AppDynamics - excellent application monitoring with a steep(ish) learning curve
August 30, 2017
AppDynamics - excellent application monitoring with a steep(ish) learning curve
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with AppDynamics
AppDynamics is used to provide application performance monitoring for our ecommerce booking website and external APIs, providing a valuable tool to ensure the application is working as it should, particularly in terms of performance - especially response time, etc. Alerting from AppDynamics is used to ensure any production issues are dealt with swiftly and it is also used for error monitoring and analysis.
- AppDynamics provides an excellent overview of all the interactions between all of your various applications, providing a high-level view of the overall health of the whole application and any interactions or elements that are unhealthy can be seen from here.
- AppDynamics focusses on Business Transactions, rather than overall application or server performance, meaning you can quickly see if one part of the system is not working as it should, meaning production issues are shown clearly as isolated problems (if they are) rather than overall application health problems.
- AppDynamics provides excellent functionality with regards to tracing coding exceptions - errors can easily be drilled down to the method or line of code that is problematic.
- AppDynamics is hugely flexible allowing very fine grained configuration and customisation.
- It's just so complicated - it takes a while to get to grips with and needs careful thought and planning to get the most out of it. AppDynamics do provide excellent support for this though and will guide you.
- It doesn't list out enough Database Transactions in the APM licencing model.
- AppDynamics isn't cheap, but it definitely helps to ensure our applications and APIs are up and running without issue. The alerting is usually good but occasionally mixed, for example sometimes flagging a single error as a critical issue since the API is usually completely error free.
- The cost saving in terms of trouble shooting and analyzing issues in production is fantastic - to know about issues before they are reported by customers enables you to be proactive in resolving them and ensuring maximum up time for our applications.
AppDynamics was trialled in a shoot-out between New Relic and Dynatrace and just about edged New Relic simply for the ability to drill down to the methods and lines of code in the error monitoring, which is an invaluable feature for a development manager. New Relic Insights provides slightly easier dashboarding and New Relic generally is easier to use, but AppDynamics just came out on top.