AppDynamics - A deep dive into your application data
March 19, 2019
AppDynamics - A deep dive into your application data
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with AppDynamics
We use AppDynamics to gain insight into our application through the view of the endpoint which can be a web server, SQL Database or our storage systems. Since AppDynamics relies on an agent to process the information it can access the network, and application stacks, to give us in-depth information about the way traffic is being passed to/from each server and allows us to dig deep into errors that we cannot find any other way.
- Giving a network map of our application that shows where slowdowns are occurring and where network traffic is running into a bottleneck.
- We are able to gather node-specific information that shows the number of sessions a web server or even Redis session statistics.
- We use AppDynamics to give a holistic view of our application allowing us to quickly narrow in on problems.
- The user interface can be a bit challenging to use and configure for specific things.
- Some of the performance graphs, such as CPU usage across many servers, can take some considerable time to set up whereas the same graphs can be compiled very quickly with another monitoring tool like Splunk.
- I wish there was a way to show more performance graphs of trend lines, where you could mouse over one graph and show stats across all graphs in one dashboard.
- With the ability to draw lines of traffic between subsystems we have been able to narrow in on problems very quickly.
- Being able to see exactly where slow connections are happening, and from multiple sources, has allowed us to focus on a specific subsystem quickly and keep our application performance up for our customers.
- While the dashboards can be difficult at times to configure, they can provide very useful information for specific portions of our infrastructure.
- Splunk Cloud and Datadog
We use Splunk, a lot, and I feel that the two applications complement each other well. AppDynamics is not as good at finding problems or errors in logs, and Splunk is very easy to set up visualizations. However, where AppDynamics excels is in the level of detail about transactions between different subsystems and how they interact with each other. Datadog has some very useful integrations, but I feel it cannot compete with either Splunk or AppDynamics with the level of detail you can dig into a specific server or application that AppDynamics provides. The ability to view our entire infrastructure and narrow in on a specific tier is what sets AppDynamics apart.