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Dynatrace vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 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
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
359
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (3rd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (3rd), Autonomous Operational Resilience (5th)
ServiceNow Cloud Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
39th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 5.6%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dynatrace5.6%
ServiceNow Cloud Observability0.7%
Other93.7%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
AI-driven insights have reduced downtime and improved cross-team collaboration
We encountered some challenges while using Dynatrace. Although the initial setup was smooth, fine-tuning alert thresholds and custom metrics took some time. Another challenge was that Dynatrace charges based on host units, so we had to carefully plan our agent deployments. The licensing model is expensive. Additionally, the complexity of setup is an issue. While OneAgent and auto-discover services are powerful, the setup is more complex compared to other tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. These integrations are simple and basic, but Dynatrace setup requires more complexity based on the environment. For new users wanting to use Dynatrace, it is difficult. However, the AI-related solutions and metrics took us to the next level for identifying and fixing things. Dynatrace requires an agent for operation. OneAgent is powerful, but it is also resource-heavy. On lightweight nodes or older systems, the agent can slightly impact performance. If Dynatrace could implement a lightweight agent behavior, we could make things faster. Additionally, if Dynatrace could add a long-term retention policy so that we could store more data and find fine-grained details, that would help us. While Dynatrace managed edition supports on-premises deployment, the SaaS version depends on cloud connectivity. For highly regulated or air-gapped environments, setup and updates can be challenging. Although the initial setup is smooth, if someone wants to fine-tune it and fully understand the tool end-to-end, it could be tricky.
VinayKumar16 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DeliveryManager at ITC Infotech
Provides ease of use in areas like analytics and reporting
The feature of the tool that is more impactful for cloud performance stems from the area revolving around analytics and reporting. It is an easy-to-use tool. There is something known as performance analytics within ServiceNow that offers complete analytics, which offers end-to-end analytics along with the KPI metrics with what we have in place and so on. With the aforementioned aspects of the tool, I think we should be able to create a dashboard according to the operations view called the operation dashboard view, specifically for C-level executives.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Enables my performance engineer to recreate a problem and give the developers what's happening, where to go look, all the information they need to be able to find what the root cause is."
"From my clients' perspective, Dynatrace below the dashboard is very good compared to other monitoring tools."
"The Davis artificial intelligence built-in program is valuable. It keeps all the information about the systems, connections, service calls, and requests in its database. It looks at response times and keeps everything in check with baseline figures. If anything goes outside of that baseline, it reports based on that. If the performance starts degrading, it reports on that. Before something breaks, it tells you that it is going to break, and that's the most useful feature of Dynatrace."
"The main thing we have achieved using this software is minimizing the downtime of our applications by reacting to the alerts that it triggers."
"Dynatrace has helped us reduce outage times and severity of impact."
"From a core-product perspective, Dynatrace is doing everything that we ever asked for."
"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 got to know which modules of my application are used more by the customers, as well as which modules of my application are very slow, and using this tool I got to know even before the customer told me that a particular module was not working, so when the alert came we resolved the issue proactively and the customer's satisfaction improved overall."
"The UI is very intuitive."
"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."
"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."
"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."
 

Cons

"Hard to use for beginners, to setup and explore."
"We are waiting on the new features to see how they perform."
"We're developing more and more microservices and, each time, for an AppMon license, you have to deploy it, you have to configure it, you to get charged for it. It's very time-consuming."
"Richer, deeper partner channel: It needs to expand and deepen the business use cases, where their solutions can help."
"Right now, there is a log analysis feature. This is maybe a little more deeper than the log analytics in comparison to other tools, like Splunk or Sumo Logic. If Dynatrace can come up with this replay feature, that would be great."
"I would like to see the ability to pull more user-friendly reports."
"Beginner video tutorials would really help."
"It needs more dashboards like AppMon."
"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."
"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."
"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."
"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Dynatrace is still kind of an expensive solution compared to others. But I recognize that they are ahead of the competition when we do a feature by feature comparison."
"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."
"We found a tool that can be utilized by testing, DevOps, marketing, software engineering, and monitoring. Before, we always had everybody doing their own thing. Now, everybody's utilizing one tool, which is huge. That is a huge savings."
"Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier."
"Licensing is a bit complicated for Dynatrace, and pricing is dependent on how much your organization invests."
"We found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost."
"Financially Dynatrace was a lot more expensive than AppDynamics."
"This is an expensive solution, but it is also worth the money."
"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise300
No data available
 

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 needs improvement with LightStep?
There are a lot of workflows and connectors. In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs.
What is your primary use case for LightStep?
I use the solution in my company since it has multiple tenants available. Basically, what happens in business is that you have a hybrid setup model, and for that, you extensively use a cloud platfo...
What advice do you have for others considering LightStep?
I recommend the product to others. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
 

Also Known As

No data available
LightStep
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,
Find out what your peers are saying about Dynatrace vs. ServiceNow Cloud Observability and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,719 professionals have used our research since 2012.