We used SolarWinds Loggly in our project for application monitoring. So we thought to have SolarWinds AppOptiocs for infra monitoring, so all details are in one place.
Pros
easy to set up with AWS.
UI design is straight forward , make it easy to get up to speed.
price is good compare to others (for small to mid-size infra needs).
Cons
integration with other tools.
pricing structure should be more flexible.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it works well with AWS. If you are using other SolarWinds products, specially Loggly than this might be a good choice as it would be easy to correlate and makes troubleshooting a bit easy. Pricing is good for small to mid-size infra, just clear it up on how you will use licenses (packs).
VU
Verified User
Director in Engineering (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)
SolarWinds AppOptics is being analysed to be used as a potential Cloud Services Monitoring tool - and on a side note, also being analysed on how effectively AppOptics can be leveraged to to APM things such as Appdynamics and Dynatrace does. So we are proposing SolarWinds AppOptics to our client as the new technology monitoring tool for cloud infra, primarily.
Pros
Cloud Service Monitoring
New Technologies Monitoring such as Containers Docker
APM
Cons
GCP is not Supported
Oracle is not Supported
No Integration available with Service Now
Likelihood to Recommend
SolarWinds AppOptics is a fit tool for monitoring modern technologies such as Cloud Services (AWs, Azure), Micro Services, SaaS solution - which would not require on-premises like attention for Maintenance, Patching etc, and hence no un-necessary downtime since it is being managed by Vendor itself. It also helps in application tracing like an APM tool.
I use SolarWinds AppOptics to gather high-level information on bottlenecks and quickly drill down into problematic requests and identify things I can fix.
Pros
Aggregate info to show problems
Show layer by layer overview of where time is spent
Cons
Might be related to our setup but correlating info between different apps is not possible.
Likelihood to Recommend
I love the ease with which SolarWinds AppOptics allows me to get information about our web services.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Engineering (Information Technology & Services company, 1001-5000 employees)
As an early-stage startup, we were looking for a solution that offered the following: Automated alerts Performance monitoring Request tracing Monitor 3rd party services AppOptics provides all of this functionality at a much lower price than its competitors such as NewRelic or Instana. We have been using them for over a year to monitor our application and AWS infrastructure. We have been very satisfied with their product. It has helped us identify various performance issues, resource bottlenecks, and issues with downstream services. In case of issues in our infrastructure or downstream services, it has helped us resolve the issue with low turnaround times. We have given access to this tool to our entire engineering team. Additionally, we have set up automated alerting and configured it to notify us through OpsGenie. UPDATE Dec-2022: It has been 2.5 years since the first review. We are still using AppOptics and we continue to reap the benefits that we have listed above.
Pros
Request tracing with code profiling.
Automated alerting on latency and response codes for each API.
Low resource overhead while collecting data from our application servers.
Highly performant dashboard that enables us to make progress rapidly.
Very resilient. We have not seen a downtime in their service in the entire year that we have used them.
Identify database and cache requests that are taking longer than expected
Cons
Monitoring and alerting for downstream services can be improved significantly.
They can make it easier and faster to setup alerts for the infrastructure and application.
Likelihood to Recommend
With the current set of features, AppOptics is a great option for startups that do not depend on downstream external services for their product. I have already recommended it to some friends working at other startups. I am rating it 8/10 instead of 10/10 because its monitoring of downstream services is inadequate. In our company, we have a monolithic application. So, we don't have an opinion on how it would operate in a service-oriented architecture. Dec 2022: 2.5 years since the first review, I have seen a significant improvement in the monitoring of downstream services. We have leveraged AppOptics to identify requests to Database and Cache with anomalous behaviour. Additionally, they have also made it easier to track the performance of API requests made to external services. Hence, I updated the rating to 9/10. The reason I have not scored it a 10/10 is because setting up alarms can be made easier.
VU
Verified User
Vice-President in Engineering (Financial Services company, 11-50 employees)
It is used in multiple departments of our organization. It is being used to control response time, error rate, and drill down into multiple paths of the website and 95th percentile.
Pros
Markers: Drill down into specific logical blocks of the execution timeline.
Remote services: Possibility to track external API calls separately from the main stack.
Alerting: Possibility to receive alerts as soon as a certain threshold was reached.
Cons
Get to the errors from the dashboard graphs.
Custom-selected Nth percentile.
Auto-refresh option for close to live-monitoring.
Likelihood to Recommend
I like to have it open with the last 60 minutes of data, especially during our deployments to monitor changes in the load of the website infrastructure. The only annoying thing is that I have to constantly refresh it myself to see the change.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Engineering (Entertainment company, 1001-5000 employees)
It's being used by the department to detect performance issues like response time in the application. This helps us detect the bottlenecks in our application. This includes remote calls, database queries, cache calls. It also helps us determine the different layers in a request made. This helps in identifying ones that can be removed.
Pros
Average response time.
Average request rate.
Tracing different layers in a request.
Detection of slow queries.
Cons
More data can be added, however, it could also be that we haven't set it up fully.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is best for the detection of bottle necks in the application. It gives an idea of the different layers the application spends time in. The average response time and request rate give us a rough idea of what we are doing. Transaction details help in determining finer points in the application. It could do better with a lot of server performance stats as well. Maybe we need to set it up.
We use it for most of our products. We use it for many things, but to me, the main use is when we do our deployments to monitor for changes in performance. We have also been able to see what part of the applications/stack is slow so that we can further improve things.
Pros
Shows each layer of application.
Code tracing.
Easy to visualize where the issues are.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it's useful for any and all applications.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Engineering (Internet company, 1001-5000 employees)
We use SolarWinds AppOptics in one project. We are providing engineering services to one US-based organization and we have integrated SolarWinds AppOptics in their application for performance monitoring. AppOptics helps us to create monitoring dashboards and configure alerts if some operation crosses the threshold response time to meet SLAs. Our project is based on the healthcare domain so real-time data is very important for this and AppOptics is useful to track database response time, communication time between two services, etc.
Pros
Provides default dashboards for all your services and we can create custom dashboards as well
We can configure alerts on API response times and can configure multiple notification channels
It tracks everything including infrastructure, database response, communication between different micro-services
Cons
Sometimes I have faced issues while creating custom dashboards
A few metrics do not provide accurate results
Documentation can be improved
Likelihood to Recommend
SolarWinds AppOptics is a great tool to monitor the health and performance of micro-services. Nowadays, every big organization is using distributed architecture, and application monitoring is an essential part of that. So SolarWinds AppOptics is providing almost every feature which is required to monitor a large distributed system.
VU
Verified User
Contributor in Engineering (Information Technology & Services company, 501-1000 employees)
SolarWinds AppOptics is being used to help engineers debug issues within the entire application stack, from the API call all the way down to the actual database. It's a very powerful tool to isolate latency and reliability issues that you can't typically find in logs or metrics, unless you make those very granular.
Pros
Full application stack trace
Measuring latency
Providing historical map of calls
Cons
It's confusing sometimes to dig into a trace, like certain levels don't have much info. AppOptics just says this level occupies 95% of the call time.
It would be nice to have AppOptics identify if the root cause of an issue was caused by a dependency, e.g. another service it calls. It would be great to chain them together.
Not very intuitive, if you don't know what you're doing or know what to look for.
Likelihood to Recommend
SolarWinds AppOptics is a great tool if you want to debug latency or go deep into a specific endpoint to investigate the full stack call. However, when looking at the overall health of your service and its dependencies, it won't give you the overview you're looking for. We use SignalFx to provide us with the view of the "forest" and SolarWinds AppOptics to provide us a view of a "tree." It would be great if AppOptics suited both situations, so you didn't have to switch between tools.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Engineering (Information Technology & Services company, 1001-5000 employees)
It is used by both DevOps and by Tech Support. We use it to track down source code-level issues and to monitor response time and service level stats.
Pros
Distributed tracing.
Basic hardware monitoring.
Application transaction stats/details.
Cons
Support for celery in Python.
Overall better Python support.
Backwards compatibility.
Likelihood to Recommend
Any web app that needs distributed tracing and transaction monitoring is well suited for this product. Python support for Gunicorn is good. Python support for celery tasks has been broken for some time. Releases of the Python language binding are infrequent. There is no GitLab or GitHub project to submit tickets to which would help with issue tracking for users.
