AppDynamics

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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".

Avantages

- 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.

Inconvénients

- 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.

Avantages

I like that it is really easy to implement, add AppDynamics agent to your code manifest and it starts to monitor your application. Easy to set up triggers for events which should be monitored.

Inconvénients

Sometimes for same url applications it tends to not find requests between multiple applications, but give it some time and it should work as expected.