Dynatrace Reviews

The primary use case is to monitor all our applications. We are doing an eMPOWER application, which is a new project including customer engagement across eCommerce, CRM, etc. We want a single place where we can monitor all our applications that we are building. Therefore, if something goes wrong, we immediately can find out what went wrong. 

We have not gone live yet. We just configured our environment and just started using it. So far, it is pretty good. 

We have not gone live yet. From a technical perspective, the expectation will be it is going to provide quick turnaround on issues and provide more stability. Based on how we observe Dynatrace, it will provide us some insight on what we can expect. 

From the business perspective, I think it is going to be a big deal. The conversion rate of people searching for a product and buying a product, these do not exist in our company right now. 

We expect there will be big business impact once we properly go live. 

• PurePath: Right now, we are using it for all our applications.
• Web monitoring: What we have is currently good. 

Cloud monitoring is insufficient. There is something that they are introducing for Salesforce, which is called agentless monitoring that I like. However, it is not going to cover the server side of Salesforce, it is going to cover the UI side of it. So, we would prefer Dynatrace to make more partnerships with major cloud applications like Salesforce, C4C, etc. That way they have an agent in their cloud services, and we can capture the code level analysis of what is going on in the Salesforce side. Right now, we do not, so that would be good. 

Given our scenarios so far, it is pretty good. The expectation is to remain the same.

The number of failures and the number of collectors servers, those look good right now and I do not see a need for increase for at least the next two years. Maybe after once we go live, once we will see the traffic, we may decide to if we want increase the scale. However, it may just be the extendability, and not a drastic change in the architecture of how we deploy the interface. 

We used the Dynatrace three month package, where I worked with a technical support person for three months and she helped in building the dashboards and exposing more features of Dynatrace. So, it was very helpful.

In our company, we had Microsoft SCOM, but I do not think it did the job well. Once we figured out there is a monitoring system that can show us code level details, nothing came closer. 

The initial setup was challenging for us. Initially, when we heard about Dynatrace, we knew why it was so good. However, it was complex until you grasped the nuances of the product and the building blocks: what makes what,  from where you can derive what, thresholds, goals, measures, etc. It took time for my team and me to get a grasp of what things are, so now we know what at least we have and have a good handle on it. Therefore, it is easier for us, so whenever there is a challenge, we have an idea of how to handle it. 

New Relic is one company that we had in mind, but our company preferred Dynatrace. New Relic was on the shortlist. As the technical team, we sat with Dynatrace for the PoC and we were able to do the PoC for Dynatrace. We loved it, and we explained the same to the executive team. Another team did the PoC for New Relic and our executive team decided on Dynatrace.

I would recommend the Dynatrace solution. I know firsthand that it is the most proven solution.

In today's sessions, I heard more about Dynatrace monitoring. We are using app monitoring. Dynatrace monitoring seems to be much more helpful.

Once the engine of AI is properly trained with sufficient amounts of data, it is going to be very critical for IT and it will be helpful and suggestive for the users. The only fear is that stage where it is trained, but not sufficiently, it will be very annoying. This is because it might pull up error messages, often times irrelevant. However, the concept of AI is going to be the future. 

If I had one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be that it would solve our problems much sooner.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The baseline is when a user comes in, we want to know everything he does in our landscape. It does not matter whether it is two applications or 10 applications in our landscape. We want to be able to follow exactly they do. 

That was the baseline we needed and Dynatrace fitted it pretty good, except there are some legacy applications, which Dynatrace doesn't support. Still, those are made as black box code. The bottom line is the traceability of any user. If something goes wrong, we should be able to pinpoint where exactly things go wrong. 

• Ability to see issues as they’re happening for our users. We can see problems from the user’s perspective.
• The ability to set dynamic, non-static thresholds.
• Ability to use the browser capture app allows someone non-tech savvy to get something up and running quickly.
• Being able to test from multiple locations.

Within IT, we know that if there’s an alert, there’s a real problem. It’s a rallying call and people are responsive when that happens. It tends to be accurate so people are willing to respond to it.

They need to improve the browser interface. I can’t get it to work visually for some of the things I want to do, and that’s frustrating.

I haven’t had issues, but one of our secondary teams say they get an alert, but when log in don’t see a problem. However, this could be their own reading of the issue. Sometimes users who don’t understand platform don’t quite understand what they’re seeing.

No issues scaling up and out.

I haven’t had to use it because there have been no problems.

I was not involved, but did a comprehensive overhaul, and it was complex. The relationship between tests you create and those that you run is hazy. It’s not very apparent and there’s a disconnect. The configuration components are unclear.

It loses points in value because we’re not getting our money’s worth. I think New Relic Synthetics will be significantly less. I also feel like it’s an older company and isn't as forward-leaning. For example, New Relic has more capabilities that Dynatrace doesn’t cover. Because once on New Relic, I can use other products.

I'd advise that you think about your use cases and who you’d be notifying. If you think about those two pieces, then you can determine which product to get. Look at some of the other vendors that offer synthetics and see if they might be a better fit.

The solution is predominantly used for application performance monitoring.

The solution's most valuable features are AI and root cause analysis. These two features maintain a chain of dependencies so that everyone knows about the things that depend on each other across all the parts of this application.

The solution's user interface could be improved. Because of the browser metaphor, you must click multiple times, which is not as slick as a purpose-designed user interface.

I have been using Dynatrace for a few years.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We have quite a big application that is used by almost every single person living in this country. This application is quite mission-critical. So, it was very important to detect problems as soon as they appear anywhere in the application. Dynatrace was able to show us the problems immediately without even knowing the application, code, etc. It showed us all the problems, and we have been able to present reports and solve problems very quickly.

The agent deployment is the most valuable. You don't need to do any configuration. You just deploy the agents, and it can automatically detect your infrastructure. That was the greatest feature that we saw in Dynatrace. If there is any database, it can detect it automatically and present everything to you.

It required minimal setting, and after we deployed a couple of agents, the very next day, we had the full picture of the internals of the application, and all the problems were visible straight away to us. There was no need to go and search and do a couple of things. It was quite impressive.

When it comes to monitoring, we did the integration with VMware vCenter, and we were able to see some good stuff. The VMware vCenter integration was really great, but what we really missed was the integration with the network management stuff such as Cisco ACI. We wanted to see integration in that area, but it was not provided by Dynatrace. So, the main feature for us is integration with things like Cisco ACI. If they can bring that one in, with vCenter in there, it would be a total solution. It would be absolutely incomparable to anything else in the market.

We used Dynatrace almost six months ago. It was the latest version at that time.

It is extremely reliable.

We didn't have to contact them because it was so great. The solution was taking care of itself. For example, if there was any problem, we would shut it down, and the next day, when you try to figure it out, it would have got resolved by itself. That was quite impressive. So, we didn't have to call technical support at all.

There is absolutely no configuration that you need from any technical person. Our engineers are very junior, and they don't really know how to configure an agent or play with the configuration file. They're not familiar with that. We just deployed the agents, and these agents went and detected which is the application server, where are the logs, and what are the processes. 

We approached them and told them we want to try it. They were very cooperative. They sent us a link to download the software and the license. We did everything ourselves. They just came to do a quick onsite demo of how things work, but we had already figured out ourselves how it works. So, it was quite interesting.

We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good.

We have been a long-time user of Broadcom CA APM. In addition to Dynatrace, we tried Elastic and AppDynamic. 

Dynatrace gave us the license for around six months. We were quite impressed with it. It was very impressive, but unfortunately, due to financial reasons and the network management interface integration, the management decided to go with Cisco. We got a better deal with Cisco, and it was bundled with some of the other stuff that they were looking for, such as network monitoring, network management, etc. Our manager really wanted to see the network management interface integration, and it was available in AppDynamic, and that's why they went with it, but if it was for me, I would have gone with Dynatrace. So, we got a good deal with Cisco and went with AppDynamics. They've just bundled the whole solution and given it to us. We are standardizing on AppDynamic right now.

It is the best solution in the market. I can't believe the people classify it at the same level as the other leaders on Gartner Quadrant. It is way advanced than anything else. You can't find anything that is exactly like this.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 because it is just missing the network management interface integration. I would rate all other solutions that I've seen a six out of 10.

Analysis, PurePath comparison, database hotspots, user experience monitoring, agent overview, incident management, building charts/dashboards, business transactions, etc.

Dynatrace helped us with root cause analysis of poor performing components of our applications. 

With the Agentless monitoring and ability to create custom plugins, we've been able to transform the tool not just into a great APM solution but a really good enterprise monitoring solution too. 

The product allows us to build preferred/customized business transactions to track complex transactions. UEM (User Experience Monitoring) agents track user experience on webRequests. The advantage is that Dynatrace correlates the measures on the devices with those on the backend servers, giving us an end-to-end view of transactions, from the user's phone deep into the backend servers.

• PurePath and PureStack Technologies
• UEM
• Drill down to root cause analysis
• Deep insight into code, measures, and methods

RFAs submitted via the forum need to be answered or resolved quickly. This truly helps improve the product to the greatest degree.

Three to five years.

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.

Our primary use case is operations monitoring.

When something goes wrong, we have visibility into the system, can find the issue, and quickly get things back up. This was previously much harder to do.

It gives us visibility into the product and what we are doing operationally.

As we move into using more AWS native architectures, it should support everything that we want to do. We don't want to adopt another tool.

The solution has been really stable.

So far, scalability has been fine. We have not seen any issues related to it. It looks good.

We had a good experience working with their technical support.

We were previously using CA Wily (CA APM).

The technical support helped us spin it up, then we received training on how to use it.

We compared it to AppDynamics. While I did not chose Dynatrace, from a technical standpoint, AppDynamics and Dynatrace are pretty comparable. I liked how both of them worked. Because we were moving more onto the AWS platform, Dynatrace was more compelling because they were right there with us.

Kick the tires. Figure out how it fits your use case.

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.