Dynatrace Reviews

Our primary use case for both Dynatrace and AppDynamics is for application performance monitoring (APM). The main reason for having application performance monitoring is, when we see something is running slowly, we can immediately look to see where the issue is at before our systems crash on us. So, one of the major roles it plays for us is the ability to keep our system performing in peak shape.

Our ability to see issues coming, then quickly isolate and correct problems was our main use of Dynatrace. We are not there yet with AppDynamics. It has been ten months, and we are still spinning our wheels trying to set it up and figure out how it works.

When collecting data with Dynatrace, we saw every single transaction that happened in real-time. Whereas, with AppDynamics, they take snapshots, and we only see a tenth of the information that we did with Dynatrace. While the information is there, if an issue with an application happened in-between snapshots, it would not be readily identifiable. You would have to go hunt and peck for it. We don't have time for that.

Using Dynatrace, we collected application metrics within three hours, in most cases. The majority of our triage were within three hours, then we were able to discover the root cause of issues.

With Dynatrace today, you have a single agent. You stick it on a server, and it doesn't matter if it's Linux, Windows, etc. It is a single agent and executable. You run it, and it injects itself into your collecting data. This is compared with AppDynamics, which on some of servers, we have had to install as many as four different agents and configure them all individually, trying to collect the same type of information.

The dashboarding for Dynatrace is ten times easier to set up and has more options of what you can put on it, especially if you are in a single payment class environment.

With Dynatrace in our environment, the managed server required root access to run. As a government agency with tight security, this has been an audit concern for us. A major area of improvement for Dynatrace would be to make it so the program does not need root access to perform. AppDynamics does not require root access to the servers. Once they are set up and configured, they can set their end run without root access.

The number one area of improvement for AppDynamics is to simplify their agent install. Instead of having four or five different agents to get all the different things that you need with different pieces of information, they need to figure out how to put theirs into a single agent, like Dynatrace has done.

We have not found AppDynamics in our environment useful at all. We are struggling to try and make it work. AppDynamics is for applications that are static. In our government agency, we are too dynamic. Everything is changing constantly, and AppDynamics does not work in this type of environment.

The stability for Dynatrace is probably 85 percent. We had enough issues where one of the services would just stop running, then we would have to restart it. Not very often, but it happened.

With AppDynamics we haven't been able to use the system long enough to determine its stability.

Dynatrace is very scalable. We grew it over the 12 years that we had it. So, that has proven that it is scalable. 

AppDynamics is scalable as the environment grows. However, we are still in the product's infancy, so we haven't seen this happen yet.

A company with a single application over multiple locations, like a retailer, but only needs to worry about one application and monitoring it, this is the perfect fit for AppDynamics. If you have an organization with more than 40, you definitely want Dynatrace. AppDynamics is not a viable product for an organization with lots of applications.

On a scale of one to ten, my experience working with the AppDynamics onsite people and offsite support is maybe a five. I feel that they don't want to take responsibility for the areas that AppDynamics is lacking in. When things don't work in which they were sold, then they want to tell us that it is our environment more than their application not functioning correctly. 

Whenever we had issues with Dynatrace, you could get Dynatrace support on the phone, and they were all over it. They would get into our machines, then take screenshots or look at the performance of the systems while it was running. They wrote custom patches to help us resolve issues that we had. I would rate the support that we receive from Dynatrace as a ten out of ten. 

We have been using Dynatrace since 2007 and AppDynamics for just about a year. We have not been using them concurrently. Dynatrace was not renewed, and management decided that we would use AppDynamics. This decision was beyond my control.

With Dynatrace, the installation and setup were a piece of cake. It could be accomplished usually within fifteen minutes, and definitely, within a half hour of deciding to do it. 

A big difference that we found between the two vendor is in setting the system up and getting them ready for production. With the latest version of Dynatrace, it took three days and we had it in production. We are still trying to get AppDynamics in production since last May.

With our Dynatrace system, it required three servers and the program when we installed it on the servers. It was straightforward. You just clicked, clicked, and clicked as it went through the setup, then you were done. 

With AppDynamics, we are now on eight servers to make it function like it should. We are ten months into it now, and we're still trying to get it right. We have AppDynamics folks onsite to help us with it. It is just difficult to implement. There is so much to it. 

I sat down with one of their architects to decide how many servers that we needed, how they need to be spec'd out, etc., and that is what we built. Then, when we stood it up, and it didn't work, some other personnel from the AppDynamics team came in to look at it. They said, "None of this is correct. You are on the wrong this and that." 

Thus, we did not have consistent information and support from AppDynamics when implementing the system. However, it is up and running now.

Our annual costs were about the same for both AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

When learning Dynatrace, we brought in Dynatrace people to come onsite and take my team through a week long training. We did that two or three different times. They offered this type of training. They also have online training out on their community that I could set up for my team members. The effectiveness of that training was about 75 percent. 

With AppDynamics, they have provided some online training. The take away from it (from my team) has been maybe 10 to 15 percent. The training is geared more towards sales than using the product for what it was intended. It boasts the features and selling points of the AppDynamics product instead of the ins and outs of how to use it once it has been installed in our environment.

I would definitely recommend Dynatrace. I have the benefit of having used it for so many years. It takes less infrastructure to set it up initially. It's a single agent engine. You just set the agent up and run it, then it configures itself. It goes out and finds all your processes with everything that's running, configuring itself. The simplicity of the infrastructure and simplicity of setting it up, then actually using it, along with setting up your dashboards to monitor your metrics is much better. There are more features than the AppDynamics dashboarding.

I would rate it Dynatrace as a ten out of ten. 

At the point of where we're at with our AppDynamics experience, I would rate it as a five out of ten.

We purchased Dynatrace to give us an end-to-end picture of transactions from the end-user, all the way back through all the infrastructure, and tag it all together - and it's worked out great.

The main benefits are that, obviously, we can see the transaction throughout the entire infrastructure.

One of the things that we're embarking on is, we're trying to measure the impact to the business of infrastructure events and incidents, rather than using gut feeling or emotions of whether we feel there was an impact, or asking our customers, how were you impacted. We have data now to prove it. So it's just taking the emotions out of it and just providing the facts of the impact, of the incidents or events.

The most valuable component of it is taking that guessing out of troubleshooting problems. We no longer have to rely on an architect, or an application person, or someone's memory of how the transaction moves throughout the infrastructure and the different dependencies that it has on it. We can see it right there and we find out more that we ever imagined.

We like the user's experience piece: being able to see, from the browser perspective, the user's behavior; being able to answer questions from our customers about why such and such happened, why the performance was slow, why we had an error. Many of our customers are business partners. They're not a customer online that couldn't shop or something. They're customer service representatives, maybe, or a customer service team, that is experiencing slowness, so they're reporting it very quickly and letting us know. We're able to see those transactions and it's helped with our mean time to repair.

I'd really like to see more dashboarding abilities. The ability to do workflows within dashboards, being able to start at a high level and click into it with custom dashboards. I think most of the time, we are creating our own custom dashboards, and I'd just like to see more ability with that.

I would also like to see it baselining more metrics out-of-the-box. We have a lot of rich data, but if someone says, "Well how did that look last week?" If you're looking at a problem and you see, for example, a long SQL statement, is that the root cause, or is it always slow; that kind of thing. It's difficult to take that and say, "Oh the SQL statement was fine last week and it's now slow and it started slow at this specific time." So, it's difficult to get historical data, unless you know in advance what your problems are going to be.

I feel, overall, it is very stable. We have some response-time issues from the product or from the UI, and getting all that massive data back. But overall, the stability, the availability of it, is good.

I think scalability is what we're struggling with. I would say it's okay, but there's a little bit of room for improvement.

We've spoken with tech support several times. We've used them to answer questions and to help us get more value out of Dynatrace. We've also uncovered bugs and they've been able to help us identify those and support has come out with fixes for them. It's been good overall.

We didn't really have a short list. We had another solution that we were using and it just really wasn't fitting the bill anymore and Dynatrace just slipped in. We just started evaluating it and we liked it, so we just went forward.

I think with anything that's of a massive scale, there are complexities - even just trying to understand the product. Obviously it's a new product and you're trying to architect something you don't know. There are definitely challenges and hiccups that occur with that.

I think, overall, the implementation of actually installing was fairly easy. Most of the problems, really, were organizational problems on our end. You know, change-windows being very small, and the testing requirements that we've put in place, caused the implementation to take a while. But the tool itself was pretty easy to implement.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, we're not really using the cloud very much, so I can't really say for the cloud piece. But I do think that these transactions are more and more complex, and there's so much data. That's one of the great things about Dynatrace is there's so much data, and it's also one of the most difficult parts about Dynatrace, is there's so much data. So having that AI to bubble things up for you, so that you're not searching for a pin in a haystack is definitely the future, I think, for Dynatrace.

We have used many, many siloed solutions and still do. It's hard to give  those up. The problem is, obviously, everybody is looking at their own silo and looking at their own monitors and, of course, it never looks like it's that silo's problem.

One solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, is really what we're looking for. It takes the guessing out of monitoring and everybody is seeing through the same window. That's what our team is designed to do, come up with answers, not just provide a lot of data. Obviously, we can send out data to folks, but they're not looking for that. They want your opinion of what the problem is, or what the answer is, not just charts and data. So it's very valuable for our team.

The criteria we were looking for when choosing an APM solution were the ability to gather metrics on a lot of different technologies and solutions. I was on more of the technical side. The financial side was kind of smoke and mirrors for me. I just evaluated the technical aspects and was looking for a solution that would give us an entire picture of the transaction.

I would recommend Dynatrace, of course, but I would just mention again, that you have to kind of think about the story that you want to tell. Determine, in advance, the metrics that you're going to want to show over time, for that historical view of data.

The primary use case is infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring. It's performing really well, the OneAgent aspect of Dynatrace; we love it.

We spend less time in root-cause analysis. That way we are saving man-hours, and focusing more on fixing issues rather than trying to find the real cause of the issue.

Interrelating the logs and infrastructure issues, application issues, DC RUM, everything in one dashboard, saves us time in troubleshooting.

This is the constant evolution of the tools. 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. It would be quite evident on the dashboard, where the failures are. It would be easy for troubleshooting, and even on the executive dashboards, we could relay the message appropriately.

It's much nicer, it's lightweight compared to the previous versions. OneAgent is much nicer compared to Dynatrace AppMon.

We have not used it in a big environment yet, so I'm not quite sure how well it will perform. I hope it will perform well.

We used tech support just on the implementation side of it, initially, for a day. They were knowledgeable and helpful.

We had Dynatrace, the previous version. That's how we started. Now we have migrated from Dynatrace AppMon to Dynatrace Managed.

It was straightforward.

I think AI is the future when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, especially with the complexity of the systems and containerization of all the environments. Troubleshooting means increasing headcount or implementing AI solutions and being very smart with what we are doing. 

AI is learning things at this point. I don't know if it's the best. It took a while for AI to understand our applications. The first few weeks there were false positives, and now we are getting into the real issues, troubleshooting, etc.

I have used siloed monitoring tools in the past The challenges involved in them are interrelating outcomes of each tool with other tools; especially log monitoring with infrastructure analysis. That took a bit of time, double effort.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, we could focus on our strategy initiatives rather than our ops-type of activities, day-to-day. That would be the immediate benefit.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor, or working with a vendor,  are 

• stability
• technical knowledge
• industry expertise.

I would say Dynatrace is a nine out of 10. It's, again, the concept of evolution of the tool. What we have right now: fairly decent. There are always new things coming out.

You should at least consider this as a strong contender. The ease of implementing - we were up and running in less than a day, which is pretty impressive.

We use it for monitoring all the applications in our bank, and it works fantastically. 

We know it is a primary part of it and we use it for everything. It is starting to become a culture differential. People are starting to understand what it is and what it can give them. It is a slow process, but it is really changing and it is making people start to understand how their applications work.

• Root cause analysis
• Problem solving

Deeper dive on the Dynatrace web versions, so we can get down to the packets if it is available. The ability for business transactions in application automatic deciphering.

The integration of the tools is getting there. It is still not there yet, because we still have to get a lot of tools to put together.

It is sometimes good, sometimes bad, but most of the time it is getting better. Some of it is the installation and configuration, we screwed it up. The other side of it is that sometimes we have issues with the code on their side. We like to get it fixed.

Scalability is getting better. It has had its issues. We have scaled it very large, and it is getting better. The newest version will scale, but we have not tested it yet.

When it's something technical support can fix, it is very good. When it is something they can't fix, and it is either an environmental area or something they need to work on it sometimes can take time to get done.

They take a reasonable amount of time if it is on the roadmap, but if it is not on the roadmap, then it does take awhile. 

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. I have a big problem with silo. Silos never solve a problem. 

I am a trouble shooter. I used to have break silos. Silos are the not "ME" generation. Not me, not me, not me. We had to break that. Sometimes silos caused people anger and stepped on people's toes. It just made people say "Not me, it's not my job," but they found, when you break them, it opens up reality. 

There are the tools that are better, but overall, it is the best suite out there. 

Do tests. Do PoCs to make sure that it fits in your environment, because there are a lot of different ways of doing things, and if you find out that it fits your environment, do use it. It is a fantastic tool, but you have to learn how to use it.

The role of AI has become very important when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. The more complex digital gets, the more important AI is when it is done right, because it takes less time to do things. It filters through all the garbage, so you do not have to pay somebody to it, and it takes care to do a good job.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, it would affect our team and every team in the world if it was done properly very well. 

Most important criteria when evaluating products:

1. Does it work.
2. Don't listen to the FUD.
3. Make sure it does what you want to do under the load that you want to do it.

Our primary use is for DevOps. As far as that's concerned, it's been a great tool for finding where transactions are slow, at the development stage.

The main benefits have been getting to root cause on certain issues, being able to deploy applications faster because of the way that you can troubleshoot those issues. So delivering products to our business and driving revenue have improved.

The fact that you can drill down to the code level and get a breadth of information. We do use it for a little bit of troubleshooting in production so that's been a great feature.

I think they've already touched on it at this Performance 2018 conference: enterprise monitoring in a single solution for all of your monitoring needs, whether it's infrastructure, application; having that whole holistic view. Having something high level, in terms of dashboards implemented to provide executives with answers. I think that's the direction it seems that they're going and that's the direction that, hopefully, they'll continue in.

It's very stable. It's very powerful but it's extremely stable. We hardly have any issues from a stability standpoint. 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. But I feel it's pretty stable.

It's easy to scale. It's costly, but it's easy to scale up. I haven't seen any issues in terms of increasing our user base or the number of the agents that we have deployed, so I think it's pretty easy in that respect.

I submit a ticket once every week or every two weeks. They always have been pretty comprehensive in their responses. They're also quick when it comes to responding to our tickets.

I think they may have been using ManageEngine Applications Manager monitoring. It's not quite as in depth as the level of information that Dynatrace can provide. It provides some pretty basic application-health type monitoring but not to the code level that Dynatrace provides. So I think that was the solution. We still use application monitoring since it's relatively cheaper than Dynatrace. So we use it for application teams that may not want to spend the money on a Dynatrace license.

I was not involved in the initial setup. But I can imagine it was complex due to the high learning curve. There was also some complexity in the adoption rate of it because of how costly the licensing is. So getting application teams to spend the money to use it, I think was one of the biggest hurdles.

Given the nature of digital complexity, the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale it in the Cloud and manage performance problems is very important because our brain, humans, are only able to compute so many things. AI can take a whole bunch of data and turn that into something that we can create more data out of. We can have several million lines of code and AI can detect if there's anything wrong, without us having to look at it manually.

Regarding siloed monitoring tools, we use infrastructure monitoring tools and application-specific monitoring tools. Getting them in to a single dashboard has been a challenge, because our executives don't want to log in to different tools to view our enterprise, they want to see it in one page. So that's been a problem with those siloed tools.

If there was one solution that provided real answers as opposed to just data, it would help executives who just want one view and just a single page of answers for problems. So that would benefit us greatly.

I would rate it about an eight out of 10. For me, personally, I mentioned it before, it has a high learning curve. They probably did provide a comprehensive training when they first rolled it out, before my time with the tool, so I didn't get a chance to take advantage of that. There are some videos and there is some documentation out there, but it still requires you to delve into the tool to learn it. Because applications are very complex and very different, creating a training video to set up some basic monitoring would probably be a little hard. But a little bit more comprehensive self-paced training would help.

I would suggest you evaluate what you want out of it. It has a load of information and if that's what you want, if you're looking at it from a DevOps standpoint, then Dynatrace is a great tool for DevOps. But if you're looking at it from merely a monitoring standpoint, it might be too much of a tool for that purpose.

DCRUM is no longer used by my team, due to lack of executive support.  Our primary use case was for post mortem investigation on application data flows.

We isolated to root cause on multiple occasions, identified performance bottlenecks in load balanced app infra, and delivered unparalleled usage and performance reporting for newly designed applications.

Agentless Transaction Analysis allows my team to granularly decompose complex operations and flows for business applications. Combined with SSL decryption, this capability helps my team to see the exact path a real user's transaction takes with meaning metrics captured at every hop.

Decodes on less used/popular protocols are available, but they should be included.  Additional investment should not be required.

No

In house

To monitor and mimic the external customer experience for our external customer-facing websites. This tool does the exact same thing. It monitors the customer experience at over 10 US locations and informs us if there are any issues through email alerting and text alerting in the mobile. This has made our life so much better.

This is the first gate where we come to know if our external customers are facing any slowness in response times for critical page navigation irrespective of if there is any background issue or not. Once there is any slowness, an alert is triggered to the corresponding team and they immediately start looking into the background to find out any issue. This way, when a customer reports any issue, we can always assure them that we are already working on the issue and it will be resolved soon.

There are lot of features, but I found data analytics and triggering are the two most valuable feature of this tool. 

• Data analytics help us to find us issues in the short-term or long-term. 
• Triggering gives us warning that system is getting slow and we need to nail down the issue soon, so it does not impact our business.

This tool had a feature of doing load test in production or lower environment, which was shut down earlier this year. We are missing that feature badly and we definitely want to see that feature back. 

The test automation feature.

The test automation feature has enabled APM to “shift as far left” as possible and has enabled us to integrate it within the Agile CI and accompanying unit test frameworks within that CI process.

The UI.

I've been using it for two years.

We had minimal issues, but this was more to do with internal issues than the tool/vendor.

We had minimal issues, but this was more to do with internal issues than the tool/vendor.

Initially, we had issues scaling it to the enterprise level on a large, complex environment.

It's excellent.

It's excellent.

We used a previous tool which was minimally used by developers, as it was not as deep of a monitoring tool and lacked sufficient support.

I was not directly involved but the complexity was more to do with our own environment than the vendor/tool, and the amount, and placement, of servers needed to support the Dynatrace components.

We used a mixed team. The vendor team was very technical and available and we learned a lot from them assisting us.

Assure enough and proper training and have a guardian, a single point contact from Dynatrace assigned for your organization to provide timely support/service.

We also considered:

• New Relic
• Lucierna
• AppDynamics