Dynatrace Reviews

My main use case would be for a business transaction and doing a monitoring solution that my client is looking for.

We feel the Dynatrace Managed, the stage that this product is in right now, is not 100% mature. Its admin is the best compared to the managed. I understand it is under the transformation from AppMon to Dynatrace, but we are still waiting for the better dashboard views to come in to play for the executive views, the business transactions, etc.

I used to be a monitoring person for IBM, for close to 10 years. I moved to monitoring Dynatrace recently, and I see lot of benefit while monitoring the microservices related to this product.

The one thing we have tried the most is the microservice monitoring. All the apps are moving from the native server base to serverless. Some of them are AWS microservices, for example. This product seems best when compared to other vendors.

It still has a long way to go to reach that single pane of glass based on the releases that it launched into this training session. It looks like slowly features are coming out every month, and I am expecting more features to be released. However, I would just like to have a solution that cleary works with the current situation, i.e., how we can integrate the products to achieve better results for what we seek.

Also, it does not have mature enough dashboards.

I am fairly new to this product, but stability is good. 

They have quick answers for scalability. When we wanted to get up from two nodes to three nodes, it worked quite fine. We are happy with that.

When something goes wrong, support is unbelievable. I really can't expect that they are so slow in the support, which I really did not like. They expect the customer to do the basic analysis, do all the solutions, and find the solutions themselves. If it is really a product problem, only then will they be able to identify and spend time on the customer. 

Several issues in the last month took us the whole day to get our system back online. It is good that we are not 100% live with all our critical applications, so management is not so hard on the Dynatrace team. I can't imagine that will happen again, and I am wondering how do I improve the support? Long story short, the support is not good.

Siloed monitoring tools were for old style of application deployments. They were good for that aspect, but not anymore. 

CA Wiley and similar products are good for a JVM in-house infrastructure. Now that technology has changed in the last two years, so they are not the ideal solutions anymore.

We are partially enrolled, but I have not done it 100%. Next week, I am setting up a lab environment in my organization. Then, I will be doing it completely.

Coming up from the OneAgent side deployment, it is basically a daily job and a 100% improvement. It is a lot better improvement from the agent side. Earlier, it used to be every tiny agent for each aspect.

Being on the technologies team, I get to use all the products that the people see. We always pick the top three in the market to do the PoC. Dynatrace being reliable, backed up with the support, etc. So, we did a PoC with Dynatrace, New Relic, and AppDynamics. Then, we have chosen this one, which meets all the company standards and requirements.

Definitely implement the solution because I can see the Dynatrace team is working with all the customer requirements. I am hoping to have a better solution by the end of the year.

The importance of the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in their cloud and manage performance problems:

1. AI is not the 100% solution for all organizations.
2. It is the common quick solution for all the apps. 

If anybody is interested in doing more real analysis and baselining in AI, it really does not work out. I need my SLA for my set of transactions. I do not need somebody telling me and defining that this is your application solely. So, it is good and bad for the solution.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, I would need Dynatrace Managed to be my back-end and I would want AppMon to be the front-end. Basically, I am relying on both the products to fit my exact solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: I am a supporting person, not the decision maker, but my review is definitely considered and valuable. I am the APM architect in my group with middleware background, which has knowledge on all the moving parts in web application technology, not just monitoring.

Support is the first criteria, because that is the lone factor after purchasing the product. Features, while I am not 100% happy with this, with all the technology and the innovation, Dynatrace has already met this target, but the support is missing. So, the vendor, in my view, as an active technician, needs better support. From a management standpoint, it is the other way around. Also, there is licensing and costs.

We have a new product at Farm Bureau, called Guidewire. We have been using Dynatrace to diagnose as their moving code through the systems. It has been helpful in being able to guide our application staff. This part of the code has been having an issue where we need to look at it, or we have a database call that is malformed and it is causing issues on our database. That is what we have been using it for. 

We recently had a problem. When we went through a triage or a war room type of situation. We were able to use it help us nail down a specific call which was having a problem.

The main benefit definitely is being able to pinpoint problems. I have spent a lot of time in the past on tools that did not work very well. You spend a lot of hours, nights, and weekends with VPs over your shoulder going, "What's wrong?" And, you can't find it. 

What I see in today's tools coming out is that artificial intelligence is very important to help minimize that time and get very specific with where the problems are coming from.

The version that we are on now has the ability to get us in the area of where our problems are. What I see with the new product is that it is actually going to give us a pinpoint. 

Therefore, we will not be spending hours behind the scenes being the artificial intelligence. It will be built in. It will save us a tremendous amount of time this way. 

There are some features that get in-depth into the product and you are having to redo the data across several tiles. You have got cloning at one level, but it would be nice to have cloning at deeper levels. Or, as you are doing the cloning, it would be nice if you could select different options. Then, you are not having to sit there and build dashboards, and spending a lot of time in the cloning area.  

I do not even see this as being a problem. I have seen very little of it being a problem.

What I know about scalability is from the sales pitches, not from experience. From the sales pitches, it looks to be extremely scalable. I have worked with products that when it goes into practice that this is not always the case. I would be interested to see Dynatrace in a very scaled environment. 

In previous places that I have worked, like Ford or General Motors, which are very large environments. I could see where they would need a very large scaled solution.

Mike Ditmar is probably one of the best engineers that I have ever worked with. If he does not know the answer, he is back with you within an hour with the answer. 

General support is same thing. If they can't give you the answer, they are saying, "We will have someone call you back. We will have your S.E. call you back." They get someone for you. So, it is one of the best support structures.

Dynatrace's documentation is great. I love the university. 

I used siloed monitoring tools. My view is a little bit skewed because I used them on the mainframe. The mainframe was developed over 30 years, so they were very developed tools and easy to use. I was one of the first adapters of the Vantage product from Compuware that is Dynatrace's predecessor. I thought it was cool then and that it had all the bells and whistles. 

Now that I have come back into it, today's tools don't even compare. We did a lot of work back then to try and correlate the data. Even Dynatrace 7.0 is a hundred times easier than that Vantage product was and I see the new stuff making that same leap from the 7.0 version.

When I originally looked at Dynatrace, it was because it was something that we could spread across the company. You can set something up for the VP and upper levels to look at that is a summary dashboard. Yet, you can set up that same system for your application developer, so he/she can pinpoint those methods, and you can do the same thing for the database. Thus, you have many different sections of the company in which you can set up specific data output meaning something to them. It does not necessarily have to filter through one team, because you can really clog a team up fast making them the central point. 

I was not involved in the Dynatrace initial setup. For the upgrade, we put it in, and it was done. It was not complex.

I have heard it was great to have the consulting staff help you because you got it right the first time. 

Do a PoC of all of the competitors. Do not go off the sales pitch. Once you see Dynatrace in action, it really has some shining elements that the competitors are missing. They all have, to a certain point, the same functionality. Though, what I see in Dynatrace's new AI stuff really comes into play and it out shines its competitors. 

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is invaluable. The amount of data coming at us these days is overwhelming. I started in a network team with three people, one server, and 100 users. That was manageable. 

In today's world, we support 2500 users, WAN/LAN, and applications which are becoming increasingly cross-platform and integrated. Therefore, you need artificial intelligence to help with it. 

I do not think there is one solution for one company. You pick your top tools and have them work together. For instance, you have a tool that monitors your storage and your infrastructure. You have that same tool in Dynatrace that monitors your apps, but those two talk to one another. So, when we see that blip in storage, then we see the effect over in Dynatrace because it just ran out of space. I don't believe in one tool, you pick your top tools and have them talk.

Primary use case is for application performance management. So far, we have instrumented 19 of the 72 critical applications, and it is performing well.

We display it on a big dashboard, allowing the teams to look at performance for each app within a group. Thus, it has a little bit of competition, if you will, such as my app is green and yours is not. Not only that, it allows us to see issues sooner rather than later and see the correlated issues. This is very important, because where I work many of the systems are integrated, or using the same underlying infrastructure. The tool allows us to see if it is an infrastructural related issue and see what is affected right away.

• Ease of use
• Ease of integration

There were a number of marketing promises that were made, which we do not see it in the tool yet. 

The integration between the web monitoring of Dynatrace and OneAgent. 

On the technical side, it appears good. It does not always translate on the financial side. 

The technical support has been fair. We have Dynatrace folks still working on the implementation stage so we have not used the full tech support. It is in-house support right now. 

My complaint is the feature sets that they promised slips a lot. However, that is software development. 

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. We have had challenges with its integration. 

We did an interview of all the applications and figured out what our gaps are. We identified performance monitoring as a major gap, then we did a number of vendor evaluations and tool evaluations, and our leadership picked Dynatrace. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

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. Tools come and go, but it is the vendor relationship that is important. 

We compared Dynatrace to other vendors. It is cleaner and more compact with good UX/UI.

AI's role is very important when it comes to IT's ability to scale it in the cloud and manage performance problems. AI is the next step in our digital transformation initiative. However, we need to do some simplification of the environment before we can do it.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be people will be much happier. When you have a team that is looking at several hundred applications, if they have to visit eight different tools (or eight different dashboards) to get status, then it is cumbersome. Therefore, you want a centralized solution that allows you to integrate with same products, but not just the same products, any product that whether it is Dynatrace, CA, or BMC. If you are able to grab the data from the siloed solutions into a centralized repository or centralized GUI, it makes it simpler for everybody else.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: How the vendor works with us, and whether or not they are a partner or just a customer. Just trying to get more dollars out of the customer instead of working to be a partner, and both in helping to implement the tool and supporting it after the implementation.

We often find the same pattern: Large enterprise business process management (BPM) platforms, when deployed successful, quickly become a critical piece of software which is used by the entire organization and supports 100s of different business processes. This results in unusual opportunities for improvement (tweaking a single screen may have a huge impact) and in an extraordinary pressure on operations. Dynatrace gives us and our clients information about all layers and components of their platform, including the most important starting point for us: real-time and historical end user experience.

As a consulting practice, we invested significantly in our own monitoring assets to use in tandem with our core offer, IBM BPM. We felt the need for this as we were unable to find suitable tools for our needs. Either they were too technical, without any view of the end user perspective, or they were extremely hard to implement. With Dynatrace, we have different options that we are including as part of our projects. We are not investing valuable resources in developing custom tools, but rather focusing on our core activity and leveraging Dynatrace to offer the needed visibility and monitoring capability.

1. Ease of use, with a streamlined and automated installation process. 
2. Functional coverage, from an end user business sensible view to a very detailed drill down of technical transactions. All of them, not sampling. 
3. PurePath: The automatic correlation of transactions between multiple layers and dependency identification is brilliant. Drilling down from a slow user facing transaction to a database or service call used to be one key APM promise. PurePath delivers in a way that can sometimes feel like magic. 
4. Artificial Intelligence: It is early days, but the results are already visible. Rather than keeping an eye on dashboards or emails, the AI can now tell us when something is wrong, including the impacts (e.g., affected users) and the root cause. It is a new paradigm for incident and problem management.

The initial transition from Dynatrace APP monitor to Dynatrace created some confusion. It is much better now with a clear focus in Dynatrace and an increase in functional coverage.

No.

No. The overhead to capture 100% of transactions is negligible (under 2%, measured in real life scenarios in two of our largest clients).

We have used previous incarnations of APM products with disappointing results as they were too complicated or too technical for our needs. For this reason, we built a set of custom tools which addressed our needs but resulted in a maintenance overhead. When we went back to check how the APM market was and if the old insufficiencies had been addressed, Dynatrace surprised us with a strong and future-looking product that we could start using as a real life project in a couple of hours.

The initial setup was straightforward. The OneAgent technology does a brilliant job of simplifying what was earlier one of the pain points in enterprise monitoring.

We are a business partner, so we help our clients implementing Dynatrace.

As with a BPM project, Dynatrace fits really well a start small, scale fast environment. Getting the first agents installed, getting information, and coverage in a initial set of systems can be done in hours and with a low cost entry point. Rather than investing months building an enterprise-wide business case, our recommendation to our clients is that resources are better invested in proving the value with a small pilot.

We compared Dynatrace with the other main players in the APM space. It is in a mature domain so coming up with our short list was a bit easy. After engaging with Dynatrace, we felt the product offered what we and our clients needed, plus the vision for the product and the company matches ours.

We use Dynatrace for a number of internal applications that we track in addition to API calls associated with the API engine. We have a partnership with Dynatrace and I'm a project manager.

We monitor critical internal applications including some public-facing applications. Internal transactions are being tracked and we get immediate feedback from the solution's monitoring which makes a big difference to us.

The value of this solution is in terms of the functionality, and every aspect of the hardware and connection-oriented signals that we get. We use most of the features on a daily basis.

Network monitoring doesn't seem to be a key focus of the company and if that were improved this could be a one-stop solution that would monitor the application. It would be quite useful in the data center environment as well.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, we have around 50 users. 

I am unaware of licensing costs. 

It's a wonderful product and I would definitely recommend it. I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

My primary use cases of this solution are to understand how users are interacting with and experiencing applications and to quickly identify and fix problems.

Dynatrace has reduced our total headcount in operations and the mean time to detect and resolve problems. As a result, those challenging offline times are much shorter, if not non-existent, because of this solution.

The most valuable features are session replay, which allows for full playback of a user's experience; the AI engine "Davis," which does problem identification; and automatic mapping, which gives a visual representation of how applications interact host-to-host or process-to-process.

An area for improvement would be security. In the next release, I'd like to see more network-centric capabilities - Dynatrace is good at the network level, but I have to leverage other network solutions and integrate with them, but a holistic approach including the network as a one-stop-shop would be great.

Dynatrace's stability is solid - it performs updates very often, so it's always the latest and greatest in a good way.

Dynatrace has phenomenal scalability capabilities.

The technical support is phenomenal - they have a call program called Dynatrace ONE, which is like a customer success program on steroids. 

The initial setup was extremely straightforward and fast. The deployment function was also super fast, typically just a few hours at most, with the right tuning.

When used appropriately and applied to the applications that are meaningful for businesses, the ROI is extremely high.

There's a perception that Dynatrace's value could be questioned, but this is down to a lack of due diligence on the front end. When done right, this product always gives good ROI and total cost of ownership.

Dynatrace is really good at keeping some infrastructure details and really good at the application level. I would give this solution a score of ten out of ten.

We use it for application performance management (APM).

It alerts us, or can detect, potential problems which are building up. Then, it let us quickly adapt our websites.

• Dashboards
• Problem detection
• Troubleshooting

It is very stable and reliable.

We use a cloud version for everything that we look into, so we have had no issues. Scalability is working well.

The technical support is excellent.

We were previously using AppDynamics, then we switched to Dynatrace because it has more functionality, better additional components, and better management of problems. It also has a good AI.

The integration and configuration of this product were very easy.

It works quickly with all of our servers, databases, and load balancers. We are now testing it in AWS with AWS features.

It's helping us stay alive, afloat, and scale up as we need.

The pricing and licensing are very expensive.

Try it. It is a good product.

We have used both the AWS and on-premise versions. They are about the same for us.

Application process monitoring, and user-experience monitoring.

It's used for monitoring inside of applications, like JVM thread-level applications, plus the user. I monitor usage statistics, performance statistics, plus the user satisfaction level.

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. It has helped with my overall my performance statistics.

There are different phases of product development. In the testing phase I was not able to determine if things were going fine or what was going wrong in my application. But using this tool, I got to know - even before the customer got to tell me - this or that particular module was not working. 

Using this tool, I got to know the moment he got a page-out error on his screen. It told me, for example, a person in the US is facing this particular issue. Because the alert came, we worked on it, we resolved it and things were easy.

The moment he called us we just said, "Yeah, we have already acknowledged that issue and we have resolved it. You can just try it again." The person was happy. The customer's satisfaction has improved, overall.

We also got know many internal code bugs which could have caused memory leaks or other issues which we were not able to catch during that development phase.

We also got to know, on the network level, where the latencies were. If you go via Google, what Google says is that you have a number of things on which you should measure your performance. One is if there's an error or not. Dynatrace tells you whether is an error or not. Second is saturation, whether something is getting saturated. You should be aware of what is getting saturated. Dynatrace even tells you that. The third is if there is a latency. Network latency is also told to me by Dynatrace. So these are three things I got out of Dynatrace.

The performance features are most important ones. That would include reporting, you get reports on your performance data.

The next is the alerting feature. For example, my applications are going out on some thresholds. So I get alerts, according to the thresholds I set. I get that data via emails as notifications. That is another feature that we primarily use and we like from Dynatrace.

Also, it's easy to use. The usability is better in Dynatrace.

The fourth thing is: my customer is facing some issue. The linking is very good in Dynatrace. What happens in other monitoring tools is the linking is not proper. In those solutions, a person has to manually link many of the layers and what is happening in them, while in Dynatrace you get that from the very first visit. For example, if a person is visiting your website, from there it will traverse you to the end. If the application is a Java application, it will traverse you there, to the Method level. So that linking and traversing is better in Dynatrace.

If Dynatrace is capturing everything in your application, it has to "sense" that information, and that sensing needs sensors which we have to include in our applications. The more you apply sensors - the more details you want  - the more you have to increase the level of sensing. If I increase the level of sensing, my application's performance goes down, because something is there that is, again and again, checking each and every thing in the application. So that load on the applications increases.

So, many times my applications used to crash because Dynatrace was working on them. So that was a negative point. We had to remove some sensing; either we had to reduce the sensing or we had to remove Dynatrace immediately. So that is one thing we don't like about Dynatrace.

And the second is dashboarding. The dashboarding in Dynatrace is not very good. We have used other monitoring tools like AppDynamics. We are also using AppDynamics for some of our products. If I compare Dynatrace with those monitoring tools, the dashboarding is not as good. If I have to create a dashboard it takes me time, the experience is not that good. The automatically generated reports are good, but the dashboarding was something we were expecting but did not get.

Also, sometimes it happens that we are not able to capture things. For example, if a person is logged in from India, from the city of Mumbai, and is using a Chrome browser, and his email ID is xyz@abc.com. But what happens is, Dynatrace just fetches two pieces of the information, not all of it. Sometimes it gets it all, sometimes it doesn't. So that also came into picture.

The last and the most important, which we did not like about Dynatrace - and that's why we switched to other monitoring tools recently - was the support. We were not able to get proper, good support from Dynatrace. We had to raise a lot of tickets and then, one fine day their people would eventually come around and resolve the issues. The input we had to give them was very high. Support was very bad for Dynatrace, especially in the India region.

When you go for a monitoring tool, there are two types. One is SaaS. The SaaS version means that the monitoring tool is not deployed on your servers, they are deployed on their servers. The second one is on-premise.

We were using the on-premise and we were using very good servers for the Dynatrace deployment. Stability didn't come into picture. The version that they gave us was very stable. There were was no code bugs. Actually, there were some, but those were fixed immediately.

As far as on-premise was concerned it was fine.

Scalability was fine. We were using around 100 application licenses, 100 Java licenses. On that scale it was able to handle everything. There was no reason to scale it up. I'm not sure if it could be scaled up to 500 or 600 licenses. We didn't do that. It was able to handle the load in the one tier.

I rate tech support very low. The technical support was not that good. They were not very attentive whenever there were issues, even the critical ones. We were not able to find the proper support from their end so I don't rate it very well. A one or a two out of five.

Initially, we were using New Relic. But, after that we switched to Dynatrace because of the amount of functionality, the amount of troubleshooting it was giving us was more. That's why we shifted from New Relic to Dynatrace.

But once we saw the negative points of Dynatrace, we recently shifted from Dynatrace to AppDynamics. We are in a process of shifting all applications from Dynatrace to AppDynamics.

It was straightforward. It was was easy to add up. It was not complex at all, while the other monitoring tools are more complex than Dynatrace. Dynatrace was not that bad.

The licensing for Dynatrace is high. If you want to go for monitoring solutions, then why Dynatrace? If you have a particular budget, you can go for many other monitoring tools - apart from Dynatrace - and they can help you more and give more data than Dynatrace can.

And secondly Dynatrace also comes with a lot of issues, which I have mentioned elsewhere in this review, which can easily be rectified using other tools. It's not worth the money that you spend for Dynatrace.

Initially we were using New Relic itself. Dynatrace was one thing that we were evaluating. ManagingEngine was a new one at that time from what I recall but, I'm not sure which ones were part of the evaluation, because I was not totally a part of the PoC.

Apart from that, if you want to use on a system level, you can use Nagios, that's freeware. It's also good but, again, it is just a system monitoring tool. It's not an APM. So if you wanted to go for APM, then only New Relic. It was the one competitor for Dynatrace, at that time.

In terms of implementation, it's quite easy, now that there are many automation tools. So just integrate Dynatrace with the automation configuration tools. Just ask Dynatrace which integrations it has, for example Chef, or Puppet. If you integrate, the configuration will be easy.

Also, the configuration needs to be standard. The standards should be set initially. There should be a standard protocol; that needs to there. If that's not there, then issues may arise later on. These are some things which are advisable when you work with Dynatrace.

I would rate Dynatrace a six out of 10. When I consider all the negatives plus the positive points which I have already discussed, I end up at six, including the licensing and everything.