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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
7.4
Number of Reviews
345
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (4th), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (2nd)
Wireshark
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (3rd)
 

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 11.0%, down 13.8% compared to last year.
Wireshark, on the other hand, focuses on Network Troubleshooting, holds 13.1% mindshare, down 13.2% 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.
DonniUgalde - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides visibility into the network, and the GUI is easy to use
I wish the filters were a little bit more prepopulated. It would have been easy to hit a drop-down and select a filter. If I only wanted to look at DCP, UDP, or IP, it would be easy to filter it out. Advanced network knowledge is required to get a lot out of the tool. However, it's very easy to install and deploy. It would be nice if there were some handheld Android devices with a Wireshark-specialized application that would allow us to mirror a Cisco port. Then, we can just plug into the port and click the green start button, and it will start ingesting the packet capture. Then, we won’t be using a laptop. The only downside is that we must have a laptop and connect a network cable. Some new laptops don't have network ports, so we have to get another adapter. Having an all-in-one device, like NetAlly or Fluke, and some of their network devices would be cool.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product allows us to build preferred/customized business transactions to track complex transactions. UEM (User Experience Monitoring) agents track user experience on webRequests. The advantage is that Dynatrace correlates the measures on the devices with those on the backend servers, giving us an end-to-end view of the transaction, from the user's phone deep into the backend servers."
"Dynatrace is a powerful tool for full stack monitoring with APM capabilities and AI root cause problem analysis. This helps our customers with their digital transformation and gaining insight into their infrastructure."
"The Session Replay not only allows us to watch the user in 4K video, but to see the individual steps happening behind the scenes, from a developer perspective. It gives us every single step that a user takes in a session, along with the ability to watch it as a video playback. We can see each call to every server as the user goes through the site. If something is broken or not running optimally, it's going to come up in the Session Replay."
"A monitoring system that can show us code level details."
"It is a robust solution that would help anyone get to the solution and resolution pretty fast.​"
"The ability to real-time monitor servers and databases without any major drain on application resources is invaluable."
"It will allow us to eventually become more proactive when problems start arising. We can see them before they happen and address them before there is any impact to our customers."
"The speed and problem resolution."
"Being able to dissect email data and figure out what is inside email messages was the most valuable feature. Such a feature is pretty helpful for an ongoing forensic investigation or when there is a potential insider threat that you are trying to investigate. It allows you to see the network activity of the users you are investigating. It also gives you more visibility into your network. It was very easy to set up. There is a lot of information out there on Google and YouTube about how to use it. There is also community support. If you have any trouble, it is pretty easy to find an answer online. You will have to do some digging only if you have a very specific use case."
"The solution is easy to install and use."
"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 features are that it lets us see what traffic is in the network and what data should be encrypted."
"Setup is very easy. It's also possible to change source code and compile if you want to change something in the code, because it's free."
"If you're dealing with troubleshooting network, voice issues, or network operations, having a tool like Wireshark to dive into packet details is important. The initial setup is straightforward. Anyone starting out or looking to deploy it on your personal PC or machine can do it easily."
"The session-level filtering features are valuable."
"It's easy to troubleshoot issues because there's a large online community."
 

Cons

"​We are waiting on the new features to see how they perform."
"Custom reporting capabilities should be extended, because it now has basic charting capabilities."
"Every time I want to see the PurePath, I have to launch the client. It would be helpful if they introduced this in the browser application."
"PurePath exports was a great feature in AppMon, but it is sometimes missing in Dynatrace."
"The next release I would like to see is especially with external API monitoring. Right now, everything goes into one bucket, but if it were split into which API is failing, that way we wouldn't have to drill down to find out where the failures are."
"Improvements are needed in the navigation and timeframe selection when browsing problems."
"I also wish there was the ability to do alert filtering before it triggered an alert with PagerDuty/OpsGenie/Slack."
"The one area that we get value out of now, where we would love to see additional features, is the Session Replay. The ability to see how one individual uses a particular feature is great. But what we'd really like to be able to see is how a large group of people uses a particular feature. I believe Dynatrace has some things on its roadmap to add to Session Replay that would allow us those kinds of insights as well."
"The speed of the Internet could be improved, especially its performance."
"I have not used Wireshark to an advanced point where I could provide a detailed opinion on improvements needed."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved."
"Wireshark could be improved with a delay option when getting data automatically."
"I wish the filters were a little bit more prepopulated."
"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."
"It is difficult to scale this solution."
"The solution has a steep learning curve. There are so many filters and features that are frequently being updated, it takes research, experience and familiarity to be able to use them. It could be a lot more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​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."
"We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace is excellent."
"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."
"They could improve their price ranges, as there is no option for startups or testing."
"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."
"From what I have heard in the company, Dynatrace is expensive."
"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."
"Wireshark is free software, so you can download it and use it for free with no licensing fees."
"It is an open-source solution."
"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."
"Wireshark is open source and gives great value and functionality to the network investigation."
"Wireshark is free software, so you don't have to pay any licensing fee. Individual people can use it and then donate to Wireshark."
"It is free."
"Wireshark is an open-source product, so it's free to use."
"The tool is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
35%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
10%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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: February 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.