We performed a comparison between AppDynamics and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: With a wider range of features including alerting for issues, release management capabilities, and business insights, AppDynamics is scalable, stable, and easy to use. It offers the ability to monitor applications of different technologies and manage log files, whereas SolarWinds lacks code-level monitoring of applications and software-defined network monitoring capability. AppDynamics also has better customer support and an optimized dashboard, although it is more expensive.
"I find troubleshooting is quicker because we can drill down into the end points and see which endpoints are getting critical. Visibility-wise, the micro details are easy to find."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to take a report, and in particular, a visual, and link it to actual application performance and then the consequences. This means you can show how an incident or action has an effect on the business."
"Once you get past installation, AppDynamics is highly stable and we get good results."
"We're a large organization, so we appreciate AppDynamics' wide coverage. It may not work in all areas, but it has broad coverage. We can use the same dataset for different use case aspects. That is the beauty of AppDynamics. You can coordinate APM, EUM, and infrastructure through one dataset."
"We previously had an operations team continuously monitoring applications. Now, they just have set things up and our developers can monitor, view, and act on them, accordingly."
"What I like best about AppDynamics is that it's functional, particularly in APM in Java and .NET."
"It is a stable solution."
"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."
"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."
"The solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."
"The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"In the current version of AppDynamics, there is a correlated section, where we can see all servers’ performance along with application performance, but network performance is missing."
"AppDynamics' modules and hardware resources are very high."
"I’d like to see better out-of-the-box visual reporting so that we can roll this up to management."
"AppDynamics is agent-based, so some customers are reluctant to install the agents in all their production environments. It would be helpful if they had an agentless version. It covers applications on the server, but the solution is weak on the network side. The agent is not deployed on the network components, so it cannot provide complete information about issues on the network layer."
"Sometimes, it is hard to navigate through and find if something is wrong or figure out where an error stemmed from."
"AppDynamics is a solution that requires extra learning and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, automated reports would helpful similar to have they have in Google Analytics."
"More native support for other hardware is needed because having to install various extensions and perform extra setup for different devices is really challenging, and not as easy or straightforward as it is in other products."
"AppDynamics could benefit from greater integration with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning."
"It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system. In the application layer, it has some very basic stuff. You have to build your own with manuscripts and things like that."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."
"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 155 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 17th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and Azure Monitor, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Nagios XI and ServiceNow Discovery. See our AppDynamics vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.
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We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
