Dynatrace Reviews

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 have hundreds of applications in our organization which are currently instrumented. We define business transactions and provide real-time monitoring for these applications.

Overall, I'd say we're pretty satisfied. However, as a larger corporation - our environment is very, very large, we have over 15 production servers and a total 20-plus Dynatrace AppMon servers - it's increasingly difficult to manage as our environment grows out. It's simply because our team is not fully staffed to support such a large environment, and to do the maintenance work with all the upgrades from 6.5 to 7 to 7.1. We have some challenges where our hardware that we are using today is hosting one servable host with two different Dynatrace AppMon instances, which is not, I guess, a typical setup. So sometimes it's a little bit challenging with the support, but we work through it.

As an administrator for the AppMon servers, we see the benefits every day when we help business teams to figure out some of their problems, troubleshoot to root cause. When we hear of these cases where we save business teams or application support hours or days of figuring out problems, that's probably what we're most proud.

Definitely HA, because we have so many applications that are dependent on AppMon that it has been deemed critical. Any downtime, it just affects so many users. So that's one of our key asks for the future.

Stability is where the "fairly satisfied" comes in. I think it's also due to our environment and having multiple servers hosting dual instances of AppMon, where we've seen a few challenges. We do work with the vendor. However, because we've had instances of down AppMon servers, although we can recover fairly quickly, one of the key pieces that is missing is having high availability. I believe it's coming in 7.1, so it's on the roadmap, we just wish it would be sooner.

As an organization we keep growing, because everybody wants AppMon. Even within my last two years, since I've joined the team, I think we've added four new production servers and probably eight to 10 including dev and QA. However, instead of having two very large Dynatrace servers, we had to scale out laterally. 

We've had challenges. I would say it's not scalable, because we've had to move large applications that were in a shared environment to their own separate Dynatrace server instance. Those are some of the challenges we do have.

Support has been very good. We are in constant contact with our sales engineer. 

They're very responsive, and anytime we do have an issue and raise a concern, we get immediate feedback. We have a good relationship with Dynatrace.

I was not involved with the initial setup. But since I've been there we've upgraded from 6.3 and 6.5, and we're currently rolling out, I'd say, 90% of our environment is at 7, we're just missing one server. I would say the upgrading is fairly straightforward. It was just a lot of work, due to the size of our environment.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, that's the direction that we're already going, and I don't think we can avoid it. It's something that for us, as a large organization, we will need to leverage. I think we will adopt it, hopefully, sooner rather than later.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers and not just data, the immediate benefit would be that we'd be able to do more work, free up our time to do other tasks. Also, as a trickle down effect, the more time we have to do other people's requests - we have hundreds of applications in our organization  - so the trickle down effect would benefit all teams.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are stability of the product, and HA is definitely on the list due to our nature of our business. Also, new features being added on, that's always a big plus.

I would give it a solid eight. Again, it has a few features lacking or which haven't been there since the inception - the HA - because we've gone through three or four upgrades. When we lose our one server, we might lose two server instances, so it affects more applications.

I'd definitely say sign up for the trial, test it out in your test environment, and get your business users and app support teams involved quickly just to see the benefits. Just being able to look at the PurePaths; the first time I saw PurePaths I thought, "Wow. This is a pretty powerful tool."

Our company primarily uses the AppMon product and we have it divided up in different business units: line support, corporate systems support in our organization. We primarily use it to monitor internal HR applications, enterprise document applications, anything that involves Java, database SQL. We're trying to monitor and make sure that we're tuning performance.

We have an initiative going on this year, high-availability, so we're trying to get as many applications in our organization to be monitored through this tool as, much as possible, to make sure they're all running most efficiently and performing the way that the management would expect.

So far it's going well. Quite a learning experience for us.

The dashboard gives us something to show managers and our business where the problems are. That's really been eye-opening for them. They can see, yes, this tool has been a good investment. They can see where the problems are and how we can take advantage of it for making those necessary corrections, so it's been helpful to us.

I like the end-to-end monitoring - we can see. Also the user experience, that's been really helpful for us because a lot of times things just aren't detected and I hear from the users. This isolates some of the issues from their experience, so that's definitely been useful for us. 

We're also starting to learn some of the Synthetic monitoring, hoping to do some performance testing in the future.

We'd like to see them continue to develop the AI, what they introduced today here at the Perform 2018 conference, with the whole Synthetic monitoring. I'm glad that they're starting to merge a lot of the tool-sets into one to make it easier.

There's definitely been some challenges around stability, as far as PurePaths sometimes. Also the history, we've got so much data being built. We have to be careful to keep a short amount of history available to our users, so it's been challenging.

I think the design is pretty scalable. It's pretty easy to add additional nodes if we need to. Also, it's easy to migrate changes from one environment to another. That makes it so you can scale it. I think it's met our expectations for scalability.

I personally have not used tech support, but we have other people on the team that do engage with the vendor more avidly and they've said that support has been pretty adept at meeting their needs, time-wise. We're pretty pleased so far with the way the vendor has handled problems we've proposed to them.

We've used SiteScope for monitoring a lot of our web applications. I know we've used Tealeaf and Splunk. They're great tools but there's quite a learning curve there. 

This one, Dynatrace, seemed to be a little bit more straightforward. It's certainly more robust in what it can do as far as the end-to-end monitoring. You can also see how big these conferences are, like here at Perform 2018. There are a lot of other users for networking who are familiar with this tool, so that's helped us adopt it a little bit more easily and to push that incentive towards our directors.

SiteScope is limited. It doesn't do Angular apps as much. It doesn't do single-page apps, so it's more just one web page; it's easier to write scripting for that. But when you have something that goes through a whole set series, it's been challenging. With Dynatrace it has been a little easier to monitor those types of situations. That's the primary reason.

I would like to see them improve on their licensing and the cost. It's been a challenge for us because the way they have it broken out right now, you have to buy it by units. It's hard for us to know where to put those units because our company is broken up into all these different business units, so it's been challenging in that sense. I just would like to see them improve that model a little bit.

I wasn't really involved in the process, but when we saw what the tool is capable of, it certainly went to the top pretty quickly. It has met most of our expectations since we purchased it. 

I do believe that they evaluated one other vendor, product but I don't remember who.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance is certainly a big thing going on right now. It's very important to us. I want to make sure that there's not only learning when there are issues, but also that there is taking action automatically to correct it. That's where the intelligence is at, and once you program it in, it knows how to fix the issue and you don't have to troubleshoot and find out what the issue is. That's a big initiative that's going on, it's very important to us, this AI.

In terms of one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to just data,
any solution that could tell us, definitely, when there's something going on across our organization - not just in one area, one department - something that could tell us from each point when there's a communication such as sign-on; we want to know if it's something with the network, it's something with the area that supports that application, or if it's something on a host server. Something that tells us, all the way across the board what the issue could be. That's what we're driving towards.

I'd rate Dynatrace about a nine out of 10. There are some things that they need them to improve upon, but they are pretty close to the top.

Talk with them, go out and seek, look at all the options you have. Make sure that you talk with your business and discuss what is most important when you're looking to invest toward performance issues. Look at a tool that spans across the company, that can meet multiple areas of needs, not just your own.

We have AppMon, and our primary use cases are to

• gain greater visibility into our applications and our full stack of technology
• be able to provide our developers with insight into their applications 
• be able to see our systems, monitor them for availability
• really reduce our mean time to resolution, if and when we have problems.

It does really well, it really gives us that insight that we need. We have a large instillation and it does a decent job of handling that. I do foresee us looking at the Dynatrace product long term, to help address a couple of the things that we have some issues with time to time, but overall I would say it's really good.

I think it has improved the way our company has functions because of the insight that we have now into our applications. On top of bringing in the AppMon product to our organization, we've also really been trying to push APM as a culture, trying to get everybody in our organization, developers, to start think about APM ongoing and in the earlier environment, like our system integration environment, our user acceptance testing environment, and our production environment. Having AppMon has provided the visibility and capabilities that we needed in order to be able to drive that culture.

For me, the most valuable feature of this solution is that deep dive that we get out of the AppMon product with the PurePath technology, and the way that the PurePath stack works. It's visibility that we didn't have into our applications before, and it really filled a void that we had within our organization of being able to understand what's going on at that layer.

I've learned a lot during this Perform 2018 conference about the direction and the roadmap that Dynatrace is going with the actual Dynatrace product. One thing that I would like to see is for companies like us - large AppMon customers that have a lot of presence in AppMon, a lot of manually configured things and customizations - would be something that would help us be able to make that journey more easily, the transition from to AppMon to Dynatrace. That would be something that would be really helpful for us, because we do see a lot of benefit, and a lot of new features and things that are really positive in that Dynatrace environment. Now it's a matter of figuring out how we get there.

Overall, stability is good.

We've had some scalability issues with the AppMon product. We're rather large, we have a lot of shared infrastructure, and a lot of shared code. We have one single profile, and we throw a lot of data at it, a lot of applications, we have a lot of agents, so we have had some hiccups in the past with that environment not being able to handle that. But we've worked closely with our contacts at Dynatrace who have been helping us through those situations and trying to improve that going forward.

Tech support is good. They are really responsive to our support tickets. We work really closely. Not only do we have our sales contacts and a sales engineer contact, we have a product success manager as well. We talk to them twice a month, we do calls. We always talk through those open issues, and they're really supportive if there are things that we need to have pushed and escalated, to help us do that.

I've never called, I've opened tickets through the Support Portal, that's the way I've engaged with our support. I'm more on our application business unit side of the house, so not directly involved with the configuration management of the Dynatrace server and environment. I'm more from a usage standpoint, and the configuration of our applications, how we have those set up in the AppMon environment.

We really didn't have a rich monitoring presence in the past, from the distributed environment. We also have IBM z/OS, and we have some tooling there that is meeting our needs. We did have a product before, it wasn't very well adopted in our organization, and that was one of the goals of bringing in AppMon, that it was more usable, more user friendly, have more capabilities, and that we could really push adoption across our organization. I would say that it's helped us to be able to do that.

There was a gap that we had, and one of our big initiatives was availability of our applications, being able to make sure that our applications are available and stable; and being able to have that insight to know when they are and aren't. On top of that, was our customer-first efforts, and really trying to ensure that the products that we are putting out there, whether they're for internal or external customers to use, are really meeting their needs and performance needs.

I was involved when we initially went through the PoC, worked with our sales engineer, and brought the product in. I'm on the business side of things, so not necessarily the configuration of the server, the deployment of the agents, but really the configuration aspect that we need to gain the visibility into our applications.

I don't have any complaints about the installation process. We were able to get it ramped up really quickly. From where we started, the scale that we went to in just a couple, three months, was really impressive to me.

We had some other vendors on our shortlist. Dynatrace was able to demonstrate the full capabilities and functionality, working in our environment. The other aspect was its capturing of all PurePaths, that was really appealing to us as we want to make sure that we get that data so that we have it and we can use it if we need it.

Regarding the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud to monitor performance problems, we don't have a product that has AI right now, but that's something that we're really looking at right now. We're in the middle of PoC on the AI, and capabilities that are built within the Dynatrace product are really appealing to us. We're a large company, and we have a lot of applications, a lot of processes, a lot of hosts, and having something that will automatically detect anomalies and tell us when there are problems, without us having to tell the product when to tell us that there are problems, is something that's really appealing. That is certainly one of the features that we like within the Dynatrace product.

If we had one solution that didn't just give us data, but also real answers, the immediate benefit would be not needing either to have to sit there and watch a dashboard, or to go through the efforts of identifying and programming - within the tool - what is considered bad performance. Something that would detect anomalies, deviations, would certainly free up our time, because we would only have to engage when those things occur.

I think the most important criterion when working with a vendor is having people that obviously believe in the product and know the product very well. We've been very fortunate with the contacts that we've worked with. We have a really experienced sales engineer, and really good sales consultants. We look for ongoing engagement with them, and having them want to ensure that we have a success and ongoing success with the product. We want somebody who is really engaged and feels passionate about helping us get to where we want to get to with a solution.

I give AppMon an eight out of 10. With some of the new things that are coming with the Dynatrace product over the AppMon product, there are a lot of things there. With the couple of the stability issues that we've had throughout our tiers of experience, obviously shoring those things up would help make AppMon a 10. I understand they have a new platform and where they're going with that. I also think the new platform also has solved some of the complexity around it. For AppMon, in order to use the rich client especially, I think you have to be somebody who is in there more often than not. It's not necessarily as intuitive as it could be. The web client has certainly helped with that.

Obviously, find a great partner, find a great associate within the company from which you're looking to implement a solution. But then I would say internally, one of the biggest things that has helped us be successful is, we have a cross-business unit, a group of power users - we call it our APM COE group - that really have a vested interest and a passion around driving APM as a culture in our organization. On top of that, they are working very closely together to continue to innovate and support the Dynatrace AppMon environment that we currently have. That same group is working closely together to look at where we see us needing to go in the future. Where is technology driving us? We've got a really good overall pulse on what's going on within our organization, and how to pick the right solution for the right things.

Our primary use case is for application monitoring. We have the AppMon product. It is performing well. 

We do not have a whole lot of organizational buy-in for the product yet, so there is a struggle in getting the resources to work on it to fully exploit the product's value. 

It will allow us to eventually become more proactive when problems start arising. We can see them before they happen and address them before there is any impact to our customers. 

• The overall application monitoring ability to do alerts. 
• The dashboard, so people can see what is going on. 

We do not know, because we are currently on the AppMon and we are looking at converting to OneAgent. Therefore, we are in that middle realm saying, "OneAgent, which is now Dynatrace, what is it going to buy us?" 

Then, we can say, "Well, what else might we need?"

Previously, we called support mostly about implementation issues. Docker was one which was early on and the support structure for Dynatrace. Typically, they were trying to help us figure out third-party applications and where the monitoring agent should be located. 

It seems to be very stable. We have not had any outages attributed to the product. We have not had any downtime.

We are a medium-size implementation. We have not grown a whole lot yet with the product, so we have not faced scalability challenges. It seems to be pretty straightforward to grow with it and add-on. They have guides to help you do this. 

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems will become more important, as we move forward in the cloud and with distributed computing overall with AWS.

Support is pretty good overall. Occasionally, you will get that support person who is not real responsive. However, for the most part, things have been very good. 

We have used siloed monitoring tools. We faced similar challenges using them to what we face today in that we do not have the management buy-in to get the resources needed to fully exploit the tools. 

I have been involved in the upgrade process in the finishing of the initial implementation. It was pretty straightforward.

I did not have any issues setting it up. The documentation really helped. If I did run into a question, I received a pretty quick response from our support people. 

We have not fully been able to get the full value out of the product. It is expensive compared to other things that we have had in the past. Paying that much and not being able to get the full return on the product is a downgrade. 

The technical team probably could help us learn more about the product, but some of the problem is on our side and not having the management dedication to fully exploiting the tool. 

The product is definitely worth taking a look at. Be aware that it is probably more pricey than other options on the market, but there are a lot of capabilities. Dynatrace has an eye toward the future and the computing and monitoring needs that we are gonna need for the cloud. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit for my team would be spending less time finding out what caused the problem and potentially being able to have those cases automatically routed to teams who could address them. Our team would be able to have more time to dedicate to other projects. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Capability
• Stability of the vendor
• Market share
• Number of customers. 

We have multiple applications deployed in production across different technologies. We're using AppMon to monitor the services, the memory profiles, the traffic that comes through them.

It performs well. I have a team that works on configuring it, so they have a little bit of work ahead of them. It's not used across our development space, yet; so, not wide adoption.

It definitely helps, because my performance engineer, he can recreate a problem and he can give the developers what's happening, where to go look, all the information they need to be able to find what the root cause is.

The PurePath, being able to trace what's happening; to try to identify where the problems are and find the exact place to start looking.

We're thinking about moving to Dynatrace because AppMon is not scaling for us. One of the reasons I'm here at the Perform 2018 conference is to find out if there is a better way to use the product, not knowing that they were talking about the Dynatrace version. But to me, that's the logical place to go now.

So far, so good. Looks like Dynatrace is very simple to use. The sessions that we've been through here at the Perform 2018 conference, everybody has pretty much said installation is easy. Snap it in, a couple days later, you start getting information and you can put it right to use.

Scalability is the part that I'm looking forward to, because we're developing more and more microservices and, each time, for an AppMon license, you have to deploy it, you have to configure it, you to get charged for it. It's very time-consuming. Dynatrace is much easier, because it's auto-discovery.

We have a guardian that helps us. He's knowledgeable and gives us the right answers.

I think the role of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and monitor and manage performance issues, is huge. I have a directive to go to AI, shift left, go cloud, go microservice. All of that fits within a space where I don't have the resources to do that stuff manually, so let AI do it.

AppMon is our first APM solution. If we had one solution that could provide not only data, but real answers, if we deployed Dynatrace, and it got its own baselines, and then it told us, "We saw an anomaly, here's a problem ticket, somebody needs to look at that," that would be tremendous.

My most important criteria when working with a vendor are 

• support
• usability
• stability of the products 
• are they adopting to the upcoming technologies, because they're coming fast and furious? 

And so far, it looks like Dynatrace is doing all of that.

I would rate AppMon about six out of 10 because it's hard to set up, you have to have somebody very knowledgeable in the product. It's not intuitive. Out of a couple hundred people, I probably have 10 that know how to use it.

In terms of advice to someone who is looking at implementing a similar solution, I would say: Know your technology stack, know your applications, know what the roadmaps are, so you can make sure that you're implementing the right product to support all that.

We use it for our development teams to make sure we have development feedback loops. We run about 50 different development teams and development streams. It is very important for us to keep on top of our deployments. We ran about 950 deployments and the tool gives us the flexibility to ensure that we are staying as close to those deployments moving forward.

Before we had the tool we had no visibility into the user experience and capturing what was going on inside the browser. We utilized tags so we knew how many times people were doing certain things, but we did not know how the performance was, if users were satisfied with what they were doing, and if we were serving up errors. We had no ability to correlate anything that was going on in our back-end systems and what users were doing. Being able to have that viability and that insight into what is going on for our customers was immensely valuable across the board from the development perspective all the way through to higher level business people.

One of the reasons that we are going into the new Dynatrace platform. We have a lot of data. With that amount of data and my team being very small, we are not specifically developers, we do incident management and problem management. The administer of the Dynatrace tool makes sure the monitoring is out and available for everybody where it needs to be. We do not have time to look at all the data, and with all the AI and automatic stuff being able to do management zones when that coming to us soon, a lot of the feature sets which are moving forward will make my job so much easier. I will not have to work 60 to 65 hours a week to ensure I am getting stuff to the developers so they can do what they need to do.

Dynatrace is staying up with IoT and a lot of the cloud solutions, which is really going to be helpful for us in the future.

The most valuable things that we have seen are the user experience and capturing what the users are doing inside the browser, and being able to equate that back to the business and telling them how much of their company is doing what. Also, what the performance time is, so we can give that back to our developers and make sure that the developers are spending time on what they need to spend time on to make sure that they are noting performance of the website.

Stability and scalability have been issues right now. My understanding going forward, and I am cautiously optimistic, is that we will not have these problems anymore. I would really like for that to be the case. We are a large company. We do a lot of microservices. We are going into the cloud. We are doing a lot of different things. We use PCF and Docker. We do a lot of the different technologies. The ability for us to scale the solution is going to be very important, especially going forward, because we are exploding in size. We are supposed to grow at least two times in the next year.

Session replay availability is going to be the most amazing game changer for our company. We are very heavy into user analytics. There is a completely separate segment inside of our company that looks into things like user tagging and making sure that we are gathering who is doing what inside the site. The session replay ability and the ability to send that over to the call center to say, "Hey, we know, say this," or an automated response to our users to say, "Hey, we have a problem on our website clipping coupons", or pulling in some kind of eCommerce would be absolutely pivotal. It would absolutely change the game inside the company.

We have had some struggles with scaling. We are on our way to the new platform, the new Dynatrace platform, which will alleviate some of these pains. We were not expecting the level of adoption that we got with the product. We brought it in thinking a few of the teams in a segment of our company would want to use it. Everybody jumped in on it and jumped in on it really quickly. Therefore, we quickly ran into scalability issues, but we are working on alleviating that going forward.

We were on AppMon, and AppMon has its own monolithic drawbacks. On the new platform, we will not have any these problems. We can scale in the cluster horizontally.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale into the Cloud and manage performance problems is very important. We were hitting a problem with our scalability issues but now we are going larger. Part of the problem is we have so much data and we have no idea how to use it all. We would find blind spots and be able to help and do what we can when the issues came to us. If we had the issues telling us when there were problems before development and before call centers got the problems, we could retroactively go out and get the problems before customer call centers had problems. We have a problem inside the company that we have so much data and we have no idea what to do with it all. AI will help solve that issue and help move us forward. It could pull the stuff that is problematic, the most performing or non-performing issues, in areas where we want to see certain things.

We have used support quite extensively. We have had many very imperative tickets with them, and they are very supportive. They are very good with communication. They are very transparent in issues, what they need to do, and how they need to fix certain issues and problems. We have worked very closely with a lot of the support. We get a lot of offshore support from the Austrian development teams and a lot from the Polish development teams. Anybody they could pull in to make things happen and to make the pain go away for us, they do it, and they do it very well.

I have used Wiley, though not at this company.

We used to use AppDynamics. We did a PoC for CA Wiley. Before we brought in Dynatrace, we did a PoC with all of them. We just got rid of AppDynamics (out of our environment). They did not allow for the deep dive visibility. 

A lot of the problems that we had with products like AppDynamics was it got us to a certain point, then we were not able to see any deeper. It would dump us in something they called a metric browser, then we just got metrics, but we did not see what was going on in the underlying code. 

In Dynatrace, we could decompile the source code. We could see the things on the fly. We could see what is actually going on inside the tool. It has been very helpful. We did this thing with the Wiley tool, but it was just way too immature and they were not even close to even having any of the conversations that we wanted to have. 

I was involved in the initial setup, but I have done it before. I have done it on multiple different sites so probably done three stand ups so far: two at the prior company and one at this one. It is not bad. It was easiest with this company, because this company had a level of technical maturity that was not available in the other ones. If you have companies that are doing things like continuous delivery, having built pipelines and having the ability to do these things, it is a little bit easier. I have a feeling that the companies that are more technically challenged, the initial setup is going to be a little bit harder. 

Our main problems were around security and network, but those are hurdles that almost everybody has got to get over and build. It was not bad.

The vendor team tried to help during implementation. A lot of the struggles were not with the product. It was more with the way that we do things inside the company, so it was internal struggles from the company side. The product was always there and I could always reach out for support, if I needed additional help.

Look at your audience. Who is the audience that is going to be consuming your data? If it is going to be primarily developers then you want to be able to push this out through the business, there is no other solution. If you want your developers and people to actually see what is going on inside the code and be able to fix and proactively fix stuff before it happens, this is the solution that you want.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The vendor needs to be very future facing. We jump on technologies. We are a huge company with over 400,000 employees. We jump on new technologies within days or weeks of it coming out. This is not the best strategy in most cases and most larger companies tend to stay away from change. I have been in production environments where we have upgraded and changed the version of one of our most pivotal production servers within two days of it being released from the company. This is not usually the best thing. 

Dynatrace does a good job to make sure they stay out in front of the new technologies. We have had to ratchet back our development teams and tell them, "You need to wait at least a two or three weeks before you jump on the newest version, especially going into production." We know that most technologies inside of Dynatrace that they will move with us to make sure that we are keeping up with our development teams.

It's performing well. We typically use it for its intended purpose: application monitoring, identifying trends of release-over-release of our solutions, of average response time, impacts, server metrics. 

Specifically, for the subteams that I'm on, it's very much allowed us to get real insights into the impacts of our changes. It's allowed us to see pre- and post-metrics and be able to provide dashboards for our business. It's been extremely valuable.

One aspect of development is the concept of continuous improvements. There are key screens in our applications. We get identification, through Dynatrace on its own, that these are our top ten slow preforming screens. They choose to invest in optimizing those, and then we can show them the outcome through all the dashboards.

In the AppMon, offering, currently, would be just the PurePath analysis, being able to deep-dive into call chains.

The session replay. That's probably the biggest. I think that's the struggle right now, the ability to reproduce the customer's behavior. "Oh, I had a spinning wheel," or "I observed a error." And you're wondering, "Okay. How? How did you do that?" and they say, "I don't remember." Being able to replay exactly, the exact screen movements and everything, it's very indicative of a good feature.

One of my key focus areas does deal with performance testing, and Andy, here at the Perform 2018 conference, had a good session on performance testing. But it was a lot of utilizing a custom thing he built and "hooks" there, but they should make hooks into some of the more modern performance testing tools a little easier. I think that would go a long way.

We actually experimented with Managed initially, very early in its introduction, and it very much came off as a beta product, because some of the core capabilities were just generally throwing errors. But in what I've seen in the demonstrations here at the Perform 2018 conference, it has gotten a lot more polished. The AppMon part itsself is also better polished. So, I think it's the nature of trying to rewrite from the ground up.

I know, at least from an AppMon perspective, there's very much a limitation on memory and things of that nature. I think with the move towards the Managed product that they have some better opportunities there from a scaling perspective.

I, myself, have not directly used technical support. We have a team that actually focuses on directly tooling. They're typically a go-between with support.

Custom, home-brew.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, I think AI is significant when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, especially in regards to shifting the need for manual observations, and in terms of identifying system degradation, etc. I think it's extremely valuable in terms of being able to anticipate potential issues, as opposed to the typical reactive identification of issues. I'd rather an AI system find it before a customer communicates such.

Regarding one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to just top-level data, I don't think that's a possibility. Unfortunately, I don't think that there's always a one-solution-fits-all to any problem.

If a friend said he was looking to adopt an APM solution I would tell him, "Use what we have available in the enterprise, which is Dynatrace."