Application Performance Management (APM)
4.6/5 (18 reviews)Pros
I've been working in monitoring and APM roles for 15 years and I've never been actually happy with a tool's solid performance until AppDynamics. These guys are ethical and hardworking. Their product actually does what the marketing says it does. Such a marked difference from other tools I've used in the past.
We've cut our MTTR by half just by deploying agents. It significantly reduced the amount of time we spend building synthetic monitors to the point we rarely have to build any monitors unless it's a vendor app or appliance we can't access to install an agent on.
* Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic
* Baselining of every single metric you throw at it
* Easy to use API
* Customizable extensions
* Great SaaS support, performance and uptime
* Responsive Support team
* Responsive Extension dev team
* Facilitates business, dev and ops communication
* Agents have low CPU overhead compared to other agent-based products we've tried
RUM, Synthetics, Mobile, Network and Browser Analytics make this a well rounded tool.
Cons
There is currently no automated agent management/upgrades for every agent type (currently the Universal Agent supports Java, expanding to .NET and machine agents in the future). So if you don't have a solid automation tool already in use, deploying agents can be time consuming.
The GUI can be overwhelming at first to a novice dev or ops support person, and the possible root causes of an issue don't bubble up to the first screen you see. We usually walk everyone through a few simple steps: Click here to see errors and exceptions, click here to see what is causing response time problems, click here to view the timeframe of a past issue, and click here to drill down into the root cause at the method level snapshot.
One platform that allows you to view key metrics of any "online store/service" in one pane. In a digital economy now and more people embracing the "cloud", which comes at a premium......it's great to be able to "see" in real time not only your infrastructure performance but the performance of the users and the apps and allows you know EXACTLY where the change is needed. Which gives organizations the option of freeing up staff, thus freeing up "salary" and putting it back in their bottom line.
Pros
Single pane viewing of what matters most. Simple click of a button and I can view infrastructure response, user "click thru" i.e. completes to weekly/monthly reporting taking only minutes instead of hours or days. We were able to view what percentage of users visited/clicked thru with device and time of day and able to see their drop point. Immediately saw a trend and got our app team on it and saw almost immediate uptick in customer completes/orders. What sold me was the agentless monitoring of the databases so we could actully see in real time what days/times we needed to apply additional CPU resources.
Cons
I guess I really can't state a "plausible" con......the software goes above and beyond what we had envisioned and actually made everyone's duties easier to complete which we were able to turn reports and analytics around quicker.......so if I had to complain about something.....maybe the price??? But isn't always about "price".
I use it everyday to track down following on SQL server:
- SQL statements or stored procedures that are consuming most of the system resources.
- Statistics on procedures, SQL statements, and SQL query plans.
Pros
- Simple and easy to use interface.
- Provides complete visibility on the application's performance (Application Monitoring), database performance, and infrastructure performance ranging from 1 day - 1 year.
- Provides tons of information which can be used to resolve an issue quickly.
Cons
- Although the interface is easy to use, but still it is very hard to find the valuable information quickly many times.
It is highly recommended that a beginner must go through a training program before using this software.
- Some parts of the software still use flash.
Proactive management of software performance/ issues in production
Pros
We started using AppDynamics in 2012 when we inherited code in production that was built by someone else. The level of insights it provided helped us address the production issues quickly and we started using it for all new development and deployment. It helped us move from being reactive to proactive in identifying and managing issues/ bottlenecks
Cons
Like any complex piece of software it requires some learning. However, given the amount of information it generates out of the box it is easy for people not to make changes to configurations. That might result in more noise than news
We use AppDynamics to monitor the performance of our servers and applications. It helps us to find the reasons for the slowdown in servers. Monitoring current servers was not enough for us. Appdynamics made it very easy to find the problem.
Pros
The user interface so everyone can understand. Especially the graphics showing the flow of network traffic between our various monitored servers is great.
Cons
Learning all the features of the application can take time.
Integration with load runner
Pros
The good thing about the tools is its integration with the load runner tool for performance testing
We can get the exact method and class names from the code which helps in finding the bottleneck
Cons
Some flex calls cannot be captured with the appdynamics so cannot be used for the flex coded developed applications. Extra license cost for the database monitoring can be more structured
Pros
The functions of projects are great, drill to the issue to root level and this makes it easy to resolve issues.
Cons
Slowness, it takes time to respond and granularity of data reduces with time.
It's not the easiest APM out there to use by far. And manually instrumenting non-web software is the pits. But it pays off in droves. We've cut support times by 80%+. Before when we had issues, it involved a lot of trial and error, randomly looking at diff server logs, and manual hunting for problems. Now we know right where to start, and most of the time, even know what exactly is causing the issue. Root cause analysis is quick and easy. Database traces, full cross-app traces, it's all there now and it works amazingly. Now they just need to make it easier to use, because anyone outside of IT is instantly lost.
Pros
Deep, useful analysis of performance of applications. Makes for quick troubleshooting.
Cons
It's not user friendly at all. And instrumentation of non-web apps is a slow painful process.
Monitoring and analytical
Pros
Appdynamics supports many platforms, and it's set up is relatively easy. It also supports customized monitoring, and allows you to build what you need.
Pros
It is easy to monitor the server side and client side performance metric.Easy to identify the bottleneck at application and database level.
Cons
It adds licenses to be installed as well as the cost brings limitation for use.
Pros
AppDynamics provides great reports to analyze performance of applications. Dashboards provide simple but effective data to get an idea of the application's behavior.
Cons
Price of the AppDynamics is high. But it has many valuable features. This is not for small businesses.
Overall it's above average.
Pros
All app and machine agents can be viewed. We can create dashboards as well for all server performances that gives us overview of how quickly we can identify issues.
Cons
User Interface. Not very user friendly. In addition, sometimes user interface respond slowly.
performance metrics, alerting and notifications
Pros
auto detection of environment connectivity, I don't have to do anything to configure my connection patterns which is amazing
Cons
none as of now, the only thing I could think is the cost, other than that we should check on integration with ticketing tools
Able to see JVM memory usage, garbage collection, JVM error, and applications error per tier to associated systems.
Pros
Easy to install, configure, and manage. Just straight agent that you need to install on your systems and add it as part of your JVM process.
Cons
Nothing to do not like it. Sometimes could be difficult to troubleshoot it if they agent cannot start with JVM process.
The freemium version of AppDynamics offers many useful tasks for smaller websites. I think to a certain extend it can also be useful for larger ones. Right now, I am using the free version and I think I can get along with that for some time. That´s great!!!
One negative point that I can see is that the Lite version records data from only the last two hours, that´s not enough.
Pretty new to this tool, but its already impressed me with the auto detection of nodes.
still exploring for more options.. but this tool could be one stop for all monitoring
Rating breakdown