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Dynatrace vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 2, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Dynatrace
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
344
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (4th), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (2nd)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (5th), Container Security (1st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (1st), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Dynatrace and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Dynatrace is designed for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability and holds a mindshare of 12.4%, down 14.5% compared to last year.
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), holds 19.6% mindshare, down 21.1% since last year.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Sathis-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Mindaugas Dailidonis - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides multi-cloud security visibility, but requires customisation and is great for AWS and Kubernetes, but average for Azure and OCI
Prisma Cloud is based on acquisitions, which is both a pro and con. Palo Alto Networks made it fast to the market, however, they are now catching up and trying to integrate their acquired solutions into the Prisma Cloud platform. Ability to See the Full Picture of Risk: The main hurdle from user standpoint for me was the ability to see the full picture without effort. This was still true when I last used it in April 2024. A user has to switch between the modules to get different pieces of information. To see the CWPP data, you need to switch to that module. To see the code security part, you need to switch to the Code Security module. It is the same story with CSPM. At least two competitors of Prisma Cloud offer a better experience when it comes to visualisation of data. They show the full view of a risk (what Prisma Cloud claims to do, but does not do well). The good news - Prisma Cloud is catching up and has slightly improved over time. The User Interface: I simply didn't like the first one, then they changed it and made it even worse. But that might be a matter of preference, not an actual negative. Ease of Building Custom Policies: The RQL and APIs are poorly documented, which significantly complicates building of custom policies. There should be no expectation that someone without a clue on how cloud services are constructed can effectively write custom policies using any of CNAPP offerings available in the market, however, this is especially true for Prisma Cloud. When we compare Prisma Cloud with competitors, for sure, it is much more difficult to create custom policies because the APIs themselves are not that well documented. When discussing this topic with their Professional Services engineer who was assigned to the project, the person admitted that at times it is trial and error path to building custom policies. The JSON preview feature did help to improve it, but you still need to guess which API to pick to get what you want. With all that said, Prisma Cloud offers a powerful custom policy building engine, and when a skilled person works on it, they can do advanced queries, joining the results of different APIs for example and using them to futher build the custom policy. Quality Control Issues: During the year-long project while working on alert triage, I encountered a number of CIEM policies that were displaying odd results, which were reported to the Customer Success team and were addressed with an update. This was an indicator that these built-in policies have not been tested that much, since the issue that was identified was impacting all users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of Dynatrace are the ease of installation and management, as well as its extensibility."
"This tool helps us gather information from all hosts and services, then cross reference the information."
"The technical support has always been responsive."
"Dynatrace AppMon has allowed a deep dive review of performance problems in near real-time for our primary external website and related web apps and web services."
"It makes our lives easier as we drill down to problems."
"24/7, all transactions: The fact that every transaction is captured gives us the possibility of acting on every exception. But it also ​shows us what happens when everything works well, so we can compare it with the moment something goes wrong."
"The most valuable things that we have seen are the user experience and capturing what the users are doing inside the browser."
"Dynatrace's new AI stuff really out shines its competitors. ​"
"I've been really pleasantly surprised with how Prisma Cloud is, over time, covering more and more of the topics I care about, and listening to customer feedback and growing the product in the right directions."
"I have not seen any limitations. Everything is customizable. You can do whatever you want, defining the reporting and custom use cases. They recently updated the UI, so it's much better than before."
"The CWP module, runtime protection, and WAAS API are valuable."
"Prisma Cloud provides the needed visibility and control regardless of how complex and distributed the cloud environments become."
"The runtime mechanism on the solution is very useful. It's got very good network mapping between containers. If you have more than one container, you can create a content data link between them."
"The most valuable features are vulnerability monitoring, serverless access, container runtime features, and Defender."
"It helps to identify the misconfigurations by monitoring regularly which helps to secure the organization's cloud environment."
"The container and serverless security is most valuable. It is quite a new technology for this region. Even though containers have been there for a long time, the adoption of containers is very minimal in this region. When it comes to using Kubernetes containers in a complex architecture, there is a lack of security in the market. People aren't aware of the security controls or the process for governance. Container security provided by Prisma Cloud is quite good at filling that gap."
 

Cons

"It needs container log monitoring."
"I'd like to see the UI a bit more polished. For example, I saw a demo of the dashboards here at the Perform 2018 conference. There was a table of these widgets, but they're not sorted alphabetically and there's, like, 50 of them. So if you want to find your widgets, you're of scrolling up and down. So small features, being able to search for widgets, that things are more categorized; just a bit more focused on the user experience."
"It needs more dashboards like AppMon."
"Monitoring asynchronous code requires manual instrumentation (most of the time)."
"Our main problems have been that it has a high learning curve to it. I've used it for about three years now and I'm still learning it. There are some videos and there is some documentation out there, but it still requires you to delve into the tool to learn it. A little bit more comprehensive self-paced training would help."
"I would like to see the same features as in the New Relic Insights in the dashboard. That is the only thing I want to see improved in Dynatrace."
"Some technical architectures are based on an event mechanism operating via a publish/subscribe system. APM technology sometimes reaches its limits to go upstream."
"The solution is a bit pricey."
"Sometimes, on the Azure side, there are issues. Some errors aren't being found on Prisma Cloud."
"The UX part of Prisma's user interface could be simplified and the metrics tool should be highlighted more."
"I don't have any specific notes for improvement; however, if they could continue to focus more on giving users the ability to create custom policies and configurations, that would be ideal."
"They need to make the settings more flexible to fit our internal policies about data. We didn't want developers to see some data, but we wanted them to have access to the console because it was going to help them... It was a pain to have to set up the access to some languages and some data."
"The UI is the worst."
"It provides all the cloud details but is not entirely linked to the compute model."
"We had some teething issues with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, but overall, it did what we expected."
"It would be nice Prisma Cloud merged its modules for CSPM and infrastructure as code. It would simplify the pricing and make it easier for customers to evaluate the solution because there are different modules, and you need to add it to your subscription separately."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was a pretty straightforward process. We had no hiccups."
"Pricing is based on the number of servers monitored, so for big applications, it is a bit expensive."
"The solution is not cheap."
"Its licensing is complicated or not transparent."
"Everything is great, but the licensing could always be cheaper. With the every growing tool set of Ops teams, we find it harder to budget for tooling while ensuring we still have the proper insight into our applications."
"While it is quite good in respect to its functionality, there are few area in regards to pricing that they can look at how to possibly change. I have heard it's costly."
"The pricing is a little high, but still cheaper than competitors because Dynatrace at least has pay-as-you-go. Others do not. However, the pricing is confusing. I wish it was more simplified when trying to price out moving to a yearly contract."
"​A Dynatrace partner will always be willing to give you a trial. Go through the trial to see if there is a benefit for your company."
"The pricing is competitive. From what I have seen in the past, it is on par with the others."
"Although the cost can be high, the value is worth the price tag."
"The Prisma Cloud pricing is good."
"I find the pricing to be expensive."
"The cost was not on the higher side. Overall, the cost gets recovered with its implementation."
"The pricing is competitive; for the most part, the security firms have similar prices."
"Its price is reasonable as compared to other products. The main challenge is explaining the licensing model to customers. It isn't a problem related to Palo Alto. Commonly, people don't understand cloud licensing or security licensing. When they have fixed virtual machines, they know what they are going to be charged, but when it comes to cloud automation, it is hard for them to get clarity in case of high workloads or when they have enabled auto-scaling, etc. It would be helpful if Palo Alto can educate people on their licensing programs."
"Prisma Cloud is more expensive than some other solutions, but when we consider all of its use cases, the cost averages out."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
34%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
17%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
Any advice about APM solutions?
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 monitor...
What is your primary use case for Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks ?
Prisma Cloud helps support DevSecOps methodologies, making those responsibilities easier to manage.
What Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform do you recommend?
We like Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, since it offers us incredible visibility into our entire cloud system. We are able to easily see where our container vulnerabilities lie and and where cl...
What do you think of Aqua Security vs Prisma Cloud?
Aqua Security is easy to use and very manageable. Its main focus is on Kubernetes and Docker. Security is a very valuable feature and their speed of integration is very good. The initial setup was ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud, Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: December 2024.
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