Dynatrace Reviews

We use this product for troubleshooting performance issues in our growing set of IoT portal solutions.

This solution has helped us to unearth quite a few issues that were present for a while. Also, it has helped us improve the performance of many of our applications.

The most valuable features are code-level visibility, real user monitoring, and response time statistics.

This solution could be improved with better compatibility with legacy applications.

In our case, we were not able to deeply monitor proprietary solutions such as Windows CE or some BI/ERP applications, which either got crashed or slowed down noticeably.

These kind of issues are bound to happen considering the intrusive nature of the instrumentation process (which is necessary to get good performance insights).

However, some of these technologies would often warrant quite an extensive amount of work to be made compatible, if even feasible.

This solution is used to create dashboards for business-related applications.

This solution has helped us with improving the monitoring and RCA.

The most valuable feature is the 360-degree view for monitoring, infrastructure, and application worlds.

This solution needs improvement in terms of automation.

This solution is used to monitor an IoT customer portal. It is hosted on Amazon Web Services. It is using Drupal, Microsoft SQL server, and eWON. By using Dynatrace Managed, we have given recommendations to developers and application owners on coding practices, but have also raised alerts on performance and availability.

By using Dynatrace Managed, we have improved customer satisfaction and have also helped internal teams and subcontractors make the application more stable. Communication between different teams has also been made easier and more fluid.

Dynatrace Managed has given us an in-depth, comprehensive view of every single layer of the entire application stack in a single, easy-to-use point of access. We have had several wins and increased our credibility among all actors involved with the application.

If we can gain more insight into older applications, using not-so-recent technologies, then it would be a plus. Also, having more flexibility to have different user profiles could be beneficial. No real frustration though.

Dynatrace is an extremely helpful APM solution in large, complex environments, whenever we need to have an integrated vision of our users, infrastructure, and applications. It excels when we need to do all this with the lowest resources possible, with the best data quality, across all layers, and with the least management overhead. 

The first time I came across Dynatrace, I simply remember the WOW factor. Being a performance enthusiast since the mid 80's, I cannot remember more than a handful of such technical experiences!

Dynatrace excels in troubleshooting scenarios. You do not get samples or gaps. You get the real thing. That is absolutely important when troubleshooting the strangest situations.

Focus on root cause analysis has dropped significantly for the importance of alerts. I was used to be drowning in alerts, but now have refocused. I still have them, of course, but now they are about minor things. I see myself getting rid of them very soon.

The most valuable feature is Dynatrace's commitment to bringing in new features. It is very difficult to keep pace with the new developments that are always occurring.

The OneAgent technology is one of the most important features. You install it, no configuration, and it just does all the stuff for you. It automatically detects whatever is happening, and even gets to automate JavaScript injection across different web server technologies. You can have tag management, but you can even forget that, because that is fully automated, too!

Given the full-stack approach, you are able to view from the end user perspective, almost down to the bare metal. It gives you all the way from the user perspective, network experience, web and application server view, application detail, process detail, operating system detail, and you even get to manage virtualization and datacenter support.

Dynatrace is capable of following all user actions across all monitored infrastructure, even to systems not monitored, but interconnected. This technology is known by the name PurePath, and being able to do this sometimes feels like magic. I have been told, time and time again, by very knowledgeable IT personnel, that this is not possible. Sometimes, you have to see it, to believe it.

One of the most promising features is the AI capability. I have seen some of its capability in production environments, and it is pretty impressive! It is not a marketing buzzword being abused, but it actually works. Being able to offload problem handling and root-cause analysis, and get to the point analysis of complex systems is something that I have not seen with my eyes, and in this depth, in any other IT solution to date. 

Dynatrace's online presence in APM "education" is second to none. Viewing the YouTube online videos, hearing the PurePerformance Podcast, getting to learn in Dynatrace University, and following the documentation is like being in performance heaven! You just can't grasp it all!

In the new Dynatrace solution, support for legacy applications is still not there. Given there is excellent support of legacy applications and protocols in the Appmon & DC RUM offers, they have the knowledge to put it there. Knowledge that their competition simply doesn't have.

One to three years.

Not seen one stability issue since I been dealing with it.

No issues with scalability. The solution is multi-tenant and based in Big data technology.

What impresses me more is the ability to be able to analyze 100% of all activity going on, and do that with so low overhead. I have not been able to observe more than 1% overhead, despite Dynatrace saying that it can be slightly higher in some situations. I sometimes get the impression that overhead might be negative (underhead?), because you can get rid of inefficiencies like log dumping, that typically have high (disk and CPU) overhead.

Support is just great. Part of it is public, so everyone can check it out. Dynatrace direct support is even better, and you sometimes get direct answers from the teams that are implementing the functionality.

I have worked with other APM, IT, and UX monitoring solutions before. None of them is even near what Dynatrace has to offer.

Never seen anything so complex be so simple to install.

Directly implemented.

Pricing can be high, especially for Portuguese standards. But as one says, you get what you pay for.

Setup cost is very low considering that it is an almost totally, automatic process. Installing SaaS or Managed is only some minutes away. Given that there is no configuration involved in the agents, you can develop how many you want per hour. It only depends on your IT deployment strategy. TCO is thus much lower than expected. Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier.

Since you cannot manage what you cannot measure, I do give the most importance to data quality. This is priceless. If you manage based on bad or incomplete data, you are leaping into the bad decisions direction.

The return might just be immediate. You install it and after minutes you are getting the full data in. The other day I compared Dynatrace to another APM solution, and the other person had been struggling nine months to get the data out. When he saw what Dynatrace did out-of-the-box, he simply could not believe it.

Finally, be prepared to be surprised! It is very fast pace. The Session Replay and the Augmented Reality are just two recent examples. Almost every day I get some new perspective in this field, like AIOps, and it just keeps getting faster! 

Monitoring front-end for mobile banking within AppMon. We are using a balancer on NGNIX with a Dynatrace plugin to check availability by parsing logs.

Dynatrace helps to build business and non-business dashboards and the appropriate alarming on mail groups.

Native Java integration and building complex PurePaths between the front-end and back-end databases.

• It looks like it has already been improved with OneAgent, but it needs migration. 
• It needs improvement with proprietary protocols for the DC RUM part.

Enables fast deployment of application and host monitoring of our estate with minimal user intervention and hosting costs for the tool.

Currently, we are still in the proof of concept stage, but it has massively addressed time to deployment issues. The integration into ServiceNow has provided key data for populating our CMDB to include service mapping.

The ease of deployment via OneAgent, which then finds what is installed on the server, is fantastic. In addition, Dynatrace provides probable root cause for any issues which assists our support team to quickly address issues identified by Dynatrace.

The plugin architecture is not very flexible, which makes it difficult to add the custom monitoring not available through Dynatrace, specifically around file monitoring.

The proof of concept has been so far successful.

Support from Dynatrace is excellent. They are always on hand for any queries, demos, and/or issues.

We used Dyntrace AppMon. Though it provided a lot of useful information, it was very difficult to deploy, which is why we are looking at Dynatrace.

The initial setup was very straightforward, as it is a SaaS solution.

Dynatrace SaaS was setup by Dynatrace, however deployment of OneAgent was in-house and very straightforward.

Not applicable.

The setup costs for Dynatrace are low, however licensing costs are high.

We also evaluated AppDynamics.

Details of EUM: It helps the entire team, including our management, our application owners, and DB owners.

Adds value to application owners, DB owners, and provides visibility on how end users utilize browsers and where they are originate from.

The most valuable features are end user visibility, Smartscape, and the entire visibility of our data center, including SQL queries.

Cloud monitoring and reporting need improvement, as well as how to manipulate data and export it to share with business executives.

It is part of our performance testing, where the team can run our workloads and can see the insights, where the bottlenecks are.

We had a very quick turnaround, and it solved our problems. We get more insights into what our code is doing, where the bottlenecks are. The tool helps us to find the root cause much faster than other tools in the market.

Our team can find bottlenecks quickly, and work with the engineering team to fix the problems at a much faster rate. So this is the quick turnaround, and they can go to production with better quality, and make the user experience much better than what previously they were experiencing.

The PurePaths can give us more insights, where the time is spent with the whole HTTP call. And we can clearly see where the bottlenecks are.

The business use case is that most people want to see how many orders came in. I'd like to be able to get data out of JavaScript tags, and capture more data. I think that would make it much more useful, rather than using Google Analytics. Instead, have one tool to capture all the stack, that would make it easy.

It's pretty good. It gives us what we need. We use the on-premise, with limited licenses, and we have never had any issues so far.

We've never seen any issue with the scalability.

We have never had an issue. We're pretty technical, so we can resolve things ourselves. I think, initially, we worked with them to help set up the on-premise, but afterwards, we didn't have any issues.

My previous client, the big pain points were, we had a lot of memory issues, upgrades not responding properly, and meeting SLAs, so that's why we were evaluating different APM tools. Finally, we picked Dynatrace for our own needs, for the use case.

We were using an IBM product which was not useful. Then we evaluated the APM space in the market and chose Dynatrace.

When we compared other APM tools, Dynatrace was the only one which could give us 100% visibility into the whole codebase. That's a key for us, because we can find the problem much faster.

Regarding the role of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, I haven't used the new Dynatrace tool, but as far as I know it can pinpoint the problem with AI. Based on the basin of data which they're collecting, it makes it much more that the developers can see where the problems are faster, rather than waiting for perf testing to be completed. I think it makes developers much more productive. They can see the problems right away, rather than waiting until they happen in production.

In terms of siloed monitoring tools, we used ITCAM before. We had a lot of pain points. It captured only 2% of the data, and we had to run a lot of workloads, change the config, and run the workloads. We spent a lot of time, wasting our human resources time. When we picked Dynatrace, it was a much faster turnaround.

If we had just one solution that would provide real answers, and not just data, the benefit would be - in most products, the tools are fragmented. If there were a tool which could give the full picture on the screen, the full stack, and give away the pain points, that would make it easier for any perf-engineer or developer to see easily. That's where I think Dynatrace is farther ahead in the game, in the APM space. There are other tools in the space, but I think Dynatrace is the only one that captures 100% of the data.

Also, I think they have good integration. Yesterday, here at the Perfrom 2018 conference, I saw xMatters integration where, when there's a problem, it can kick out a message to the whomever it is, with xMatters.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• product
• ease of use
• pricing
• features.

I give it a nine out of 10 because, as I said previously, I'm looking for more features, like getting data out of the JavaScript tags. That would make it much more usable.

But I would recommend the product.