Dynatrace Reviews

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.

We have a critical enterprise-level project where we have seen a lot of performance issues. We tried to figure out what tool might help us solve some of those performance issues. Then we heard about Dynatrace, so we engaged Dynatrace. It's basically about solving performance issues.

In terms of performance, we're still a work in progress. I think we have made good progress identifying the areas where the problems are, and now it's a matter of just working with the different teams trying to figure out what the roadmap is going to be.

We're learning the tool. At the same time, it's also about educating folks within our organization in terms of what Dynatrace can do. And also how do we apply it? How do we make use of Dynatrace and what do we do with the information we get? How do we take that and go to the next step of implementing the changes?

At least we're able to pinpoint where the problems are instead of just saying, "Here's the results and here are the failures." At least we're able to tell them which calls, which methods were the problem, which interface. That was a huge step for us, to be able to do that. 

We are not the DevOps or the application team. We're coming from the testing side and, generally, it's challenging when you are working with an application built by a different team. When you run a test and say, "Hey! Here's your problem," unless you show the proof, you show the information, they're not going to be able to take it and make some changes to it. So the big first step for us was to identify where the problem was within the application. 

Now, it's mostly about, "What do we do about it?" You have these problems. What are we doing about making some changes and getting into the roadmap.

PurePath. We just started using it, it's been less than a year. PurePath is really helpful. 

And I'm learning now about the dashboards, and the session replay is another that was really fascinating to see. I guess AppMon probably doesn't have those things yet.

The features I'm most excited about are the AI piece, the session playback, and the fact that the deployment is even easier with the new version. Not only deployment, but the setup piece of it, I'm hearing, it's easy. I haven't tried it out but that's really encouraging.

To be honest with you, I think they have a great roadmap. And the fact that they are using the feedback from the customers to build into the roadmap, is a great feature. I have nothing in particular that I want to see.

From what I've seen, from what I've experienced, absolutely no problem with stability. Especially the ease with which it gets deployed, and also the support we typically get has been amazing. We have no regrets using Dynatrace. It's been a good experience so far.

So far we've implemented this for a couple of different applications. It scaled pretty well for us. We're about 2,000 or 3,000 users, but we'll have a better answer as we start rolling it out to more applications. So far, no issues with scaling.

From what I've seen, they're very knowledgeable and easy to work with.

We've used a variety of tools, not so much in the APM space. It was mostly about SiteScope and Wiley, those kind of things.

With Dynatrace we were able to pinpoint where the problems were with PurePath, which was something we did not have. Obviously, we didn't work with an APM solution so I'm only comparing this with a non-APM solution like SiteScope. There, it's mostly about, "Hey, here's your CPU, here's your memory," rather than pinpointing where the actual problems are, which is something that PurePath gives us.

I think it was really, really straightforward. It's the second time around. Some of the things, we did them ourselves.

In terms of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, we don't have a cloud implementation yet. But, in general, what I've seen with AI, I think they're learning. The self-healing thing was really impressive in terms of, if you have a problem, what do you do about it? You get notified automatically. Then how do you fix it? Those are some of the things with AI that I thought were pretty cool.

If there was one solution that could not only provide data but real answers, the immediate benefit of that for our team would be huge. Not just telling us, "Here's the data" - there's so much data out there - but what do you make of it? What's the critical data? I guess that's where Dynatrace is headed with AI and the self-healing. That would be huge. If they can say, "Hey, here's your problem. Here's what you need to do to fix the problem." That would be significant. 

I think the solution meets our needs where it is, so from that perspective, it's a nine out of 10.

The most important criteria when working with a vendor or selecting a vendor are customer service and what type of product offerings they have. Do they see the vision of the future in terms of cloud and those kinds of things? Those are some of the things we consider very important.

To a colleague who is looking into this type of solution, I would say we have had a really good experience. If they're in a similar situation, try it out. Do a proof concept. Try it out and see if it's good for you. It may or may not be a good fit. Everybody's different. Try it out.

To look at the full transaction flow, from the customer all the way through back-end systems, for problem analysis, triage, performance optimization.

It does it really well. The more visibility you have through the agent implementations, the deeper you can get down through the stack and identify what you're looking for and how to fix it, find it, tune it.

The Managed SaaS is going to simplify things a lot and allow us to consolidate a lot of tool sets. We are going to be able to get rid of some of the old Legacy monitoring tools and replace them with something much better that puts everything in one place.

The stuff that's coming with the new pieces around the Dynatrace Managed SaaS implementation. The ease of implementation there is significant. We've spent a lot of time with AppMon and DC RUM - that's a lot of time to set up, configure. With Managed solution, you just drop it in and everything pretty much auto-instruments, which makes life a lot easier.

One of the things that I was talking about with Simon earlier was getting mobile native replay. They don't have a timeline on it yet, but that's one of the key things we're looking at, to get rid of one of our incumbent products that does replay. 

Also, extended support for some of the agents, the one-agent technologies under Managed. We've got some old legacy platforms that don't have one-agent support yet.

The Managed solution is much more stable. We've been running that environment for about six months now and it hasn't had hiccup yet. We had problems with AppMon before. We've taken AppMon beyond it's stated capabilities. We are running 2,400 agents off of a single server in a single system profile, which is well beyond the stated capacity. I think the stated agent cutoff limits are 1,200. We passed that like a year ago. We measure the internal workings of AppMon to make sure it's not going to fall over, but we hit those thresholds almost daily now. So we are throwing data out just because it's over capacity.

Managed, we can scale it out massively. AppMon doesn't scale well. That's the other piece, why we're looking at Managed, because we're already over capacity there. We've got to move stuff to the other platform, to Managed, so that we can get the horizontal and the vertical scale ability, and get away from our "problem child" on the other side.

We use tech support. How I would rate them depends. So some of our problems are quite complex, because of how we've stressed the system to the extent that we have. So, we've had some stuff on the AppMon side that's because we're well beyond the usable limits. They help where they can, but in some instances it just is what it is.

On the Managed side it's been pretty good. Stuff gets turned around pretty quickly. With them being able to do the remote management from the back-end, they are able to fix stuff up if they need to.

In terms of response time, relative to the complexity of the problem, I think it's reasonable. Some of our problems have been not normal. But the normal stuff, they turn it around fairly quickly. We don't pay for Premium support either, so you get what you pay for. They are usually quite responsive, and we've got really good connections into most of the folks back in the labs, so it works out well.

With the company I'm consulting with now, they had Dynatrace before there was a desire internally to look at some AppDynamics stuff. They did a bit of a bake-off and decided that it wasn't the right way to go just because of the capabilities and features. So it's always been on that side of the Dynatrace stuff. 

But I've used New Relic and AppD and the IBM Application Performance Monitoring solutions, so I've seen lots of them, and Dynatrace is definitely the better of them all, by a long shot.

Set it up myself. It took 20 minutes. Put a piece of hardware in, run two scripts, done.

We ran into a bit of a technical issue where we had to engage the support guys. They identified the issue, fixed the scripts, and then the people after us didn't have to deal with it. I think we were one of the first Managed on-prem implementations; maybe, not the first, but one of the few. So we weren't doing a normal implantation I guess, so little hiccups, but they were quickly resolved.

I think is role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is a big game changer. That's one of the reasons that we're looking at moving a lot of our stuff from the legacy AppMon over to the Managed platforms, so we can take advantage of that and get rid of some of our more archaic event management, event lifecycle, alerting-type platforms. A lot of that stuff doesn't add the value that it should. So we are looking at the AI engine and the anomaly detection to basically replace a lot of that manual effort.

These archaic solutions are all siloed monitoring tools. That's one of the things I presented on here at the Perform 2018 conference yesterday, about all the data silos across all the old platforms, and being able to pull them together into Dynatrace so you can get that single pane of glass. The siloed solutions all had their own purposes, but the data was not inter-relatable. You'd have OS monitoring tools, and even AppMon, DC RUM, Synthetics; they all have great data, but they're not tied together.

The immediate benefit of just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, would be you could look at it in one spot. Even one of our groups that came to us a couple weeks ago said, "Oh yeah, we are going to do a new native mobile app and we're going to use this piece of freeware from Google and this piece of freeware from there." And I said, "Okay, so how are you going to pull that all together?" And they said, "Well, you can look here, and then look it up there..."  And when I said, "Why? We already have a solution that does that," they said, "But, they're free tools", and I said, "Yeah, free necessarily isn't always the best option."

In terms of vendor selection, I think one of the key things with Dynatrace is that they are very open to influence on product development side. So, we've influenced them fairly heavily on development and capabilities for Citrix and DC RUM. They've given us integration and support components around some odd technologies that we've got, and they have always been very open and accommodating to going after and developing capabilities around the stuff that we are looking for, which has been good.

I rate it an eight out of 10. I don't know if it could ever get to a 10 because there are always going be anomalies and idiosyncrasies that, commercially, it doesn't make sense for them to cater to everything. There is stuff that I'd like it to be able to do but commercially it just doesn't make sense. But, at the same time, they are evolving into things that need to happen as technology advances.

In terms of advice to someone who is research this type of solution, I get pulled on from the Dynatrace Accounts team regularly to do those sorts of conversations. I'm a pretty firm believer in the products and what they can do. I highly recommend them to anyone who is looking at them. I've used the competitive - or non-competitive - products that are out there, so it's pretty clear for me as far as why it's the right choice. I'm happy to have those conversations with them to take them down that path and let them understand the why's and what decisions they should make.

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. 

Website performance monitoring of load times for both desktop and mobile web.

Comparison of our site performance to other financial services companies to ensure we balance the delivery of rich content, which enhances the user experience, with comparable page load times to ensure it's not at the cost of performance. 

We seek to understand the areas of page composition that have the greatest impact on load time performance so we can focus our efforts on optimization to improve the user experience.

Understanding what elements on the page contribute to load time and the primary areas to focus on for improvement.

The daily metrics which help us analyze the page composition and the corresponding performance metrics so we can quickly and easily determine when something has changed, to aid in root cause analysis.

Perhaps there is a FAQ which explains the metrics and how to interpret them, and I just haven't seen it. This would be beneficial in providing context to allow sharing the daily metrics reported within the company.

Minimize application downtime.

We are able to solve many problems using Dynatrace. The main thing we have achieved using this software is minimizing the downtime of our applications by reacting to the alerts that it triggers. 

The server monitoring is very accurate enabling us to identify the issues proactively and fix them.

• The best part of Dynatrace is that the tool is very lightweight and very easy to install. 
• It is very simple and interesting to install agents on the multiple servers. 
• I like the UI and dashboards that we can build on Dynatrace. 
• The PurePaths section is very very informative. It points exactly to the exception and we can pinpoint using parameters.
• We are able to generate many reports which we were not able to produce before. This helps in visualizing the data better and in presenting the data in more advanced ways.

The one thing I do not like about Dynatrace is that their web dashboards are very very slow. They seriously have to improve their web  dashboard configuration and SSL timeouts.

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.