Dynatrace Reviews

Our primary use case for the product is going through logs and tracing through what has happened.

In general, it has helped me go through different logs more easily when something breaks.

Being able to quickly go through logs and figure out what is happening.

It needs a better way to figure out how to dig deeper into the details, e.g., sometimes we have to wade through multiple logs, etc. 

It has been stable. It doesn't break.

Its capabilities are good.

We have a couple AWS accounts that we are running on the cloud. Then, we have a lot of on-premises applications, as well.

The technical support is readily available.

The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment is pretty seamless and easy to configure.

We don't really integrate it with anything else.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was a pretty straightforward process. We had no hiccups.

I think the pricing is at a fair value for what it is.

We looked into New Relic and other logging solutions. 

After doing our research, we figured out that Dynatrace was the best for us.

It is a very useful product. 

Depending on your use case, try all the solutions out, then figure out which one is best.

We use Dynatrace for all our client-facing or student-facing core web systems, which give students access to their information. We are monitoring all those for user expectation and user experience management. We are also using application performance management metrics to detect and troubleshoot issues which pop up from time to time because it is a job. It's a Java-based environment that we're monitoring. 

Dynatrace AppMon has served us very well. We are able to get insights into our systems, which previously took us weeks to be able to detect. It gives us a much better view on the performance of our environments. 

One of the big benefits is being able to manage user expectation to better understand what the performance of our systems are versus what the users expect of those systems. We are also able to scale. 

We can prevent major system downtime because the system uses baseline monitoring. It can when something is about to horribly wrong and affect systems in a short while. This has helped a lot. We are more pro-active instead of reactive. Reactive monitoring in IT is always viewed in a bad light. People don't like it when you just react to problems.

Keeping a record of full user transactions which we can then go back to the SIEM. Mostly, when a user complains about poor performance, it's very difficult to put a metric on it. With Dynatrace, we can actually go into the user's transaction and look at all the transactions the user has. We can see the actual metrics behind those transactions and what caused them to slow down and have poor performance. 

If it's a case of the user's ISP and it is not actually our system that is the problem, it has given us a lot of capability to provide feedback to users, and say, "The system was slow because you were working from a slow ISP connection," or "You were working from a degraded browser." This helps specifically for cases where we want to educate our users on how to get the best performance out of their systems.

There is still a certain amount of technical skills needed to be able to understand what you are seeing on it. You also need a large amount of technical or infrastructure skills to understand how and where to install it.

The reason why we are looking at Dynatrace OneAgent is because Dynatrace OneAgent is better at troubleshooting than AppMon. Dynatrace OneAgent now comes with analytic engines and an AI system which helps you troubleshoot quickly. It also does root cause analysis. Therefore, we wouldn't need to do root cause analysis anymore, since it would show us the exact point where things go. 

The capability development and user experience management that OneAgent would gives us is a step above what we have with AppMon. For example, we can see exactly what our full user compliment is leading us towards. With AppMon, we could determine:

• How they use the systems.
• What systems they use the most.
• What effects there are if something goes down.
• How the user is affected.

Patching and updating is very easy. The system's stability is good. 

Depending on how much storage you allocate, you can actually keep quite a lot of information in regards to your system. You can scale it yourself. The system doesn't force you into a specific storage medium. 

It's able to scale linearly and vertically. It doesn't matter how many systems you have. You can just plugin more collectors and agents. It does this very well.

Every now and again, we contact technical because we have a few questions and they are very responsive and helpful. If it's a problem that we cannot figure out over the phone, they will make an appointment. They will come to our site. It's all part of the support contract, and there is no extra charges for it, which is good.

Previously, we were using infrastructure monitoring to a large extent. We didn't have application performance management. We realized that we have been spending a lot of time trying to figure out why applications were not performing correctly. That's the main reason why we went for the AppMon solution.

The initial setup was a bit technical. 

We've used technical support mainly for the original setup.

The time that we save troubleshooting or finding the actual issues within the application execution.

The vendors on our shortlist were AppDynamics, CA, and Dynatrace. We chose Dynatrace because they performed the best during our PoC trials. It was the best all-round monitoring platform.

Make sure that you understand the scope before you start looking at application monitoring. Understand your environment.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. They must have support in our country, so we may be able to contact them locally. 
2. They must be able to fit to our functional requirements up to 80% or better. 
3. They must be able to fit into the space that we operate in, which is the tertiary educational space. 
4. They must be able to integrate with our current systems, as much as possible.

• Alert monitoring: Helps react to events faster.
• Threshold monitoring: Helps maintain capacity.
• Incident diagnostic: Helps to troubleshoot.

• Reduced incidents, as alert monitoring aids in quicker resolution of events.
• Reduces PTC and reduced incidents.
• Easier gaining stats for reporting.

• Alert monitoring: Due to quicker response time for events. 
• Dashboards: Easier to see what is happening on your services. It is easier to show product owners the status of their products.

• I would like to see the ability to pull more user-friendly reports. 
• A nice to have would be the ability to send automated reports to customers who are not a user of Dynatrace.

We use JS, JVM, stack, PHP, and Python.  We use database and NoSQL solutions, such as Redis,  MongoDB, and Hadoop.

Dynatrace is a good monitoring tool. It helps DevOps find all its problems easily and analyzes performance problems.

Dynatrace united some monitoring tools, such as app monitoring, JVM, PHP, network, log analyzer, etc.

A role-based view and a Python monitoring tool would make a simple user interface more usable.

Our requirement is to monitor and manage application performance. Our primary solution is AppMon for application monitoring.

The performance comes with a little bit of overhead, but we are designing the solution that way. If my application allows to be within that overhead, we are using it.

I think one of the interesting parts is they are going to deliver, in the new release, artificial intelligence, which is like analytics that will improve the correlation technology: What is causing the problem? So that will help us to drill down the actual problem, more quickly, rather than analyzing from another tool's perspective.

For us is it is the PurePath technology which is helping us to drill down to what the root cause of the problem is. That helps us to escape the war room.

I would like to see machine learning, which will give it even more of an advantage. And the self-healing, which is there, I would like to see it even smarter, to get it to quick healing, itself.

Stability is very good. Initially, when some of the problems happen, say  application issues come up, if you haven't properly designed, then it's really breaking. But now it is quite mature to handle those things, so it is quite stable for us.

Because we are now we are moving out of AppMon to the Dynatrace tool, probably in the future the scalability will be really helping us.

We use the Dynatrace University, plus some of the guidance solutions. Generally these guys are quite experienced and they help us to understand properly. They cannot help our environment - we help them to understand our infrastructure. It's like handshaking with each other. It's good.

We used a lot of different solutions. Those other solutions didn't have the ability to focus on a problem. What we had was application performance monitoring and not measuring as well. They were mostly infrastructure monitoring, but we really needed some sort of DevOps tool, which would help us to really know where our problem is.

I was the architect, I designed from the very start. In terms of the setup, initially there was a little bit of a learning curve, but now, because the tool has been simplified, I think this learning curve is gone.

When you adapt a new tool, obviously the people and culture need to adopt it, so it will definitely be a challenge. We found it was quite challenging in terms of the learning curve. But now, after two or three years, it is quite mature.

I think we had quite a lot of different vendors, but the reason we went with Dynatrace was because they were number one in industry reviews, and there were a lot of features we really needed that were already in place.

The role of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance comes in when the complexity increases, because your stacks are high, so human intervention would be really difficult. That's the reason we need AI power. Dynatrace has that capability and we want to use it. So looking to the future, AI and analysis will help us.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. The biggest challenge is that we don't actually have one view. Let's say a new application is launched or different tools, they have a particular focus for a particular problem solution. But when you don't have a major overview, one view, it is very difficult to find the solution. So Dynatrace helps in that we can easily get one view, correlate, and everything will be one single pane.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, the way DevOps is going on, we would probably want to adopt that solution. It would really help us regarding the cultural change of DevOps; the tool would help bring us to that level.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are, first, do they meet our requirements. Second, whether they have the right support for us, when we have a problem can they immediately eliminate it for us. They need to understand us and to have the skill set to remediate those things.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There have been some improvement announcements, but overall they are doing a great job.

I would recommend Dynatrace to colleagues.

I'm an admin so my primary use case is to manage the product and the software. And whenever there is a user, they have a question, they don't know how to browse or look at the PurePath, that is where I come in, to show them how to.

It has helped us reduce time spent on root cause analysis. Whenever there's an issue, there are multiple teams involved, and we are using multiple tools: Splunk, Nagios, etc. If we have one product that gives one solution to the root cause, the issue, it reduces some of the operation time for our team, so we can spend most of our time on automation or something else.

The PurePaths. The ability to see the transaction flow of the web request. It's very useful.

It's valuable because our developers, when we have an issue, they can drill down to see exactly where in the application, the call in the application; where the high response time is, or where something is wrong. At least they know where to look for the solution.

I want to see an increase in the load, at least to 7,000 or 8,000 transactions per second, just for it to stable for this upcoming holiday, if we do not transition to the new Dynatrace product yet.

What is missing right now is, it doesn't tell me where the problem is. So whenever we find a problem from the customer, or from our incident management team, then we go into the tools and look for it. So we want it to have more problem identification, somehow, just like the new Dynatrace product. They have the problem tab, you can go in there an see it. But AppMon lacks that.

Right now, for AppMon, the maximum handling load, the transactions per minute, is around 6,500. We had an issue on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, some kind of stability issue, that users who could not log in.

It's not very scalable, we cannot add another server onto it. We have a little trouble there, so that's why we're trying to upgrade to this new Dynatrace product to see how it will go.

We just submit a ticket, and it will probably take them one day. That's sufficient for us, for now.

The resolution time is also about one day. Right now, one day is not good enough. We would like it to be in the hours. So that's why, another thing with this new Dynatrace product is they have the messaging system, something like that. And they have the server that would monitor our Dynatrace server, where they can see everything, what the issue is already, so they can resolve it quicker, instead of our submitting a ticket and waiting for one day.

I was not involved in the set up of the app. I remember they were doing it manually. They installed the agent, set up the server manually, on each server. So when I came in, we used Jenkins to write a script to automatically deploy to our server. There is still a lot of manual configuration. It's not straightforward.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, I think moving to the cloud is very agile and provides scalability. Right now, we're using AppMon which doesn't have the AI feature. That's why we're interested in upgrading to the new Dynatrace product, which has the AI feature and scalability.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to just data, there would be a lot of benefit. If somehow the new Dynatrace product - the AI engine that tells you where the problem is - would tell us where the problem is and bring it down to the pinpoint, to the root cause, so we don't have to spend time looking into it, or the developer team doesn't have to manually look into it, that would be good because those actions require time.

When we were selecting a new APM solution, the criterion of our company was performance. The performance team, they mainly use this tool to test how load capacity runs. So they are mainly testing for the performance stability of the application.

I would say that if you haven't used AppMon before, then just go and order Dynatrace, instead of going to AppMon and then transitioning.

We have used it for application performance management (APM). We have been using it for almost seven years now. 

We use it, in many instances, to find the root cause in production. It has definitely helped out in many important critical cases. 

Business use case: One typical user could take down an entire post. Therefore, we had to institute Dynatrace to find out what is exactly causing it to pull down a question. For example, when you do not know if it is going down, then it causes an outage for the customers. 

It can actually prorate anomaly prediction (the problem resolution), which was happening in the production. It is quite detailed and deeper in the insights that it provides. 

Stability is pretty good. Everything run smooth so far.

Scalability has improved quite a bit from the beginning. I have been using the product for so long, and it has transformed quite a bit and is now scalable. 

Initially, when we were onboarding the product, we had to use technical support, especially for contouring the system. We found the technical support to be effective and the resolution time to be good.

I have used other APM tools as well, such as CA Wiley and SiteScope.

We had support from the Dynatrace team. They actually flew to us and we were working with the developers. We spent about a week with them understanding the product.

We evaluated New Relic. We were already users of the software Wiley Introscope.

Go for it. Implement the solution.

They want everything in technology to be self-learning, so AI is the future. It is not just somebody who has to be enlisting for time to debug an issue, rather AI will help out at that critical point as to what the solution could be.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: An APM solution has to be simple. We were actually evaluating other products at that point of time. One thing was the deeper insights that it could give. I should be able to pinpoint the issue and see the details. Dynatrace provides that and no other solution was giving any comparable. On top of that, we can't move over to the cloud, so we did not go with any cloud-based solutions. We wanted to have total control, so that was a requirement of the solution, too. 

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.