SolarWinds AppOptics

We used SolarWinds Loggly in our project for application monitoring. So we thought to have SolarWinds AppOptiocs for infra monitoring, so all details are in one place.

I think it works well with AWS. If you are using other SolarWinds products, specially Loggly than this might be a good choice as it would be easy to correlate and makes troubleshooting a bit easy. Pricing is good for small to mid-size infra, just clear it up on how you will use licenses (packs).

We use AppOptics to monitor performance, error rate, latency, database activity, and remote calls of our applications. We use this to monitor applications running on NodeJS (Express/HAPI), Java servlet, and services running on tomcat. It provides insight into the number of requests per second, errors coming in, and some information about JMX and database parameters. This helps us debug issues, slowness, and unexpected events with ease and speed.

AppOptics is good for small to medium-sized organizations with less than 150 servers or less than 40 services to monitor. It performs well for this use case where people need to get an overview of application performance, and 95%ile data is okay. Somewhere every data point and every record is critical; it should be avoided.

This product has [helped] me to do Performance management for my website. I was able to get detailed and real-time statistics of various variables like network packets, user counts, and this really helped us to better track our website. The data was also showcased in an interactive graph which made it easy to use to visualize our stats.

Very useful for monitoring your application and [tracking] its uptime/downtime. The graph is super interactive and customization as well and the dashboard and be configured to fit your needs. The theme (light and dark modes) will also be an additional welcome bonus!

SolarWinds AppOptics is being analysed to be used as a potential Cloud Services Monitoring tool - and on a side note, also being analysed on how effectively AppOptics can be leveraged to to APM things such as Appdynamics and Dynatrace does. So we are proposing SolarWinds AppOptics to our client as the new technology monitoring tool for cloud infra, primarily.

SolarWinds AppOptics is a fit tool for monitoring modern technologies such as Cloud Services (AWs, Azure), Micro Services, SaaS solution - which would not require on-premises like attention for Maintenance, Patching etc, and hence no un-necessary downtime since it is being managed by Vendor itself. It also helps in application tracing like an APM tool.

I use SolarWinds AppOptics to gather high-level information on bottlenecks and quickly drill down into problematic requests and identify things I can fix.

I love the ease with which SolarWinds AppOptics allows me to get information about our web services.

As an early-stage startup, we were looking for a solution that offered the following: Automated alerts Performance monitoring Request tracing Monitor 3rd party services AppOptics provides all of this functionality at a much lower price than its competitors such as NewRelic or Instana. We have been using them for over a year to monitor our application and AWS infrastructure. We have been very satisfied with their product. It has helped us identify various performance issues, resource bottlenecks, and issues with downstream services. In case of issues in our infrastructure or downstream services, it has helped us resolve the issue with low turnaround times. We have given access to this tool to our entire engineering team. Additionally, we have set up automated alerting and configured it to notify us through OpsGenie. UPDATE Dec-2022: It has been 2.5 years since the first review. We are still using AppOptics and we continue to reap the benefits that we have listed above.

With the current set of features, AppOptics is a great option for startups that do not depend on downstream external services for their product. I have already recommended it to some friends working at other startups. I am rating it 8/10 instead of 10/10 because its monitoring of downstream services is inadequate. In our company, we have a monolithic application. So, we don't have an opinion on how it would operate in a service-oriented architecture. Dec 2022: 2.5 years since the first review, I have seen a significant improvement in the monitoring of downstream services. We have leveraged AppOptics to identify requests to Database and Cache with anomalous behaviour. Additionally, they have also made it easier to track the performance of API requests made to external services. Hence, I updated the rating to 9/10. The reason I have not scored it a 10/10 is because setting up alarms can be made easier.

We are using SolarWinds AppOptics for application monitoring. Compared to other monitoring tools, AppOptics' GUI is the most simple and any layman can understand the functionality of it. Latency monitoring between the application or the components is easy. Integration with the application is also easy.

If you are using microservice architecture in your company to monitor microservices, AppOptics will be useful to monitor the latencies between the applications and other services.

We use AppOptics for our application monitoring across the whole infrastructure. AppOptics provides a very deep-dive and point to point metrics and alerts for the various microservices which help to track and identify various issues which may/could cause the instability in our application flow. So if I need to check my latency stats from one microservice to another, and if latency rate is higher than usual, we can easily trace the number of facts with the help of AppOptics like:

As I already mentioned in the use case section, AppOptics provides a very deep-dive and point to point metrics and alerts for the various microservices which help to track and identify various issues which may/could cause the instability in our application flow. So if I need to check my latency stats from one microservice to another, and if latency rate is higher than usual, we can easily trace the number of facts with the help of AppOptics like:
1) Current response code from the API.
2) Number of DB connections.
3) Queries requested from app to DB.
4) Queries that track latency.
5) Failing APIs.

I mostly use AppOptics to monitor our website performances, response time, status code, etc. How is the loading time distributed between servers, databases, and caches? Is one of our services spiking for some reason? We use it to focus our attention on pages that need to be optimized to improve the user experience. It also helps us to focus on what needs to be optimized.

Here is one scenario where AppOptics is well suited: when we deploy a new release. When you work on big projects, it is sometimes hard to evaluate all the impacts that our new release will have on our production environment. AppOptics allows us to monitor very easily the release behavior on production. Another scenario: when we'd like to optimize our website. AppOptics shows us what page is the most used and which one takes the most time to load and how the loading time is distributed between servers, database, and cache. That is very useful to focus our efforts on what's is important for our users.

It is used in multiple departments of our organization. It is being used to control response time, error rate, and drill down into multiple paths of the website and 95th percentile.

I like to have it open with the last 60 minutes of data, especially during our deployments to monitor changes in the load of the website infrastructure. The only annoying thing is that I have to constantly refresh it myself to see the change.