AppDynamics Serverless APM for AWS Lambda

I use Splunk AppDynamics  as our monitoring tool, and it has been effectively used in the last five years to identify major issues and rectify them without causing a major impact to the website.

Splunk AppDynamics  tells us what the top 10 queries are which are actually contributing to the load on the database, and it gives us the view of what exactly the query does, whether it uses more DB CPU or is contributing to the roll-up contention on the database. These details provide great insights, making it one of the good features from Splunk AppDynamics.

When it comes to the front end with my Node.js and React.js applications, it doesn't capture much of the details. The improvements I made were mainly around the Java agent side in our app layer, but it was lacking detailed information on the front-end layer. This is a disadvantage, and it could be improved from Splunk AppDynamics' perspective.

I have been working with this solution for the last five years.

It has a cost associated with it, but it is scalable only from a scalability perspective. It is scalable.

I have two different types of technologies used in my project. One of the projects was using a different monitoring tool called Dynatrace , a major competitor for Splunk AppDynamics. Discussions were going on whether I wanted to replace Splunk AppDynamics with Dynatrace , and a decision was made to replace Dynatrace with Splunk AppDynamics because of the capability it has with custom metrics and Java agents. However, discussions are now ongoing about potentially replacing Splunk AppDynamics with Dynatrace. I am using these two major tools in my ecosystem: Splunk AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

I monitor all the business transactions such as basket and add to basket via Splunk AppDynamics. I have set up and diagnosed those transactions.

For the others, they get captured as part of the catch-all transaction itself. In case I need them to be investigated, I use filters to identify the transaction specific to the particular BT.

I have not used auto-discovery as a tool such as analytics and the tracing, trace component, and diagnostic traces much. However, I use historical data to understand where exactly the issue is and try to rectify it.

I have not used the anomaly detection and root cause features.

I have not used troubleshooting as a feature.

Regarding Digital Experience Monitoring, I will lose the limit, causing licensing issues. I identified what pages and applications I don't want to monitor and removed them to cope with licensing. Going beyond the license means paying additionally.

I was not using the Secure Application feature.

Currently, I am not using an on-premises environment, so I cannot comment more on the on-premises side of things as I am using a cloud-based application in all areas.

My overall rating for Splunk AppDynamics is 9 out of 10.

My usual use cases for Splunk AppDynamics  involve monitoring application performance issues.

I have used Splunk AppDynamics  for business transaction monitoring. It helps us in prioritizing business transactions such as logins or checkouts because we can see the transactions, what problems they have, and what we need to do to fix them.

The most valuable features of Splunk AppDynamics that I have found so far include it being a deep-in monitoring solution for applications such as Java and databases. You can dig into the log information and performance information that is within the application. For a very easy setup, you have all the information that you need.

My impression of Splunk AppDynamics' AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis in diagnosing performance issues is that it works and does the job. It's acceptable.

Regarding Splunk AppDynamics' line-of-code-level troubleshooting feature, specifically in diagnosing performance issues down to specific code lines, it relates to the database agent. The help is quite deep and quite useful. You get the code line error, and you are very fast on track to resolve the problem because you will be pinpointed into the real problem where the real problem is using Splunk AppDynamics for databases, for example. That's quite good.

My experience with the application performance monitoring capabilities of Splunk AppDynamics, particularly in on-premises environments, is that it works well for us. We can see that the best benefit is the service dependency mapping regarding different kinds of services. That's key—dependency mapping.

Splunk AppDynamics could be improved or enhanced as they are on track because they have the tools working with OTel. That is one thing I can mention since that has forced us to use other tools to monitor because of the price. Price is the key part here.

I have been working with Splunk AppDynamics for more than five years.

Based on my experience, Splunk AppDynamics has been very stable and reliable for us. As I have mentioned, we have run it for over five years, six or seven years I would say, and I think it's very stable with no problems with the agent or the setup.

I do not think we have counted on the scalability because our setup is not so large; it's quite a small setup, and that depends on the cost. We want to expand, but the cost is quite high.

I do not often communicate with the technical support. I think it's one or two times per year or something similar because it's so stable.

Based on my encounters with the technical support, I rate them at least seven, seven to eight. It depends on the technical question that we asked, but I think the support has been quite acceptable, more than acceptable. From my point of view, it's a seven to eight, which is more than acceptable.

Before Splunk AppDynamics, I used a different solution for these use cases.

The previous solution consisted of a number of different kinds of tools; I cannot go into details on that, but we used different kinds of other tools.

I participated in the initial setup and deployment of Splunk AppDynamics.

The process was very straightforward; there were a few components and steps that we documented and added internally because we are using Splunk AppDynamics as a SaaS solution. The setup is quite straightforward. Therefore, the setup is not an issue; it's working as designed.

Splunk AppDynamics provided technical help that assisted us in this process.

Regarding whether I have seen any return on investment so far regardless of expenses, I think we can say so because of the problems we had in the past and the fast way we solve problems with the tool. The technical person that is using this is quite happy when they know what to fix.

The overall positive impact and benefits I have seen from using Splunk AppDynamics so far is that the overall function is acceptable. Unfortunately, the setup is quite expensive, which is the bad part of it because I want to spread my agent across the IT landscape, but that's very expensive.

Overall, I consider Splunk AppDynamics an expensive product; it's very expensive.

Before choosing Splunk AppDynamics, I evaluated other options and other vendors.

I chose Splunk AppDynamics instead of the other options I had because of the deep insight you get with agents, especially for the databases and other application frameworks such as Java and .NET. You get quite useful information with a quite easy setup.

I am not using the secure application feature in Splunk AppDynamics.

I don't think we have tested Splunk AppDynamics' digital experience monitoring, so that's nothing.

I would rate this review overall as a six.

A main use case for Splunk AppDynamics  is monitoring the applications in production environment. We are doing infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring.

For all the applications, we monitor the infrastructure such as CPU, disk, and memory. If there are any issues with CPU, memory, or processes, we send alerts to the teams. Similarly, we do application monitoring for JVM and server availability.

We are using Splunk AppDynamics  for troubleshooting predominantly, and sometimes for capacity planning as well.

The best feature about Splunk AppDynamics are the Business Transactions. It automatically detects and captures them, which helps most of the application teams.

Whatever the important business transactions are, it automatically captures them and their performance as well. If there are any performance issues, business transactions will help point out exactly where the performance has been degraded. This helps the development team to troubleshoot and rectify if there are any modifications required in their code.

Splunk AppDynamics monitoring is helping our organization. Because of this tool, we have reactive monitoring. Whenever there are any issues, the application will get the ServiceNow  ticket. This is the policy in our organization. If the threshold criteria is exceeded, it creates a ticket and assigns it to the application team. The application team investigates that issue, and in that way, we avoid downtime. Apart from that, if there are any application performance issues, with the help of business transactions or memory leak functionality, the development team will be able to drill down that issue and fix it faster than the traditional way.

We have seen application availability increase. There is a twenty-five percent reduction of the application downtime.

With Splunk AppDynamics mapping, it captures the business transactions and provides the feature to add business transactions or eliminate those which are not necessary. This auto-mapping helps most of the applications.

With the help of infrastructure monitoring in Splunk AppDynamics, server availability is one of the key features. It captures the memory, CPU, and disk. These are helping my organization to keep all the applications up and running with minimal downtime.

We are looking for some more common extensions and custom extensions. Specifically, we are doing log monitoring, URL monitoring, and port monitoring. We are looking for cloud monitoring if there are any features available in Splunk AppDynamics.

Splunk AppDynamics can be improved specifically by providing the log monitoring feature that is currently not available, centralized log monitoring. I know that is available in Splunk. Apart from that, we are seeking to address a couple of issues in Splunk AppDynamics. Specifically, machine agents are not reporting, or we have to restart our machine agents. Another issue is with disk utilization. For disk utilization, it will automatically detect the mount path, but we have seen for many mount paths, even though they are mounted, the data is not reported in Splunk AppDynamics. If the Splunk AppDynamics tech team fixes these issues, that is going to help significantly. Additionally, there is one more feature regarding how we can do cloud monitoring with the help of Splunk AppDynamics. Regarding the market trending with AI, how will Splunk AppDynamics help with artificial intelligence?

In the technology stack, I believe Python is going to be heavily used in AI applications. I'm not certain about this. We currently monitor Python, but it is not as extensive as Java monitoring. If Splunk AppDynamics provides more information on Python monitoring or artificial intelligence application monitoring, that will be helpful.

Customer support takes time. Whenever we face any issues, we have to open the vendor case and then there will be back and forth happening. I can see there is an opportunity to improve the customer support in Splunk AppDynamics.

I have been using Splunk AppDynamics for the last four years.

We have not seen any issues with Splunk AppDynamics. It is stable. We haven't seen any outages.

We have not seen any issues with scalability. We were able to scale up as the number of applications increased.

Customer support takes time. Whenever we face any issues, we have to open the vendor case and then there will be back and forth happening. I can see there is an opportunity to improve the customer support in Splunk AppDynamics.

Earlier we were using some other monitoring tool, and troubleshooting in that monitoring tool was difficult. We switched to Splunk AppDynamics because of the business transaction feature specifically and other customized extensions available.

Before choosing Splunk AppDynamics, we evaluated some other tools as well. Specifically, we tried our hands with the Tivoli monitoring tool. We are still using OpenText  as well, which is also a monitoring tool. We have used some other tools as well, but we chose Splunk AppDynamics because of its user-friendly UI and because it is easy to understand.

Splunk AppDynamics is user-friendly and it's easy to monitor applications and troubleshoot. This helps the entire organization.

It requires minimal training to get onboarded for the application team as well as the support team.

Recently we are exploring how Splunk AppDynamics can be integrated with OpenTelemetry , but we are in a very initial stage.

Depending on the organization's requirement, we will definitely recommend Splunk AppDynamics because of its features, specifically all the custom extensions, and to maintain the application uptime. Splunk AppDynamics will help. It requires minimal training to get onboarded for the application team as well as the support team.

I think with the current era, we can see Splunk AppDynamics being a costlier tool. Most of our clients have shown an inclination toward open source tools, such as DataDog. Many applications and many organizations are using Grafana , and there are other tools available, so they are exploring that possibility because of the pricing.

There were a few issues that we have noticed with Splunk AppDynamics. Data is not reporting, and custom extensions are not readily available. That is why I have chosen seven out of ten.

This metric is not currently available on top of my head.

I believe you have covered all the points, and I am satisfied. My overall review rating for Splunk AppDynamics is seven out of ten.

I use Splunk AppDynamics ' data collection features with agent-based collection.

I am using application performance monitoring with the agent-based application which is injected into the Java application or .NET application to see the response time, the business transaction itself, and snapshots for each business transaction.

I have used Splunk AppDynamics  for business transaction monitoring and we are totally depending on application performance monitoring using Splunk AppDynamics.

I am seeing each service in our mobile app, from the login service, CD redemptions, and fund transfer, balance transfer impacting what I can prioritize.

The features I find most valuable in Splunk AppDynamics are Database Visibility, Server Visibility, and Application Visibility.

I see room for improvement in Splunk AppDynamics, specifically in correlation between transactions.

I would appreciate more flexibility for the dashboards because we have more flexibility in the dashboards and real-time capabilities with Splunk, but I didn't find this feature in Splunk AppDynamics. Splunk AppDynamics is collecting data for sampling, not all data, for at least five minutes.

I would appreciate alerting on time, not for sampling, and robust correlation between business transactions as functionalities in the future.

More widgets for dashboards would enhance the experience.

I have been using Splunk AppDynamics since four years ago and Splunk since one year.

I am using Splunk AppDynamics with a staff of 25,000 people in my company now.

For Splunk AppDynamics, I need twelve administrators.

I would rate their technical support from one to ten as seven.

I think they could improve resolution time, as they are fast in response, but they take too much time to fix the problem.

Before Splunk AppDynamics, I worked with Broadcom APM .

I am responsible for administrating Splunk AppDynamics as a team, engineering team, and developing new dashboards while onboarding new applications. We already have in our organization a monitoring team which has detected alarms and reported this instance to the concerned people.

I have seen a return on investment with Splunk AppDynamics, as we are investing more and more for Splunk AppDynamics because we have many tools and many applications in our organization.

I find the pricing of Splunk AppDynamics reasonable for its features.

I switched to Splunk AppDynamics because of the support, as Broadcom does not have good support, but the tool itself is good.

Splunk is a separate environment from Splunk AppDynamics, but Splunk AppDynamics is called by the engineers Splunk AppDynamics or Cisco AppDynamics because Splunk is acquiring Splunk AppDynamics.

I don't have experience with Splunk AppDynamics in hybrid environments, as I only use it on-premises.

I am not using Splunk AppDynamics' AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis right now.

My experience with Splunk AppDynamics' line-of-code level troubleshooting feature in diagnosing performance issues is that we are using many tools for detecting the issues, but Splunk AppDynamics is the majority for detecting issues. When the issue is related to the network or infrastructure, we switch to another tool.

We are not using Splunk AppDynamics' digital experience monitoring because we are stopped by information security due to downloading the SDK with the mobile app itself and then collecting the user experience while having confidential data for our end customers.

I am not familiar with the Secure Application feature in Splunk AppDynamics and I am not using it.

I would recommend the product to other companies. I gave this review a rating of eight out of ten.

I use Splunk AppDynamics  for monitoring the infrastructure and the applications, their health and performance, and any bottlenecks on memory or disk, as we have defined many KPIs. There are specific use cases where we need to send data out very fast, and to ensure we are not breaching the SLA, we monitor closely, especially if we need to tune something on our application side. It is primarily for infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring.

The best features of Splunk AppDynamics  that I appreciate include the ability to drill down to a specific transaction, which is very useful for analyzing situations. For example, we might have 10,000 transactions in one hour, but if there is only one transaction taking five seconds while all others are processed within nanoseconds, we can drill down into that transaction and see the details, which is very useful for us.

I appreciate the speed and the details that Splunk AppDynamics provides, and the visualization is also good for anybody who is not technical enough to understand where the data is coming from, whether it is a transaction on an API, a web service request, or JMS. Splunk AppDynamics has very good visualization that allows a non-technical person to grasp some basics, such as understanding where we are receiving something from and how it flows.

My thoughts on the AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis in Splunk AppDynamics are that in the first two or three years, it was not very great, possibly because it lacked sufficient data. However, now it suggests possible reasons since it has enough data to identify potential issues, so we do not have to look everywhere. Based on the input we receive from the agent or dashboard, we focus on selected areas, saving us time during investigations and reducing the time from four hours to just one hour.

The time saved is significant as we have gone from four hours to one hour, which means we are saving a lot of time. If there is an issue requiring root cause analysis, we typically look into 10 areas, but Splunk AppDynamics helps us focus on about three or four areas, where we find 95% of the issues based on its suggestions, making it an effective time-saver.

Splunk AppDynamics has indeed helped improve our business resilience by allowing us to carry out proactive maintenance and identifying problems beforehand. We monitor application heap memory thresholds and take corrective actions before any crashes occur, which definitely indicates its effectiveness.

If I consider what can be improved in Splunk AppDynamics, I would point out that it could enhance its reporting capabilities, as it remains very technical. Some business users struggle to create their own dashboards or reports because they are not technical and do not want to dive into the complexities, so making it more user-friendly in the manner of Tableau would be beneficial.

My experience with Splunk AppDynamics is approximately five years.

In comparing Splunk AppDynamics with other vendors, I find that for conjunction monitoring of infrastructure and applications, it is one of the best. However, for pure infrastructure monitoring, tools such as Dynatrace  and BMC might be better suited, so the choice depends on your specific use case.

Regarding pricing, I reiterate that I think it is right on target and it is cheaper than Dynatrace .

Regarding how Splunk AppDynamics' digital experience monitoring affects user experience, I think it is similar to other tools such as Dynatrace. From a user experience perspective, all of these applications, including BMC Remedy , have essentially the same layout, so I would not say it has any standout advantage in user experience.

When I assess the infrastructure monitoring of Splunk AppDynamics in correlating infrastructure and application performance, I find it to be better compared to tools such as Dynatrace or BMC Remedy . Splunk AppDynamics excels in monitoring both infrastructure and applications together, offering better insights than when using just infrastructure monitoring tools.

I would recommend Splunk AppDynamics, but my advice is that it depends on what you are trying to monitor. It is best for monitoring both infrastructure and applications together, but if you are monitoring just infrastructure, it might not be right for you, as it is situated in a competitive space alongside tools such as Dynatrace and BMC Patrol . I would rate this product as an 8 out of 10.