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. 

Still implementing.

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. 

Appmon:

• Drill downs to root causes.
• Easy to find the performance bottlenecks.
• Full insight into all classes.
• UEM helps to identify user experience and detailed steps performed by the user.

I have identified and fixed the following performance issues in non-production before we release the app:

• Identified memory leaks that caused heap utilization maxed out.
• Identified thread bottlenecks at JVM.
• Identified JDBC connection pool limits.

There are so many!

• Transaction flow: Helps to identify server health at every layer.
• Threads on JVM: Helps to identify active, hung, and count.
• GC: Helps to identify GC collection time and number of times GC kicks in.
• UEM: Helps to identify user experience.

DT Saas: Does not have all the features that Appmon has. Maybe in the future releases it may have all features.

More than five years.

We use it for identifying issues in production.

We had an issue with Web Services going down in production, and we used Dynatrace to monitor the exceptions and alert the vendor to correct the service. This, in turn, helped minimize end-user impact.

• CPU utilization
• PurePath analysis
• Alerting mechanism
• Finding exceptions and errors
• Dashboards to generate the transactions count

Every time I want to see the PurePath, I have to launch the client. It would be helpful if they introduced this in the browser application. 

Also, configuring alerts is bit confusing.

Still implementing.

We are using Appmon and Gomez tools to monitor performance metrics in production systems. Appmon is used to monitor performance of production and test environments. We even use it to debug the results of performance tests using Appmon.

We have used Dynatrace for various projects. Everytime it has been really handy in identifying the root of the cause. We have used this tool to help in cases such as production performance outages and functional level issues.

PurePath is the most useful feature in the Appmon tool. It gives a lot of flexibility in identifying issues and finding the flow of execution. PurePath is also used to create many complex measures and business transactions as per our needs.

Addition of more statistical features, plus different time series modeling techniques, would really help for future versions.

One to three years.

Easy product to set up and very little administration once the product is in operation. Real User traffic 24x7, nice reports, and our customer is very satisfied with the results. The Dashboard gives us a quick view of where the application problem is which means quicker resolution times.

Probably, like so many other products out there, the database reporting engine has an awful lot of metrics that can be used for reports. Could also be considered Pros!Pleased with the attention that Compuware gives their customers and the support process, when needed, works rather smoothly.

The customer that we are using the product for is extremely pleased with the reports and detail of information that they are receiving on-line, 24x7.

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.

On-premises

Our primary use case is to monitor the full stack of our digital platform, including the user experience. This provides us with business insights.

This solution has helped us with faster identification of the root cause, allowing faster resolution and increased uptime.

The most valuable feature is the AI, which makes root cause identification much faster, and the support much easier.

I would like to have the ability to share live data with selected third parties so that they can see how their product is performing for our company.

More than one year.

We are using it track how the data flows throughout the entire AWS environment and seeing if there are any road blocks in between and trying to fix those. Dynatrace is really good at illustrating those. It provides a nice graph, and we can see where everything goes. It is easy to explain both to the people that work with it and the customers who want to see where their data is going.

In terms of tracing where the data is going, some clients don't want it to hit a particular instance, or even worse hit a database that is not part of what its designed for. Therefore,  it makes sure everything is where the customer expects it to be. It is a great tool for that.

The graphical interface is helpful, as it illustrates things well for anyone who wants to know about the information it provides.

If Dynatrace could take out the controller that would be great. It is one less thing to install right now. Though, I understand why they would need it. 

The less stuff that you have on the instances which are running on the actual apps themselves are better for people that watch user products. So, if it could go agentless, that would be great, but I understand why Dynatrace would need it to capture the points. However, every time we spin up an EC2 instance, we have to slap an agent on it and that is more work.

I would like them to make those agents and controllers as small as possible. That would be great. Or, if they could remove them entirely, that would be great too.

One to three years.

I haven't had any major issues with stability. Sometimes, the controller feels a little overloaded if you have a lot agents running, but that's just a matter of sizing things up.

The scalability ties into the Dynatrace controller, because there is just one which talks back to your on-premise. While it is nice to have just one point to talk to, when you start having a lot of apps and things trying to connect to the same thing, it can cause some issues. I do get it, it is just a networking thing along with design.

I have not used the technical support.

It is a brand new environment. They didn't have anything before.

In terms of explaining to a customer how their data works, it has been a great tool. Instead of trying to draw it out, then hoping that is exactly where the data goes.

Try it out. They are other tools on the market, but with this one, the graphical interface is what I like the best. If that is what you really want, definitely go for it.