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Dynatrace pros and cons

Vendor: Dynatrace

4.4 out of 5

350 reviews
95% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Dynatrace offers comprehensive visibility into application performance with end-to-end transaction tracking and AI-driven analytics, aiding quick root cause identification and reducing mean time to resolution. The real-time alerting system enhances proactive monitoring, while OneAgent technology simplifies component discovery. Smartscape visualizes topology and dependencies. Despite benefits, complexities in setup, steep learning curve, costly licensing, and cloud integration challenges present drawbacks. Reporting enhancements are needed for better business insights.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Agentless Transaction Analysis allows granular decomposition of complex operations for business applications.

The AI-driven root cause analysis and dependency mapping improve problem resolution efficiency.

Dynatrace's real-time monitoring enables proactive issue detection, reducing downtime and improving service reliability.

PurePath provides flexible tracing, allowing detailed inspection of transactions from user actions to backend processing.

Simultaneous monitoring of infrastructure, applications, and user experience increases productivity and reduces troubleshooting time.

CONS

Users report that Dynatrace consumes significant system resources, causing performance issues, especially when high levels of sensing are applied.

Many find the configuration process complex and unintuitive, making initial setup and use difficult, particularly for large environments.

The lack of support for legacy applications and older technology stacks remains a common issue among reviewers.

Some users experience challenges with Dynatrace's pricing model, citing it as high and somewhat unclear, especially when integrating with third-party applications.

Dynatrace's capacity for advanced network monitoring and infrastructure monitoring is perceived as lacking, often requiring reliance on supplemental tools.

Dynatrace Pros review quotes

BP

Manager, Performance Engineering at Medica Health Plans

Jun 16, 2020

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.

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reviewer1360584

Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

May 31, 2020

Dynatrace is a single platform. It has all these different tools but they are actually all baked into the OneAgent technology. Within that OneAgent... you have the different tool sets. You have threat analysis, memory dumps, Java analysis, the database statements, and so on. It's all included in this OneAgent. So the management is actually quite easy.

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MK

Senior Director IT at BARBRI Inc.

Oct 20, 2020

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.

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reviewer1352679

IT Technical Architect at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 19, 2020

It has improved our critical incident response, exposing critical issues impacting the environment and our ability to respond to those events prior to client impact as well as resolving those events more quickly. We have use cases where we have studied a 70 percent improvement for response times in an occurring event as well as future reoccurrences being improved.

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KM

Director, Digital Projects and Practices at Rack Room Shoes

May 21, 2020

The alerting systems are definitely the most valuable feature. The AI engine, "Davis," has proved to be a game-changer for us, as it helps to alert us when there are anomalies found in our applications or in their performance... letting the Davis engine find those anomalies and push them to the top, especially as they relate to business impact, is very valuable to us.

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DH

Manager, Ecommerce Support at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 3, 2020

My primary use of the tool is to keep revenue coming into the business and to use it to help our business team in running their site analytics and web performance tools. They have things like Adobe Analytics that provide them with one layer of data. We use Dynatrace as another railroad metric to both confirm the Adobe Analytics data and enhance it in certain places where Adobe won't give us the answers that we need. In terms of metrics, we've had roughly about 120,000 unique sessions per hour on our website. So, we're capturing a lot of session data and real user data, and all of that data is kept in user sessions. We can look this information up by user ID to tag any given session that we want to find by date/client. E.g., if the user said that they had an issue last Thursday at 11:00 PM, then we can just do a search on their email address, go through all their sessions, and find the one that they mentioned, then dig directly into that one.

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RW

Senior Product Manager at SAP CX

May 21, 2020

Service engineers save a lot of time because they can just go in look at the data and share it with the customer, who has the same view, and say, "Here's an improvement which can be immediately implemented." It's not like a collection of big, multiple findings that are consolidated into one results presentation, then the customer needs to do something. It's more like a continuous performance analysis and improvement process, which is more efficient than those workshops approaches. That's one of the biggest of the advantages that our services team sees because it helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production.

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Platform Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Feb 7, 2018

I like the PurePaths dashlet the most. This is mostly because as soon I open the PurePaths dashlet and sort by response time, there is the problem. Every time.

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Supervisor Of Event Management And Monitoring at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 7, 2018

From the monitoring perspective, the ability to triage quickly is important, and the ability to alert and tell people where the problem is.

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Senior Manager APM Team at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Feb 7, 2018

End-to-end visibility of the applications, since we have them instrumented. Understanding where the hotspots are in the applications.

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Dynatrace Cons review quotes

BP

Manager, Performance Engineering at Medica Health Plans

Jun 16, 2020

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.

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reviewer1360584

Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

May 31, 2020

The solution's ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is great. In my opinion, it could be extended even more. I would like it to be more configurable for the end-user. It would be nice to have more business rules applicable to the severity. It's already very good as it is now. It is based on the impact on your front-end users. But it would be nice if we could configure it a bit more.

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MK

Senior Director IT at BARBRI Inc.

Oct 20, 2020

I would love to see Dynatrace get more involved in the security realm. I get badgered by so many endpoint protection companies. It seems like a natural fit to me, that Dynatrace should be playing in that space.

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reviewer1352679

IT Technical Architect at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 19, 2020

There continues to be some opportunity to expose the infrastructure from a broader reporting standpoint. Overall, the opportunity is in the reporting capability and the ability to more flexibly expose or pivot the data for deeper analysis. Oftentimes, the solution is good at looking narrowly at information, but when you want to broaden that perspective, that's where the challenges come in. At this point, it requires the export of data to external systems to do this.

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KM

Director, Digital Projects and Practices at Rack Room Shoes

May 21, 2020

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.

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RM

Richard Mitchell

DevOps Leader at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees

Aug 25, 2021

The user interface for the management functions is not particularly intuitive for even the most common features.

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DH

Manager, Ecommerce Support at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 3, 2020

Some of the analytics that you get in, e.g., a waterfall analysis of a web page could be clearer. A lot of that is not directly attributable to Dynatrace. Sometimes a vendor will implement a tag or JavaScript plugin that's named something entirely different than what it does. This makes it difficult to track that from the waterfall list, figure out where exactly that component is, and dig more into what it's doing. Dynatrace could probably improve a bit on that waterfall layout to make it clearer as to what exactly is there. It does a wonderful job of telling you what loads and when, but it could be improved in terms of telling me what exactly it is loading.

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RW

Senior Product Manager at SAP CX

May 21, 2020

Documentation could be improved. E.g., you don't know how to properly use Dynatrace because documentation is almost lacking behind the features being deployed.

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Platform Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Feb 7, 2018

I would love to see a better data export, because AppMon's charting capabilities leaves a lot to be desired. You have about a 5,000 line limit. I would really like to see the ability to export, in Dynatrace and AppMon, in essentially in a nice format of whatever you want to whatever else.

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Supervisor Of Event Management And Monitoring at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 7, 2018

I haven't had a chance to go through all of it, but I would like to see the ability, from an administrative standpoint, for it to collect statistics. I want to be able to see the servers that the agents are installed on. I want it to be able to start doing collections for me by platform: How many Linux servers do I have? How many Windows servers do I have? Statistically give me the information of how things are performing, but I want that in a dashboard, where I can look at a dashboard and I can look at a section. So the ability for me to drill down will make it easier for me.

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