Dynatrace Reviews

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

We use Dynatrace for monitoring channels like mobile banking and internet banking.

It is being used in a commercial organization for monitoring two high priority services. If you are changing some PCs or doing some updates, it provides some responses. It has been very useful for us.

It is really comfortable and easy to use for application monitoring. We are able to see and go deep into the problem. We didn't have any issues with this product.

Its pricing could be better. Dynatrace has an option to monitor the end users to see what they are doing, but it required a separate license and had an additional cost. It was coming out to be expensive, because of which we didn't use the feature.

I have been using this solution for about two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We are currently using it only for four channels, but we want to add more servers. Next year, we may extend the licensing for eight more servers.

We never had a problem, and we never had to create a case with Dynatrace. The company from which we buy this product also helps us in using it in our organization. We don't have support problems. 

The initial setup was really easy. We had the first testing environment in just two days. We tested how the agents work, and it was easy.

I would recommend this solution. In Georgia, it is already very popular, and many companies are using it for applications and external channels. 

I would rate Dynatrace a nine 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.

The primary use case is monitoring and diagnostics for production marketing usage.

The visibility into the application's performance helps the executives and managers by using easy dashboards. Our engineers are also super happy with the ability to drill down and fine-tune based on issues which we have seen. A bunch of issues with OpenID were easily investigated, then we were able to fix them quickly.

It has been a very enabling tool for us, especially for my team. The visibility that it provides through the application's behavior allows us to find trends based on our customized metrics.

• Alerts: The alerting system is really nice.
• The ability to drill down and pinpoint issues.

The new Managed Edition is too complex. I feel like a fish out of water. From the on-premise version to the AWS version, our initial use has been very complex. 

For the integration, I use a hollow testing tube called Performance Center. I would like the ability to integrate with it. This would be a good feature. While I believe it is there, it needs to be fine-tuned.

I'm pretty impressed with the stability. 

With the AWS version, you can access the updates through the browsers, not worrying about the tick line. 

With the on-premise version, you need to use the tick line for updates. There are times when architects, who do not use the product constantly, find their stage and production options out of sync, then they need to have two tick lines on the same system.

There was an issue on-premise. We were trying to troubleshoot a production issue. We had to run a bunch of queries for different time frames to see where the issues were and how recently they had been seen. This crashed the Dynatrace server.

We are now moving slowly moving in installments of the AWS version because our environments are not large enough right now. So, we haven't tested it yet.

I have only heard positive reviews.

We went with Dynatrace because of its ease of use and it is feature-rich. It helps you to drill down into bottlenecks and find issues. When you have highly integrated systems, it gives you an extra lens through your whole ecosystem.

The Dynatrace team helped us with the integration and configuration in our AWS environment.

There have been many advantages in terms of production and issue resolutions.

The product is pricey, but it is feature-rich, which is why we probably haven't looked away from it.

We are also using New Relic. Our product teams keep explore new options to see what is out there.

I prefer Dynatrace over New Relic because there are better features.

I would recommend Dynatrace Managed because it has more features, and go straight for the AWS version because it is simpler to manage. It can also be accessed through the browser. 

We previously used the on-premise version, but have switched to the AWS version, which has more features.

Our primary use is application performance monitoring and real user experience. Our Dynatrace application monitoring has been in since 2012. It is performing extremely well. We have not had any downtime or issues with stability or scalability.

The benefits we receive using this tool increase productivity, which increase revenue for the state.  A huge benefit of having Dynatrace AppMon in our environment is the proactive monitoring it provides.  This help us avoid unexpected outages and downtime.

Its ability to deep dive into the application code and find bottlenecks that reduce productivity for the users and downtime.  Proactive alerts are extremely beneficial and help us keep IT out IT team small.

The AppMon solution that we are using is the Dynatrace AppMon. I am currently working to upgrade it to the Dynatrace Managed solution. This is basically leaving AppMon and going to their next generation. This will streamline everything: Ease of installation, ease of use, and built its own intelligence, which I like to call self-healing.

Dynatrace AppMon is a tested and stable product in my environment.  The only downtime I have is planned for patching servers.

Dynatrace is highly scalable and works well in our hybrid environment.

I would give Dynatrace's technical support a 100% rating. I feel like whenever I call or send an email that I get the right person automatically. For the most difficult answers, the most I have to wait is about three days and the answers have been relevant.

We have used Wiley from CA. It did not perform the way we wanted it to, which was a driving factor for switching over to Dynatrace products.

The initial setup started a year before I joined the team. I have been involved in the upgrade processes and they were straightforward.

Our implementation was with the help of Dynatrace.  We wanted it to be fast and right the first time.  Success on both counts!

I do not have dollar figures, but if I did, the ROI would be at least 100%. 

Look at the product and the product features, not the price. Too often people look at the price and turn away. Dynatrace costs a little bit more than the other products I researched, but it can do far more. Since my last review, I have stood up a competitor's product.  My Dynatrace installation is two servers plus my collectors.  The competitor's product required seven servers.  That is significant when looking at the cost.

I feel the price is good for what the product does.

I have done research on other products that are in the same market space. They cannot provide the same in-depth detail that Dynatrace does.  I have since implemented, as a proof of concept, a major competitor of Dynatrace.  The result - I will never stop using Dynatrace.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit for my team would be less resources needed. This would streamline and automate things.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reputation of the vendor. We go read reviews. We also check vendor references and talk to other customers to find out what their experiences have been.

The primary use case is application monitoring. We are using APM to test for performance, bugs, and hoping to resolve the issues faster, and hoping to catch them before we go to production.

It's been great, it has helped us a lot. It can do more, but it's definitely helped us a lot and I'm a big believer in Dynatrace products.

First of all it's mitigating issues before they are in production, and if they do go into production, it's reducing the time to find the issue and actually resolve it. I believe, in the organization that we're in right now, that is challenged for resources and time, a product like Dynatrace helps immensely.

The PurePaths, because that's where somebody who is a non-developer can figure out where the problem is and send appropriate PurePaths, clean charts, or even the link to the developer. The developer can then look at it and figure out exactly where the problem is, this is the piece of code that took the longest time, and then resolve it.

Right now, since I'm primarily an AppMon user, so maybe the Dynatrace product addresses this: The challenge with AppMon is, what if you don't have an AppMon agent on a host, but it talks to the database. It talks to it, but I don't have either a host agent or an AppMon agent on it. That has been a challenge, but I believe the Dynatrace agent, the OneAgent, will solve that, potentially. You ask me three months from now, after we take a crack at the Dynatrace product, maybe my answer will be different, but I'm hoping that addresses some of the issues.

The configuration of the alerts, that's been a challenge in AppMon for me, right now. Some of the alerts are too noisy, but that might be my lack of some configuration. Again, it's just me primarily handling it, so that could be an issue. Somebody asked a question in one of the sessions, here at the Perform 2018 conference, about noise and how many alerts to your problem count, and the person doing the session answered right away saying, "I checked my dashboard before I came to this session and I had one alert on it." So I'm guessing that will resolve itself.

I think I like the direction it's going in, the only challenging part for me is to keep up with the name changes. But other than that, as far as stability, I think I'm happy with it.

I think for the deployments we have right now, it has not been a challenge. My goal is to increase the usage throughout the organization, maybe that's where I'll face some challenges, but at this point there are no challenges.

I have used technical support in the past and they are pretty quick to respond. The other thing is, the APM community is available, Andy answers pretty much any question I post pretty quickly, so I think that group community help is really good.

I have use siloed monitoring tools in the past. When I started at Nemours 17 years ago, I had custom scripts that I would use to apply to various servers. They were on the host level, but the deployment was challenging. How to tie in a CPU alert to application slowness is challenging, because you had to go to the timestamp, look at the log and say, "Okay, this might be the issue." Dynatrace tells you how it is, and I think that's the most important feature.

I'm the primary Dynatrace admin, if you want to call me that, and it was pretty easy. But keep in mind, my skill sets are probably unique in the sense that I understand applications well, so I know how to insert the agent - because we use AppMon - how we insert agent into JVM.

But I believe the new Dynatrace product is probably the way to go, because you don't need to actually talk to the application folks, you just deploy it on the host and you're done. I believe it's definitely going in the right direction. It is complex, it wasn't for me, but I can imagine it being complex for some people.

I don't know if there were any other vendors on my list because we've been users for about 15 years. We started out with a Vantage product that moved to server monitoring, and then we had the Gomez platform, and then you also had Dynatrace, but then they all came under the same umbrella. So we never really evaluated any other vendor. We had some of the free tools we used to use, like  Profiler, but from what I've heard from developers, nothing ever came close to this so I'm a fan.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to just data, we could spend less time on troubleshooting and trying to figure out what the problem is, and actually do our jobs, which is to design, build, and develop software.

The criteria we look for when adopting an APM solution are ease of use, and does it truly get you down to the problem area - and I believe that Dynatrace does - and the third one, it's true for everyone, is the cost.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. I'm not giving it a 10 yet because I would like to see the Dynatrace product in action and truly want to understand it. If we move to Dynatrace, away from AppMon, are we missing out on something?

My advice would be go with Dynatrace.

We are mainly using Dynatrace right now to monitor what we call our customer-facing applications and our middle layer applications. We have Hybris Commerce and Sitecore, and our middle layer is made up of BizTalk. Therefore, we are using Dynatrace to monitor Hybris, as Dynatrace is a gold partner for Hybris. That is how we picked Dynatrace.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what the benefits are yet because we are not live with our Dynatrace monitored software applications yet. Our go-live date is in October. 

Right now, even before the go-live, I see the value because our ecosystem is pretty complex. We have applications above our middleware layer and then applications that are below the middleware layer, which are all 30 to 40 year old ERP applications, which are not Oracle nor SAP. Then, we have other custom applications that we have built which we need to connect. When there is a performance problem that comes up visibly to the customer above the middleware layer, most often the reason is not in these applications. It is in what we call the enterprise applications. Judging that, knowing that, and where to go to fix what has been very valuable even without going live. I am waiting to go live and see where the value is. 

I love how Dynatrace can hook on at the code level, then tell me all the details that I need. For example:

• Which query to the HANA database is executing, and how many times?
• Where exactly is the bottleneck when it comes to Hybris Commerce?

They need better infrastructure monitoring. New Relic is beating them for infrastructure monitoring. Come on! They have to pick up the pace for infrastructure. I do not need to have Microsoft SCOM, Dynatrace, and Splunk. Now, I have Microsoft SCOM for infrastructure, Dynatrace for application monitoring and performance monitoring, and Splunk for log monitoring.

Why? Why do I need Splunk? Why can't Dynatrace get into machine data? 

They can either go buy Splunk, or at least get into the log monitoring side of things as effective as Splunk does it. 

The siloed monitoring tools that we use and we have still in place for monitoring basic infrastructure. They do not monitor an application at the code level for the software side of it. Therefore, it is more, "My server is out," or "My virtual memory is running out or not," or "Is my call to my DNS working?" or "Is my load balancer up and running?" 

For basic infrastructure, we have been using Microsoft SCOM to monitor infrastructure. 

Our customer-facing ecosystem has been moved to SAP Hybris Commerce-based solutions and Dynatrace was a natural partner for SAP Hybris Commerce. I love how detailed Dynatrace agents can hook into the code level and tell me exactly where the problem is, if there is a problem in the customer application side of things. What we were using before was just a infrastructure monitoring tool, not a software code level monitoring tool. So, it was not existing before.

The vendor team who did the setup was very good. They sent a very skillful resource for the setup. However, with the BizTalk side of it, they were less effective as they were with Hybris Commerce.

We have had problems with our implementation. 

The SAP Hybris Commerce side of things has been very smooth, but not the BizTalk side. Microsoft BizTalk is our enterprise middleware and the implementation has not been smooth with it. We purchased a professional services package from Dynatrace, but then the customer rep who was assigned to it was not very skilled in helping us overcome the challenges. She was a very nice person, and she was very resourceful when it came to Hybris Commerce, but not the other applications. Therefore, the engagement was not effective and I don't believe that I got the entire value that I thought I would from the professional service package, or from using Dynatrace with BizTalk. As a result, my BizTalk team has a huge resistance to implementing Dynatrace completely, and I have to convince them. 

As of now, we no longer have the professional services package.

I evaluated New Relics application performance monitoring tool as well. They were good in certain aspects that Dynatrace is not good in yet, but they were not able to do it at the code level for Hybris Commerce. Therefore, they are not as detailed as Dynatrace can be. 

The role of AI is very important, but it is the future. Thus, I am counting on more innovations in the AI space to monitor, not just applications, but an ecosystem from hardware to software. 

If I had one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be more valuable customer engagement. Especially since I am on the customer-facing side of the organization, it would be like if Facebook was down for five minutes, the perception created is exactly the same as the perception created when websites are down, or not performing. It is quite frustrating for customers who do not plan to be there for such a long time but would like their work done faster. Therefore, the solution's immediate benefit should be about customer engagement. 

I actually support Dynatrace a lot. I am a champion inside the organization. 

For Dynatrace, there are other ERP systems other than SAP and Oracle that many companies are struggling to get out of (like mine) but Dynatrace treats them as a black box. Some more details than we usually get with Hybris Commerce, but though maybe not at my level, but a little higher up we need something. Right now, it is just a black box. So, I have been pushing for people whenever I see a Java application or a Darknet application by saying, "Guys, use this."

However, if it is not a Java or Darknet application than there is a huge resistance. They all just default to an infrastructure monitoring application. That is about it, not a software side. That space seems to be unconquered. 

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.