Think your application has no issues? Think again and try AppDynamics APM tool!
October 23, 2019

Think your application has no issues? Think again and try AppDynamics APM tool!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AppDynamics

Our application is costing and contracting modeling software. The application involves very extensive calculations that are very CPU intensive on the app server-side as well as on the database server. These calculations are pretty complex queries that needed optimization as they generally take several hours. We brought in an APM tool to look further into these transactions to improve the performance. After exploring a couple of products, we decided to go with AppDynamics. It is currently used by just our department.
  • Ease of setup, with pretty extensive documentation.
  • AppDynamics has several components to monitor applications, physical server resources, database servers, and networking. The fact that all of them are independent of each other makes it convenient to start/stop these services as needed in production.
  • The support team is very knowledgeable in the product and provides the necessary help from the initial setup to the final setup in production.
  • Generally speaking, AppDynamics serves the purpose we initially intended this product to do. However, there are certain limitations to how our application works. AppDynamics was likely built for monitoring applications that handle hundreds and thousands of transactions such as an ecommerce application, and so is limited in how a baseline can be set up as it pertains to our product. Ours does not deal with so many transactions in a given amount of time but every transaction has sub-transactions it performs. So, while using a SaaS model to setup business transactions, we are limited to what the cloud server is configured to and is not customizable.
  • It has had a positive impact at least from our initial use of it. It has been in service for about 6 months. We also have been able to monitor our networking and server resource clogs via AppDynamics and were able to request additional resources right away, saving us a lot of headaches. Generally AppDynamics has had a positive impact.
  • Application Delivery Analysis (formerly CA Application Delivery Analysis)
We compared CA APM and the ease of use was day and night compared to AppDynamics. Just the presentation of information is very modularized and appears very clean in terms of data captured and the console has a flow to its presentation. CA APM uses the concept of buckets with the user having to be very savvy to know the product where the data collected will be under.
We did purchase paid support but it also included help with the initial setup. Our experience with their technical team has been positive, they are knowledgeable and are on top of any questions/issues we have raised.

Do you think AppDynamics delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with AppDynamics's feature set?

Yes

Did AppDynamics live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of AppDynamics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy AppDynamics again?

Yes

As it pertains to monitoring database transactions, as our application relies heavily on SQL, AppDynamic's monitoring tool made an immediate impact on sorting which ones are slow. The business transactions that we can capture are limited in the sense that our application works where it can't be limited to 200, so we ended having to setup service endpoints to account for it.

AppDynamics Feature Ratings

Application monitoring
9
Database monitoring
10
Threshold alerts
10
Predictive capabilities
8
Application performance management console
9
Collaboration tools
8