows users to visualize your entire web scale
application. Users can also zoom in on any node for more details about the health of the associated components
along with information useful for troubleshooting problems.
Automatically discover business transactions
AppDynamics agents will automatically discover and identify the methods, classes or web services that service
transaction entry points. Requests that follow similar code paths are categorized as instances of a single
business transaction.
Automatically discover standard back end systems (database, web services, SAP etc.)
Agent automatically discover common types of remote services as backend systems based on the exit point.
Discover and display non-standard backend systems through point-and-click configuration
If AppDynamics doesn't automatically detect the backend, you can manually define a custom match rule to discover
specific backends in your environment.
Automatically baseline every component within the business transaction
Our agents watch every line of code and monitor application traffic patterns to update dynamic baselines of
acceptable performance. When transactions experience slowdowns, Appdynamics can automatically trigger diagnostic
actions based on health rules.
Can be deployed in a multi-tenant environment
Yes. Clients can also switch from a single-tenancy to a multi-tenancy mode. However switching from a
multi-tenancy to a single-tenancy is not supported.
Application Visibility and Control
Provide correlated views of distributed business transactions between tiers/services
AppDynamics provides visibility into the transaction logs that can be correlated to specific business
transaction requests. Log correlation visibility requires a license for both Transaction Analytics and Log
Analytics
Automatically baseline every component within the Business Transaction
The AppDynamics platform automatically calculates dynamic baselines for your metrics, defining what is "normal"
for each metric based on actual usage.
Provide code level diagnostics (class and method-level visibility) of business transactions
AppDynamics offers code-level diagnostics and end-to-end visibility.
Monitor JVM health information (heap, GC, generational spaces, etc.)
In addition to monitoring JVM head information you can also can set up health rules based on JVM or JMX
metrics.
Monitor CPU utilization, OS memory usage, disk I/O, network I/O, other hardware metrics
Machine agents can monitor and report on memory metrics, disck and paetition metrics, volume metrics, load
metrics, machine metrics, network metrics, process metrics, service avaiablitity metrics, disk usage metrics
free/used memory metrics and viewing hardware metrics, amongst other things.
Report application errors and exceptions
The Controller UI presents information on errors and exceptions in various places in the UI, including in
transaction snapshots, metrics, and dashboards
Automatically monitor entire call stack when application problems occur
AppDynamics automatically collects full call stack traces for slow transactions, stalls and errors, allowing you
to drill down to the class and method level in your production environment
Does not disable monitoring functionality as a compromise to limit product overhead
By default, AppDynamics monitors your production applications for maximum visibility with the least operational
overhead. In non-production environments where agent overhead is not an issue, you can enable development mode
in AppDynamics. Development mode removes overhead-related restrictions so agents can collect more diagnostic
data.
Historical performance monitoring and trending
Analyze and alert based on storage performance trends over time, and use this information to proactively tune
performance to improve resource efficiency and optimize the end-user experience.
Full view of infrastructure details without leaving the context of business transactions
Infrastructure Visibility provides end-to-end visibility into the hardware and networks on which your
applications run. You can use Infrastructure Visibility to identify and troubleshoot problems that affect
application performance such as server failures, JVM crashes, and hardware resource utilization. When you add
End-User Monitoring to Application Performance Management, you can correlate business transaction performance to
the user experience for those transactions
Single UI for server and application monitoring
Regardless of how complex your application may be, AppDynamics allows you to monitor everything from a single
UI
Alert on deviation from baseline
"AppDynamics provides default health rules for business transaction performance:
Business Transaction response time is much higher than normal
Business Transaction error rate is much higher than normal"
Mean Time To Repair
Identify slow and stalled business transactions without manual intervention
You may receive a notification email or SMS based on a health rule violation or see performance indicators in
flow maps or transaction scorecards.
Count, measure and score every transaction
The business transaction list contains a high level look at the performance of the business application by
transaction. You can click on a particular business transaction to access additional information on the business
transaction, such as information on slow performing instances of this transaction, errors, and the transaction
analysis view.
Identify error business transactions without manual intervention
AppDynamics will automatically detect application errors for each business transaction.
Identify slow SQL queries without manual intervention
You can monitor all your database platforms such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, SQL Server,etc and view all that
your end users perform from the browser to the database
Identify slow backend systems or external services without manual intervention
AppDynamics automatically detects backend services and external calls. These can be seen in the application
flowmap, transaction snapshots, and an individual component showing all remote services.
Automatically discover code deadlocks
By default the agent detects code deadlocks. You can find deadlocks and see their details using the Events list
or the REST API.
Provide quick cross launching into problem areas within the UI through hyperlinked alerts
Within AppDynamics, you have the ability to set up custom health rules and actions. By doing this, you can be
alerted when errors or latency is experienced in the application. Through a number of actions, you can be
alerted with a hyperlink and jump straight to the issue through the link.
Automatically send email containing hyperlink to identified problem
In AppDynamics you can set up rules to automatically send alerts to a number of email
Automatic analysis of end-to-end APM data to provide root cause analysis
AppDynamics automatically detects transactions and the performance of those through our automatic dynamic
baseline. From there, root cause analysis is performed and captured in the Transaction Snapshots for you to
diagnose.
Business Transactions
Automatically discover business transactions
AppDynamics agents watch every line of code and monitor application traffic patterns to update dynamic baselines
of acceptable performance. When transactions experience slowdowns, Appdynamics can automatically trigger
diagnostic actions based on health rules.
Automatically learn and baseline performance of discovered business transactions
The dynamic baseline will automatically discover the performance of each transaction.
Automatically count, measure and score every transaction
AppDynamics automatically counts, measures, and scores each transaction that passes through the application
server by performing byte-code instrumentation.
Discover synchronous, asynchronous and multi-threaded business transactions
AppDynamics supports the discovery of syncronous, asyncronous, and multi-threaded transactions with our business
transaction discovery.
Business Metrics
Provide visibility into the impact of outages on business metrics
When you set up data collectors, you are able to pull out business data and report and alert of them. With our
analyics, you can extend the visibility by running queries against all the data that is collected.
Capture business metrics (e.g. revenue, orders) from applications and background jobs
When you set up data collectors, you are able to pull out business data and report and alert of them. With our
analytics, you can extend the visibility by running queries against all the data that is collected.
Enables creation of custom dashboards for business metrics and application behavior
AppDynamics has the ability to create custom dashboards to represent business and transaction data.
Out of the box reports on business transaction summary and trends
AppDynamics provides out of the box reports for transaction and application data. These can be generated on a
schedule or on demand.
Automatically correlate business transactions with environment monitoring (OS, JMX, etc.)
AppDynamics automatically correlates business transaction data with the server and infrastructure data.
Usability
Browser-based web client
The AppDynamics UI is an HTML 5-based browser application
Automatic and dynamic baselining of all metrics to reduce false alarms
AppDynamics automatically calculates what constitutes the baseline for your application environment,
that is, the prevailing performance characteristics for your environment. Once it calculates the
baselines, AppDynamics can detect conditions that may be considered anomalies for your application.
Include an online virtual collaboration space as a virtual "war room"
Users can access war room creation within the troubleshoot navigation menu. Other widgets, and templates
are also available.
Visualize multiple applications and the connectivity / dependencies between them
AppDynamics provides cross-app correlation to show transaction flow between multiple AppDynamics
applications.
Enable sharing of analysis / visualizations without having to export data from the UI
There are a few ways to share data without having to export the data. One is to create a war room and
discuss the issues between multiple people within the UI. Also, with Role Based Access Control, every
user should have specific access into AppDynamics. You can share links to those that have a login, and
the exact screen is loaded for the user.
Group transactions using a Session ID and display transactions in order of execution
You can sort transactions by session ID and transaction time among many other fields.
Drill down from business transaction to correlated log file entries in single platform
AppDynamics provides a way to correlate Business Transactions to associated Log entries.
Historical Trending
Trending with metric persistence to do historical analysis and compare to baselines
In AppDynamics, you can compare time frames or releases to understand performance changes over time. Also
through dashboard creation, you can visualize performance trends in the baselines over time.
The ability to view and drill into Flow Map for extended periods up to 1 year
You can access AppDynamics performance data for up to a year in time.
The ability to compare Flow Maps from different time frames for up to 2 years
Up to 1 year
Support for Agile
Dynamic instrumentation of the application
When you instrument AppDynamics agents, the flowmap and data is automatically created and captured. As you scale
your application up and down, AppDynamics will dynamically pick up the changes and present them in the UI.
No need to reconfigure agent instrumentation when new app releases are deployed
A user would only need to reconfigure an agent if they switched programming languages.
Automatically pick up application configuration changes as a result of agile releases
Yes. The flow map visualizations allow teams to see the differences in transaction flow between configurations,
releases, sprints, etc.
Regression analysis to compare and highlight app performance improvements
Yes. User can create application deployment events, which can be used for regression analysis, root cause
analysis and performance studies.
Provide capability to compare business transactions flows for different releases
Yes. In compare releases, you can compare performance for business transactions between two different time
frames.
Pre-Production Performance Tuning
Identify the longest running methods in business transactions
In the Transaction Snapshots, you will be presented with the longest running methods.
Determine the relationship between increased load and application response time
In the AppDynamics graphs and snapshots, you can determine the relationship between load and response time.
Identify worst backend calls (Database, Web Services, other backend) automatically
AppDynamics will automatically discover the backends in the environment as well as categorize the slowest and
most expensive calls.
Provide business transaction performance change from one code release to the next
Yes. In compare releases, you can compare performance for business transactions between two different time
frames.
Scalability and Infrastructure
Support at least 5000 agents on a single platform without requiring data federation
AppDynamics can scale to up to over 5000 agents to a single platform. You also have the ability to run the
controller on your premises or in the AppDynamics SaaS environment. If on-premises, you will have to size
accordingly.
Ability to support high availability APM infrastructure servers
AppDynmaics provides a high availability tool kit to support HA.
Has steady network traffic between agent and APM server regardless of transaction levels
The AppDynamics agents constantly communicate with the controller no matter how much load is on the
application.
Encrypt data transmissions end-to-end across the environment
AppDynamics encrypts data over HTTP(s) in transit but it does not encrpyt data at rest.
Agentless monitoring
AppDynamics Database Monitoring uses an agentless monitoring architecture that eliminates the management
overhead and risk associated with deploying agents to database servers.
Analytics
Single UI incorporating Analytics and APM modules
Yes
Analytics UI is web browser based with no locally installed client software
The AppDynamics UI is an HTML 5-based browser application
Analytics layer providing intelligence across data collected by APM modules
AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform allows you to monitor, automate and analyze your
application infrastructure.
Scalable repository capable of collecting and storing large volume of metrics/events
You can size your controller accordingly to fit the amount of volume you expect to collect. You also
have the ability to change the default values for storage time and data.
In context drill down between analytics data and APM data
From the searches that are mande in analytics, you are able to directly drill down into APM application
data.
Graphical query builder for ease of use and broad adoption
The entire AppDynamics platform is built for ease of use and broad adoption across the enterprise. In
our Analytics, there is a graphical query builder that enables you to build searches quickly and
easily.
Ability to adjust timeframe via click and drag on dashboard charts
You have the ability through a drop down to adjust the time frame back to a year or select a custom time
range.
Automated ranking (top N) of relevancy of every indexed field to current selection
By default, Appdynamics will categorize your transactions into different categories by response time,
errors, etc.
Configurable to collect not all, but specific desired transaction data/fields
AppDynamics has auto detection rules, however, you have the ability to change those rules or create
specific Custom Match Rules to discover transactions and data.
Alert off of metrics created in analytics based on search criteria
You can create a metric from an analytics search that uses count as the function in the SELECT clause
Analytics data collection does not require full call method stack data
Within the AppDynamics UI, you can create Data Collectors to pull out transaction data.
No code changes required to pull custom (non-native) metrics into data repository
C++ requires an SDK with a few lines of code
Data collected, stored and analyzed in near real time (i.e. not hours, days, or weeks later)
Organizations can see the business impact of performance issues and outages in real time, allowing them
to make important decisions and prioritize fixes on the fly, reducing the cost of performance incidents
to the business.
API to input custom metrics
The AppDynamics APIs let you extend and customize various aspects of the AppDynamics Application
Intelligence Platform
Search API
The AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform exposes various APIs for customizing and extending its
features. Some APIs include: Accounts API, Application Model API, Metric and Snapshot API, Alert and
Respond API , Configuration API, Configuration Export and Import API , Analytics Events API.
Ability to chart result set in custom dashboards
AppDynamics provides full support for creating custom dashboards. You can also import JSON templates and
create dashboards from that.
Granular role-based access control (RBAC)
Yes. App analytics provide RBAC to enable control and protection of your data.
Log Analytics
Ability to collect and store log files from monitored nodes
Log Analytics collects, correlates, and analyzes your machine data to give you comprehensive real-time insights
into operational performance.
Log file data through TCP
You have the ability to set up Log analytics by extracting analytics fields from syslog messages over TCP.
Auto-inject business transaction identifier for each log statement
Supported for two Java frameworks and requires a GUID configuration.
Ability to extract any field from log file for processing
Yes. The centralized log management UI enables you to configure your log files for processing
Root Cause Analysis
Historical performance monitoring and trending - retain 100% of historical data
Yes and by default, snapshots are retained for two weeks, and individual snapshots can be archived
Report top database activities (e.g. Top SQL, Top Users, Top Programs)
The information within the UI includes the metric identifier, date and time of the observation, along with other
key performance metrics
Collect and store all database wait events and correlate with SQL/Stored Procedures
With AppDynamics Database monitoring, you are able to see individual queries and any wait events that are
associated.
Collect and store SQL/Stored Procedure KPIs (CPU, Count, Reads/Writes)
AppDynamics DB monitoring will collect and store all SQL and stored procedures that hit the database and the
corresponding KPIs.
Collect and store database instance level statistics (table size, row count, indexes)
Within the Database monitoring module, you can view more administrative statistics such as error logs, user
information, tables, indexes, etc.
Collect and store database server/host KPIs (CPU, Memory…)
You can configure AppDynamics DB collectors to capture the host level metrics from where the DB instance is
running.
Ability to breakdown latency of stored procedure components
In the DB Monitoring, you will be able to identify the Stored Procedure and where latency may be coming from.
Collect SQL Explain and Execution plans
You have the ability to view and download the Explain and Execution plans from the UI.
Collect and store performance data on database objects (Schemas, tables, indexes)
With AppDynamics Database monitoring, AppDynamics will collect and store DB performance data and the database
object information.
Ability to collect and correlate deep-dive storage information
In AppDynamics Database module, you can view the storage information in the object browser.
Database Monitoring
Provide a real-time view of performance showing current database activity
With AppDynamics' database monitoring, you can monitor and trend key performance metrics such as resource
consumption, database objects, schema statistics and more, allowing you to proactively tune and fix issues
before they affect end users.
Provide a holistic view of all database performance through a multi-instance dashboard
AppDynamics supports DB2, Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, and SQL Server, all from one central installation of
AppDynamics. There's no need for separate database monitoring products for different databases -- with
AppDynamics you see it all in a single pane-of-glass.
Ability to send pro-active alerts based on health and performance of databases
Get alerts when database thresholds are violated
Static and dynamic alerting on collected database metrics
You have the option to set performance alerts against both a dynamic baseline or a static threshold.
Server Monitoring
Monitor Machine availability
The Standalone Machine Agent (Machine Agent) collects and displays CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network metrics on the
Node Dashboard Server tab of the UI
Monitor CPU usage
AppDynamics provides alerts on Business Transaction and infrastructure metrics. To ensure that you get alerts
when they really matter, these alerts must be based on algorithms that assess deviation from normal behavior.
Monitor Disk performance
An AppDynamics Machine Agent extension to alert if disk space crosses a warning or critical threshold. If a
threshold is crossed, the extension will create a custom event upon which you can trigger a Policy + Action to
get notified.
Monitor Volume usage
The following describes the columns available for the Server Volumes window.
Disk Usage %: The percentage of storage space in use.
I/O Utilization %: The percentage of time spent performing read and write operations.
I/O Rate read: The number of kilobytes per second of data read.
I/O Rate write: The number of kilobytes per second of data write.
I/O Operations per sec read: The number of read operations per second.
I/O Operations per sec write: The number of write operations per second.
I/O Wait Time read: The percentage of time the CPU was waiting for read operations to complete.
I/O Wait Time write: The percentage of time the CPU was waiting for write operations to complete.
Monitor Machine load
Reported for each machine
Monitor Memory
Reported for each hierarchical group.
Swap Free (MB): The total amount of free swap space.
Swap Total (MB): The total amount of allocated swap space.
Swap Used (MB): The amount of swap space used.
Swap Used %: The percentage of used swap space.
Swap Free %: Percentage of free swap space.
Monitor SWAP
Reported for each hierarchical group.
Swap Free (MB): The total amount of free swap space.
Swap Total (MB): The total amount of allocated swap space.
Swap Used (MB): The amount of swap space used.
Swap Used %: The percentage of used swap space.
Swap Free %: Percentage of free swap space.
Monitor Processes
Process Monitoring Extension gathers process metrics from a Linux/Windows/Solaris/AIX machine and reports to
AppDynamics Controller.
Monitor Network Adapter(s)
With AppDynamics Server visibility, you can monitor the throughput and packets or the individual network
interfaces.
Dynamic Baselining
AppDynamics automatically calculates what constitutes the baseline for your application environment, that is,
the prevailing performance characteristics for your environment. Once it calculates the baselines, AppDynamics
can detect conditions that may be considered anomalies for your application.
Synthetic page checker
AppDynamics offers synthetics which can run and monitor dynamics selenium scripts or a simple webpage. These
page checks can be set to run on a specific schedule or can be generated on demand.
Application Monitoring
Identify JVM memory leaks caused by leaky collections
Easily monitor the different memory pool sizes over time to understand just how close your application is to
getting a Java memory leak so you can better fine tune your JVM memory settings and prevent Java memory leaks.
AppDynamics automatically tracks the size and growth of Java Collections like HashMap, HashSets and
ConcurrentLinkedQueues over time as data in your application is requested and persisted within JVM memory.
AppDynamics uses intelligent algorithms to detect which Collections may potentially be leaking, and flags these
Collections automatically so users can drill-down, and inspect the contents, to better understand what objects
are being allocated, and how much memory these objects are consuming inside the Collection.
Enable tracking of object instantiations/destructions to troubleshoot JVM heap thrash
Allocation Tracking tracks all the code paths and those business transactions that are allocating instances of a
particular class.
PHP monitoring
Supported Frameworks for PHP Monitoring:
Drupal
WordPress
Magento
Symfony 1 + 2
Zend Framework 1 + 2
CakePHP
CodeIgniter
Moodle
SugarCRM
PHP CLI
Kohana
Joomla!
Laravel
Yii
Lightspeed
FuelPHP
Phalcon
.NET monitoring
AppDynamics Intelligence platform supports all common .NET monitoring frameworks including:
Microsoft Azure
WCF
MVC5
ASP.NET
IIS
Managed Standalone Applications
Managed Windows Services
Microsoft Sharepoint Server
ADO.NET
ODP.NET
Message Queues
Remoting Services
Async Monitoring
Node.js monitoring
Node.js monitoring frameworks including:
Express
Kraken.js
Restify
Hapi
Sails.js
FlatIron
Geddy
Koa
Derby
Mojito
Python monitoring
Monitor your Python applications in real time, drill down into call stacks, correlate transactions traversing
your distributed environment, and diagnose performance bottlenecks while running in a live production or
development environment.
Docker Monitoring
Integrated monitoring of Dockerized containers with application monitoring
You can use the Standalone Machine Agent to monitor application nodes running inside Docker containers and to
identify container issues that impact application performance
Automatic discovery of containers
Automatic discovery of entry and exit points of your microservice as service endpoints for focused microservices
monitoring
Support Docker attributes and perspectives
AppDynamics provides visibility into applications and business transactions made out of multiple smaller
decoupled (micro) services deployed in a Docker environment using the Docker monitoring solution. The
AppDynamics Docker Monitoring Extension monitors and reports on various metrics, such as: total number of
containers, running containers, images, CPU usage, memory usage, network traffic, etc. The AppDynamics Docker
monitoring extension gathers metrics from the Docker Remote API, either using Unix Socket or TCP giving you the
choice for data collection protocol.
Visualize distribution of containers over cluster hosts
AppDynamics provides visualization of the services path including traceability from end to end for each
interaction, from the user through all of the services calls, along with the infrastructure
Network Monitoring
Autodiscovery of network topology and interdependencies
Auto-discover application and network topology and interdependencies, including reverse proxy load balancers
Report on throughput, packet loss, and RT rates
Detect network performance issues before they impact application performance:
Eliminate expensive packet capture/analysis appliances and associated SPAN/TAP hardware
Track network KPIs including throughput, packet loss, and RT rates
Monitors network without need of TAP or SPAN port
Does not require network taps or help by networking teams to install and operate
Eliminate expensive packet capture/analysis appliances and associated SPAN/TAP hardware
Single UI to drill from network to application and business transaction
All of AppDynamics is consumed in a single UI. Therefore, you are able to drill in from any component to another
within the same UI.
Virtualization Monitoring
Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop monitoring
The AppDynamics Apache CloudStack Extension for Citrix CloudPlatform provides the ability to monitor and manage
your critical cloud-based applications, ensure application performance pre and post-cloud migration, and take
full advantage of cloud elasticity with auto-scaling.
Server virtualization monitoring
Server Monitoring includes additional windows in the Controller UI that enable you to quickly see underlying
infrastructure issues impacting your application performance
VDI monitoring
Due to the way Citrix technology is set up, AppDynamics is able to see a partial amount of VDI performance.
There is some manual steps that need to take place to achieve this visibility as it is not acheieved out of the
box. Please work with the AppDynamics representative to learn more about what is possible with your virtualized
environment.
Web RUM
Support for modern desktop browsers
AppDynamics supports the current modern browsers:
IE6/7/8/9/10/11/Edge
Chrome, including Mobile
Firefox, including Mobile
Safari, including Mobile
Opera
Support for mobile browsers
AppDyanmics supports the current modern browsers:
IE6/7/8/9/10/11/Edge
Chrome, including Mobile
Firefox, including Mobile
Safari, including Mobile
Opera
Monitor all page requests
Users can receive detailed information of how each of your pages, Ajax requests, iframes, and virtual pages are
performing over time within the Pages and Ajax view within the UI.
Monitor all iFrame requests
Users can receive detailed information of how each of your pages, Ajax requests, iframes, and virtual pages are
performing over time within the Pages and Ajax view within the UI.
Full support for monitoring single page applications properly
Browser RUM supports single-page applications created using the AngularJS 1.x
Automatically detect JavaScript errors
Users have the ability to enable and disable reporting of JavaScript and Ajax request errors. When enabled,
JavaScript and Ajax request errors are reported throughout the Browser Monitoring UI: in the geo page, in the
user stats browser and device dashboards, in the page list, and in browser snapshots.
Display response time status on Geo Map
All Geo Dashboards display key EUM performance metrics by geographic location. You can quickly see which regions
have the highest loads, the longest response times, and the most errors. You can understand at a glance which
locations are active and of the active locations, which are slow.
Collect and display Navigation Timing API data for all poor performing requests
You can build custom health rules based on Browser RUM Page, Ajax, and iframe metrics in the health rule
builder. Please refer to 4.2x documentation to see what metrics are available for both modern browsers that
support Navigation Timing API and other bowers, as well as NavTime browsers.
Collect and display Resource Timing API data for all poor performing requests
AppDynamics can capture resource timing and can also help capture resource timing data when the browser stops
collecting this information.
Correlate web transactions with server side transactions for drill down
With AppDynamics End User Monitoring, you can collect information on where in the world your requests are coming
from and what devices and channels are being used, as well as the performance of your code once it's on your
user's device. You can even investigate mobile crashes by seeing stack traces and other contextual data at the
moment of the crash. And that data can be tied to business transaction data from the server side.
Provide detailed browser traces for poor performing end user requests
AppDynamics app agents discover requests to your application as entry points to a business transaction. The
agents tag the request data and trace the request path as it passes from web servers to databases and other
infrastructure components. AppDynamics collects performance metrics for each tier that processes the business
transaction.
Provide usage based analytics showing browser types and versions
AppDynamics provides accurate browser-user insights to optimize web experiences based on large volumes of
multi-dimensional data that includes user response time, first byte time, DOM ready time, device type and
browser type, version, etc.
Provide usage based analytics showing device and OS types
AppDynamics provides accurate browser-user insights to optimize web experiences based on large volumes of
multi-dimensional data that includes user response time, first byte time, DOM ready time, device type and
browser type, version, etc.
Provide customizable analytics area for troubleshooting and analysis purposes
AppDynamics Application Analytics enables you to do real-time analysis of business performance that is
correlated with the performance of your application software
Provide cache metrics for each page request
AppDynamics collects cache metrics for each of the request for you to view. You have the ability to define a
specific cache endpoint for monitoring.
Show server side response time for all pages
Detailed storage and network pages for additional details required for troubleshooting
Provide drill down from poor performing request to server side deep diagnostic session
Retroactively troubleshoot and diagnose the root cause of infrastructure performance issues -- in a live
production environment -- using fine-grained historical data
Session tracking
Using Browser RUM Sessions you can analyze sessionized results from all requests stored in the AppDynamics
Events Service
Ability to generate a synthetic page request directly from the poor performing request
Browser Synthetic Monitoring uses geographically distributed agents to continuously test key user workflows in
your application. This allows you to monitor the correctness and performance of multi-step flows independently
of user-generated load. AppDynamics provide two way of using synthetics: Scheduled jobs and on-demand
snapshots.
SDK for support of any Single Page Application (SPA) framework
Browser RUM supports single-page applications created using the AngularJS 1.x, commonly known as just Angular,
and provides methods for monitoring Ember.js applications, but you can extend the JavaScript Agent to other
Angular versions and non-Angular frameworks using the JavaScript Agent API
EUM cross application correlation
The cross application flow map lets you see shared points in your application environment. This allows you to
organize business applications by the services, infrastructure, and software components in your environment in
the way that best fits your needs, while still being able to see business application interdependencies.
Analytics built into EUM portion of UI
Application Analytics is built on the App iQ platform, which includes the Events Service, the unstructured
document store for the platform. The exact components you need to install depend upon your environment and your
requirements.
Custom user data available at the session and page request level
You can add user information that is specific to your application to a browser snapshot.
Page grouping at root level instead of individual pages for each set of parameters
You can configure the display names by which various pages and iframes are referred to and sorted in controller
lists and dashboards.
Mobile RUM
Support for native mobile applications
AppDynamics Mobile Application Monitoring solution enables organizations to deliver a reliable, consistent
mobile experience and protect increasingly important mobile device revenue streams and customer interactions,
even under the most demanding situations. AppDynamics provides full support for iOS, Android and XAMARIN
operating systems. Our Xamarin plugin makes it easy to instrument Xamarin apps for iOS, Android, and Windows.
Support for mobile browsers
AppDynamics Browser RUM Supported Environments include:
IE6/7/8/9/10/11/Edge
Chrome, including Mobile
Firefox, including Mobile
Safari, including Mobile
Opera
See mobile app performance, http errors, and network error information
As your end users interact with your application, the AppDynamics agent collects metrics and any error
information on the application's performance and sends that information to the EUM Server, where it is
processed. The EUM Server then makes the data available to the AppDynamics controller UI, where it is displayed
in a series of dashboards and charts
See the performance of API calls from your mobile application to the server side
Yes. Platform allows users to enforce SLAs for APIs, content delivery networks, and other third-party services.
Track crashes and exception
Automatically capture stack traces to pinpoint code issues while, correlating crash events with user sessions to
understand the cause of a crash and how to reproduce it.
Provide crash analytics
The Crash Analyze tab in the UI lists all the individual crash snapshots.
User tracing/breadcrumbs
If your application crashes, the agent also creates a crash snapshot with information to help you analyze what
happened, including the crashed function, the source file containing the crashed function, the line number, if
available, and a stack trace of the application at the time of the crash, along with various other identifying
data. And if the server-side application with which your mobile app interacts is also instrumented, you can get
correlated metric information for the entire round-trip request life cycle.
Trace transactions from mobile device all the way to the server side
Mobile RUM collects data on every network request that your mobile app makes, and it also takes detailed
snapshots periodically in case performance issues have been detected. Over time, the network request metrics are
rolled up, based on averages and percentiles.
Correlate mobile transactions with server side transactions for drill down
Yes. You can correlate mobile network requests with business transactions. The correlation enables you to map
network requests made by your mobile application with an underlying backend application.
Provide usage and performance analytics based upon device type
Yes. Graphic representations of overall usage statistics by device, carrier, OS version, connection type, and
version
Provide usage and performance analytics based upon OS type
Yes. Graphic representations of overall usage statistics by device, carrier, OS version, connection type, and
version
Provide usage and performance analytics based upon OS version
Yes. Graphic representations of overall usage statistics by device, carrier, OS version, connection type, and
version
Provide unified user interface for mobile and server diagnostics
Yes.
Integrated and correlated data between mobile, server, and infrastructure monitoring
All application data is integrated into one UI, so users have a single paned view of the health of their
application infrastructure
Display response time status on Geo Map
The Geo Dashboard provides high-level insight into how your application is performing across the world.
Provide device and carrier diagnostic metrics
Yes. Graphic representations of overall usage statistics by device, carrier, OS version, connection type, and
version
Track user sessions to understand user flows and behavior
The crash snapshot list within the dashboard will provide summary information, contextual and user information,
and a detailed stack trace from the crash.
Capture user interactions within each session
The crash snapshot list within the dashboard will provide summary information, contextual and user information,
and a detailed stack trace from the crash.
Alert based upon deviation from normal behavior for mobile metrics
Resolve crashes faster by getting alerted when unique crashes occur.
Provide percentile metrics related to mobile performance
Parts of the Controller UI for Mobile RUM rely on processing done by the Events Service, including some of the
widgets in the Mobile App Dashboard Overview, Network Requests Analyze, and Crash Analyze.
For the Mobile App Dashboard, Network Requests Analyze, and Crash Analyze, you can choose widgets to display the
metrics collected using either averages or percentiles: Specifically, you can:
enable or disable percentile display of metrics.
set up to four different percentile levels to be applied to metrics.
AppDynamics is a leader in APM (application performance monitoring) tools. The solution is designed to help you spot application issues on the spot so you can get to the root causes of problems, all in real time. In addition, AppDynamics offers seamless traceability and is fully capable of enhancing application performance and visibility in the multicloud world. It uses AI to solve application problems and prevent them from occurring in the future. AppDynamics is a great tool that can help your organization make critical, strategic decisions and is ideal for businesses of all sizes.
AppDynamics Features
AppDynamics has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
Code level visibility
Dynamic baselining
Powerful alerting
Visibility and control
Quick installation
Mobile real-user monitoring
Browser real-user monitoring
Application performance management
Database agents
Server visibility
Trend database performance over time
Data retention
Monitors multiple platforms
Troubleshoots performance issues
Synthetic monitoring
Continuously monitors in a high-volume environment
AppDynamics Benefits
There are many benefits to implementing AppDynamics. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Deep insights: The AppDynamics solution can provide deep insights into your processes, including real-time insights into performance, user experience, objectives, and business outcomes.
Unified monitoring: With AppDynamics, six monitoring applications are combined into a single robust solution. In turn, you gain complete visibility and multi-channel user experience management. The solution’s unified monitoring also quickly produces previews that are more accurate.
Data-led customer experience: By using AppDynamics, you can ingest and analyze data across your entire technology stack and transform it into detailed visualizations. This allows you to easily make the right business decisions while enhancing the user experience and also driving better business results.
Advanced network visibility: AppDynamics allows you to gain insight across your entire technology stack. As a result, you have greater visibility of the external networks that your applications rely on, which enables you to quickly resolve issues with connections to Domain Name Service (DNS), Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers.
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the AppDynamics solution.
Chandan K., Associate Director at a financial services firm, says, “The tracing is the most important aspect of the solution. The way it traces the information within the particular application or within the particular infrastructure is great. That actually helps. Apart from that, all of the data that's in the production APM is good.”
PeerSpot user, Yacin H., Responsable Commercial at Zen Networks, mentions, “You can use one module for each server, for each application, and for each API”. He also adds, “With the solution you can put add-ons on it and it's very customizable. You can customize it easily. If you want something that the tool doesn't have, you can add it easily.”
Another reviewer, a Head Of Information Technology at a mining and metals company expresses, "The solution helps us save a lot of time on certain tasks. The dashboards of the solution are excellent. The stability is good.”
David G., Systems Engineer at a tech services company, states, “The solution has beneficial application analysis, is highly scalable, and has a great ROI.”
Sematext Synthetics provides the ability to actively monitor APIs, Web URLs, websites, and user journeys/click flows from multiple locations around the globe. Synthetic monitoring helps you ensure the availability and performance of your APIs and websites. Synthetics will help you identify downtime and performance issues by simulating user requests and interactions with your web page.
No agent installation is required and there is no need to change your application code.
Sematext Synthetic Benefits
Fix performance issues before they affect your end users Synthetic monitoring allows you to simulate user interactions at different locations worldwide. Synthetic performance monitoring monitors all your APIs, web applications, and mobile apps, no matter how many users they are. With Sematext, you can customize Dashboards and Alerts to monitor critical infrastructure aspects and trigger them when they malfunction. This will help you spot problems before they arise.
Benchmark your website Synthetic monitoring solutions let you look at your APIs from different places during the day. Then you can use this data as a baseline for benchmarking since it helps you figure out what needs to be improved, and lets you compare your service to the competition.
Test your scaling capabilities A website and application are built to respond quickly to users, but your server needs to be ready when traffic spikes unexpectedly. You can run artificial tests to determine how your server will behave under load with synthetic performance monitoring. Once you have this data, you can decide what steps to take to scale gracefully.
Test new product features before launching If you're launching new features, synthetic monitoring lets you run a full test suite before releasing them during peak hours, which is a great tool to have. You'll be able to see how the application reacts under load and whether any of the recent changes will impact a 3rd party API you might use.
Monitor third-party APIs and critical business processes If you don't use any third-party tools in your business, you run into a number of problems related to their availability. You need to keep an eye on them and get an alert the second things start to slow down. Monitoring API metrics is not enough to ensure your users get the best experience possible. Make sure your application works as expected, including logging in, searching, and checkout.
Ensure SLA compliance Whatever side of the SLA you are on – the key is to make sure everyone in the contract adheres to the contract. To understand the performance limitations of your application and set realistic expectations, you should use synthetic monitoring tools if you're a service provider. Customers want to know that the vendor can fulfill his promises.
Reduce MTTR With synthetic monitoring software like Sematext Synthetics, you can lower your MTTR by sending out alerts before the issue becomes a problem. In addition to being notified sooner, you'll also learn what's causing the problem and how to fix it.
Just some of the things you can do with Sematext Synthetics
Monitor & track the availability & performance of APIs
Monitor SSL certificate expiration time
Monitor websites and track various web performance metrics like page load time, paint metrics, etc.
Monitor website uptime
Monitor individual resource performance in a website by domain, type, and response code
Create public status page showing the availability of your selected web services and share it with your customers
Identify slow resources
Monitor third-party resources performance
Investigate slow pages & identify bottlenecks using a waterfall chart
Create user journeys with custom assertions based on the content of the webpage
Collect and track custom metrics from your sites
Benchmark against competitors
Create custom dashboards and alerts based on gathered performance metrics
Debug downtime with end-to-end visibility of application performance
Get alerted when things fail via multiple alert channels like email, Slack, Pagerduty, webhooks, etc.
Monitor websites behind firewalls and on private networks with Private Locations
Check out the full product update.
At Sematext, we’ve also had the need to monitor application availability. We use Synthetics actively to monitor our own applications and it has helped us uncover issues with our APIs on multiple occasions.
Where to go from here?
Sign up for a free trial and try it for yourself. Pricing starts at $2 per month for HTTP monitors and $7 per month for browser monitors. We have pay-as-you-go pricing if your usage changes or fixed plans if you can estimate your usage.
Sample Customers
Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more
See more customers
Access Intelligence Plc, Adore Beauty, Agmatix, alaTest Reviews, All Time Data Pvt., Appsari, Appwrite, ASK Staffing, Associated Company, Atlantic American Corp, Bata, Baťa, Binerals, BITTE KAI RAND, Bixlabs, Boost Insurance, Broadcom, BUFF Technologies LTD, ClariLab, Comelit Group S.p.A., CommIT, createME, Deepbluecompany, deeprojects, Depth-Sa, Diesel Laptops, DigiHaul, Digitaltentstudio, Doole Health, Dovetail Technologies Ltd, Ebctechnologies, ECB, Ekcsoft, Emento, Empact IT, Enhance-It, Ennomail, Enterprise Knowledge, ESCIO AS, Essential Assists, Evercoder Software SRL, Extendi srl, Ezgiant, Ezyhaul, Factinsect, Fenom Digital, Fino, fino, fino.team, Firespring, Fulcrum, General Authority for Statistics, GradGuard, Grovia, Health Catalyst, hkcac.io, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, InfoAsilo, Information Customer Service My Account Navgrahaa Jewels, Inpla, Ipdetect, Isovist, isovist.net.au, iVendi Limited, Ivinco, Jan Ptáček, Kal-It, Leen151, Macrovo, MediaLab 3D Solutions, Metabolic Living, Mobizcorp GmbH, Moneri, Moqups, Morizon-Gratka, Morrison Agency, Mrcall, NETIM, New Media Services, Nextgenins, NIUKS, Nordic, Nordic Naturals, North Star Network, Noveo Group, Novopayment, ObjectifSEO, Pharmacies BENU SA, Planis, Pulsar Platform, QIMA, QL Gaming Group, RedINTER, RedINTER Colombia, Rudderstack, SeatGeek, Section, Sematext Group Inc, SHIFT Connect, Solidstudio, Sparkle Place, Spineor, Spot Metrics, Stanford University, SteelEye, T P EQUIPMENT LEASING, TalentPools, Taroko, Teams, Termly, The Institute of Internal Auditors, Thorborn, Treatwell, Universal Equations, Upc Romania Bucuresti E320 Ra7, Upmenu, Velocitor Solutions, vendnovation, Verztec Consulting, Vuelio, Wahoo Fitness, Warehaus, Wealthica, Weareyourhero, wirtschaftsbildung.ch, Workframe, Workmade, Zenus Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 153 reviews while Sematext Synthetics is ranked 58th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while Sematext Synthetics is rated 0.0. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". On the other hand, AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and New Relic, whereas Sematext Synthetics is most compared with Datadog and Honeycomb.io.
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