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Dynatrace vs Wireshark comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
7.3
Number of Reviews
348
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (10th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (3rd)
Wireshark
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Dynatrace is designed for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability and holds a mindshare of 10.2%, down 13.0% compared to last year.
Wireshark, on the other hand, focuses on Network Troubleshooting, holds 13.4% mindshare, up 11.7% since last year.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Network Troubleshooting
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a comprehensive view by integrating with other monitoring systems
There may be an issue since there are many tools like Splunk involved in network monitoring. From an IP perspective, Dynatrace is performing well. If they want to develop in network monitoring, they can, as it's part of their product line. It's not rocketry, so they can accomplish it. If I, as an SI, look at it from an enterprise perspective, considering the cost from the client, I prefer not to go with multiple systems, as they don't provide a complete 360-degree view. They need to improve on claims about being an enterprise system. The definition of enterprise is loosely used, however, from a holistic security perspective, including infrastructure, network, ports, software, applications, transactions, and databases, there are areas lacking, especially in network monitoring tools.
Vijay Duggal - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides detailed traffic analysis and helps troubleshoot issues
There is a disadvantage when it comes to sampling intervals. While the solution supports sampling as fine as one millisecond, it requires a copy at that interval. My Python script allows me to achieve a granularity of up to ten microseconds, but I can't go beyond that. When dealing with provisioning on both issues, it would be beneficial if I could go down to the microsecond level, if not the nanosecond. Additionally, I've heard from a colleague that Wireshark might be less effective in the voice domain.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Dynatrace provides visibility into the application and its performance from the user to back-end services."
"You don't have to configure it. It just needs to be installed."
"Its ability to correlate a large source of information to pinpoint a root cause. This speeds up issue resolution and allow us to better reach our objectives."
"Dynatrace has designed its agents to capture limited stack traces for each transaction executed."
"The real user experience monitoring is very helpful. We can see what real users are seeing, what JavaScript errors, what pages are very slow for them. As well, it helps to correlate the front-end users to the back-end application components, and the corresponding Method which is failing, as well. We are able to go to the correct spot and fix the issue."
"It has helped us by reducing the number of incidents that we have had in the past."
"Reduced incidents, as alert monitoring aids in quicker resolution of events."
"Packet-capture files can be hard to use due to their size. Wireshark has a tool called tshark that can parse the files with out opening them so that you can take large captures, say 2-10GB, and return only relevant information."
"The transmission and reception issues are valuable."
"The filter option provided by Wireshark is its most valuable feature...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Wireshark's best feature is that it's adaptive, which means it's the go-to tool for network-related developers."
"The session-level filtering features are valuable."
"Wireshark's best features are that it lets us see what traffic is in the network and what data should be encrypted."
"The options that are required to get the details for the packet drops are good."
"It's easy to troubleshoot issues because there's a large online community."
 

Cons

"The installation process had quite a few moving parts, so it was a little tricky getting everything to work in first go."
"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."
"I believe that something related to IoT devices should be improved."
"Bring the interface to the same level as OneAgent."
"What needs improvement in Dynatrace is its dashboard. Creating dashboards in Dynatrace is good, but compared to Grafana, which is integrated with Broadcom DX APM, the resulting dashboard in Dynatrace isn't as clear. The Dynatrace dashboard needs to be more graphic."
"To improve in Dynatrace the log analytics, this is the first thing that has to be enabled."
"They've leveraged those security gateways and renamed them ActiveGates, and now there are different web plugins we can run on it... Sometimes the development of those seems to be running very fast and it's not complete. They don't yet function quite as easily as the OneAgents do. But I have hopes that that's going to get better. We have tried the MQ, the Citrix, and the Oracle ActiveGate plugins. They could be sharper. It's the right direction to go. It just seems like it could be smoother."
"I would like to see the ability to pull more user-friendly reports."
"This product needs to improve the UI."
"The decryption of encrypted packets could be better."
"The only thing that I don't like is sometimes there is an update, and something that I was using is either no longer there or it has changed."
"You need good network connectivity to download during the setup, otherwise, it might take a while."
"Big trace files (more than 1,000,000 packets) can be slow, but then you can use "TraceWrangler" (also free) to help with slicing and dicing the data."
"I wish the filters were a little bit more prepopulated."
"The speed of the Internet could be improved, especially its performance."
"We'd like to be able to extract the output into an Excel table."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing model is confusing in solutioning clients for the number of hosts needed to deploy."
"Its price is quite high. Although it is worth it, it would be better if its price is reduced. They base their prices around licensing. Their prices are based on agent licensing and consumption licensing. Both of these can be a bit cheaper, but if they are the best in the market, as I consider them to be, I assume that their prices will be higher. They are delivering the product for that price."
"We have not fully been able to get the full value out of the product. It is expensive compared to other things that we have had in the past. Paying that much and not being able to get the full return on the product is a downgrade. ​"
"There was also some complexity in the adoption rate of it because of how costly the licensing is."
"The price range is quite high."
"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."
"The product is superior to others, but it comes with a price tag that is often difficult to position back to clients."
"It's expensive."
"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."
"It is free."
"Wireshark is an open-source product, so it's free to use."
"The tool is free."
"It's a stand-alone tool. If there is a commercial license for it I am unaware of it."
"Wireshark is open source and gives great value and functionality to the network investigation."
"I've never personally had to pay for it, making it a highly valuable internet resource that's accessible for use. While they offer some paid versions, our firm has utilized the free version for the past three years."
"It is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Educational Organization
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
7%
 

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 experience regarding pricing and costs for Wireshark?
Wireshark is priced at a medium range, not too high, not too low. The pricing could be more flexible, and they might make it more expensive. That said, compared to other products, it is competitive.
What needs improvement with Wireshark?
The speed of the Internet could be improved, especially its performance. Performance can sometimes be a challenge due to numerous factors.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Comversion, ADP, Talbots
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.