AppDynamics Serverless APM for AWS Lambda

The primary use case for Splunk AppDynamics is to find the root cause diagnostics for issues. I am currently using the agent-based approach for data collection features, not OpenTelemetry. I have used Splunk AppDynamics for business transaction monitoring.

The features I find most valuable in Splunk AppDynamics include two aspects: the ease of managing the tool and how it helps me identify where the agent itself caused issues in the application, where it crashes and causes problems due to my very large environment. It gives me the code where it is stuck or what is going on, which is largely helpful for application developers who need to understand where things are going wrong after seeing the reports. The tool presents basic JVM utilization, memory heaps, and all those metrics.

The limitations I notice include the instability of the agent, which crashes, and the application itself consuming memory under heavy loads. Additionally, the customizations are not easy to build, especially for new parsers and functionalities that are just supported out-of-the-box. Splunk AppDynamics needs to be more user-friendly so that even someone who does not know what is happening should be able to easily find the root cause of issues, as the tool is specifically designed for application developers, not from a user perspective for problem identification.

My experience with the application performance monitoring capabilities of Splunk AppDynamics indicates that it is complex. The correlation from the front end to the back end is not working properly. In an application using the EUM feature and having the app agent, the app agent gives me the transaction data, but the EUM data does not correlate to the backend transactions, and I do not know why. It can be very complex to find the root cause in those scenarios, as there is a disparity in metrics, making it challenging. Even though Splunk AppDynamics is trying, my very large environment presents hurdles that medium-scale organizations might not experience. After spending around three to four years trying to get value from it, I still feel a lack of satisfaction.

To get closer to a rating of 10 in the future, I would like to see whatever features are being provided made to work, particularly in large environments. Splunk AppDynamics claims it can do 100 things, but if those things are not functioning cohesively, it is ineffective. Instead of offering 100 features that do not work together, it would be better to focus on a smaller set of features that operate effectively. Changes happen daily with new applications and technologies, and Splunk AppDynamics needs to adapt more swiftly to keep up.

The feature that helps detect and protect against vulnerabilities does raise concerns. I experience vulnerabilities in Splunk AppDynamics that I communicate to support for fixes, and they often respond by indicating that some fixes are available in new versions. This creates a continuous cycle of raising issues and waiting for resolutions through version updates.

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

Regarding the effectiveness of Splunk AppDynamics' auto-discovery and mapping in visualizing my application ecosystem, there is a limitation with enabling over 200 transactions. Everything beyond that goes into an overflow section, and I have applications with 2,000 transactions that I want to evaluate independently, but I cannot due to this limit. Moreover, while evaluating, snapshots only capture what is present at that moment, meaning specific VIP customer issues may not be recorded, preventing detailed analysis. For general issues affecting many users, Splunk AppDynamics might indicate an impact, but for few users experiencing issues, it may not reflect the actual performance, leading to potential missed captures.

I would rate the technical support based on person-to-person experiences. If I get a good person, I definitely give a good rating, but for me, it is average, as some persons who got the case are good, while others are average or just starting. It varies, and I cannot assign a static rating because it depends on my needs. If I have a dedicated good engineer, I will likely receive good support, but for standard cases, the support could come from a level one engineer.

I would rate the support at five out of ten because I have instances where the support engineer has to understand the problem and accept it before they will work on finding a fix. When I escalate, the second-level engineer comes and understands my concern, trying to figure out what is going wrong.

The pricing of Splunk AppDynamics is too costly. The value does not match the cost, as for the higher price, the value received is less than expected.

I am giving Splunk AppDynamics a last shot to revive its performance. If it does not work out, I might consider alternatives since I have already invested around four years in this tool.

I do have other Splunk products, but I will opt for new ones. Currently, I utilize legacy tools from HP, such as Micro Focus and OpenText, and Splunk AppDynamics is the only tool I use outside that suite. If Splunk AppDynamics does not meet my needs, I might look into options such as Dynatrace or other alternatives.

In terms of usage, I am an end-user, not a consultant, manager, or integrator.

Currently, I am using the latest version of Splunk AppDynamics, and I keep updating. I think the latest version was released just a few days before, so I am not using that version.

Overall, I would rate Splunk AppDynamics in the middle, giving it a score between five and six, but not more than that.

I use Splunk AppDynamics data collection features with agents. It is on-premises, particularly in hybrid and on-premises environments. I have used Splunk AppDynamics for business transaction monitoring.

Splunk AppDynamics has helped me significantly in monitoring application performance. We use it with assistance from application owners and the business team to prioritize business transactions such as logins and checkouts. We concentrate on the very important business transactions that have a direct impact on our application.

The APM features are what I find most valuable, including session transactions and transaction tracing. I have quite a good experience with Splunk AppDynamics' application performance monitoring capabilities. I would describe the effectiveness of Splunk AppDynamics' auto-discovery and mapping in visualizing my application ecosystem as pretty good, at approximately eighty percent.

While I am not focused on code, other teams and application owners are finding Splunk AppDynamics' line-of-code level troubleshooting feature very interesting and helpful for their work.

There is room for improvement in auto-discovery and mapping. While it is very good, sometimes we need customization to match our application or business needs, but currently it is satisfactory.

If Splunk AppDynamics has limitations, they are by design as it depends on MySQL, which is a limited database. A more powerful backend database would be needed to accommodate more transactions or higher rates of transactions that it keeps. This would allow for input or historical data for more than three months, which would be helpful for our application, though we can manage ourselves in the current way if necessary.

I am very satisfied with the impact of Splunk AppDynamics' baseline performance and alerting on my organization's user experience, although the dashboard creation needs to be more advanced or sophisticated to match our needs. I hope that improvement is coming in the future.

In infrastructure, I do not depend on Splunk AppDynamics very much. Most of my environment is AIX and Linux, and the machine agents need to be supported extensively because it is not an automatic service. Therefore, I do not depend on it for infrastructure monitoring and I have another tool for that purpose.

I have been using Splunk AppDynamics for approximately six years.

I would rate the stability of Splunk AppDynamics as very good; it is a stable application.

A lot of people are using Splunk AppDynamics in my organization. The daily monitoring team and some application owners are using it, so there is significant IT adoption. Even higher management is using its dashboard to view the metrics because we are working twenty-four seven.

I would rate the technical support by Splunk as good and satisfying. First-level support is good, but sometimes the agent or engineer with the support needs to be escalated to another sector or level to have faster resolution, which is why I give it an eight. In general, it is good support.

I previously used Broadcom APM before moving to Splunk AppDynamics in two thousand twenty.

My experience with the deployment was straightforward. I used it before even in a CA application before Splunk AppDynamics, and it uses the same methodology. I did not try the smart agent, so I do not know how it works or how stable it is.

We calculated a return on investment with Splunk AppDynamics at the beginning, but we did not continue its comparison on the ROI beyond that initial study.

I find the pricing high and not very competitive with others. However, we depend on Splunk AppDynamics, so it works well for us. I find the pricing increasing, particularly since Cisco's acquisition. We purchased Splunk AppDynamics from Splunk directly here in Egypt through its partner, and Splunk AppDynamics in Egypt is involved directly in the pricing and selling.

I do not think Splunk AppDynamics is the best option on the market at the moment because Dynatrace still has a powerful impact on the market. To be honest, I have not tried SaaS applications such as Datadog, and I only know that our organization depends on on-premises solutions, not SaaS solutions. For our daily work, Splunk AppDynamics is very good.

I have not used Splunk AppDynamics' AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis yet.

We are not using Splunk AppDynamics' digital experience monitoring very much, so my experience on it is slight and not deeply developed.

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

I would rate Splunk AppDynamics an eight out of ten overall because the automatic deployment is not very straightforward. The one-agent method is not something I depend on very much; there is a different agent between infrastructure and application. I give it an eight overall.

Splunk AppDynamics serves as our main solution for end-to-end application performance management, and we conduct a certain level of digital experience monitoring as well.

We ensure that customer visibility is being perceived properly, and we want to understand issues much before customers struggle through them.

We are helping different application support teams by enabling them to gain the right visibility into the tool stacks that we have.

The best features Splunk AppDynamics offers include business transaction journey maps, service maps, dashboarding visualizations, and baselines.

I find myself relying on the service maps the most because they provide a high-level visualization of the different layers of instrumentation where the application is connected to upstream and downstream dependencies.

The dashboards give a high-level perspective into the full stack visibility into application performance.

When the machine agent is connected, we also get enriched data, allowing an application team to look into all the specifics from the application layer to the infrastructure, giving them substantial visibility into the metrics and transactions they are discussing.

Splunk AppDynamics has positively impacted my organization substantially because most of the critical applications within our organization are monitored through Splunk AppDynamics for application performance monitoring.

Issue resolution has come a long way, and the mean time to detect incidents and enable troubleshooting efforts is really helping the application team work through many challenges.

One area for improvement regarding OpenTelemetry and open-source aspects is that Splunk AppDynamics lacks credibility in open-source collectors, where we do not have full line of sight.

OpenTelemetry invocation enablement through the OTEL collectors, along with custom-built dash modes that can be easily plugged into different technology stacks such as cloud-natives, databases, and middleware components, would be absolutely helpful.

From an integration perspective, the product performs well.

If Splunk AppDynamics could bring in high-level Kubernetes visibility end-to-end across all clusters with pod-level information, that would be beneficial.

I have been using Splunk AppDynamics for three to four years.

Splunk AppDynamics is stable, though we do have some issues with the private synthetic agents.

Splunk AppDynamics is pretty much scalable because I am using it in the CI/CD pipeline.

The customer support for Splunk AppDynamics is pretty good. I rate the customer support about a nine.

The setup for Splunk AppDynamics is pretty simple.

I have the agents installed on all our telemetry collectors, and the pricing is pretty much competitive, while the licensing is still acceptable.

A general impact is that during any outages, incident application teams or end-user teams rely on Splunk AppDynamics to look into application performance and identify performance bottlenecks.

I think anyone who wants to monitor their native workloads and legacy platforms to gain full visibility can use Splunk AppDynamics.

I rate this product a six overall.