Item: AppDynamics
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

AppDynamics is our enterprise preferred application monitoring tool. It has an easy way of installing the agents onto the servers and calculates valuable metrics for us. It has a great UI and we can configure various widgets and alarms. We can even set up notifications for alerts and debug the infrastructure very efficiently.

Pros and Cons

Ease of installing the agents is unbelievable. Supports almost all the servers and technologies.
The UI is very clean and very intuitive. Setting up widgets, Alarms, notifications are very powerful features
The ability to drill down to a particular layer in technology is useful to find out the performance bottlenecks efficiently.

It's an excellent tool to start with. There are some open source monitoring tools catching up fast and the cost of AppDynamics can be a little burden.
Integrating infrastructure monitoring along with application monitoring can be a differentiator.

Most Important Features

Application monitoring to improve the performance aspect of the application.
Notifications on when the app is not responding to the level you expect.
Combined with performance test to understand performance bottlenecks.

Return on Investment

I would say it was a huge positive for us as we were able to optimize our application to production demand loads.
Overall organization ROI is positive as well.

Alternatives Considered

New Relic and Datadog

AppDynamics is almost the same as New Relic and I would say they both are at the same level. Datadog is infrastructure monitoring and AppDynamics can catch up on this impact.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of AppDynamics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy AppDynamics again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Excellent tool for Application monitoring. Can be combined with Performance tests to understand pain points in the application and improve Setting up alarms/notification on an excellent UI is awesome. If you want to fine-tune performance issues looking at various layers of architecture like middle layer, DB layer, etc.., this tool is a perfect fit. Areas that are not best fit - In my opinion, If you want to do infrastructure monitoring AppDynamics is not yet there. Eventually, it will catch up is what I think.

AppDynamics is an excellent tool for Application monitoring

Overall Satisfaction with AppDynamics