Dynatrace Reviews

Currently, at my organization, we have DC RUM, Gomez synthetics, and AppMon. We are getting ready to PoC the OneAgent technology. Our use case for OneAgent will be containers monitoring, AWS monitoring, and microservice monitoring. Our organization currently has a digital services team that will be doing a lot of this cutting edge stuff and our architecture is not being fully monitored by the current stack that we have. We also have a tool called ScienceLogic that we use with our Ops bridge and we have Splunk. Therefore, we are really looking for the OneAgent to fill in the gaps that we are not covering. 

Out of the gate, I can tell you that just changing the agent model from having to go, "This is a Java, this is a .NET, this is a web, or this is an app," And getting rid of that to having the OneAgent is an improvement. Then, being able to monitor anything, literally anything on the infrastructure, that will be huge for us. 

Another thing is the log analytics. We have to work with the Splunk team. We have a very fractured organization, so anytime an application team wants log monitoring, they have to work with the Splunk team. Anytime we want log monitoring we have to work with Splunk team, it is a paperwork process. It is not that they are not nice people, it is just that it takes a really long time, and by then, the problem may be gone.

We really just need the immediate log analytics, because we might not need long-term analytics all the time. Like Splunk, they do awesome data analytics, but sometimes when we are troubleshooting an issue, we just need to look at where the problem is.

I would like better plugin support, because they are constantly asking us to do plugins, saying "Yeah, we can do that. Use this plugin."

Then, the moment something goes wrong with that plugin, I have no way of getting help. They recommend, "Contact the plugin author." You are kidding me? Those guys do not have any obligation to respond. They wrote it, but they do not have to support it. 

I do have concerns about stability. I have heard there are gaps being mentioned and I think that we will lose some features. I am not entirely trusting that this is fully-baked yet. I am probably going to go back to my organization and say we really need to do a PoC and we need to get on the train. However, I am not stepping down AppMon or our current DC RUM for another year or two, because this really needs to mature.

I am not worried about scalability. OneAgent is going to more scalable than the clunky old solutions that we just put to bed.

I evaluate technical support on a criteria of:

• Did they help solve my problem?
• How long did it take them to help solve my problem?

I have not had very positive experiences in the last year. I found them to be arrogant, rude, not solving my problems, and not interested in solving my problems. 

They are very insulted if you ask them questions. They refer you to read the documentation. I am like, "Well, I already read the documentation and that is why I am asking you a question." 

"Google that," is not the answer that I want hear out of tech support, because I already googled it. So, I have been rating them very low. It is actually the one pain point I did bring up to my sales engineers and sales support. They are aware.

Our organization just dumped HPOM and the plug was pulled on it in 2017. We are getting ready to sunset SiteScope and HPE BSM. The really siloed monitoring tools are archaic and high maintenance. The infrastructure is too big and moving too fast to be constantly updating old-fashioned tools.

What I really am excited about is that they just announced that it will be doing session replay for the DC RUM part of it. We currently have IBM Tealeaf and we hate it. We hate its guts. Our management hates it because we rolled it out to one application and it cost us over a million dollars to do that. We wanted to roll it out to a second application, and IBM wanted another million dollars. We already have the on-prem and a trained administrator. That was the licensing that they wanted that million for.

Dynatrace just said the session replay that DC RUM will have, it will put IBM Tealeaf out of business. Thank God, because that solution literally is from the 90s. I am not kidding you, it was coded in the 90s, and it is extremely brittle. It is hard to maintain, and it is clunky. If they can get that replay to be smoking, then they will make so much money. All the Tealeaf customers will stampede over here.

We stood up AppMon five years ago. It was not straightforward; it was complex. 

We paid for a Dynatrace guardian to be onsite for two years. The guardian rocked. We really loved the guardian. If we had not had the guardian there, we would not have had an adoption rate like we got.

Thursday and Friday last week, I got pulled into what they call a triage team. They had a problem in production where all these people were in a war room with all these fingers being pointed. Nobody had the full picture. I am using AppMon, which performed beautifully and management was super impressed. Just using AppMon 6.5, the visits, being able to drill down, and find the answers there worked. However, if I had had the OneAgent, DC RUM, and SaaS solution altogether, I would not have been in there for two days. It cost our company so much money and they still do not know what the answer is.

This is an expensive solution, but it is also worth the money.

My organization evaluated Nagios and a start-up company. Then we evaluated Dynatrace as well, and it just outperformed the others.

I am really excited about the AI that I am seeing out of the OneAgent because I was just at the IBM conference last year. The IBM AI is still pretty much a toy and I have not really seen the rubber hit the road with their stuff, but the rubber hitting the road is here with the Dynatrace AI. From what I have seen, it will be a key tool set for us just to pin down problems and get answers immediately. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Everything that they are doing is right, except tech support and plugins.

We've installed it to help us with performance issues and we use it when there's a problem, but we find it difficult to get in to find out what's really wrong. We always have to call someone from Dynatrace to help us figure out the problem, because we're not very good at it, which is why we want to get to OneAgent or the new Dynatrace.

Our organization really hasn't improved because they haven't adopted it very well. We've had it for three years and the adoption of it has been really, really slow.

One thing it helped with: We should never get traffic from outside the U.S. and we were getting traffic from Europe, and that was a problem. And we found out what caused it was that an agent outsourced some of their work to someone off-shore, and they weren't supposed to do that. Dynatrace helped us find that information out. We wouldn't have found it otherwise.

The amount of detail it gives you about what's really going on in your system.

It would be nice to get the AI piece into AppMon. If we can't get to where we need to be, it would be nice to have that AI as part of it. And I think, actually, you can do it now with the availability of Davis.

Very stable. I've never had any downtime with it at all.

I can tell you it scales very well. We went from nothing - we're a small shop - but we went from nothing, five agents, to installing 150 in a week. It was very, very scalable, especially OneAgent; it's even  or more scalable. I was able to actually turn off AppMon and put OneAgent on it as a demo, and it took me 30 minutes for 100 agents.

They're very helpful. They help us get right to the problem.

It's been Dynatrace or something called Reveille. Those are the two products I've used.

The problem with siloed monitoring has always been the complexity; trying to figure out how to get the information that you need out of the tools, that is usually the problem.

Regarding the importance of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, for our company, we don't do AI. So it's not important at all. However, I absolutely believe it's the future of technology. I would love to move our company in that direction, to use AI to help us - especially with Dynatrace - be proactive with problems, see them coming before they actually happen, which is what the AI piece can help deal with.

If there was one solution that could provide real answers and not just data, the immediate benefit for our team would be ease of use. It's easy for people to see, "Oh, I just caused this problem," especially if you want to get into a CICD, which is where we're trying to go. When I release some code into my performance environment and I can see impact immediately. That's something that would be great to have.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are stability, and what other people in the industry are saying. We look at industry reviews for what they think about a company. That's where we look: How other companies in the same industry look upon a vendor.

In terms of rating the product, I think with all the changes they're making with it, it's probably a nine out of 10. It's probably one of the best ones out there. You can always get a little better.

Make sure you go with the Dynatrace SaaS option. It's easier and it all comes out-of-the-box. It figures things out for you.

We are a retail market. We wanted to understand how our business is doing, how our website is doing. This solution is one of our key parameters for determining how we are behaving on a timely basis, because every second is currency. Every second is money, so it matters.

It's reducing our manual efforts. Once you get the application guys to install OneAgent and it's done, there's no need for them. You can do every task. And AI, Smartscape, we're really into them. These are the things that are helping our organization the most.

In my organization, where we are using Dynatrace, three years back we were using Dynatrace AppMon in order to instrument .NET applications. It used to take time, because you had to onboard your resources from the support team, get that guy, get that instrument. It was a little bit of a pain, because you had to plan things prior and get these things started.

With this, the new Dynatrace, what's happening is we don't need to do all those things. Get that OneAgent installed and it does everything and it takes care of all the applications. It's actually simplifying my job. That's why I feel Dynatrace is great at this point of time.

Smartscape is a wonderful feature. I'm really loving it because there's no need for you to go deep into an analysis and go in to see where we are going wrong. You go to Smartscape, pass all the connections, and it will tell you the root cause. 

One of the coolest features is AI. It's amazing. You don't need to create the process groups, you don't need to create any other groups. It will automatically take all of this, based on the technology, create groups. It does amazing things. My manual labor is almost reduced because of this.

With Linux or Windows, it automatically takes care of everything, so there's no need for you to do any manual config changes. But when it comes to AIX - because I implemented it two weeks back - you have to go back to kind of an AppMon approach, where you instrument agents for .NET applications. So if Dynatrace could make those changes and make it automated, that would be one of the biggest action items.

One of the features that we are lacking is on the reports side. We don't have much reporting available. And the dashboards. I checked on their blog and they said that they are working on the dashboard front where you can create the dashboards. We do have dashboards available. They said they are bringing in a lot of things there, so I'm looking forward to that, on reports.

And there's no download action for the reports, so if they could add something like that, it would add value for us. We cannot save data for more than seven to 10 days, so it would be better to add a feature for downloading. At least we could store the data and then we could compare for ourselves, where we are starting and where we are and where we are heading. I would have those metrics, that's something I'm looking for. 

They do have some APIs where you can feed the data into Splunk. 

I really cannot say or comment on this, because it is still evolving. They are bringing in a lot of changes. Also, I'm posting a lot of questions and queries and requesting they add some of the coolest features. So, stability-wise, probably next year, or middle of this year, I can comment on this. Right now, I don't want to.

Scalability-wise, on the data side, I'm really worried because they are giving only seven days data retention. They should plan something on that, to increase the data.

Whenever I reach out to technical support, they are helping us. There's no point at which I would say they're not helping. They are very good. 

The problem here is that they are evolving day to day. Some features they're saying they'll include the next week or coming up. They have planned features, and that's where we are lagging.

But whenever I reach out to the support guys, they are very good.

When it comes to support, it all matters. You have a problem with your application and you don't know how to solve it, you reach out to the support guys. And if they are responding on time, that solves your problem. If you have a problem in an important application and your support guy doesn't respond and you are losing business... that's where these guys are standing out. Their support is constant, so you can reach out to them at any time and they are there. They're just helping us in that.

I've used different monitoring tools. I don't want to name them, because it could cause a problem. We used siloed monitoring tools but we couldn't find most of the features that Dynatrace offers. That's the reason these guys are standing first in the market. Number one in the market.

We also switched because of the coolest features and support.

It's straightforward. Very simple. There is a lot of automation.

I rate them an eight out of 10. Although they have a lot of things already available, still, there's a long way to go.

I'm always recommending Dynatrace now. We had two vendors come to us and we proposed to one the Dynatrace solution; and the other is in the pipeline, so we have to start the discussion. I'm part of a the team that works on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions. We do RFPs for them, PoCs for them, so that's one of the engagements that I am involved into. So my first choice, obviously, would be Dynatrace.

We primarily use Dynatrace to monitor our job applications for our eCommerce platform. Generally, we are using it to diagnose user performance and our systems performance, especially for back-end functions. 

From a diagnosing standpoint, it has been a game changer. Before, we did not have monitoring, so anytime there was an issue, it was just guess and check. You would try something, and hope it fixed it. If it did not, then we tried something else, and did it fix it? No. Then, we would be up on phone calls at eight o'clock in the morning on a Sunday trying to figure out what went wrong with our last appointment. Now, within fifteen minutes (most of the time), we can diagnose or at least know where to look, after a problem has surfaced. 

It is nice to be able to deep dive and pull historical data. Sometimes, especially with our databases and stuff, we could not look at historical information for applications or issues that we have had in the middle of the night, for instance. Since putting Dynatrace in, we have been able to diagnose some of those issues in aftertime, not so much in real-time because we did not catch them. Therefore, it has been a big help to us being able to go back and check on things that happened in the past, so they do not happen again. 

Some of the complexities, especially with dashboarding, could be improved. While I know what I am doing, I am trying to get the developers to create dashboards and they just will not do it. They will just ask me, "Hey, can you make this for me?" It is like, "I can show you guys how to do it," and they respond, "Nah, I don't want to learn that."

With the newer products, they have improved them. However, the dashboarding process and creating measures and metrics, it needs to be made a little bit easier and more simplified. 

I do not know that I had any issues with stability. Generally, if there have been any issues with stability, it has been something on the server side, not really with the application itself. I do not think we have ever had Dynatrace crash. 

We are still pretty small in this. It is largely just our eCommerce platform that we are using it on right now. We have always been constrained by licensing on that anyway. Hybris does not let you scale too much unless you want to pay a lot of money, so we have not had too much issue with scaling at all, largely because we have not been scaling it. 

We have not really branched out too much into the cloud. We are just getting our toes wet, so I do not know that I have a really strong opinion on the role of AI when it comes to the IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. I expect that it will, as we grow, and it will continue to become more important. However, at this time, we are just not there. 

I have opened a couple tickets with technical support. I can't recall any of them off the top of my head, but I do not recall there being issues with them. They got back to me pretty promptly, and I was able to get a solution for them. Then, not for frontline things, but we purchased some coaching sessions and utilized those, which were very useful. 

We were not really using anything beforehand.

I was the sole person who set it up. There was complexity to AppMon and getting everything set, but more specifically getting the dashboard setup. It was reasonably complex. Some of the stuff was not super intuitive to me. Maybe I was approaching it from the wrong way, but I definitely had trouble. I especially struggled in the first couple of months trying to get everything set up the way we wanted it. 

We attempted to use New Relic, but the biggest issue was implementation. People before us tried to implement it, and it was never fully setup properly. Therefore, when I took over, we just decided to move to Dynatrace and canned the whole New Relic project.

Go with the new Dynatrace solution with it stats solution. Just the way it is implemented, they have made it a lot more user-friendly. Sometimes with AppMon, it is not so user-friendly. Otherwise, if you are choose AppMon, be prepared to sink a fair amount of time into it, because it is not something you learn overnight. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We were looking for something that could really help us deep-dive. That was the principal criteria. There were a lot of solutions, such as New Relic that we kind of looked at, but a lot of that was just surface-level. It was not giving us the full methods and full path of exactly what is going on, and that was what we were really looking for. 

Primarily, we use it for monitoring our end user performance experience, as well as diagnosing root cause analysis for one of our core applications. 

It is performing quite well. We are able to see globally our end user response time tracing down to the user ID. If there is an issue, we are able to diagnose it very quickly. This is the key to diagnosing quickly the root cause, then fixing it. 

In the past, we would go into war rooms and contact each vendor fighting over what the issue was, as each vendor would blame the other vendor: infrastructure would blame middleware, middleware would blame server, and so on. Therefore, the issues were not visible. 

The app shows you where the problem is, so you can go to the correct person. While there was initial resistance, now they has accepted the tool because they actually see the data is correct (tangible proof).

There are two components. One is the DC RUM, which provides me with the visibility for end-user experience down to user ID. This is one of the key features that we use it for. AppMon gives me the key feature, PurePath, which gives me access to basically the root cause of my issue, JWC. Thus, PurePath for AppMon and DC RUM provides end user experience monitoring. 

Dynatrace has a bit of a AI component in one agent. Prior to that, using AppMon, the user needed to be quite skillful to understand where to troubleshoot and what was the root cause. With the add-on of AI, at least upfront it tells you it analyzed all the logs, and it actually gives you a first level analysis instead of having you spending a lot of time trying to understanding the logs. AI is very useful, especially in the modern age to just speed up your diagnosis for finding the trouble/issues. 

The mobile app provided by Dynatrace could be improved, especially the DCR mobile app because it does not have some of the basic functions, like push notifications or even customized reports. It is very basic. I can't use it. I have to use the full app version. Whereas if you have a good mobile app, it actually gives you all of the notifications and you can drill down, which would help.

Stability is not an issue.

I have only used it for two applications, so I have not really scaled up. I do not use the cloud version, so I do not have that experienced. So far, in my environment, it works fine and has low overhead against my applications. So, that is the key thing. 

Technical support normally goes through our partner. The partner will then contact Dynatrace if they have an issue who will then come in with our partner and consult. When Dynatrace has come in, I have felt they have been knowledgeable.

We were all siloed. The challenge associated with siloed monitoring tools is it only gives you one perspective. It is a web server log, so you need a lot of human intervention to piece things together to find a root cause.

The key driving force towards Dynatrace was we were doing application transformation, so we were running the application and we had performance issues. We immediately needed help troubleshooting. For this case, we actually moved Dynatrace straight into production and it was able to detect the core issues, then we were able to resolve them very fast. Thus, this was the immediate selling point for Dynatrace and we procured it. 

We deployed it quite fast. Managing to install AppMon was quite straightforward, but for the DC RUM, building the reports is a bit complex. It needs a lot of training and a partner to actually help out.

A Dynatrace partner will always be willing to give you a trial. Go through the trial to see if there is a benefit for your company. Just try it out, implement it into production, and you will see the benefit.

Not really.

It was delivered when we wanted it and has performed exceptionally well. However, we have had to resolve a lot of things and had a lot of issues with the tool.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be time saved (streamlined) instead of analyzing so many different tools.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: You need a good business partner to work with and help you implement the solution, thus it is the implementation and the support. These are the key things that I would look at in a vendor.

Application performance monitoring for testing our pre-production environments. Along with that, we use AppMon to create B/T's for alerting and graphing trends.

Prior to the use of Appmon, our team was in the dark. We had zero visibility into our production application, and it would take up to days to find out why our clients were being impacted and how.

Since Appmon has been leveraged, we are now down to just hours (sometimes minutes) in resolution times.

PurePath analytics, I can't imagine not having this feature in your application. Not only have we been able to improve troubleshooting, but we have also used PurePath data (response times) to improve and tune application performance.

Ease of Use. I find it is very difficult to train someone in using this application. As amazing as it can be, the learning curve is extensive.

The primary use case of the Dynatrace is to monitor our application and its performance.

It helps in many ways in our organization:

• managing capacity planning
• managing services performance
• tuning database performance and optimizing queries.

There are so many features which we find very useful. One of them is to use PurePath to pick out frustrated users, see where the issue is, and analyze why it is happening. Dynatrace helps a lot in find the issue and fixing it.

We are still exploring features. But one feature which would be great in the next release would be that it provide a summary of the main fail point for frustrated users, instead of our having to go to PurePath and look for it. It should provide the list of pain point areas in report format.

Monitoring our production systems and diagnosing the critical and difficult to find issues. Great tool for deep diving into performance data and tracking issues through all the connected systems to better diagnose and pinpoint the real issues. 

This tool has been essential for monitoring our systems, gathering all performance data, and helping to quickly resolve difficult problems affecting our customers ability to process their work through our systems. 

With Dynatrace PurePath information and performance data, we can trace through all our systems end-to-end. It is one of the critical features that we primarily use. This feature has helped us diagnose and resolve quite a few difficult problems affecting our customers over the years. 

Dynatrace has been difficult to set up and use to diagnose problems in the past due to the complex nature of the tool. However, I have seen great improvements over the years to make this easier to do as well as the latest versions incorporating smart technology to more quickly help diagnose issues and pinpoint the problem. Looking forward to seeing continued improvements in this area.