Dynatrace Reviews

The primary use is for both corporate and manufacturing plants' applications.

Performance has been great. We started out with application monitoring and now we're in the process of switching over to Dynatrace. So far it's yielding great results. It's getting people to think more, and it's easier to deploy.

The old generation tool from Dynatrace, the application monitoring, has been our defacto solution, and it was very successful. Switching over to Dynatrace it 

1. reduces complexity
2. increases the speed to market
3. reduces the amount of knowledge that is needed by applications consuming this data.

There are two main features that we're very interested in. Number one is, when the tool ingests data from other tools, being able to correlate those with the existing topology, so that the AI engine can draw more conclusions in case Dynatrace does not monitor those instances. 

Also, more dashboards like AppMon.

Stability is great, and it's constantly improving. We haven't had any issues with it. There hasn't been any downtime since I've been working on it.

We haven't scaled the Dynatrace solution at this point.

Technical support is really great, and they're very quick. If they cannot fix it, they're very good about escalating right away to product development.

Our issues were mostly around Synthetic, some incompatibilities with the JavaScript frameworks. For Dynatrace specifically, it was for the browser RUM.

When I joined our company, they were already using a little bit of Dynatrace. The concept of APM was there. And then, the company that I had joined split from the initial company. It was pretty much a new, clean slate, but there was the awareness of APM already there.

It was very straightforward. We deployed it on our own.

We evaluated ManageEngine because we already have their infrastructure monitoring. We did evaluate their APM solution, but it was no where near as good as this solution.

I think our complexity is increased by the fact that we use a lot of custom, off the shelf, or COTS, applications, as well as in-house applications. So that introduces a high complexity of different technologies. Having a tool that can be self-injected into all of these is one thing. And the second thing is the fact that it gets deployed at the host level, without having to go tweak application containers. That reduces complexity and the time to value a lot.

We still have some siloed monitoring tools but they don't have any awareness of other components that might make up that application's delivery chain.

If we had just one solution that could provide a real answer and not just data, at the company level it would definitely reduce a lot of the downtime. That would be key for our company, especially since we're in the manufacturing environment and deal with very strict SLAs with our customers.

Our most important criteria when working with a vendor are 

• their willingness to understand the needs of our company
• the responsiveness to technical questions
• the availability during a PoC, so that we can address outstanding items.

I definitely rate this solution a 10 out of 10, because it's a very mature product, and due to the quality of support.

Make sure they understand what you're going to use the tool for, and do a PoC and you will be amazed at how fast you get value from it. 

We are a smaller startup. We do not have the luxury of time or staff resources to spend on the major tasks of implementing traditional server host monitoring, application performance monitoring, or log ingestion. Dynatrace was an amazing find! 

An additional benefit that we did not even realize at first were the dashboards! Dashboards were not even on our radar when we purchased it. Now, we have a giant TV hung in the office that shows various application and network metrics from a custom Dynatrace dashboard. We love it.

No other provider gives us log ingestion, Kubernetes/Docker monitoring, and application monitoring for NodeJS. Some competitors provide aspects of that, and some offer all three, but not for NodeJS. Dynatrace was the perfect fit.

We also really love the automatic alerts. Dynatrace alerts are based off of deviations from baseline metrics, which it is constantly collecting. We did not need to set thresholds ourselves. If something suddenly changes with our application or network that "doesn't look nromal", Dyantrace will tell us. It has been a breeze.

The pricing is a little high, but still cheaper than competitors because Dynatrace at least has pay-as-you-go. Others do not. However, the pricing is confusing. I wish it was more simplified when trying to price out moving to a yearly contract.

I also wish there was the ability to do alert filtering before it triggered an alert with PagerDuty/OpsGenie/Slack.

With nothing more than three commands, or a simple Docker container, we had everything running in minutes. Within one week, we had enough customizations to be production ready.

As mentioned before, we are a small startup. Implementing Dynatrace was a no-brainer. It would have taken us at least two months and hiring another SysOps person to get logging, monitoring, alerting, and APM implemented with cheaper or free open source solutions. It was far cheaper and faster to go with Dynatrace.

I primarily use the solution for mobile monitoring and service management. 

The monitoring is very good.

We like that the solution has the ability to drill down so that you can see your payload. 

The solution is ideal for large companies. 

I'm not sure if there are improvements needed. I don't work actively with it. I sit at the management level.

The solution is a bit pricey. As a result, you can't shift quite so easily, and you always are testing in production.

It's not the best solution for small-scale companies. 

I've been using the solution for five years.

The cost model for developers, et cetera, is too expensive. It's not very affordable for small companies. 

I am just a customer and an end-user.

I'm using the latest version of the solution. It updates regularly.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd advise users to try it out. However, it's more for large-scale companies and not really the best for smaller organizations. 

The solution is primarily used for user happiness monitoring. Basically, we look at how well we'll use it to run some arbitrary metrics over the website's behavior. I'm trying to understand how the user experience is going. Therefore, we're doing user experience monitoring. We're also using it for monitoring and listening, where we fire off specific test cases against that site with it. 

Typically, it does quite a lot. We can also do health monitoring of the actual service hosts, and servers, and dependencies.

Dynatrace provides us with the ability to actually map out the whole ecosystem and our websites and services that exist within it. You have that whole picture even though it's now a distributed network of products and things. We use Dynatrace to just monitor the health of that ecosystem and manage, and identify where the dependencies are. In doing that, we can also look at hotspot monitoring, so that we can determine bottlenecks within our system. We can use it to follow metrics to help us figure out how fast things should occur, to identify slowdowns of speed - or potential slowdowns - which can cause us to have those little mysterious bugs where suddenly the user experience drops out because something three or four levels down is not behaving itself.

Basically, it's a lot of use cases based on the user experience. There's lots of user monitoring. Lots of looking at where they're entering the sites from, where they're exiting the sites from. The behaviors can sometimes help us detect failures in our overall user experience. It's a lot of user experience management that's assisted via AI. We can use AI to develop, identify, establish, buy, and build trends so that we can look forward to purchasing requirements. Ideally, the AI will make it that we can identify where the system is going to fail in the future. We're still working on that side of things, but we're getting there.

The ability to play back individual user sessions is very helpful. I can look at what people actually do when they interact with our product when I use that website.

The solution has a lot of use cases based around the user experience that helps us make a better product.

The AI is great. In the future, we hope it will help us predict problems before they arise.

They provide a lot of quite useful training equipment for training materials for it. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The solution is very easy to manage.

You can set access fairly easily so users can see only parts that are relevant to their roles.

The solution is quite stable.

The product scales well.

Technical support has always been quick to respond. 

It does do nice dashboards.

Due to the fact that you doing a lot, you have a problem with the learning curve. We're really looking for ways to make this product more accessible. That comes back to training and also having the information within the system presented well. Right now, quite a lot of time is spent learning the idioms of the system.

That said, they work very hard on taking the edge off it. However, the reality is that it will take time to learn. It does take time to come up to speed with this product. Most of the problems I've had are just a lack of familiarity with the product so far.

I haven't pushed it far enough to discover that my answers are not met by the product fully. I still need time to explore it before giving it a full review. 

I've personally been using the solution for about seven months or so. It's been less than a year so far.

The stability of the product is very good. It's rock-solid. there are no bugs or glitches. We haven't had any issues at all. 

The solution can scale quite well.

Basically, the way it works is you put in it, you put an agent into each of the deployments you're using it to monitor, and then it just gathers data. It doesn't really impact the operations of things. The majority of its work is actually done by the parent in the cloud.

We have one or two administrators and various people in the company have various levels of access. We have quite a fine-grained control over what people can see, however, at the same time, we can provide some useful information to them to know what they need so that they can know what they actually do need to know to do their jobs.

We haven't been in touch with technical support lately. However, when we have contacted them in the past, they have been helpful and responsive. We're quite pleased with their capabilities so far. 

I wasn't actually involved in the deployment itself. It was a case of just coming in and seeing it was available for various use cases.

However, looking back, it's a relatively straightforward process. It's often as simple as installing an agent with your deployment, and it takes off from there. My understanding is the deployment was very seamless and quite quick.

There's definitely a maintenance contract with it. It's a case where you subscribe to it, and they provide regular updates. You've actually subscribed to a service and there's regular maintenance happening organically.

We got a lot of support from the vendor. There was a lot of ongoing support from the vendor at that time.

The solution is a SaaS. If we were to stop paying the subscription entirely, the service would end shortly afterward, based on the contractual arrangements we have with them. Assuming we were not to renew our contract, the facility would just go away.

I was not a party to the actual license negotiations or costings. I can't fully answer to the exact cost, to any degree of certainty, other than to say it's not a free product. It's a business. I believe that we have been getting value for money. We do have to watch how we use it. We have to watch that the costs are not substantial. We do restrict where it's actually deployed and how it's deployed. That's part of our management strategy and that's kind of informed by a budget. That said, I'm not aware of the actual budget numbers.

App Dynamics is a product in a similar space. 

It compares well to other instrumentation tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.

We're a customer.

We tend to use the most up-to-date or stable version of the solution. 

I would recommend Dynatrace as an application performance management tool. It does its job quite well. I am able to see a wide range of the application I'm looking at, and what other applications it is interacting with. We do get quite a lot of information, which allows us to better understand what's going on. I would recommend exploring an IPM tool. I haven't used one of the IPM tools yet. 

I'd be interested to see how it handles a security event or security incident and event management. That is a bit of a gap for me at the moment. I'd love to know if it does that. There are other tools available, however, it is kind of nice to be able to sort of stop in one spot.  

I need to learn more about the tool. I was kind of running up against my limitations with the tool, rather than the limitations of the tool itself.

I'd rate it seven out of ten, simply due to the fact that I still need to explore it more. 

Our network and security managers used this solution. They had many problems with it because of the injection. 

If you look in the APM sector, it is a very nice package to install. It's very easy to install. It's also locked up. You can not do a lot of things yourself.

We were planning to use it to assess things from Jira, but after we installed Dynatrace, Jira was not working anymore because of the injections that were put in Jira — we could not integrate with Jira.

The flexibility when it comes to integrating with other tools is very low.

We have not used it for a long time. We had problems with it so we used it for about six months and then we decided to throw it out the door.

It's both scalable and stable. We've never had an issue.

There is room for improvement, support-wise. We have a lot of experience in many different areas — I worked for years in the IT industry. I missed in-depth knowledge of audit tools. They know Dynatrace very well, but when it comes to solving problems, for example, in PeopleSoft, they don't know anything about PeopleSoft — that's what's causing the problem in my opinion. You need to know the tools to able to resolve the problems.

Yes, we had IBM Tivoli in place. We still use Tivoli — they were running at the same time. We wanted to compare the results from both tools.

APM is nice for application performance, but there are a lot more problems you need to resolve. You need a helicopter overview of the total environment. That's what we were missing from Dynatrace.

We stayed with the IBM solution (Netcool) but combined it with Riverbed. Netcool is a new tool that can do everything.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We implemented it ourselves.

The pricing is a concern because the price of Dynatrace depends on how much memory is in a system. Our customers have systems with over 300 84 gigabytes of memory. In addition, you have to pay the head price, too.

If you're not working within real big enterprise environments, then it's a nice tool to implement; however, if you have a huge assignment enterprise, then I think Dynatrace is not suitable and would be expensive.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of six.

We are in IT services. We implement and provide support to our clients.

They have a feature that allows you to monitor the user, and we are able to create a VIP customer.

Normally when you are doing application monitoring, you are only trying to look for the high priority applications. The reality is if you are a CIO or have a CEO or another C executive who is trying to use an application, even though it's not a high priority from the perspective of the overall organization, being a VIP user, whatever we are trying to do with the non-critical application also becomes a critical activity.

It needs to be more user-friendly.

They could have a better user interface, better automation, better support for cloud-based, and SaaS applications.

Nowadays, everybody is going to SaaS or the Cloud. 

Historically these products started on-premises, but now obviously they start with a data center.

Dynatrace is evolving but it has a bit of catching up to do.

We have been familiar with Dynatrace for approximately a year. One of our clients is using this solution.

Technical support is fine. We have not had any issues.

We have also worked with AppDynamics.

I think that the price is reasonable.

As IT service providers, we are always looking to explore other solutions that may be suitable for our clients, that might be better than Dynatrace.

I would rate Dynatrace a seven out of ten.

Application monitoring to quickly troubleshoot production issues and determine the root cause, as well as non-functional performance testing in QA.

Dynatrace has helped us reduce outage times and severity of impact.

So far, we have not achieved the benefit of preventing issues.

Quick availability of multiple aspects of performance from infrastructure to application layers.

• Wider coverage of platforms supported.
• Better mapping to true business service rather than purely technical monitoring.

Experience with relationship/account manager has been really poor, it does not seem to be the firm's priority to support their customers.

I joined Datacom about 15 months ago - the consulting company, systems integrator - and we're currently building a system for the Red Cross Blood Service. It's an organ register, it's got algorithms in it to match donors and recipients, and as part of that we're replacing an existing legacy system. It's going to be in the cloud, AWS, and we're building greenfields, completely from scratch on a .NET platform. Dynatrace is the primary application monitoring tool for the platform.

Currently, we are about six months away from finishing the development phase, and we're using Dynatrace as part of our build phase, to actually help detect design issues and bugs during the deployment phase.

The benefit we've seen so far is the ease of configuration, ease of set-up, just drop an agent in the machine and off it goes. That's been good. 

Also, having a single point of availability of all your performance data has been a big benefit.

Another big benefit is to be able to track those individual transactions and being able to really pinpoint where your issues are, based on the individual activity. With the traditional monitoring tools, you generally just see infrastructure metrics, CPU, memory, disk; that's sort of outside, a black box of an application, and you can see how it affects your infrastructure. Whereas APM tools really crack open that box and make those other metrics almost irrelevant.

The ability to track that user, the real user monitoring, for me that's always the key, to unlock that. That tells you what your user is experiencing. Everything else is meaningless. For me, the number one measure of how your system is performing is what your user is experiencing on the front end. If they're having a good experience, the fact that maybe your infrastructure isn't performing that well is not really that relevant. Whereas before: "The CPU is going nuts." Well, our user is not impacted, I'm in the cloud, I don't really care. The system is behaving itself, the AI says, "Well, that's just normal." It just changes your perspective from looking at your raw infrastructure, to measuring performance on your user experience, just completely turns it around.

Problem detection. Obviously, during the building of a system that is new and it's in development, there are a lot of bugs. Being in the cloud it is very difficult, sometimes, to diagnose where the issues are. Dynatrace gives us that deep insight into errors.

It's very useful for performance issues as well. When you build a system generally, there is a lot of that technical debt. We're an Agile project, our developers are initially focused on business value, rather than building a technically perfect solution. We want to get that business buy-in, build a system and get that functionality going. While we're doing that, we're accumulating some technical debts, we haven't built it perfectly in terms of technical design; things like scalability, being able to handle loads, that kind of thing. As the system is maturing, we're starting to throw some load at it, and we start to see performance issues. Using that telemetry from Dynatrace, we are able to pinpoint what our performance issues are so we can tune the system.

So it's tuning and problem resolution.

The role of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, is a feature of Dynatrace that I like the most. I've used some competing products, and the fact that it has that AI capability in it, for me, is really the primary, the number one feature, that ability to automatically do problem resolution.

The one feature that I was really pleased to see coming is that configuration management - that's scripted configuration management - which really fits into that whole DevOps idea of being able to do that.

I'd like to see the UI a bit more polished. For example, I saw a demo of the dashboards here at the Perform 2018 conference. There was a table of these widgets, but they're not sorted alphabetically and there's, like, 50 of them. So if you want to find your widgets, you're of scrolling up and down. So, small features: Being able to search for widgets, having things more categorized; just a bit more focused on the user experience.

Another example is, we have multiple tenants. If you have them up at the same time, you can't see in the UI which tenant you're in. It doesn't tell you.

So focus on the user experience. I can see where they're coming from in the Agile development process, where they delivering value, but they need to go for a bit of that gold-plating now and just polishing off the UI.

Stability is very good. We went straight into the brand new platform. You can still see the UI is a bit unpolished, but it's good to see that kind of iterative release and all those new features coming on a regular basis. You can see, hopefully, that some of the big customers like with SAP, that will definitely drive maturity while they migrate off their legacy platforms.

For us, the scalability is perfect. Some of our challenges - especially with this specific solution we're building, it's not really load, it's a very low-utilization system - our challenges are accuracy, donor privacy, and availability. Those are our key concerns.

Being a consulting company, we're looking at introducing this as part of other solutions within the blood service organization, and other organizations as well. So, we work with some large organizations like government and other big companies. Scalability is important, and seeing some really big clients adopting it gives us a lot of confidence that it's not going to be an issue.

We've had a few issues along the way and they've been very responsive. We have had some small defects with an agent and some of the functionality. One example would be, we were using a single pager, using Angular, and we upgraded our Angular from version 2 to version 5, the latest and greatest. Dynatrace had some issues with supporting the latest version. So they were quite responsive to some of the issues we had.

I've used those traditional monitoring tools. I come from a development background. I have used a competing product that is in the same space as Dynatrace, and the biggest challenge I found was - me being a bit of a nerd, a DevOps guy - I could look at a chart, a performance chart, from previous systems when we were doing load testing. I could look at a chart and understand where the performance issues are and how the system is behaving, and the load. But when I engaged other people, even technical people, I would say, "Hey, just look at this chart." And they're just looking at some graph, it's meaningless to them. The way Dynatrace looks at things is to try and translate things into a business perspective, impacted users, root cause analysis, that's really the message. With traditional tools you'd have to take those metrics, translate them into business language. Dynatrace is giving you that capability.

We're using Dynatrace Managed. Because of donor privacy concerns, the client wanted us to create our own on-premise, in our on private cloud, meaning a private tenant in a public cloud. We set up our own Dynatrace instance and completely managed by Dynatrace so we never touch it. We patched it due to some of those vulnerabilities, but other than that it's been really seamless for us.

My role as solution architect is twofold. One is designing the actual system, but my background is DevOps and my main day-to-day role at the moment is very heavily DevOps-focused. I'm also involved on the practical side, putting in all the automation, that automation platform. To have a tool like Dynatrace, where I don't have to work out for hours how to configure and set up alerts and monitoring - especially in a solution that is not completed yet - it's not only a major time-saver, but I know going forward that it will be able to learn how the system operates. So we don't have to spend time doing that. Day one, we're getting all of that stuff for free, out-of-the-box.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. Not only is it a great product now, but I can just see from their vision and what they're trying to achieve, I'm really excited about the direction it's going. It's a great product.

First of all, if you don't do it, you're flying blind, so do it immediately. 

The other thing I want to say is you need to make sure that your organization, from a maturity point of view, is mature enough to adopt it. So if you're going to put in a tool, and if it's just going to be another tool that's sitting there... To really get the benefit out of it, you need to be in that sort of Agile, lean, innovative mindset. Dynatrace enables that feedback, so you get that quick feedback from ops into development into business, and the benefit you get from DevOps is to be able to react quickly to that information. But your organization, your business, especially, needs to enable that rapid feedback. Your business needs to be set up to be able to use that information and share it.