We performed a comparison between Apica and AppDynamics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"There are several features that are really good. The first one is the flexibility and the advanced configuration that Apica offers when it comes to configuring synthetic checks. It provides the ability to customize how the check should be performed and it is very flexible in the number of synthetic locations that it can use. It allows us to run scripts from different locations all over the world, and they have a really good number of these locations."
"It uses a basic scripting language, which is easy to learn and customize as needed. Compared to LoadRunner, I found writing and customizing code much easier in Apica."
"As always, within the IT industry, everybody's always looking to upgrade and update everything else like that. Apica has been one of those things but it's really hard to replace because it offers us the unique capability to see what the customer is seeing. A lot of other ones can do Selenium script and things like that, but there's a lot in Apica that we use right now. We utilize a lot of the scenario options in Apica right now, and there's a lot of other ones that do parts of it, but it doesn't do everything that Apica does."
"It is easy to set up and configure."
"Our application SREs do script checks in such a way that closely mimic our customers' actions using the platform. Because there are so many different ways and options to be able to configure checks to closely mirror your applications' capabilities, it provides a lot of optionality for teams to create the right type of check that can notify when there are any issues. At the end of the day, we want our monitoring tools to be able to catch any outage before our customers do. This is where Apica Synthetic does a great job."
"You can tell from the operational space of people who are using and consuming this data that they are more integrated. It is not dependent on one team anymore. It saves a lot of time by capturing and pinpointing the exact problem that is happening quickly. We have moved from getting escalations manually to getting escalations synthetically."
"What I like the most is that Apica can simulate different browsers and different versions of desktop or mobile browsers."
"One of the biggest advantages of moving to Apica is the ability get to a hybrid model with the architecture in the cloud and our agents on-prem. We also have access to Apica's cloud agent across the globe. That has changed the way that we have our load testing setup at this point. Previously, it was always internal. Now, with this change in the way it is implemented for load testing, we can test anywhere across the globe and from the list of agents available within Apica's cloud. If I don't have an agent available in a second location, it just takes an email to their customer support, then it is spun up within 24 hours. That flexibility has changed the way that we perceive our load tests, not just in the US, but globally."
"We are able to correlate performance between tiers."
"AppDynamics' most valuable features are the response time of the business transaction modules, the ability to monitor multiple services, and testing and developing environments."
"AppDynamics makes it much easier for us to detect problems or issues before they become problems. We have alerting on all of our business transactions."
"It is used to test customer behavior on a website."
"The best feature of AppDynamics is the analytics, which gives us the business insights of the application."
"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."
"From the performance management side, I like everything from business transaction work to tracking. On the database side, we can get a lot of insights from the database. On the server monitoring side, it helped us a lot to find out some of the issues on the VM side because VMs were creating a little trouble for us."
"It is a stable solution."
"We could use more detailed information in the request and response sections."
"Alerting needs improvement. It's a little noisy. It needs some better options. Currently, they have an issue, when you set up a synthetic monitor, you can set up where it's monitoring from, a data center that Apica owns."
"Apica should add more features and integrations with different tools and certain ticketing systems, like ServiceNow."
"The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them."
"We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement."
"The accuracy of alerts can be improved a little bit. Right now, it's pretty good in terms of alerting pretty quickly about failures or changes in response times. However, what we have seen happen is the number of alerts that we are getting is very frequent, and we would like to tone down the number of alerts. That's the only trouble we have. Apica could tone down those settings because there is no option for us to tone it down to a level that would reduce the alerts to a minimum. As a platform, it does send us good alerts, but it could be improved a bit."
"Apica was a relatively new tool when I started using it. Although Apica had good documentation, it still felt less developed or advanced than a tool like LoadRunner."
"When it comes to the way the internal agent is installed, because you can install an application on a server, I would love to see the application Docker-ized. If you could install internal agents using Docker or using containers, it would be easier for us to manage them and spin up internal agents."
"Regarding Search Guard functionality, there is room for improvement."
"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."
"I would like them to change their business model for scalability to accommodate growing companies. The business model should be more flexible."
"There are too many installers available for this solution."
"We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues."
"AppDynamics scaled well up to around 3,000 agents. The performance deteriorated after that, while Dynatrace could support more than 10,000 agents. We were surprised that AppDynamics' scalability is not so good."
"There could log management features included in the product."
"The integration with cloud services is still pending with AppDynamics. We would like the product to be serverless."
Apica is ranked 45th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 4 reviews while AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 154 reviews. Apica is rated 8.4, while AppDynamics is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Apica writes "Offers transcript download feature and easy to set up and configure tests but not very user friendly". On the other hand, the top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". Apica is most compared with Datadog, Dynatrace, Apache JMeter and OpenText LoadRunner Cloud, whereas AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and New Relic. See our Apica vs. AppDynamics report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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