AppOptics: A must-have for a startup
Updated December 15, 2022

AppOptics: A must-have for a startup

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Infrastructure and Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds AppOptics

As an early-stage startup, we were looking for a solution that offered the following: Automated alerts Performance monitoring Request tracing Monitor 3rd party services AppOptics provides all of this functionality at a much lower price than its competitors such as NewRelic or Instana. We have been using them for over a year to monitor our application and AWS infrastructure. We have been very satisfied with their product. It has helped us identify various performance issues, resource bottlenecks, and issues with downstream services. In case of issues in our infrastructure or downstream services, it has helped us resolve the issue with low turnaround times. We have given access to this tool to our entire engineering team. Additionally, we have set up automated alerting and configured it to notify us through OpsGenie. UPDATE Dec-2022: It has been 2.5 years since the first review. We are still using AppOptics and we continue to reap the benefits that we have listed above.

Pros

  • Request tracing with code profiling.
  • Automated alerting on latency and response codes for each API.
  • Low resource overhead while collecting data from our application servers.
  • Highly performant dashboard that enables us to make progress rapidly.
  • Very resilient. We have not seen a downtime in their service in the entire year that we have used them.
  • Identify database and cache requests that are taking longer than expected

Cons

  • Monitoring and alerting for downstream services can be improved significantly.
  • They can make it easier and faster to setup alerts for the infrastructure and application.
  • Faster Troubleshooting of issues in the infrastructure or our application, which helped us reduce downtime
  • Helped us identify and resolve resource bottlenecks, which in turn, helped reduce our overall footprint and operational costs.
  • It enables us to continuously monitor our application and alert us. This has allowed us to focus on product development without worrying about any underlying, hidden issues.
As an early-stage startup, we evaluated the different options on the following parameters: Functionality Monitoring overhead Cost Easy-to-use dashboard AppOptics had most of the features that we needed and offered their services at a reasonable price that made sense for us. While CloudWatch provided a lot of the required functionality, we needed to spend a lot of time configuring it as per our needs.

Do you think SolarWinds AppOptics delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SolarWinds AppOptics's feature set?

Yes

Did SolarWinds AppOptics live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SolarWinds AppOptics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SolarWinds AppOptics again?

Yes

With the current set of features, AppOptics is a great option for startups that do not depend on downstream external services for their product. I have already recommended it to some friends working at other startups. I am rating it 8/10 instead of 10/10 because its monitoring of downstream services is inadequate. In our company, we have a monolithic application. So, we don't have an opinion on how it would operate in a service-oriented architecture. Dec 2022: 2.5 years since the first review, I have seen a significant improvement in the monitoring of downstream services. We have leveraged AppOptics to identify requests to Database and Cache with anomalous behaviour. Additionally, they have also made it easier to track the performance of API requests made to external services. Hence, I updated the rating to 9/10. The reason I have not scored it a 10/10 is because setting up alarms can be made easier.

SolarWinds AppOptics Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
9.0
Application monitoring
10
Database monitoring
10
Threshold alerts
8
Application performance management console
9
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
10
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
Not Rated
IT Asset Discovery
Not Rated

Using SolarWinds AppOptics

11 - All the users of our AppOptics portal are in the Engineering team. This is a mix of technical leaders, Devops engineers and software developers.
1 - After enabling AppOptics in our setup, we have not dedicated any significant amount of time to support our internal use of the tool. It has been extremely low maintenance for us.
  • Continuous Monitoring
  • Automated Alerting
  • Application performance monitoring
  • Reduce MTTD and MTTR for issues
  • Leverage it for monitoring in multi-service and multi-cloud environments
We have been using AppOptics for over 3.5 years and expect to continue to renew it for the foreseeable future.

Comments

  • Jennifer Kuvlesky | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Jennifer Kuvlesky
    (Vendor Representative) commented 5 years ago
    Thank you for your review! Regarding your comment on monitoring and visualizing downstream services, AppOptics has a new feature (as of May 2020) to more easily see the relationships and dependencies of downstream services. https://blog.appoptics.com/application-service-map/

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