AppDynamics

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.

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".

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.

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

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.