AppOptics gives us insight into how our apps *actually* perform
May 07, 2020

AppOptics gives us insight into how our apps *actually* perform

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Infrastructure and Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds AppOptics

AppOptics is used to help maintain the availability, efficiency and functionality of our public facing web applications and APIs - these are business critical platforms upon which internal customers, clients and suppliers all rely.

AppOptics is an invaluable tool in diagnosing problems at an early stage, and gives our development team deep insight into the context of problems as they arise, as well as providing proactive monitoring of resource usage and error rates across multiple endpoints.
  • Deep insight into the ASP.NET pipeline, allowing drill-down into individual requests.
  • Intuitive dashboards with the ability to slice by time give a good overview of real-world endpoint performance.
  • Ability to drill into individual queries executed during the lifetime of an IIS request provide excellent intelligence for targeted optimization of SQL bottlenecks.
  • Extending visualization into the asp.net processing pipeline would be really helpful - the ability to see which handler/piece of middleware did what, and when would be great.
  • The ability to capture parameters for certain SQL queries - possibly based on a filter.
  • The ability to describe the relationship between requests and users - so being able to see all requests submitted in a particular session (by cookie, http header value, etc) would be most useful.
  • Better insight into real-world performance of applications.
  • Quicker diagnosis of issues with our applications.
  • Useful visualizations in the form of dashboards to have informed discussions around platform load, throughput and error rates in response to real world events.
We analyzed a number of alternatives to AppOptics, but none combined strong performance in all of our key areas - we needed a solution which could be deployed on premise, supported multi tenant hosts, provided the ability to analyse individual requests, presented intuitive dashboards and had a licensing model we could easily account for.
In our experience, AppOptics is most suited to ASP.NET Applications or APIs running on IIS, using SQL Server as a persistence layer.

AppOptics gives a good visualization of each request, and crucially how that individual request interacted with SQL Server. This enables to us monitor the effectiveness of our in-app caching as well as the impact of cache misses on performance and responsiveness of our apps.

In addition, capturing of exceptions is detailed and intuitive, providing mostly complete stack traces where problems occur. This is invaluable to our development team, who can use the wealth of information provided about a problematic request to in many cases reproduce the issue without having to seek additional information from the customer. This expedites the fact-finding portion of our support activity, leading to more timely fixes being deployed to production.

SolarWinds AppOptics Feature Ratings

Application monitoring
8
Database monitoring
7
Threshold alerts
8
Predictive capabilities
Not Rated
Application performance management console
7
Collaboration tools
Not Rated
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
7
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
Not Rated
Virtualization monitoring
Not Rated
Server availability and performance monitoring
7
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
8
IT Asset Discovery
Not Rated