ThousandEyes vs. AppDynamics

Quick Definition: ThousandEyes excels in network monitoring, internet visibility, and application delivery optimization, providing insights into network performance and end-user experiences. AppDynamics shines in application performance monitoring, user experience optimization, and business impact analysis, making it the better choice for organizations where application reliability and user satisfaction are critical. 

If you run an online business, you know that smoothly running networks and apps are crucial. After all, every second of downtime leads to lost revenue. 

To keep things running smoothly, IT professionals use network and application monitoring tools to get insights into the health and performance of IT infrastructure. This allows them to identify and resolve issues before they escalate into major problems.

In this article, we’ll compare two heavyweights in the network monitoring field — ThousandEyes vs. AppDynamics. We explore their key features, integration capabilities, and pricing to help you choose the best network monitoring and intelligence platform for your business. 

What are the Features of ThousandEyes?

ThousandEyes is a network monitoring solution that offers a comprehensive approach to network visibility and performance optimization. Developed with the modern, distributed IT infrastructure in mind, ThousandEyes helps businesses gain deep insights into their network's behavior and health.

Some of ThousandEyes' key features include: 

• Deep network visibility: With globally distributed vantage points, ThousandEyes can monitor the intricate paths data takes as it traverses the internet, enabling organizations to identify potential issues. This visibility extends across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, so no part of your network goes unchecked.

• Robust internet health monitoring capabilities: ThousandEyes continuously monitors the performance and availability of ISPs, cloud providers, and other internet infrastructure components and provides real-time data about outages and disruptions. This feature is particularly important for companies that rely heavily on cloud services and global connectivity.

• Application delivery insights: By simulating real-world user experiences and monitoring application performance from multiple monitoring locations, ThousandEyes helps organizations understand how their applications are performing from the end-users' perspective. This data-driven approach helps businesses identify and address performance bottlenecks, ensuring a seamless user experience.

What are the Features of AppDynamics?

AppDynamics is an application performance monitoring (APM) solution that optimizes application performance and enhances user experiences. It provides a powerful suite of tools for monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing applications.

Here are some of AppDynamics' core features:

• Application performance monitoring: AppDynamics collects and analyzes real-time data from various application components, including code-level diagnostics, giving you granular insights into application performance. This includes identifying bottlenecks, detecting anomalies, and finding the root causes of performance issues. Armed with this information, you can take proactive steps to ensure optimal application performance.

• Comprehensive user experience monitoring: This tool provides deep insights into how users interact with your applications, from load times to error rates. This user-centric approach allows you to identify and address performance issues that can impact user satisfaction.

• Detailed business transaction tracing: AppDynamics automatically tracks business transactions across distributed architectures, enabling organizations to visualize the entire transaction flow. This high-level visibility helps you make data-driven decisions and prioritize improvements more efficiently. 

Comparison of Features Between ThousandEyes and AppDynamics

While ThousandEyes and AppDynamics share some common ground, their strengths lie in different areas of performance monitoring. Here’s a breakdown of how the two tools compare across several key areas.

Network Monitoring

ThousandEyes excels in network monitoring, providing visibility into the underlying network infrastructure. It focuses on mapping and analyzing network paths, monitoring internet health, and detecting potential bottlenecks or issues. 

Businesses can monitor on-premises, cloud, and hybrid networks and get real-time insights into network disruptions and their root causes. This is particularly valuable for understanding external factors that might impact network performance.

AppDynamics also offers network monitoring capabilities, but they focus on understanding the impact of network performance on application performance rather than providing a comprehensive view of the network itself. It doesn't match the depth and breadth of ThousandEyes in network visibility and is more suited for environments where network monitoring is a secondary concern.

Application Performance Monitoring

AppDynamics excels at application performance monitoring. Its code-level diagnostics, transaction tracing, and deep application insights allow organizations to identify and resolve performance issues quickly.

While ThousandEyes provides some application delivery insights, its strengths lie more in network-centric monitoring rather than application performance analysis. It can help identify issues affecting application performance but isn’t as specialized in application monitoring as AppDynamics.

User Experience Monitoring

Both ThousandEyes and AppDynamics offer user experience monitoring capabilities, but they approach it from different angles. 

ThousandEyes simulates real-world user experiences and monitors application performance from various locations, providing insights into end-user experiences. It provides valuable data on response times and availability, helping ensure a positive user experience.

For professionals looking to deepen their expertise in network monitoring with tools like ThousandEyes, CBT Nuggets offers comprehensive Cisco 300-445 ENNA training. This course equips learners with the skills to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize enterprise networks, preparing them for the ENNA certification.

AppDynamics, on the other hand, focuses more on understanding the impact of application performance on user experiences, leveraging techniques like synthetic transaction monitoring and real user monitoring. 

It tracks user sessions, error rates, and performance from the user's perspective, offering detailed data to improve the overall user experience. This feature is more advanced in AppDynamics than ThousandEyes.

Business Impact Analysis

AppDynamics focuses on linking application performance to business outcomes. Its business transaction tracing feature allows organizations to see entire business processes and identify performance issues affecting important operations.

ThousandEyes also provides insights into how network performance impacts business operations, but it is not focused on detailed business impact analysis. Its strengths lie in network health and visibility.

ThousandEyes vs. AppDynamics: Performance Evaluation

In our tests, ThousandEyes consistently performed well in network monitoring scenarios, demonstrating high scalability and accuracy. It excels in providing real-time data and insights into network performance, making it a reliable choice for organizations with extensive and complex network infrastructures.

AppDynamics, on the other hand, showed strong performance in application monitoring environments, with excellent scalability and precise accuracy in tracking application performance metrics. Its live monitoring capabilities ensure that businesses can quickly identify and address performance issues, maintaining optimal application functionality.

Below, let’s see how well each platform performs under various conditions, including scalability, accuracy, and real-time monitoring capabilities.

Scalability

ThousandEyes is designed to scale efficiently with growing network demands. Its architecture supports monitoring across global networks, so it can accommodate increased data volume and complexity without compromising performance.

AppDynamics is equally adept at scaling with business needs, especially in environments with multiple applications and extensive user interactions. Its cloud-based and on-premises solutions are built to handle large-scale application deployments.

Accuracy

One of ThousandEyes's standout features is its accuracy in network monitoring. Its vast array of globally distributed vantage points enables precise measurements of network paths, latency, packet loss, and other critical metrics, giving businesses an accurate understanding of network performance.

Similarly, AppDynamics offers detailed insights into application performance by tracking metrics like response times, error rates, and transaction performance. This accuracy is crucial for diagnosing and resolving performance issues quickly.

Real-Time Monitoring Capabilities

Both platforms excel in real-time monitoring. ThousandEyes offers live insights and instant alerts on network performance issues. Its real-time internet health monitoring further enhances its ability to provide timely data on external factors affecting network performance.

AppDynamics also provides robust real-time monitoring for applications, ensuring that performance data is continuously updated and accessible. Its real-time analytics and alerts help businesses stay ahead of performance issues, maintaining high application availability and reliability levels.

How Each Platform Addresses Common Challenges

Each platform takes its own approach to address common network and application performance monitoring challenges. ThousandEyes tackles the complexities of modern, distributed networks by providing end-to-end visibility and proactive monitoring, enabling organizations to stay ahead of potential issues and maintain optimal network performance. 

AppDynamics, on the other hand, addresses the challenges of monitoring and optimizing applications in dynamic, multi-cloud environments with advanced application performance monitoring and user experience optimization capabilities.

How Much Do ThousandEyes and AppDynamics Cost? 

ThousandEyes charges an annual subscription based on the number of monitored units (such as network agents, endpoints, or cloud agents) and the level of service required. 

AppDynamics also uses a subscription-based pricing model, with costs determined by the number of application nodes or agents monitored. Pricing can vary based on the specific modules and features included in the plan. Additional pricing options for specific features or use cases with add-ons can be purchased separately or bundled with the core subscription or license.

Use Cases: ThousandEyes vs. AppDynamics

ThousandEyes and AppDynamics have both been adopted across various industries. Let's explore some real-world use cases to better understand these solutions' strengths.

ThousandEyes Use Cases

• Network monitoring for distributed enterprises: ThousandEyes is ideal for enterprises with a globally distributed workforce and infrastructure. Companies like Salesforce and Okta have leveraged ThousandEyes to monitor their network performance, identify issues proactively, and ensure reliable connectivity for their employees and customers worldwide.

• Internet outage and service provider monitoring: ISPs and cloud providers rely on ThousandEyes to monitor the health of their networks and services. For instance, Akamai, a leading content delivery network (CDN) provider, uses ThousandEyes to monitor its global network and quickly identify and resolve performance issues.

• Application delivery optimization: Organizations like Twitter and eBay use ThousandEyes to optimize the delivery of their applications and services. By monitoring application performance from various locations, ThousandEyes helps identify bottlenecks and prioritize improvements, ultimately enhancing the end-user experience.

AppDynamics Use Cases

• E-commerce application performance monitoring: Online retailers like Wayfair have leveraged AppDynamics to monitor and optimize the performance of their e-commerce platforms, ensuring a seamless shopping experience for customers during high-traffic periods like Black Friday.

• Financial services application monitoring: Financial institutions, such as Nationwide Building Society, rely on AppDynamics to monitor and optimize their mission-critical applications, ensuring compliance with strict performance and availability requirements.

• DevOps and continuous delivery: AppDynamics has been instrumental in supporting DevOps practices and continuous delivery pipelines for companies like Cisco and Expedia. By providing real-time performance insights, AppDynamics enables teams to identify and resolve issues quickly, ensuring smooth application deployments and updates.

What Network and Application Monitoring Tool is Right for you?

Choosing between ThousandEyes and AppDynamics requires a thorough evaluation of each tool's strengths and weaknesses and consideration of your organization's specific needs, budget, and operational goals.

Suppose your primary concern is monitoring and optimizing network performance, ensuring reliable internet connectivity, and gaining insights into application delivery from an end-user perspective. In that case, ThousandEyes is the more suitable choice. It excels in these areas and can be a valuable investment for organizations with distributed infrastructure or a heavy reliance on internet-based services.

For organizations that focus on application performance monitoring, user experience optimization, and supporting DevOps, AppDynamics may be the better fit. Its APM capabilities, coupled with its user experience monitoring and business impact analysis features, make it a powerful tool for organizations invested in application development and delivery.

That said, many organizations opt for a combined approach, leveraging the strengths of both ThousandEyes and AppDynamics to gain a comprehensive view of their IT infrastructure's performance. This approach can be particularly beneficial for large enterprises with complex, distributed architectures and diverse monitoring requirements.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, your organization's choice between ThousandEyes and AppDynamics or a combination of both will depend on its specific needs, priorities, and budget constraints. Both solutions are powerful and become even more effective when used together. 

Before making a decision, conduct a full evaluation, including proof-of-concept deployments, to determine the suitability and potential impact within your specific environment. 

Want to learn more about network and application monitoring? Check out our Cisco Certifications for in-depth training.