Dynatrace Reviews

We purchased Dynatrace to give us an end-to-end picture of transactions from the end-user, all the way back through all the infrastructure, and tag it all together - and it's worked out great.

The main benefits are that, obviously, we can see the transaction throughout the entire infrastructure.

One of the things that we're embarking on is, we're trying to measure the impact to the business of infrastructure events and incidents, rather than using gut feeling or emotions of whether we feel there was an impact, or asking our customers, how were you impacted. We have data now to prove it. So it's just taking the emotions out of it and just providing the facts of the impact, of the incidents or events.

The most valuable component of it is taking that guessing out of troubleshooting problems. We no longer have to rely on an architect, or an application person, or someone's memory of how the transaction moves throughout the infrastructure and the different dependencies that it has on it. We can see it right there and we find out more that we ever imagined.

We like the user's experience piece: being able to see, from the browser perspective, the user's behavior; being able to answer questions from our customers about why such and such happened, why the performance was slow, why we had an error. Many of our customers are business partners. They're not a customer online that couldn't shop or something. They're customer service representatives, maybe, or a customer service team, that is experiencing slowness, so they're reporting it very quickly and letting us know. We're able to see those transactions and it's helped with our mean time to repair.

I'd really like to see more dashboarding abilities. The ability to do workflows within dashboards, being able to start at a high level and click into it with custom dashboards. I think most of the time, we are creating our own custom dashboards, and I'd just like to see more ability with that.

I would also like to see it baselining more metrics out-of-the-box. We have a lot of rich data, but if someone says, "Well how did that look last week?" If you're looking at a problem and you see, for example, a long SQL statement, is that the root cause, or is it always slow; that kind of thing. It's difficult to take that and say, "Oh the SQL statement was fine last week and it's now slow and it started slow at this specific time." So, it's difficult to get historical data, unless you know in advance what your problems are going to be.

I feel, overall, it is very stable. We have some response-time issues from the product or from the UI, and getting all that massive data back. But overall, the stability, the availability of it, is good.

I think scalability is what we're struggling with. I would say it's okay, but there's a little bit of room for improvement.

We've spoken with tech support several times. We've used them to answer questions and to help us get more value out of Dynatrace. We've also uncovered bugs and they've been able to help us identify those and support has come out with fixes for them. It's been good overall.

We didn't really have a short list. We had another solution that we were using and it just really wasn't fitting the bill anymore and Dynatrace just slipped in. We just started evaluating it and we liked it, so we just went forward.

I think with anything that's of a massive scale, there are complexities - even just trying to understand the product. Obviously it's a new product and you're trying to architect something you don't know. There are definitely challenges and hiccups that occur with that.

I think, overall, the implementation of actually installing was fairly easy. Most of the problems, really, were organizational problems on our end. You know, change-windows being very small, and the testing requirements that we've put in place, caused the implementation to take a while. But the tool itself was pretty easy to implement.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, we're not really using the cloud very much, so I can't really say for the cloud piece. But I do think that these transactions are more and more complex, and there's so much data. That's one of the great things about Dynatrace is there's so much data, and it's also one of the most difficult parts about Dynatrace, is there's so much data. So having that AI to bubble things up for you, so that you're not searching for a pin in a haystack is definitely the future, I think, for Dynatrace.

We have used many, many siloed solutions and still do. It's hard to give  those up. The problem is, obviously, everybody is looking at their own silo and looking at their own monitors and, of course, it never looks like it's that silo's problem.

One solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, is really what we're looking for. It takes the guessing out of monitoring and everybody is seeing through the same window. That's what our team is designed to do, come up with answers, not just provide a lot of data. Obviously, we can send out data to folks, but they're not looking for that. They want your opinion of what the problem is, or what the answer is, not just charts and data. So it's very valuable for our team.

The criteria we were looking for when choosing an APM solution were the ability to gather metrics on a lot of different technologies and solutions. I was on more of the technical side. The financial side was kind of smoke and mirrors for me. I just evaluated the technical aspects and was looking for a solution that would give us an entire picture of the transaction.

I would recommend Dynatrace, of course, but I would just mention again, that you have to kind of think about the story that you want to tell. Determine, in advance, the metrics that you're going to want to show over time, for that historical view of data.

We use it primarily for performance. We bought it so we could be more proactive versus reactive with our customers. We are using it for anything from database monitoring, performance monitoring, end user experience monitoring, etc.

It is performing great. No issues so far. It is fast, and there is no overhead.

We are not in the cloud yet. We are moving to the cloud. This is one of the reasons why we bought Dynatrace. We know Dynatrace is going to OneAgent with the its product. That was a big part of our decision of buying Dynatrace, so when we move to the cloud we will have something to monitor.

I am getting emails every day about how great this application is. We are rolling it out to a few teams. They are using it. They love it, and it is easy for them. They can just get right in, look at things, and say, "Oh yeah, there's an issue right here." I got an email today from another team saying, "Hey, this helped a customer with their slowness issue," So, it is good. 

The most valuable feature is being more proactive versus reactive, because before customers would call us with issues and we had no clue what they were. Now, we can call or alert them that there is an issue and we are working on it. That is the most valuable part.

I would like to see single pane monitoring.

We have had no problems with stability. Though, we did have a couple issues in our production environment getting the UEM working. It would crash some of our applications. Agents were injecting the JavaScript twice so it was bringing down our apps, but we worked with support, and they fixed it pretty quickly.

It scales well. We are going to be able to use it for everything we need.

They have a very active community.

I have used CA Wiley. It was slow and cumbersome to use. It was good, but it just did not have anything like Dynatrace has.

I have been a performance engineer for about 10 years. Using Wiley, you could look into the system. I moved to this company and went to SEP Con in San Diego where I met with some of the guys from Dynatrace, then I knew the company needed this tool. 

When I moved to this company, they did not have any production monitoring or QA monitoring, so that is where we have started Dynatrace. This is what we have needed.

I was involved from the PoC to the setup, then roll out. I am not an admin, but I was part of all it.

It was pretty easy. Our middleware architect, he had no problems with it. We rolled out all our environments (QA and prod) in about three months.

New Relic and AppDynamics were on our shortlist. We picked Dynatrace because of the training and ease of use.

Dynatrace has great training available. It is easy for everybody to use. Anybody can go out to YouTube, watch a video, and figure out how to use the piece that they need. All these other application monitoring tools, they are all basically the same. They are going to give you the same data and just present it a little bit differently, but Dynatrace goes above it with their training.

If you had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be time. Everybody would have more time to do something; get things done a lot faster and go out on the golf course and play golf.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: With this vendor, the most important piece was the amount of training which is available. There are so many YouTube videos. The website has so much to offer. None of the other APM tools had anything close to it, so that was our number one criteria.

I'm using it for our websites. We're a company that owns numerous stores and numerous sites and I track the site performance, to see things like load time. That's the primary use. I have a lot of page loads of home pages, and then there's the check-out process, so it's been great for that.

It's working well.

Customers are looking at our site, every second, constantly. They're able to do that because, if for some reason it goes down, I can instantly get it back up, because I know what needs to be fixed.

In the past, before having the tool, we were being notified by the brand, or the brand manager, "Hey, customers are complaining that our site is down." And then there was me, as a developer, trying to track down what was causing this issue. With Dynatrace, it's right there in front of me, it's a JavaScript error, or something I can narrow down.

I get valuable information like, for example, if a site is down. That's the key. I'm instantly getting a message, or even on the app, I can see if something overnight went down a few times, or it's not performing at 100%. Those are the key things.

I'm excited about the big announcement: session replay. That's going to be pretty awesome. I don't think the solution was lacking without this, but I do think now, that we're going to be able to get that view of an actual user, with the actual problem... The example that I saw was, a person is tapping through, and then all of a sudden it's not working, right there. Now, as a developer, I'm saying that's fabulous for me because I know there's a problem with that field. That's perfect. Otherwise, I'd be spending a couple of hours, at least, trying to figure it out, and also do my own testing. So I'm happy that it's here. I'm glad they introduced it and bought the company.

Honestly, I've heard this asked of others, and for me, I'm thinking, "Can there be anything else?" I just haven't even thought about it because I feel that Dynatrace thinks of everything before I can even think of the need for anything else. For me, we already have everything I need.

No stability issues at all, it's always been up.

We had to reduce our usage but then we were going over, so now we're back up again. But it definitely scales well.

I have not used technical support but I think my coworker has. He has recommended it to me. He's like, "If you have issues, totally call them."

We didn't have performance monitoring until we picked up this product. I wasn't involved in the process of tracking down a solution, but my thought is we had no idea how our sites were performing, except with our own internal testing. So we were visiting our own sites, and would say, "Yeah, it's fast enough." But that wasn't covering things. We have Adobe Analytics, but that was a different type of monitoring.

In terms of AI for monitoring the performance and management in the cloud, I don't know that piece because we're not really involved with AI, as far as I know.

As for one solution that can provide real answers, and not just data surrounding it, to tell you "this problem is right here," we already have that with Dynatrace. The immediate benefit, obviously, is getting the answers immediately.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include that the product has to be what we need it to be. But then, also, the support and training would be important, because you could get this fabulous product and then not know how to use it. And then you're throwing money away.

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.

We are using it for user monitoring and service monitoring.

It is a very good APM tool. There is a lot of thorough scanning of services and applications. It has got great monitoring features.

PurePath helps us to identify minor glitches in applications and services. It collects everything from user sessions.

Its infra monitoring is not that good. They are mainly into the APM environment, such as network monitoring and other things. Strong end-to-end infrastructure monitoring is missing. SNMP monitoring is currently not very good in this solution.

It is a bit expensive. It could be cheaper.

I've been using this solution for the last one and half years.

Its stability is good. It does not break easily.

We have not scaled it yet. It is good enough to handle the bulk load. We never faced any performance issues with the tool. We have more than 150 users, and we never saw any issues with it.

Their support is very good.

It was straightforward. The full deployment probably took a week.

We have vendor support, and we collaborated with our vendor for its implementation.

Its license is a bit expensive. We renew it yearly.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

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.