Item: AppDynamics
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AppDynamics

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have an internet banking platform with a quite complex architecture that involves different dev and ops teams. Our performance and stability requirements are high. We needed to modernize the way we monitor the platform and improve our support SLA. AppDynamics gave us a brand new centralized vision of our environment. We now monitor the platform, detect slowness, and get more accurate information quicker. AppDynamics is used by all of our IT teams. after months using AppD, our power users can add metrics and indicators to detect the first signs indicating problems before we run into trouble.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Complete visual application monitoring--slowness, bottlenecks, crashes...
Provides a lot of dashboards and insights on platform behavior
Non-intrusive monitoring on existing deployments
Gives a lot of very accurate data

Cons

Very expensive licensing policy
Quite confusing and complex interface (with a quite tough learning curve)

Most Important Features

Real-time performance and activity monitoring
Real-time performance and crashes alerts
Code-level visibility for troubleshooting
Platform network map, showing traffic, slowdowns, and bottlenecks
Requests-level data capture

Return on Investment

Platform map drilldown capabilities and code-level visibility helped us to find the root cause of problems faster
Threshold alerts made proactive problem handling easier
Data capture module helped us to link technical data with business data and support customers far more efficiently

Usability

AppD has a very rich user interface with a lot of menus, tab bars and options.
but its UX is also quite confusing and complex, because of its quite tough learning curve.
you can easily get lost when you drill down inside the dashboard of a large application (with a complex distributed architecture), switch indicators and menus...
especially when you are troubleshooting critical production problems zooming in and out in specific areas of your infrastructure.

Alternatives Considered

System Center Operations Manager and Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Microsoft Intune + SCCM)

AppDynamics perfectly does the job and does more. We choose it after a successful POC that showed its efficiency from the trenches.
we were able to add by ourselves a lot of KPIs based what we learned from the info gathered from AppD while monitoring our platfrom, and that made our use of AppD even more efficient

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Azure Pipelines, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Virtual Desktop, Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Visual Studio

Likelihood to Recommend

Very useful if you want to monitor multi-server complex architectures involving different technologies and IT teams. Very useful to proactively detect or prevent slowness on load increase. I think AppDynamics would be far less appropriate for small companies or "simple" software, or when you have to deal with it alone (without support for setup, learning, features activation, and troubleshooting).

AppDynamics Feature Ratings

Using AppDynamics

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Well integrated Consistent Feel confident using Familiar	Difficult to use Requires technical support Slow to learn

Easy Tasks

monitor complex software infrastructure
drill down into architecture looking for bottlenecks
set up custom metrics and KPIs

Difficult Tasks

navigate between application monitoring features
drill out from a detailed view in your architecture

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Comments

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AppDynamics for enterprise-level complex platform monitoring