AppDynamics vs Dynatrace comparison

AppDynamics and Dynatrace are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. AppDynamics is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.2, while Dynatrace is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3. AppDynamics holds a 5.2% mindshare in APM, compared to Dynatrace’s 12.4% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of AppDynamics users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Dynatrace users who would recommend it.

AppDynamics

Read 156 AppDynamics reviews

14,486 Views
9,226 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Dynatrace

Read 344 Dynatrace reviews

35,807 Views
21,723 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

AppDynamics

Dynatrace

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Dynatrace and AppDynamics compete in the application performance management solutions category. Dynatrace generally scores higher due to its automation and AI capabilities, while AppDynamics is often praised for its deeper application insights and business transaction monitoring.

What features are offered by Dynatrace in comparison to AppDynamics?

Dynatrace is recognized for its automatic full-stack monitoring, AI-based problem detection, and robust automation features. AppDynamics offers detailed business transaction monitoring, end-to-end performance insights, and comprehensive application dashboards.

What areas of improvement can be found in Dynatrace in comparison to AppDynamics?

Dynatrace could improve its complex pricing structure, reduce heavy resource usage, and provide more flexible deployment options. AppDynamics users highlight the need for better Kubernetes support, simpler configuration processes, and enhanced reporting features.

How is the ease of deployment and customer service of Dynatrace in comparison to AppDynamics?

Dynatrace has straightforward deployment and responsive customer support. AppDynamics also provides good deployment options but can be complex initially. Both companies receive positive reviews for customer service, with a slight preference for Dynatrace.

What setup costs and ROI can be seen with Dynatrace in comparison to AppDynamics?

Dynatrace is criticized for its high setup costs but offers significant ROI due to its features and problem resolution capabilities. AppDynamics users report good ROI from detailed transaction monitoring despite high setup costs. Dynatrace offers more immediate cost justification, while AppDynamics is valued for long-term insights.

To learn more, read our detailed AppDynamics vs. Dynatrace Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

AppDynamics vs. Dynatrace

November 2024

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Categories and Ranking

AppDynamics

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

5th

Ranking in Mobile APM

3rd

Ranking in Container Monitoring

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

156

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Dynatrace

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

2nd

Ranking in Mobile APM

1st

Ranking in Container Monitoring

2nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

344

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (4th), AIOps (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AppDynamics is 5.2%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 12.4%, down from 14.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Q&A Highlights

reviewer1555236

IT Operations Executive at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 29, 2021

What are pros and cons of AppDynamics vs Dynatrace?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitoring. We maintain critical processing on our mainframe so there was a desire to include this in our transaction trace. Due to a highly mature ELK implementation, we are not trying to incorporate log analytics into solution buy may consider in the future. We had AppD, Dynatrace, New Relic, and CA Wily all in house at the time of our evaluation. We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing. Between Dynatrace and New Relic, Dynatrace won based on the automation, integrated AI, support for "old" techs, and confidence we could eliminate multiple APM and infra monitoring tools. I would not include products like BigPanda, MoogSoft, in this analysis. They are not monitoring solutions but event correlation solutions. You will need additional monitoring products to capture data and feed them. Having said that if you cannot consolidate tools you will likely need to purchase an event solution to make sense of all the alarms. We did evaluate these products but with Dynatrace AI did not feel the business value was there for the investment. Here's a quick pro/con list on Dynatrace & New Relic from our analysis. New Relic Pros: Insights is an awesome product and capability. Lots of capabilities and plugins to extend data collection. The APM dashboard is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Good training and documentation are available to support the product. New Relic Cons: Requires lots of manual configurations to implement and support. Insights product requires an investment of time to achieve value. Licensing is a nightmare as there is virtually no transparency in what you are being charged for. Lack of solution to consolidate alerts across implementation other than significant investment in insights to manually achieve this. Dynatrace Pros: Very simple to implement and maintain with out of the box automation which supports modern (cloud/Kubernetes) and "old" (mainframe). In-app chat is helpful. High integration of infra and APM data for full-stack observability and engineering. Topology and trace discovery is more reliable than other products or our CMDB. Synthetics are easy to set up for any user. AI-assisted problem analysis on the trace discovery streamlines troubleshooting. AI includes "events" in an analysis like VMotion, deployment events. Have not done yet but looking to leverage monitoring as code for a fully integrated and automated delivery pipeline. See keptn.sh open source project. Dynatrace Cons: User SQL lacks some functions of NRQL for user analysis. Host, process, and service data is not available to query within the product. Alarm processing lacks some granular controls. The Plug-in library is less robust. Good luck with your decision!

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Featured Reviews

Noorul Mustafa Khan

Senior Associate Vice President at Wells Fargo

Widely used by most financial services sectors, such as banking and insurance sectors

Currently, the solution is on the cloud as well. You can have your cloud applications onboarded to AppDynamics without any issues. AppDynamics has its own SaaS environment and SaaS controller on which you can onboard your application. You will need to install some of the AppDynamics agents. I used to contact the tools team, and they used to answer our queries mostly. If not, they used to take it to the support and then come back with their solution. Users need to list all the servers related to their application on which they want the AppDynamics agents installed. Depending on whether your application is cloud-based or non-cloud, you need to list all your servers. Then, a further installation process would be recommended. To use AppDynamics, you need to understand the different flows. If an issue is currently ongoing, you need to check which GUI flow is being used. If you want previous data, it will be in the history, and that's a different flow. Working with the tool is tricky, but two to three weeks of continuous work on it should bring you up to date. Suppose you are working in a bank. For your application, you can configure everything regarding the business transaction. For balance transfers, you can have one business transaction that will monitor balance transfers. There can be another business transaction that can monitor credit cards. You can configure different flows and transactions within the flows in terms of business transactions. Wherever there is an issue, that exact business transaction will start developing. The integration of AppDynamics within our CI/CD pipeline has positively affected our deployment frequency and application quality. Whenever there is a deployment or release, we see some hiccups in AppDynamics. There will be some things going on on that server, which we can easily identify in AppDynamics. Only after we validate that do we give the next go. Overall, I rate the solution eight and a half out of ten.

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Sathis-Kumar

Senior Manager at Bank of America

The single-agent format is easy to use and accurately captures issues

We are currently migrating from AppDynamics to the solution. AppDynamics is moving toward a fast model and has a few issues with vendor support. It also requires multiple agents for each function. For example, a Java-related APM requires the installation of another agent. The solution is a bit higher priced than AppDynamics but is more user friendly and only requires one agent, so our application teams prefer it.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic."

"The ability to check parameters for microservice applications is most valuable. It is important for me. I can manually create new business transactions for applications and individually monitor business transactions. I can also use a lot of extensions. It has a lot of extensions to monitor other third-party applications, such as NoSQL applications, memory cache applications, Kafka applications, and Couchbase applications. It is very useful. We are also using the end-user monitoring site to follow all end-user activities. It is important for us to check the errors on the customer site."

"We can make custom alerts in our system for specific issues like high CPU utilization or application downtime."

"The solution helps us provide a better user experience to our customers."

"It allows us to configure health rules so that we can, based on our own experience, determine when an application is behaving incorrectly."

"The most valuable feature is the detailed statistics, like the consumer count, for the ActiveMQ server."

"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."

"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."

More AppDynamics pros

"We’re monitoring our SQL databases, we’re monitoring our microservices infrastructure, we’re monitoring our front-end we’re monitoring our mobile apps. It has increased our productivity, we’ve been able to optimize all of our applications."

"I find that the AI on offer is useful, as it's good at identifying problems. You do need a bit of customizing, however, even in its sort of vanilla form, it's pretty good at identifying problems and the root causes of those problems and whatnot."

"It is a product that helps developers, testers, and operations to make sure their applications work quickly and reliably."

"I get valuable information like, for example, if a site is down. That's the key. I'm instantly getting a message, or even on the app, I can see if something overnight went down a few times, or it's not performing at 100%."

"Reduces the amount of knowledge that is needed by applications consuming this data."

"Transparency and visibility into application performance, errors, incidents, etc. helps to foster a collaborative environment."

"The full stack - Everything from the browser, all the way back to the database, and being able to see everything, and really narrow in very quickly on what is the root cause."

"We are using it on most of our platforms, which are on a big scale and across the globe."

More Dynatrace pros

Cons

"They need to improve the consolidation of agents for the agent's installation process."

"The integration part in AppDynamics with other systems is an area with a little difficulty, especially when it comes to the configuration area. The integration of AppDynamics with other products takes a lot of time."

"If it can be able to intelligently provide all the things we need to look at, from a data point of view, that would be very useful."

"While it is scalable, it could be better."

"It needs strengthening in the database tiers."

"This solution is expensive."

"If AppDynamics could do a one-agent function with their actual monitoring effectiveness, it will be the greatest tool."

"AppDynamics could benefit from greater integration with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning."

More AppDynamics cons

"Where we are struggling is being able to pull that information out and combine it with other contextual information that we have in other sources. Mining that data in a big-data environment, and joining it together and coming up with larger types of analysis on it."

"They should provide a guide to arrive at the solution for non-super experts."

"If we can gain more insight into older applications, using not-so-recent technologies, then it would be a plus."

"I would say it's not scalable, because we've had to move large applications that were in a shared environment to their own separate Dynatrace server instance."

"There is a limitation on timeframe. Now, if you look at the dashboard, it will state five minutes, then 15 minutes, then one hour, then six hours, and finally 24 hours. I would like them to provide a set of options defining the business hour."

"The functionality needs improvement."

"They need a capability similar to Tealeaf where you can actually view what the consumer is doing and record the sessions. That is the biggest missing element."

"The installation process had quite a few moving parts, so it was a little tricky getting everything to work in first go."

More Dynatrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product’s licencing policy is competitive. However, properly identify and size your needs to get the best rate."

"I would like more flexible pricing: A pay-per-use model, rather than just a fixed-price model."

"For those who appreciate the value and had issues with the visibility of the performance of their applications, then the pricing is good. For somebody who does not need it, it can be pricey, but overall, it is worth the money which it costs."

"Our purchasing experience through the AWS Marketplace has been pretty painless."

"There is a license needed to use the solution and it is expensive. The licensing model needs to improve."

"There were no added costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"AppDynamics is an expensive solution."

"As a technical person, and as an application development team, they all understand that this is the right tool for us. But when it comes to budget and financial matters, it takes days and weeks to convince upper management to buy this tool. So they should do something more on licensing costs."

More AppDynamics pricing and cost advice

"The product is really fast to implement and gives customers instant value. This is important, because it reduces costs on the implementation."

"Dynatrace is an expensive solution."

"The price range is quite high."

"There was also some complexity in the adoption rate of it because of how costly the licensing is."

"Always gives good ROI and total cost of ownership."

"They could improve their price ranges, as there is no option for startups or testing."

"We found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost."

"Make sure your leadership buy-in is in place. Ensure leadership understands that an APM solution is a fairly expensive, so they know what they are getting into."

More Dynatrace pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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Comparison Review

ITspe9886

IT Specialist at a government with 10,001+ employees

Feb 24, 2019

Compared to AppDynamics where we are still trying to get it into production, we had the latest version of Dynatrace in production within three days

Our primary use case for both Dynatrace and AppDynamics is for application performance monitoring (APM). The main reason for having application performance monitoring is, when we see something is running slowly, we can immediately look to see where the issue is at before our systems crash on us…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

49%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

34%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?

See all answers

APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit

Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...

See all answers

What do you like most about AppDynamics?

The solution saves time and cost.

See all answers

Any advice about APM solutions?

The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...

See all answers

What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?

While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Datadog vs AppDynamics

Compared 10% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs AppDynamics

Compared 8% of the time

New Relic vs AppDynamics

Compared 7% of the time

Elastic Observability vs AppDynamics

Compared 7% of the time

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs AppDynamics

Compared 5% of the time

More AppDynamics Competitors

Datadog vs Dynatrace

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Dynatrace

Compared 8% of the time

New Relic vs Dynatrace

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

Elastic Observability vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

More Dynatrace Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AppDynamics

December 2024

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Buyer's Guide

Dynatrace

December 2024

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Also Known As

AppD, AppDynamics APM

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AppDynamics

Dynatrace

Overview

AppDynamics is a comprehensive tool used for monitoring application performance, identifying user issues, analyzing traffic, managing infrastructure, and performance testing. It supports environments like Kubernetes, WebLogic, and Azure, and is crucial for industries such as banking, telecommunications, and financial services.

AppDynamics offers a robust solution for application performance monitoring, enabling deep diagnostics, transaction tracing, and root cause analysis. Users benefit from its real-time monitoring and comprehensive analytics capabilities. It's designed for ease of implementation and scalability, featuring intuitive dashboards that streamline infrastructure optimization and enhance user experience. AppDynamics supports extensive third-party extensions and provides proactive monitoring and alerting to ensure optimal system health. It assists in troubleshooting, database monitoring, and setting custom alerts to address Java applications and performance challenges efficiently.

What are the most important features of AppDynamics?

Application Performance Monitoring: Real-time insights into application health and performance
Business Transaction Capturing: Detailed tracking of business transactions across the application
Memory Monitoring: Monitoring memory usage to optimize application performance
Analytics: Advanced analytics to understand application and user behavior
Customizable Dashboards: Intuitive dashboards for better visualization and decision-making
Proactive Monitoring and Alerting: Immediate alerts and monitoring to prevent issues before they affect users
Integration Capabilities: Integration with third-party tools to extend functionality
Root Cause Analysis: Deep diagnostics to pinpoint and fix issues promptly
Transaction Mapping: Mapping transactions to understand and improve user journeys
Error Detection: Identifying and diagnosing errors to maintain application stability

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Ease of Implementation: Simple deployment process
Scalability: Ability to grow with the organization's needs
Time Savings: Reducing time spent on troubleshooting and issue resolution
Enhanced User Experience: Improving application performance for better user satisfaction
Cost Efficiency: Balancing functionality with cost to deliver value

AppDynamics is widely adopted in banking, telecommunications, and financial services to ensure optimal user experience and system health. Its capabilities support these industries in maintaining robust, efficient, and reliable applications. The tool is instrumental in troubleshooting, performance optimization, and providing a seamless user experience.

Dynatrace is an AI-powered software intelligence monitoring platform that accelerates digital transformation and simplifies cloud complexities. Dynatrace is an entirely automated full-stack solution that provides data and answers about the performance of your applications and deep insight into every transaction throughout every application, including the end-user experience. By modernizing and automating enterprise cloud operations, users can deliver an optimal digital experience with higher quality software to customers faster.

Dynatrace offers an all-in-one automated artificial intelligence solution that brings together application performance, cloud and infrastructure, and digital experience monitoring. Dynatrace accelerates performance-driven results through operations, development, and business teams with a shared metrics platform. In addition, users are provided a full-stack monitoring experience with three patented technologies:

Smartscape - visualization mechanism that maps the totality of everything working in your environment and detects any casual dependencies between your applications, processes, websites, services, hosts, cloud infrastructure, and networks.
OneAgent - a technology that analyzes, gathers ,and unifies all business performance metrics throughout every layer of your technology stack.
PurePath Technology - code-level context and timings are captured from the mainframe to the cloud for all end-to-end transactions.

What does Dynatrace offer?

Dynatrace redefines how organizations monitor their digital ecosystems. The solution offers:

Cloud Automation: With AI engine Davis®, users can see the exact reason for problems and facilitate quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.
Application Security: With automated application vulnerability management, users can deliver applications faster and more securely.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Convenient broad visibility across your environments is provided with streamlined, automated infrastructure monitoring.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): Optimize your applications, provide better support, and improve user experience with a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM), Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring throughout your environment.
Applications and Microservices: For complex cloud environments, Dynatrace can automatically provide visibility and root-cause answers. It can also monitor microservices.
Digital Business Analytics: Get AI-powered, real-time answers to analytical business queries with KPIs and metrics that are already flowing through applications.

Reviews from Real Users

Dynatrace is the only solution that provides answers to organizations based on deep insight into each user, transaction, and organization's environment.

Barry P., a managing performance engineer at Medica Health Plans, writes, "With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place."

A consultant at a tech service company notes, "A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it."

Sample Customers

Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express

Buyer's Guide

AppDynamics vs. Dynatrace

November 2024

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