Dynatrace Reviews

We log everything. Anything that goes wrong, we want to make sure that we are able to see the reason why. Therefore, we check metrics around CPU usage, RAM usage, etc.

It's a different way of thinking. Before, we were with a big, monolithic app in the beginning before fully transitioning over to AWS Services, which has been breaking it down into a microservices architecture. It has allowed us to look at it and debug out from a different perspective. Previously, we were going in and looking at server logs, logging into SSH toolbox and debugging manually there. It puts everything in one place, so everyone has one center has one center tool to look at.

For what we're using it for, and having seen the other side of things, where we were debugging and looking into logs manually, then trying to run an analysis on them, it was a painful process. Looking at it from that perspective, it makes things a lot more user-friendly if you are using a tool like this. That is just been my experience with it personally, which is nice. 

It is tool for the job. It does what it's meant for and does what it is supposed to, which is good.

From a debugging perspective, when we look at things, we want to ensure that we know exactly what is happening at a certain point in time. It provides us a reference for being able to go back and look at data at a certain point, analyze it, then determine if something was the root cause. 

When compared with other tools, the experience needs improvement. I would like them to build out the interactions and make them friendlier.

So far, so good. I know there are a lot of competing tools out there. For what it is and what we've used it for, it has been good.

I have never had any issues, so I haven't had to contact them.

There is time savings. People's times have been cut in half using this solution because we were previously doing a lot of that manual work. Now, it's a lot more automated, and the data is just there.

We used a different tools out there, like New Relic. Dynatrace is good, but there are features which other tools provide that it doesn't.

Do some research. There are a lot of tools out there with a lot of features, which people have bought into it. Make sure to get the right tool for the job. When you do bring a tool on, take it for a trial run first, then see if it is giving you the value which you are looking for.

Our primary use case is monitoring.

Previously, some of our web publications were so hard to find that we would be constantly monitoring it using a graph and a type of installation tool. Now, it is very different. Dynatrace has reduced the time it takes to detect the service failing in production.

• You don't have to configure it. It just needs to be installed. 
• It locates services on its own, providing us good visualizations of them.

They should include more mission learning into the product and provide additional performance metrics for application learning.

The stability is good.

Scalability is good. 

It reduces our efforts to identify services failing in production.

Our experience purchasing through AWS Marketplace was good.

It is perfect for application monitoring.

The integration and configuration of this product on the AWS environment is good. We are using the on-premise and the AWS versions, which are pretty much the same.

I work with a product called Rancher, which integrates really well.

Our primary use use is to monitor apps in terms of performance and availability.  

We can analyse problems more quickly, and detecting problems becomes easier with Dynatrace.                               

PurePath: The transaction structure can be seen by any user.                                            

Under heavyweight, Dynatrace becomes slower when listing PurePaths. 

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. 

I joined Datacom about 15 months ago - the consulting company, systems integrator - and we're currently building a system for the Red Cross Blood Service. It's an organ register, it's got algorithms in it to match donors and recipients, and as part of that we're replacing an existing legacy system. It's going to be in the cloud, AWS, and we're building greenfields, completely from scratch on a .NET platform. Dynatrace is the primary application monitoring tool for the platform.

Currently, we are about six months away from finishing the development phase, and we're using Dynatrace as part of our build phase, to actually help detect design issues and bugs during the deployment phase.

The benefit we've seen so far is the ease of configuration, ease of set-up, just drop an agent in the machine and off it goes. That's been good. 

Also, having a single point of availability of all your performance data has been a big benefit.

Another big benefit is to be able to track those individual transactions and being able to really pinpoint where your issues are, based on the individual activity. With the traditional monitoring tools, you generally just see infrastructure metrics, CPU, memory, disk; that's sort of outside, a black box of an application, and you can see how it affects your infrastructure. Whereas APM tools really crack open that box and make those other metrics almost irrelevant.

The ability to track that user, the real user monitoring, for me that's always the key, to unlock that. That tells you what your user is experiencing. Everything else is meaningless. For me, the number one measure of how your system is performing is what your user is experiencing on the front end. If they're having a good experience, the fact that maybe your infrastructure isn't performing that well is not really that relevant. Whereas before: "The CPU is going nuts." Well, our user is not impacted, I'm in the cloud, I don't really care. The system is behaving itself, the AI says, "Well, that's just normal." It just changes your perspective from looking at your raw infrastructure, to measuring performance on your user experience, just completely turns it around.

Problem detection. Obviously, during the building of a system that is new and it's in development, there are a lot of bugs. Being in the cloud it is very difficult, sometimes, to diagnose where the issues are. Dynatrace gives us that deep insight into errors.

It's very useful for performance issues as well. When you build a system generally, there is a lot of that technical debt. We're an Agile project, our developers are initially focused on business value, rather than building a technically perfect solution. We want to get that business buy-in, build a system and get that functionality going. While we're doing that, we're accumulating some technical debts, we haven't built it perfectly in terms of technical design; things like scalability, being able to handle loads, that kind of thing. As the system is maturing, we're starting to throw some load at it, and we start to see performance issues. Using that telemetry from Dynatrace, we are able to pinpoint what our performance issues are so we can tune the system.

So it's tuning and problem resolution.

The role of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, is a feature of Dynatrace that I like the most. I've used some competing products, and the fact that it has that AI capability in it, for me, is really the primary, the number one feature, that ability to automatically do problem resolution.

The one feature that I was really pleased to see coming is that configuration management - that's scripted configuration management - which really fits into that whole DevOps idea of being able to do that.

I'd like to see the UI a bit more polished. For example, I saw a demo of the dashboards here at the Perform 2018 conference. There was a table of these widgets, but they're not sorted alphabetically and there's, like, 50 of them. So if you want to find your widgets, you're of scrolling up and down. So, small features: Being able to search for widgets, having things more categorized; just a bit more focused on the user experience.

Another example is, we have multiple tenants. If you have them up at the same time, you can't see in the UI which tenant you're in. It doesn't tell you.

So focus on the user experience. I can see where they're coming from in the Agile development process, where they delivering value, but they need to go for a bit of that gold-plating now and just polishing off the UI.

Stability is very good. We went straight into the brand new platform. You can still see the UI is a bit unpolished, but it's good to see that kind of iterative release and all those new features coming on a regular basis. You can see, hopefully, that some of the big customers like with SAP, that will definitely drive maturity while they migrate off their legacy platforms.

For us, the scalability is perfect. Some of our challenges - especially with this specific solution we're building, it's not really load, it's a very low-utilization system - our challenges are accuracy, donor privacy, and availability. Those are our key concerns.

Being a consulting company, we're looking at introducing this as part of other solutions within the blood service organization, and other organizations as well. So, we work with some large organizations like government and other big companies. Scalability is important, and seeing some really big clients adopting it gives us a lot of confidence that it's not going to be an issue.

We've had a few issues along the way and they've been very responsive. We have had some small defects with an agent and some of the functionality. One example would be, we were using a single pager, using Angular, and we upgraded our Angular from version 2 to version 5, the latest and greatest. Dynatrace had some issues with supporting the latest version. So they were quite responsive to some of the issues we had.

I've used those traditional monitoring tools. I come from a development background. I have used a competing product that is in the same space as Dynatrace, and the biggest challenge I found was - me being a bit of a nerd, a DevOps guy - I could look at a chart, a performance chart, from previous systems when we were doing load testing. I could look at a chart and understand where the performance issues are and how the system is behaving, and the load. But when I engaged other people, even technical people, I would say, "Hey, just look at this chart." And they're just looking at some graph, it's meaningless to them. The way Dynatrace looks at things is to try and translate things into a business perspective, impacted users, root cause analysis, that's really the message. With traditional tools you'd have to take those metrics, translate them into business language. Dynatrace is giving you that capability.

We're using Dynatrace Managed. Because of donor privacy concerns, the client wanted us to create our own on-premise, in our on private cloud, meaning a private tenant in a public cloud. We set up our own Dynatrace instance and completely managed by Dynatrace so we never touch it. We patched it due to some of those vulnerabilities, but other than that it's been really seamless for us.

My role as solution architect is twofold. One is designing the actual system, but my background is DevOps and my main day-to-day role at the moment is very heavily DevOps-focused. I'm also involved on the practical side, putting in all the automation, that automation platform. To have a tool like Dynatrace, where I don't have to work out for hours how to configure and set up alerts and monitoring - especially in a solution that is not completed yet - it's not only a major time-saver, but I know going forward that it will be able to learn how the system operates. So we don't have to spend time doing that. Day one, we're getting all of that stuff for free, out-of-the-box.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. Not only is it a great product now, but I can just see from their vision and what they're trying to achieve, I'm really excited about the direction it's going. It's a great product.

First of all, if you don't do it, you're flying blind, so do it immediately. 

The other thing I want to say is you need to make sure that your organization, from a maturity point of view, is mature enough to adopt it. So if you're going to put in a tool, and if it's just going to be another tool that's sitting there... To really get the benefit out of it, you need to be in that sort of Agile, lean, innovative mindset. Dynatrace enables that feedback, so you get that quick feedback from ops into development into business, and the benefit you get from DevOps is to be able to react quickly to that information. But your organization, your business, especially, needs to enable that rapid feedback. Your business needs to be set up to be able to use that information and share it.

I look into application degradation issues for mostly eCommerce, retail-based customers. The main agenda of it is to have a better user experience. When I look into it, Dynatrace plays a vital role. We use Dynatrace products to make sure that the applications are running per their guidelines as to whatever the application team designates. This is one of the key factors.

We have been having awesome responses and reviews from the customer. After Dynatrace was installed, there was a lot of outages that Dynatrace could actually catch even before there was a major outbreak within the ecosystem. So, we have been receiving good testimonial. 

OneAgent, the new platform of Dynatrace, it is called artificial intelligence (AI), so basically that artificial intelligence correlates multiple infrastructure competence transactions services and application processes. It is one of the most important features, so when there is a fire break, you do not have to go multiple hops to go look where exactly the issue is. Dynatrace can do that because of its artificial intelligence. 

AI plays a vital role in most of the customer's work that we have done, because all the implementation, Dynatrace OneAgent is on SaaS. Data is a limitation in human capability. AI takes care of a lot of things: autoscaling, you do not have to worry about taking care of the infrastructure, etc. Everything has been taken care of on the cloud. Most of the inputs we get from the AI engine, they are already integrated with Dynatrace. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the most important benefit would be the AI engine which correlates your multiple infrastructure competence with any environment. The firefighting within the environment is quite less. There are days where we used to take close to 24 hours to find a problem by looking into multiple tools involving multiple teams. When you have a single tool doing all this, there is only one place to go look. From 24 hours, we have come down to one to two hours.

I was keenly looking forward to the next releases for this platform. I saw that they are going to release by March something which is really interesting, and I am looking forward to: How a user can replay a session. E.g., if I have access to a website, I can do a whole replay of the session and where it actually went wrong. Right now, there is a log analysis feature. This is maybe a little more deeper than the log analytics in comparison to other tools, like Splunk or Sumo Logic. If Dynatrace can come up with this replay feature, that would be great. 

Technical support is good. Dynatrace OneAgent is a pretty new tool in the market. In comparison to other products that Dynatrace have, they are scaling up. We have been getting good resolution. We are quite happy with the support that they have been providing. 

We have a plethora of tools within most of our customer places. When that is actually an issue or problem, the 24/7 team comes into play. If they do not know which tool to look into when there is a problem, they go into the network tool or infrastructure. Here, Dynatrace plays a vital role by correlating the network, infrastructure, and application telling you exactly what the root cause is. 

We switched to Dynatrace because we were previously using an APM tool, which did not yield benefit, so then we had to look into other products. 

The initial setup was straightforward. The documentation and the university helped on Dynatrace. 

Surprisingly, it is quite expensive. That is something that we could always see: Improved pricing and the overall construct on how do we use each license in regards to usage of the tool. 

On our shortlist, we did have all the competition for Dynatrace. We evaluate all the major three tools and found Dynatrace to be the best fit because of the AI and Dynatrace's innovation.

AI, ease of use, and SaaS were the things that we were looking for when selecting a tool and we found them all in this particular box.

We have strongly evangelise to go ahead with Dynatrace OneAgent because we have reaped the benefits within the last six months. We have seen what Dynatrace can do and because of ease of use, SaaS based, you don't have to worry anything (everything is taken care of by Dynatrace), and the AI, the technology feature, functionality. We strongly recommend other customers to go with this product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We look into innovation. We look into the new feature functionality regarding what is coming. The Dynatrace platform comes with new releases every week. Every week they do an update, and every update is not just a normal update, it comes with a very strong feature, which is actually useful for the application's users. This makes them ahead of the technology. 

The primary focus using this product is to find performance issues and then to find the root causes to provide a full recommendation. Coming from a performance engineering background, we love this tool. We focused on PurePaths, looked at hotspots, and this helped us a lot in rectifying most of the performance issues.

We are using it for production monitoring, mainly testing all the new applications and performance monitoring.

The core features are the monitoring alerts and an easy, faster way of getting to the problem, and identifying what should be fixed.

The most valuable feature is, I can quickly go to the PurePath and find the problem in the application. I can say that it provides me a way by which I can quickly find the root cause of the problem. Then you try to tune it. So that has been an amazing experience.

The new Dynatrace release is already fully loaded. I still need to explore it. We are still using it and the new features, like log analysis and session replay, are good. As of now, I don't see any particular feature that is missing in Dynatrace, except one.

I still don't see the full depth of database metrics for database performance management. For example, I use Oracle Enterprise Manager and I use a type of access that provides me a lot of metrics and meaningful ways to evaluate database performance. That is something I don't see in Dynatrace yet.

It's very stable. I haven't seen any issues with the stability.

We started with a couple of the applications initially, and it was fast. We wanted this tool to be part of the applications and that's when and we started adding more and more application into Dynatrace. Then, we realized that there were some slowness issues, but we were quickly able to see what was causing them and then we added adequate hardware and storage so that it became scalable. 

Now we know what the math is between the number of applications and the sizing requirements of Dynatrace. After finding these things we know what to do, how to scale in terms of how many applications we want to put into Dynatrace.

They're very quick, they're always on top of our questions. Most of the issues are getting resolved quickly. I can say the support is fabulous.

We were using the Wily Introscope before, and we had a hard time setting up and capturing method-level performance metrics. For example, in Dynatrace the way PurePaths show insight into the method-level level hotspots, stack trace - that was missing in Wily Introscope. And Dynatrace was more intuitive. These are the few things that pushed us to go for it.

It was complicated in the sense of teaching the support team how to do this because they were new. But once we showed them how to put the agents and how to administrate it, then it was easy for the ops team to take care of supporting, administrating, and putting all the applications into one stack.

New Relic, and Wily.

What we have seen in the last two or three years is the technology space has been continuously changing and new features are being added. What we realized in the last quarter was, we should have a better way of identifying in production, end-users' scenarios using artificial intelligence. Since our alpha, we are excluding thousands of test scenarios. Better to run focused test scenarios based on artificial intelligence and our log analysis, and focus our energy on testing the key scenarios that have been performed by end-users. I think that is a new space where we need intelligent solutions like artificial intelligence.

The problem with the siloed monitoring tools was you could not save the past or the story of your test results, and it needed a lot of setup. You needed to work with so many tools and it didn't provide all the key features that we were looking for. Maybe it is good for one thing, maybe just plain CPU and memory. If I need holistic metrics, that's missing in the siloed monitoring tools.

If we had just one solution that could provide real analysis, as opposed to just data, that would be fantastic. We would not need to find so many different tools and capture all the individual bits and pieces of the data. It would be faster and more meaningful.

When picking an APM solution, it should be able to support all heterogeneous applications: it can be mainframe, it can be integration, it can be Java, .NET. The tool should be able to support a wide range of applications. And it should be scalable. As we add more applications, it should not see any slowness issues. It should be easy to use. There are so many folks in the performance team, the ops team, so it should be easy to use.

I can definitely say use Dynatrace, but I would say evaluate what, in terms of space, you are looking into and make you are able to support it fully. Make sure you evaluate all the technical criteria you are setting up, based on the workspace.

My primary use case is for monitoring our applications in production. We have a number of consumer-facing applications. 

It performs really well. I have been using it for a few years now, and every year we see a lot of benefit in the many features that come out in product development.

The main benefit right now is that we really know how production is behaving at any point in time and if we need to scale; we can be more proactive versus reactive, serving our customers. We have a number of different apps in other countries, so I think it gives us a holistic view, not just for one app, but for all of our apps.

It's all consumer-facing, so it has a direct revenue aspect to it. If things were to go down, we would lose actual revenue. So it's really not a nice-to-have, it's a must-have.

It's the dashboards. The dashboards provide very good visibility into it no matter what your role or title is. They provide very good visibility into what's happening in production. It's kind of a one-stop shop for all that information, instead of having to through logs, or through multiple systems to get that information.

I also think it's more than monitoring, that's what we are learning here at the Perform 2018 conference. It's more of a platform, and it's trying to enable a bunch of different functionalities, not just the monitoring aspect of it. I think the whole AI part of it is going to be pretty interesting. To me, another area that's personally of interest is native integration, so that we can make native apps today that look like they're getting better, in the long-term perspective.

I'd like to see native support, because we're launching native apps in multiple countries so we really want to have a really good feel for how those apps are going and how well they're performing, if there are issues. 

The other one is AWS. I think they've just announced something with them. We do have a lot of AWS Lambdas in production right now for a couple of apps we have, so I'm looking forward to that being available to use.

I can't really think of a limitation, I think that it has a lot of good features. Maybe some mobile, tablet-based dashboards, even though I do believe they're already supported, but a better native capability from that perspective, having those dashboards available from the native experience.

I think it's pretty stable. I haven't really heard of any outages or things that have gone wrong. I don't use it literally every day, day in and day out, but from what I've seen and experienced, I've not really had any problems.

I think it's pretty scalable, because of the way its designed and architected, it works pretty well.

They were pretty effective. We've had to open tickets a couple of times for their new features that we were trying to integrate with, or a problem with a current feature. Their helpful resource is the guardian, which is the best security program. There is a person dedicated to each client. I think that's a pretty good idea. Most of the companies I'm typically consulting with are Professional Services type set-ups, but I think the Guardian program is pretty awesome. It's really beneficial.

I wasn't too directly involved. I worked with the team that was doing the setup, but I think it was pretty straightforward. It was pretty quick, actually. Without doing much, just installing the agents, it gives you so much automatic capability. And then you can always tweak that and configure that and make it better. But, right out of the box, I think it's really easy to install.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, I personally think AI plays a pretty wide role when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and to manage performance of product. As we have more and more data in our systems, getting more complex, going into the cloud, we will need to rely on AI in certain aspects of the decision-making. There will still always be a human aspect, in my opinion. But AI will assist with a lot of trivial or not mission-critical type tasks.

I have used siloed solutions at other organizations. Honestly, I don't recall a lot of the details, but in general they did not have a great interface. The information wasn't easy to use when troubleshooting issues in production. They didn't have as many good integrations with other products and tools, so a combination those were the challenges with them.

If there was just one solution that could provide real analysis as opposed to just data, I think that would really tell us what we need to work on and help us prioritize, and not have an ocean of issues. We could focus on the ones our customers are more impacted by. It would be pretty good to take care of them. And the other part would be, it would help us get into consumer insight and help us build our product roadmap, accordingly. We could learn from the customer and then act on that learning.

When looking at vendors, one of the things we look for is the least amount of setup. That's the number one. You don't want to have to invest in a lot of configuration and coding to enable the product. The other thing is, what kind of user interface does it have and how good is the troubleshooting tool. A lot of monitoring will tell you there's a problem, but won't really tell you how to solve it. And third is innovation, because technology is changing so rapidly and a monitoring tool needs to be up-to-date. So it's important that we will continue to be able to monitor and do stuff that's coming out.

Definitely start with a program in mind and know how you measure success, and adoption of really any tool, whether a monitoring tool or not. That's really how you get buy-in from all the right stakeholders, you get the right training in place upfront, versus, setting it up and then struggling to plug in everybody, to get on it and show the value of it . So I would think having a program or a better plan upfront helps.