What users love (and hate) about 4 leading APM tools

Application Performance Management (APM) is the monitoring and management of performance and availability of software applications. An APM solution finds and diagnoses complex application performance problems in order to maintain an expected level of service. An APM solution translates IT metrics into business value, so it is crucial for a company to choose the right solution for their needs.

Four of the top APM solutions on the market are AppDynamics, CA APM, Dynatrace and New Relic, according to online reviews by enterprise users in the IT Central Station community.

But what do enterprise users really think about these tools? IT Central Station community members give a shout out to some of their favorite features, but also give the vendors a little tough love.

Editor’s note: These reviews of select APM products come from the IT Central Station community. They are the opinions of the users and are based on their own experiences.

AppDynamics APM

Valuable Features:

It’s easy to install and use. This is key for us. Even as the product portfolio has expanded … AD has done a great job of ensuring that the deployment process is straightforward and usually up and running in minutes. – Sid R, Vice President – Operations & Client Support at a tech services company

The tool also has a nice feature for monitoring end-user experience. This provides us with browser-rendering and client-side info (OS, browser, network time, etc.). Getting all this information on a common platform has been of great value and use to us. – Utkarsh C., Performance Tester/QA at a tech consulting company

It helps us to quickly pinpoint specific application problems related to memory and slow queries. – Justin S., Gateway Systems Administrator at a financial services firm

Room for Improvement:

I think the only feedback from my team has been that it’s not an HTML based UI right now, so it’s limited on mobile devices. An HTML 4 or 5 based interface would be great. – reviewer118995, User Experience Solution Director at a manufacturing company

Charting is cumbersome; inability to do decimal fraction arithmetic in expressions (for alerts), so everything has to be done in % rather than as natural fractions. Can’t get response time by host for a given host group without laboriously setting it up in the chart widget. – Jose L., Senior Application Support Specialist – ITIL at a leisure / travel company

See more user reviews of AppDynamics APM on IT Central Station.

CA APM

Valuable Features:

We are using APM for troubleshooting and because of this product, the delay to solve and to fix issues has been reduced by 40% on average.” Igor S., Director of DevOps at a large financial firm. “The tools help us resolve issues with applications. For example, an application team had an issue with the slow average response time of their application. – Umer N., Principle System Engineer at a retailer

It reduces the down-time of applications, and has, in fact, minimized it to approximately 5% or possibly even less than that. – Winkle K., Technical Consultant at a tech services company

Room for improvement:

I like the product a lot. There are some areas which I’d like to see improved in 9.7 and 9.8. Issues with the workstation interface which could be more productive. Sometimes you have to go back and forth to do some tasks. The UI needs to be more intuitive. – Carlos A., Consultant at a tech services company

Integration with other tools and out of the box reporting. Customization should be there for reports as this is the main feature asked for several times by customers. – Pankaj S., IT Administrator at a tech services company

See more user reviews of CA APM on IT Central Station.

Dynatrace

Valuable Features:

Teams are now able to schedule deployments to any environment and watch in a screen the deployment occur. This has allowed teams to reduce the number of staff online when a deployment occurs. – Randall H., ECC Operations Manager at a financial services firm

Agent & agent-less monitoring Application, .NET CLR and Java runtime injection, PurePath and PureStack Technologies, UEM Technology, Ability to deploy custom plugins to leverage the tool in new ways. – Derek A., Systems Engineer at a software R&D company

The most important features are the ability to see trends in performance and also to aid in diagnose any performance degradation in the web applications and utilize the tool to provide a faster solution and faster root cause analysis to the problem. – Dan S., Technical Architect at a software R&D company

Room for Improvement:

More flexibility with refresh times. More UI options. – SysAdmin9707, Systems Administrator – Digital Operations at a retailer

Generally their support is pretty good, but on occasion you can tell you get someone “new”, in which you know more than they do. – Derek A.

See more user reviews of Dynatrace on IT Central Station.

New Relic APM

Valuable Features:

New Relic has changed the way we are dealing with application problems. It’s the first place for our administrators to check if we encounter issues. – Guido S., Senior Unix Engineer + Managing Dir at a tech services company

New Relic helped us in realizing that sometimes our online service wasn’t as fast and reliable as we expected it to be. With the help of New Relic tools, our organization was able to detect, track, and fix errors in our website, so we focused our efforts in these areas. – Marc P., Technical project lead at a tech services company

It allows the Ops teams to better cooperate with the DEV teams. Essential in a devops culture is that the different role within a devops team use the same metrics and data. – Edwin van V., Senior Service Manager at a tech services company

Room for Improvement:

Doesn’t recognized some third party transaction traces. – Pawan R., Engineer at a software R&D company

I would like better alerting. I also would like to see a bit more detailed information. Though I was happy with the detail I did get. – Heath L., Executive Leadership Team Member at a transportation company

See more user reviews of New Relic APM on IT Central Station.