Java automation (application monitoring agent)
Sr. IT Manager eCommerce Operations at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
It has made our lives a lot easier and reduces our troubleshooting time.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
- System profiling
- Early warning alerts
- Memory and thread dump analysis
- CPU sampling
- PurePath technology for easy troubleshooting.
These save us a lot of time because we no longer have to guess and pour through millions of log lines to figure out what is hurting.
What needs improvement?
- UEM
- Dashboards
For how long have I used the solution?
2 years.
Buyer's Guide
Dynatrace
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Dynatrace. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
No issues. Easy installation.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
No issues, but there are a few problems with our Mobile App's Dynatrace Libraries.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
No issues.
How are customer service and support?
Customer Service:
Great relationship. They respond quick and are readily available to help.
Technical Support:They have a fairly good support team. They are dedicated until the issue is resolved. In case of an emergency or product issue, they will find someone to get on the phone or WebEx.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Yes. The previous solution was very light and not helpful while troubleshooting.
How was the initial setup?
There's always a learning curve in anything, thereafter things are fluid and you rely less and less on support.
What about the implementation team?
In-house with help from a Dynatrace consultant.
What was our ROI?
We don’t share this number, but significant enough that we adopted the tool enterprise wide.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It was about $200,000. Given our small footprint back then, it was not a huge cost. On a day to day level, I can show that it is actually paying us back for multiple reasons. But for the sake of it I’d say about $500.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
When I joined, the product was already in house, and I just had to switch it with the existing one but I heard there were other products evaluated.
What other advice do I have?
Best APM tool I ever worked with. It has made our lives a lot easier and reduces our troubleshooting time. The QA and Performance team will usually just send a screenshot of the problem from Dynatrace to the developers. This way they don’t have to guess, and they know where to look to fix the problem.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Owner with 51-200 employees
Customer service could be improved but dynaTrace is installed in half-a-day, fully operational...a preferred tool
What is most valuable?
Track and tracing of each individual end user transaction throughout a complex Core Bank financial chain. Within 5 clicks you got the evidence why the performance is lacking. Also a problem could be analysed from different angles. One dashboard that provides the information and you can work independently (you don't need the presence of OPS people, and other tooling except Tibco EMS monitoring)
How has it helped my organization?
Our customer base is too immature on performance matters. Besides that, they are now working with Dev/OPs teams (more than 180!) where there is no governance overall. Every team can decide what they want to use with respect to tooling. There is no Business or Operational chain owner.
What needs improvement?
Message Bus monitoring: it is not possible to deep dive into the the Tibco EMS bus. The consequence is that we depends on EMS monitoring tools like RTView, Tibco Hawk, GEMS etc. These tools are lacking the functionality to track and trace individual Tibco messages, something you really need to do trouble shooting; Deployment of dynaTrace agent fixes per selected agents instead of all agents. Consequence is that if an Agent fix is corrupted or whatsoever, all agents are off-line; Eco system like AppDynamics (external parties can develop plugins). On the other hand, it has an disadvantage because your quality control must be very good to not jeopardize the tool stability.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for 2 years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
Not at all. This product is developed by guys who perfectly understand that a quick and seamless install is part of the customer experience. It is heaven if you compare this with IBM or HP stuff.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Not at all. No crashes whatsoever.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I can't answer this question, because it is not deployed in a broader way. I'm not convinced to deploy a large scale solution, because it consumes an enormous amount of data resulting in a decrease of retention time. So I advise to deploy more DT instances where every Dev/OPS is responsible for their own DT instance.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service: Could be improved, but has everything to do with the merge of Compuware and dynaTrace. There is a local office in the Netherlands, but available FTE is under par.Technical Support: It is good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
7 years ago I used HP Diagnostics. This was not an out-of-the-box instrumentation (1st gen diagnostic tooling). It took too much time to get added value out-of-it, too much interpretation. dynaTrace is installed in half-a-day, fully operational (including the dynaTrace agents, dynaTrace server and Collector). This is why this tool with all its functionalities is a preferred tool for performance troubleshooting, performance tests, test automation and full coverage production monitoring. It also works with a lot of performance test tools. I'm not impressed by the Dell Foglight diagnostics; I never see it working with SOA technology. AppDynamics: despite the fact that I didn't work with a full deployed installation of AppDynamics, you need a lot to do to get the information like dynaTrace provides.
How was the initial setup?
Straightforward
What about the implementation team?
We don't to depend on vendor PSO.
What was our ROI?
Can''t answer this question. The performance organisation is too immature to answer this.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Tool investment (initial 50 JVM agents, increased to 80). One time investment with yearly maintenance costs Total Stitching activities 20 days (due to Tibco wired /unwired mechanism and old JMS version usage); 5 days per week performance testing
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
No, I didn't evaluate other options. Reason: I'm not totally convinced about the products provided by vendors like IBM, CA, HP, BMC etc. Way-too-much consultancy, it takes a lot of time to generate added value, too difficult to work with etc.
What other advice do I have?
Use it as fast as you can. List prices are negotiable. You get instant success!
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
Dynatrace
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Dynatrace. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
831,997 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Principal Technology Consultant at Vodafone
Feature-rich, stable, and straightforward to set up
Pros and Cons
- "The visibility that it provides is most valuable."
- "There should be more visibility for network performance monitoring. There should be more metrics for things like 5G and IoT. That would be the main thing because they've moved more to mobile performance rather than fixed networks."
What is most valuable?
The visibility that it provides is most valuable.
What needs improvement?
There should be more visibility for network performance monitoring. There should be more metrics for things like 5G and IoT. That would be the main thing because they've moved more to mobile performance rather than fixed networks.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for over 10 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Its stability is very good. There are no complaints.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is pretty scalable.
How are customer service and support?
I haven't had to deal with them too much. I would rate it as average. It has been good enough, but I haven't had too many moments where I had to reach out. I would rate their support a four out of five.
How was the initial setup?
It is straightforward. The agents are pretty straightforward to set up. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of ease.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
As compared to New Relic and other providers, it is more expensive, which is its biggest disadvantage. Its biggest advantage is its capability. It is more feature-rich.
What other advice do I have?
My advice would be to try it before you buy it. I would rate it a strong eight out of 10.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Head Of Product Development at Stefanini SCALA
Easy to setup and manage with a very nice user interface
Pros and Cons
- "The solution has a very good user interface."
- "For the user, for the customer, they expect a solution to be not so expensive."
What is most valuable?
Overall, it's a good platform.
The solution has a very good user interface.
The product can scale.
It's fairly easy to set up and manage.
What needs improvement?
It will be great IF we could show (automatically, from the dynatrace dashboard) to the customer how much they are reducing costs, doing more business and no environment's stopped.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using the solution since 2015. it's been about six years or so at this point.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
No worries about that.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution can scale, however, if you have a large amount of infrastructure you will need to pay more. I find that if you start with just a small part (the critical part), you'll better understand why you need more of it and scaling will come naturally. It's not just about managing the servers and applications. It's about the user experience too.
How are customer service and technical support?
I haven't really dealt with technical support. However, our tech team is quite capable of handling any issues should they arise.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We are also familiar with IBM SOLUTIONS.
How was the initial setup?
The solution is very easy to implement and easy to administer. It's not overly complex.
What about the implementation team?
Our IT team is capable of handling any implementation our clients need.
What was our ROI?
What I try to say to my customer is that, okay, it's not so expensive, if you could see the return of investment you will get. However, in Brazil, we have some difficulties when it comes to showing these numbers to the customer (they don't have the actualized numbers). It might be better, in the current market to just try to sell it to IT instead of across departments.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is quite high and many customers do not want to pay for it.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
What other advice do I have?
We are an IBM partner and are beginning to work with solutions such as Instana as well. We're also partners with Dynatrace.
In the last three years, we've started to grow our customers and have new use cases. I believe due to the movement towards digital transformation, we have more opportunities to show the benefits of a platform like Dynatrace.
We are using the private and public domain from Dynatrace, however, we have customers and major financial customers who prefer to use either private clouds or a private environment. We believe that it doesn't matter where they are. I'm happy with this model, as we could get faster results in two weeks when we are implementing Dynatrace to our customers. It's faster to implement on the cloud.
I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been quite happy with its capabilities overall.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior System Administrator at Public Service Development Agency
A stable and scalable solution that is easy to use for application monitoring and easy to set up
Pros and Cons
- "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."
What is our primary use case?
We use Dynatrace for monitoring channels like mobile banking and internet banking.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for about two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Analyst Programmer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Valuable and powerful with very good monitoring capabilities
Pros and Cons
- "A very powerful solution for the end user."
- "Infrastructure monitoring could be improved."
What is our primary use case?
We use this solution for our customers for a wide range of tasks and for application optimization and such. It can be used in a performance test environment where developers run a new release to check they're headed in the right direction. I'm a senior analyst programmer and we are resellers of Dynatrace.
What is most valuable?
This solution is very powerful for the end user. It's a valuable solution but because of the cost, we try to explain this to our customers that they are not only buying a monitoring tool. Dynatrace offers a really important approach because the tool is able to monitor a lot of different features.
What needs improvement?
I think that they have to make improvements to the product, particularly with regard to the infrastructure monitoring which is not yet complete. Although it's very powerful for application and end user monitoring, the infrastructure needs to be significantly stronger. Configuration is also not so simple and that could be improved.
This is an expensive solution which makes it difficult to sell to customers. Even though the features are good, the price is too high. At the moment, we are able to sell the product, but only to really big companies. It's quite difficult to sell to a mid-size company.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been working with this solution since 2007.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product is stable, they generally provide an automatic update on the tool every couple of weeks although we tend to test and then do a manual upgrade. There have been a few issues but the support is really quick to solve problems.
How are customer service and technical support?
The technical support is very good and they have a live chat. You can open the chat from the product and check any issues. They are highly skilled. Sometimes the issues are more complex but even then they deal with it professionally.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have some experience with APM Elasticsearch. It has a module that you can activate and then make an analysis. I also know some of the other tools but they don't compete well with Dynatrace.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup has improved over the years and is now quite straightforward. There's a lot of work involved to customize the entire environment.
What other advice do I have?
Anyone looking to implement this tool needs to take a 360 degree approach. If you take that approach then everything will be easier because you can see all the stakeholders and the value that the tool can give. If you approach it from only one angle, such as from the developer or operations perspective, then it would be very difficult to get an idea of all the features that the products has. This tool is very complete, but the price can become a bottleneck for some.
I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: reseller
Principal Architect at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
It can monitor our entire infrastructure on AWS
Pros and Cons
- "The view it provides for default analysis is very nice. The way in which it showcases how the metrics have been captured and how lucidly that they are displayed. This is a good thing to have from a technical and non-technical perspective."
- "For the manage services, they work on CloudWatch logs and are given CloudWatch logs only. I would like more collaboration with AWS and insight into CloudWatch services. This would be valuable, especially when detecting the fault of the root cause analysis. It would make the process go faster."
What is our primary use case?
Primary use case is EMI, which is application monitoring. Our enterprise management infrastructure is supported by Dynatrace.
How has it helped my organization?
Dynatrace has been catering to AWS, and we moved into AWS. This resulted in us being pleased with the product.
Dynatrace has solved our problems.
What is most valuable?
The view it provides for default analysis is very nice. The way in which it showcases how the metrics have been captured and how lucidly that they are displayed. This is a good thing to have from a technical and non-technical perspective.
What needs improvement?
For the manage services, they work on CloudWatch logs and are given CloudWatch logs only. I would like more collaboration with AWS and insight into CloudWatch services. This would be valuable, especially when detecting the fault of the root cause analysis. It would make the process go faster. Essentially, more integrated services with AWS would be of help.
For how long have I used the solution?
Three to five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable. We have not lost data.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It has quite a sleek architecture with respect to the number of instances that can become an agent.
As for its environment, Dynatrace is ready to scale. Our environment is huge. We have EMR clusters ranging from 100 to 200.
How is customer service and technical support?
We regularly connect with the technical support and obtain input from them. They are nice to work with, so we have been happy with the service.
What about the implementation team?
We worked with architects for the best way to configure our Dynatrace in AWS. We selected the managed architecture, and there are less configurations and costs of adoption with Dynatrace.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
While it is quite good in respect to its functionality, there are few area in regards to pricing that they can look at how to possibly change. I have heard it's costly.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did evaluate other vendors, like Datadog, who were also good. However, Dynatrace was implemented earlier, and we continued to use it because it was satisfying all our requirements.
Our requirements include:
- Overall monitoring.
- Managed services of AWS.
- Monitoring AWS Lambda.
- Monitoring Amazon EMR clusters.
- Getting an understanding about the different set of services that we are on. We have a managed architecture supported by Dynatrace, so we could adopt them very fast.
What other advice do I have?
Dynatrace is pretty good as they are the market leaders.
We started with the on-premise version. Now, we are moving onto the AWS version. From the perspective of analyzing Dynatrace, it was able to do the EMI for all our data services. It has worked out well. We have been happy with it.
It can monitor your entire infrastructure on AWS. I don't see an option why you should not use this product. If you don't have AWS as a requirement, then maybe re-evaluate. Otherwise, I am confident in the product.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Enterprise Systems Technology Monitoring at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Having a guardian onsite for our first two years helped with our user adoption
Pros and Cons
- "Having a Dynatrace guardian onsite for our first two years helped with our user adoption."
- "I would like better plugin support, because they are constantly asking us to do plugins, saying "Yeah, we can do that. Use this plugin." Then, the moment something goes wrong with that plugin, I have no way of getting help."
- "I have not had very positive experiences with tech support in the last year. I found them to be arrogant, rude, not solving my problems, and not interested in solving my problems."
What is our primary use case?
Currently, at my organization, we have DC RUM, Gomez synthetics, and AppMon. We are getting ready to PoC the OneAgent technology. Our use case for OneAgent will be containers monitoring, AWS monitoring, and microservice monitoring. Our organization currently has a digital services team that will be doing a lot of this cutting edge stuff and our architecture is not being fully monitored by the current stack that we have. We also have a tool called ScienceLogic that we use with our Ops bridge and we have Splunk. Therefore, we are really looking for the OneAgent to fill in the gaps that we are not covering.
How has it helped my organization?
Out of the gate, I can tell you that just changing the agent model from having to go, "This is a Java, this is a .NET, this is a web, or this is an app," And getting rid of that to having the OneAgent is an improvement. Then, being able to monitor anything, literally anything on the infrastructure, that will be huge for us.
Another thing is the log analytics. We have to work with the Splunk team. We have a very fractured organization, so anytime an application team wants log monitoring, they have to work with the Splunk team. Anytime we want log monitoring we have to work with Splunk team, it is a paperwork process. It is not that they are not nice people, it is just that it takes a really long time, and by then, the problem may be gone.
We really just need the immediate log analytics, because we might not need long-term analytics all the time. Like Splunk, they do awesome data analytics, but sometimes when we are troubleshooting an issue, we just need to look at where the problem is.
What needs improvement?
I would like better plugin support, because they are constantly asking us to do plugins, saying "Yeah, we can do that. Use this plugin."
Then, the moment something goes wrong with that plugin, I have no way of getting help. They recommend, "Contact the plugin author." You are kidding me? Those guys do not have any obligation to respond. They wrote it, but they do not have to support it.
For how long have I used the solution?
Three to five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I do have concerns about stability. I have heard there are gaps being mentioned and I think that we will lose some features. I am not entirely trusting that this is fully-baked yet. I am probably going to go back to my organization and say we really need to do a PoC and we need to get on the train. However, I am not stepping down AppMon or our current DC RUM for another year or two, because this really needs to mature.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I am not worried about scalability. OneAgent is going to more scalable than the clunky old solutions that we just put to bed.
How are customer service and technical support?
I evaluate technical support on a criteria of:
- Did they help solve my problem?
- How long did it take them to help solve my problem?
I have not had very positive experiences in the last year. I found them to be arrogant, rude, not solving my problems, and not interested in solving my problems.
They are very insulted if you ask them questions. They refer you to read the documentation. I am like, "Well, I already read the documentation and that is why I am asking you a question."
"Google that," is not the answer that I want hear out of tech support, because I already googled it. So, I have been rating them very low. It is actually the one pain point I did bring up to my sales engineers and sales support. They are aware.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Our organization just dumped HPOM and the plug was pulled on it in 2017. We are getting ready to sunset SiteScope and HPE BSM. The really siloed monitoring tools are archaic and high maintenance. The infrastructure is too big and moving too fast to be constantly updating old-fashioned tools.
What I really am excited about is that they just announced that it will be doing session replay for the DC RUM part of it. We currently have IBM Tealeaf and we hate it. We hate its guts. Our management hates it because we rolled it out to one application and it cost us over a million dollars to do that. We wanted to roll it out to a second application, and IBM wanted another million dollars. We already have the on-prem and a trained administrator. That was the licensing that they wanted that million for.
Dynatrace just said the session replay that DC RUM will have, it will put IBM Tealeaf out of business. Thank God, because that solution literally is from the 90s. I am not kidding you, it was coded in the 90s, and it is extremely brittle. It is hard to maintain, and it is clunky. If they can get that replay to be smoking, then they will make so much money. All the Tealeaf customers will stampede over here.
How was the initial setup?
We stood up AppMon five years ago. It was not straightforward; it was complex.
What about the implementation team?
We paid for a Dynatrace guardian to be onsite for two years. The guardian rocked. We really loved the guardian. If we had not had the guardian there, we would not have had an adoption rate like we got.
What was our ROI?
Thursday and Friday last week, I got pulled into what they call a triage team. They had a problem in production where all these people were in a war room with all these fingers being pointed. Nobody had the full picture. I am using AppMon, which performed beautifully and management was super impressed. Just using AppMon 6.5, the visits, being able to drill down, and find the answers there worked. However, if I had had the OneAgent, DC RUM, and SaaS solution altogether, I would not have been in there for two days. It cost our company so much money and they still do not know what the answer is.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
This is an expensive solution, but it is also worth the money.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
My organization evaluated Nagios and a start-up company. Then we evaluated Dynatrace as well, and it just outperformed the others.
What other advice do I have?
I am really excited about the AI that I am seeing out of the OneAgent because I was just at the IBM conference last year. The IBM AI is still pretty much a toy and I have not really seen the rubber hit the road with their stuff, but the rubber hitting the road is here with the Dynatrace AI. From what I have seen, it will be a key tool set for us just to pin down problems and get answers immediately.
Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Everything that they are doing is right, except tech support and plugins.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Updated: January 2025
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thanks for your frankness! It encourages me to recommend DynaTrace to Ops teams,
grtz, Erik