Dynatrace Reviews

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.

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.

1. We use Dynatrace for performance testing. We use it to dig down for application layer or slowness issues, getting a clear idea of what is causing the issues, then reporting back to the engineering team. 
2. We monitor our infrastructure using AppMon, where our hosts have their CPU thresholds and our memory issues are going on. We use for that.

It is performing well. It makes our lives easier as we drill down to problems. If something happens in production, and a client reports the issue, say our page is loading in 10 seconds, and the issue comes to the performance testing team, we can get the exact API call or query level regarding what is causing the slowness. Then, our job is to open Dynatrace and test the filter on the time span if it is there. Some matters cannot be captured, because by default, Dynatrace does not capture everything. For some matters, we need to add sensors, then handle it.

Whenever a developer does a code change or new feature implementation, it comes to performance shifting. We just do not raise a bug saying that your page is loading in 10 seconds, please go and fix. What we do is analyze Dynatrace and test PurePath. We analyze metal hot spots, which are the exceptions, and we share data that in AppMon where we have a facility where we save station and take screenshots of what metal or what class it is causing issues, and share that to the engineering team. With the bugs, we have to go and do line numbers, and the same thing with the code.

Getting the EM data, we have to open a browser. Generally, one of the asks from our clients or our engineering team is to change this. However, there is not a performance single tool, which opens a browser. That is one of the problems.

It is very stable.

For our company, it is on-premise. It will be around a 100 plus hosts and 3 different servers, so it is fine in terms of scalability. 

I have not used technical support. There is a strong user community. There is no need to talk to the technical support, because all the questions which I have had, all the solutions were in the documentation. Or, I have been able to post a question to the user community and get an answer within a day or two.

No. This is our first APM solution. We have not previously used siloed monitoring tools either.

I was not involved in the initial setup, though I was involved with upgrades.

We take care of our own environment. We are responsible for our performance setting environment. We place the first sensor. We do all those things.

I would definitely recommend this solution, because it has all of the new features coming with Dynatrace OneAgent. It will be awesome for any client or company. 

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, and benefit my team, it would be one solution where you can get all the data stating this is the root cause and this is the solution. That would be awesome.  

AI will definitely play a bigger role when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. ZSA will need to predict things like rolling insights to the client on the sales and marketing front.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Ease of use
• Enough documentation
• Strong community. 

Our primary use case for the solution is in our development environment where we look at how new applications rewrite or transaction flows work, and to see what the performance is. Then, we also monitor the same performance in production.

Some of the main benefits are being able to quickly identify when transactions start to slow or run into issues, or hiccups if you will, then we are able pinpoint them. Some of the other benefits are when we are trying to push large loads through in our test environment and everything comes crashing to a halt, then it will pinpoint where the bottleneck is.

Probably what everyone else loves: PurePath. Being able to get down to the individual code level to see where transactions are taking time. It has helped troubleshoot issues immensely and other tools can't provide this.

The messaging layer is not really capturable and measurable right now. We have had this this ask for years. Examples would be like IBM DataPower devices, literally just translates message types. It would be nice to see what the weight is on there to put some sort of measure on them. 

EMS or JMS: Really with JMS base transports, there is not much there. I know a product or two ago, they added a visualization piece, but it does not actually measure anything.

The stability for the solution is pretty solid overall. 

We did have some issues in an earlier version, probably 6.0 or 6.1. We have not had issues in the more recent ones. Thus, stability seems to have improved over the past few years.

The new Dynatrace product looks like it is more scalable. We are currently using AppMon. The tool definitely allows for scalability, but you do need to have decent hardware on one side, then you also have to have the knowledge. You have to be able to implement this type of application and go into its environment. There are different ways to do that with each AppMon agent. It will be interesting to see if the new Dynatrace product resolves these issues. 

We use technical support several times a year. They are always quick to respond. They have been able to handle the majority of our issues. We lay out all of our issues, and the few times they have not been able to help us was just because the product was still in development. 

They are one of the better customer supports that we have worked with in the technology world.

We have used some siloed monitoring tools. Some of the challenges that we faced are integrating with systems external to it, such as ticketing systems.

I do not believe they were using an APM solution before. The need to invest in a new solution was because the development was moving quicker and we had more tight resources. We had to sit there and be able identify if it was quicker than spending the little resources we did have, mainly trying to figure out where the bottlenecks were.

It was selected a while back, and I was not the primary on the project. I know they were looking for something that could get code level information and could measure response times inside the application. They wanted it to break down each step of the way, not just have a large bucket of data, e.g., have the whole thing take four seconds and know each step taken.

At the time of the initial setup, I was a programmer analyst and our team was bringing in several tools. So initially, I assisted a little in the testing and rolling out.

This was probably more than five years ago. It was relatively complex because we were trying to implement into environments that they did not yet support. We wanted to try pushing the boundaries in making it compatible. Therefore, it was not as simple as some of their other setups would be.

First identify which issues, or information, you are trying to get. After doing that, get advice on the solutions out there, including Dynatrace, since Dynatrace is by far one of the leading APMs. Depending on every company's needs, you should definitely always evaluate a few competitors. 

The role of AI is important probably for most organizations regarding IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. However, AI is loose term ranging from pretty basic to pretty complex. The more human interaction is reduced and just the issues are shown and reported on, it helps. Everyone is moving to the cloud and having central transformation along with all those other buzzwords of the year. Obviously, our company is doing the same.

I am from a monitoring team, and we had a PCF environment that we were building. We needed a tool to monitor a PCF environment. We were looking at a couple of tools, and we found Dynatrace is a robust tool which provides pretty good monitoring for a PCF environment. That is when we chose Dynatrace.

It will definitely be a benefit. We are using other tools to monitor other environments, and we have to switch between different tools when we have to do RUM, do synthetic monitoring, or do competent monitoring. It is really painful.

This is where I find Dynatrace pretty good, because it has everything in one tool, and you can monitor from infrastructure to synthetic monitoring, RUM, then performance data, etc.

That is the way to go, when you do not have to waste time between setting up the tools and seeing the metrics. That is what all matters. We can save time and still get the work done.

We are just setting up the environment, so I have not done so much with Dynatrace. The thing that I like with Dynatrace is it goes to every part of the containers, and it brings up all the data and all the problems. The way it shows a problem on the dashboard is pretty good.

We finished our PoC. We have deployed our dev environment, test environment, and now we are still setting up our production environment. The reviews that we got from the PCF team, they are pretty much happy with it.

I need more experience, because I have not used the tool. As far as I know about the tool, it covers so much. Once I am more familiar with the tool, then I will have more understanding of what I am missing here. Right now, I need more experience.

We are still setting up the environment. While I was deploying it, it was pretty quick. Therefore, I did not have any complaints. I am pretty good with what I have worked with of the tools, and how much time it takes for the deployment. So, I am pretty happy with it

We had some proxy-related issues in the beginning, but it looks like it was a mix up between our environment and their environment. Maybe it was a lack of knowledge. However, so far, it has been good. 

Technical support was pretty good. They jumped on the call, and we spent some time with them in India, and issues were resolved pretty quickly. 

We did not use any tools before this product.

It was pretty straightforward and quick. I was amazed by it. I deployed it in six servers in 40 minutes, and that is pretty good.

We needed some monitoring for PCF. Therefore, we did a PoC with a couple of other tools along with Dynatrace. That is when we found that Dynatrace was the tool that we should be using for PCF.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. The capability that tool is providing. That is the most important thing, because if the tool is not providing what we need, we do not need the tool. 
2. The pricing. It should fit into our budget, because if the tool is providing everything and we don't have money to spend on it, that won't work.
3. The support. If we are not getting the support from the vendor, then it is useless. We spend the money, and they advertise that that tool provides everything. However, if I am not getting support, then I won't be able to use the tool properly. 

These three things are the most important criteria that help us decide which vendors to pursue.

We have multiple use cases for it. We use it for performance testing; it performs very well for that. We also use it for production monitoring. We use both AppMon and Dynatrace Managed in that situation. And it's an invaluable tool.

It has been transformational. We started out with DCRUM, it's ingrained in our business and we've got executives that look at that. Now, the same thing is happening with tools like AppMon and Dynatrace.

The speed and problem resolution.

We're still on 6.5, so we've haven't upgraded completely to 7, 7.1. I think most of the things that we're looking for are already addressed in the new product.

One thing that would help would be tighter integration with DCRUM. It's somewhat difficult to drill down and see everything, but I think that's in the future versions. We just haven't seen that yet.

There have been stability issues but they were not really frequent or too significant.

The system as a whole scales fairly well. It's intensive, but it's not such a big footprint that it can't be handled. I think with Managed, or the SaaS product, things become a little easier. With AppMon you need a pretty good amount of inputting of data, but I think things get easier when you move over to Managed.

Tech support is great. You're able to get through the levels pretty fast, so it has been pretty good.

We had a previous solution, but nothing that's around any more.

It's a pretty straightforward setup. Once you've got your build out, you don't have to move things around too much, it's pretty straightforward. We did it on our own and then, for our first upgrades, we had support in there.

We evaluated all the different tools, and this is the best of the best.

With siloed monitoring, which we have used, you don't get a holistic picture of what's going on, so analysis is very intensive.

If there was just one tool, obviously there would be a lot of benefit there. We would only need to learn one thing, everybody would be looking at the same data. Everything becomes more streamlined.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is that their product does what it says it's going to do. Gives us visibility.

If I were to advise a colleague at another company who is researching this or a similar solution, I would tell them to do their due diligence, look at the product hard, and make sure they size the product.

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.

Application needs to send alerts to the production team whenever there is an issue in any of the applications which are running in production.

Application monitoring is automated. Previously it was manual monitoring and having to check production servers, but using this solution we can configure the agents and look for alerts. It is very efficient and saves lot of manual effort.

By using Dynatrace, we can set up the agents to provide alerts at the JVM level.

Saves time, effort. It shows minute level errors. Node level configurations, application level configurations, JVM alerts are very flexible; you can drill down for specific errors.

• Configuring nodes and agents should be more like plug and play. 
• Transaction statistics should be more flexible to export and share with tje business side.