Dynatrace Reviews

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. 

We are actually using it in the test environment, not in production. That is our use case. What we want to do is we want to test it and find issues either with our core or infrastructure before it goes live.

We are able to fix issues rather quickly, by identifying then fixing them. Therefore, the efficiency of the organization has improved. We are spending less time fixing issues.

Business case: We had a problem with the previous solution where we were spending more time on it. That meant increased costs. Now, we are spending less time, so costs have decreased. That is how you improve the efficiency of the organization.

The ability to use PurePath in analytics is definitely the most valuable feature. It helps you pinpoint issues, then develop and focus them in the right way. It helps to fix them rather quickly.

I am more interested in the end-to-end performance system, not only the server site from the client's side. 

For example:

• How much time is spent on the client when the user is interacting with the mobile application or even web application?
• How much time each click took?
• How much time the page object domain took to load up?
• Even if it is a mobile app, when you interact with the app, how much time the control took to respond to it? 

Right now, we use the Dynatrace library to build. Then, we would like to generate the overall transaction and the performance it has when the request is coming from different networks across different regions, different periods, and different parts of the world, like the synthetic monitoring solution. So, there are desperate systems. 

What we would like to see is to make it easy, more automated with an easier way of doing these things. OneAgent is an easier approach which you just install it automatically into the installed application and it sends you the information. For the mobile clients, we want to get the end-to-end thing that makes it easier to set up, that will be cool.

With stability, we have seen some issues. Then, we fixed them. So, it is stable now. 

The scalability is another objective. We are trying to test the scalability of Dynatrace. We have seen some scalability issues because of the non-optimal users of the resources and the infrastructure, so we made it more scalable. So, it is acceptably scalable.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance is very important. The AI definitely works.

Technical support is pretty good. Not only the technical support, but the upper managers, they are also very technically, savvy people. Most of them, not all of them are. Also, some of the sales accounts, they are able to find you the right technical people, if necessary. 

In my organization, I am dealing with more than 20 applications. I have to scale with limited resources, so I needed a sophisticated tool to tell me where the problem is. Traditionally, I would be telling you that you have a problem. Now, I am able to tell you that you have a problem right now and what it is. That has made a big difference. I was looking for tool to do this, then I found Dynatrace.

The AppMon 6.5 is problematic in configuring. It is little finicky. When we configured the JVM, it did not work. 

Sometimes, people are making mistakes, typos, or even if you just sit down you need to be in the light, either in the beginning or in the end. So, this is always a little problematic for us. The issue is not super small, but it is okay.

We are buying more licenses, because we are seeing more value.

I would advise a colleague or friend to use Dynatrace.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• PurePath
• Ease of use
• The dashboard
• Having the metrics easily understood and easily articulating the information.

We have multiple applications at our company and the user experience is really important to us. We started getting Dynatrace products in to see how we can improve user experience and find some of the performance issues that we were unaware of. Some applications were practically black boxes for us, and we could not get an in-depth view into them. 

Therefore, we started with DC RUM and AppMon to get more details for such applications and this helped us immensely. We have really improved in customer satisfaction and also we found out a few performance issues that we were not aware of earlier. DC RUM, especially, was able to identify faulty tiers very quickly and Apmon gets the root cause quickly. Later on, we started getting into synthetic monitoring to identify problems from any offshore users, so this was really helpful. 

The problem we had with Apmon was the instrumentation was difficult. It is really time consuming and you need to get into every process and tie it up. Therefore, we are moving to Dynatrace and their latest solution as managed. This has completely reduced time for us. It is an agent at the operating system level and the process gets tagged automatically, so that is very useful.

We are very happy with the way Dynatrace has worked out for us and we are slowly moving into Dynatrace Managed, but we hope to get our complete monitoring solution into Dynatrace Managed.

Dynatrace is almost a single pane of glass solution.

Root cause analysis is definitely very valuable for us. Also, the proactive monitoring that we can do with Dynatrace where it is 24/7 on with all the user experience indexed and everything coming into us. With this information, we have been able to avoid issues before they actually happen, which is fantastic. Each minute that we are down costs the company money. If we can avoid that, and we can stop things from going there, it has been the greatest use for us. Being proactive about issues and avoiding downtime.

We would like to see data from different monitoring tools. We do have some network monitoring tools and some infrastructure monitoring tools that were already there before Dynatrace came in, and we would like to see if we can send that data into Dynatrace.

Maybe it could send the data from load balancers, firewalls, and everything to Dynatrace. It is my understanding that they are developing on it. Once we get that working, that would be very useful.

There are a lot of features that could be added that would make this a very useful solution, but it is getting there.

It is very stable. The improvements that they keep making just make the tool more useful.

We are on a managed solution, so everything is on-premise. Even their cloud systems are very scalable. We have never had any problems with it.

We do not really work with cloud that much. Definitely, AI would help us in scaling because even though we are not in the cloud on our physical server, we have seen some instances where an application either has way more CPU than it needs or way more memory than it needs. Just by analyzing its resource consumption, we can scale it properly, then add more servers or reduce the number of servers accurately rather than throw resources at it as a solution for any performance problem.

The technical support is very knowledgeable.

There were a few cases where we were having trouble with something and the solution gets back to us within hours. So, that is really useful.

Initially, the complexities were due to lack of knowledge about the tool and it was our fault. Eventually, we even got into problems where we had an issue with Dynatrace servers not functioning as expected, but the support was very quick to help us identify the problem and fix it immediately.

We were using multiple tools, but they were not really a single pane of glass for everything. It was one tool for the network, one tool for the infrastructure, etc. and the people had to manually stitch everything together. It is not really reliable at times when you are stitching together all the data.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

Initially, we had technical support. As we started scaling, I did it by myself.

We just started getting into APM. We did a review of a few monitoring tools, but Dynatrace seemed to be on the top. 

If you are looking to implement something right now, look for any technology like Dynatrace OneAgent, which basically removes all the manual work like tagging each process. Therefore, if you have any technology that can just sit on an operating system level and view all the processes running in that operating system, that would be fantastic.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit to my team would be quick resolution. This way we would know what exactly the problem is and we could later find out how it went wrong, but the best thing would be the quick resolution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They have quick support and how willing are they to accommodate any of our requirements or needs. Also, can they get either PoCs or sale orders quickly to us. So, just have action in time.

We use AppMon to monitor our production system today. We're also looking at ways to get our development teams looking into things as they commit, and identifying performance problems, as soon as we can.

Our team is one of the few development spaces in our organization that actually uses Dynatrace to give us some feedback in terms of performance level, test regions, things like that. We're trying to find ways to get other people involved there.

When I first started, it was about five years ago, I don't really recall what was being done for application performance monitoring. But about three or four years ago they put Dynatrace into place, and I know it's provided a lot of insight, especially when we had production outages, to troubleshoot and quickly identify the problem.

For us, some of the troubleshooting features for development, the PurePath technology. The dashboarding gives us some good insight into some fluctuations in some of the application areas. But, seeing the new Dynatrace stuff makes me think, it could be a little easier.

If there was something that could be done at a local developer's station, something like, "Hey, here's a hint, this thing looks like it might not be optimized," or the like. More development features, to hedge that performance.

Some of the UEM capability interfered a little bit with one of our UIs. Aside from that, I don't think I know of any performance problem with the application.

I don't think we've had any problems with scalability.

I have not called tech support, but we do have a guardian. I know that one of our performance engineers actively works with him to work through any kinds of problems, configuration problems, things like that. We've had good support from them.

I don't know that we use too much in the way of AI to scale our production today. We do use Pivotal Cloud Foundry when we do have some auto scaling-up of some of our microservices. But those things, I definitely think are going to become more commonplace, and more part of everything that we do. 

I think the AI stuff is going to help us going forward, because we're breaking apart some of our bigger, monolithic applications, and building our microservices, so there are going to be things that need to scale up, scale down, based on what someone is doing. So I think that AI stuff is really going to drive a lot of that.

Regarding one tool that could provide not only data but real answers, even with PurePath and things like this, it still takes time, a day or whatever - or expert knowledge of some person - to be able to identify a problem quickly. From what I've seen so far, the AI stuff actually gives you at least five, six, different possibilities at worst case. So, just that insight alone would be a big time-saver for everybody.

When working with a vendor, I think it's really important that they're - I don't want to say available - but responsive. And I think with the guardian service we've been using so far from Dynatrace, it's worked pretty well.

I would rate AppMon a seven out of 10. I think at times it has given some folks some headaches from a configuration standpoint, and a maintenance standpoint, but aside from that I don't think they've really had many headaches with it.

Definitely weigh your options. I know there's some availability for proof of concept with Dynatrace, where they actually work with you, whether it's a guardian service or sales. They will work with you to identify the proper solution and setup for you, so I think that's really a good thing, instead of just dropping some software product on your platform.

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.

The use case is internal applications and vendor applications, mostly all that run on either .NET or Java.

All the prior monitoring tools were based mostly on infrastructure. Everybody was really good at keeping their boxes alive and networks running. However, there was a big exposure point on API failures and no mechanism for service response for those. 

So far, it has been app interoperability and identifying failure cases in call-outs, out of the app to outside resources. 

We still have future issues, because the integration is ServiceNow and that is only a reference. It would appear that actually to get further along you can't use just Dynatrace. You'd now have to contract for services to finish up your integrations.

We are changing our ITSM. If we had continued on our current path, they have no integration to a HEAT ITSM. That would have been a big problem for us. Fortunately for them, Dynatrace went through a review of that last year, and they have decided to go to ServiceNow. However, it does appear that the ServiceNow is a reference platform, not an actual solution. It would be better if some of these API implementations and things were not reference solutions. Looks like the partners were working on that, but the company as a whole is not. They are working on their product primarily. They are in some tough competition with New Relic and AppDynamics, so they have to keep on that. Thus, integrations is the weak point.

Dynatrace has been terribly stable. I have run Dynatrace Managed, which is internal, and I am able to take down individual boxes in the middle of the business day with no effect. The cluster is very stable. I have not had a update with an error at all. Then, through the Spectre Meltdown stuff, my Linux admin has been able to patch and unpatch with no issue at all. The cluster stayed alive the entire time. Basically, since October, we have met 100% uptime.

Scalability is outstanding. Right now, I am running it in a virtual environment. We are running what they call small sets. We are only running at about 20%, because you have to build a minimum set of three. However, it won't tax our environment at all. It will scale sideways. If I have three, I have seven more nodes to go, so I have quite a bit of headroom. So, it will scale great.

Depends on how tough the question is. If I ask them a question about stuff they have not done before, it takes a while. Then, we have uncovered a couple of bugs, and we used to wait for the solution. I have been a good QA for them in some cases. Generally, nothing show-stopping. 

Some of their sprints have had some inconsistent pieces. They generally fix them in two or three sprints after that.

We did not have an APM solution previously.

It was not straightforward. Documentation is slightly in error as far as directory set ups and guidance. We came to our own solution for distributing the disk loads. However, there were two or three different components that worked off the same pathings. A couple of the teams were not aware that when people went outside a stock installation that their assumptions were incorrect across components, and they had to resolve some documentation issues. 

The evaluation was between AppDynamics, New Relic, and Dynatrace. Dynatrace won out for a couple of things. 

1. The AppDynamics engineers never got the solution in place on our environment, and the New Relic product was not able to work sufficiently well with the security solutions through the firewall. The real killer that took it over the top was Dynatrace's promise to work with Asia natively. 
2. The security gateways. No one else works with security gateways. I am able to configure those perfectly well within the banking and FDIC infrastructure to pass audits. With the other two products, you have to allow all your hosts out, and the security gateway solves this for me. Then, of course, we put it on-premise anyway.

Of the three, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic, Dynatrace rates a 10 out of 10.

Look at Dynatrace for these very reasons: the security gateways, the ability to scale sideways, and the ability to identify more internal applications. Do not rely as New Relic did on third-party implementations of just plug-ins. Dynatrace does the plug-ins natively, usually. 

Never go with one solution. For the same reason that you do collaborative work, it is better to have different opinions.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• It has to cover the platforms that we run in the company.
• It has to be an established company that is not too flaky. It has to show an engineering pre-sale staff that is competent. Then, it has to work within our secure environment.

We primarily use the solution to monitor business activity, transactions, and root cause analysis.

The metrics that it can capture and identify, based on the positions that have been defined help us speed launch time.

The single agent is the most valuable aspect of the solution. It's great due to the fact that you're not capturing the data.

The solution has great machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Once you are trained on the solution, it's easy to navigate. It's got very good documentation and training offerings.

The solution can scale.

The product is stable.

I don't believe the solution is missing any features per se.

The pricing of the solution should be improved. It's on the high-end of cost if you compare it to other options.

It's not really user friendly. You need to go through a certain type of training. 

The solution needs to offer KPIs so that we can read data and develop customized reports.

We've been using the solution for about six months at this point. 

The stability is quite good. It's pretty advanced in comparison to what else is on the market. It's quite reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution is pretty scalable. It's flexible. A company can scale fairly easily if they want to.

We have a small number of people on the solution currently. They are mostly application architects or developers. We are using it only as a POC right now in a particular business area.

The solution offers pretty good training modules, documentation, and community platforms. We're quite satisfied with the level of service provided. I'd rate them a nine out of ten so far.

We were using a different solution and the price was more reasonable. However, it was not as user-friendly and it didn't really have good features. We were looking for a product with better features and we're hoping this solution will provide that.

The initial setup isn't too straightforward. It's rather complex.

The solution is rather expensive. There are less expensive options.

We're just a customer.

Only a few of us are using the solution. We're currently evaluating the solution.

I believe we are using the latest version of the solution.

Aside from the pricing, which is quite high, I would recommend the solution.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use this solution for end-user experience, infrastructure monitoring, analysis of bounce rates, service calls to the database, root cause analysis, and problem management. For end-user analysis, I can monitor where the connections come from, the time, the number of navigated pages, bounce rates, and finally, if the usage was satisfactory or not.

This solution has improved our organization in several ways, including the speed of detecting problems, predictive maintenance, root cause analysis, and alert generation. We are also better able to understand trends with respect to user behavior like time zone connections, and the times when there is less usage of the system by users.

Our organization is too IT oriented. I think with Dynatrace, it has helped to bring value to the business because now we can speak using the same language.

The most valuable features for me are end-user analysis and problem detection. I am responsible for adoption, availability, and performance. In the case of adoption, the number of new users coming to the system is a good metric for management. For problem management, problem detection is a good feature to save time.

I have reported a bug where a CI was not reflected in the dashboard, yet it was detected in the problem management.

On the side of the end user experience, I would suggest adding a new service for analyzing the backtrace of users.

Also, I would like to see an option to export the dashboard to create better reports and avoid copy/paste.

In terms of stability, it is ok and we have had no issues reported so far.

We cannot properly address scalability yet.

Prior to this solution, we used Gomez. It was part of the original solution that was installed. We had many problems with synthetic monitoring because it was down most of the time.

The tools were installed before I joined the company.

There are long term benefits in using the monitoring tool. There is also strategic value added, as is the case of transforming the internal language of the technical teams.