Dynatrace Reviews

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

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

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

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

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 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. 

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.

To detect performance issues and user experience, as well.

It performs very well.

It saves the company money.

The ability to detect the issue before it's a major cost.

I'd like to see self-healing and I'd also like to see more automation. It looks like is that's the direction Dynatrace is heading in, in their Dynatrace product.

We haven't had any downtime when using Dynatrace.

It is highly scalable.

Tech support is slow.

Going from the dev department back to the front-end customer service, then back to the dev. Then it just goes back and forth, back and forth, until they finally find a resolution. If you don't push through, then they won't resolve the issue right away. So you have to keep pushing, or they're going to just say, "You need to update."

Straightforward. We did it in-house.

I've tried other ones out, AppDynamics and others, as well. What made Dynatrace stand out was ease of use. It more intuitive.

Regarding the importance of the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, I believe that's the future, the correct direction that we're heading in. We're not in the cloud yet.

We've used siloed monitoring tools in the past. The challenge with that is that one person has all the knowledge, and then when they leave, you're left with nothing. Also, those tools are high-maintenance and there's a lot more manpower going into them.

If there was just one solution that could provide real answers and not just data, so it would tell you, "This is the problem. This is how you would solve it," the immediate benefit for our team would be helping diagnose issues quicker. Self-healing would be ideal.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that it has to be scalable, and I appreciate the forums.

Keep your options open, but Dynatrace is one of the major companies that can resolve your issues.

We have a platform that is like an automation of DevOps. The company is getting into the DevOps environment and the primary hurdle for them is to choose the right tools. Our customers do not know if they get stuck with one tool if they could not easily move to another one. 

Our platform, what it does, is we give them all the tools that connect to what they want. In that process, initially we integrated the options, like ELK and Nagios into our platform. Then, some of our clients also wanted Dynatrace in it. That is how we got Dynatrace also on our platform. So, we integrated their APIs into our application, so now all our clients can use Dynatrace too. 

The most valuable feature is that I am getting business. My clients ask me something, I go to my technical team and tell them, "They want this and this." From my clients' perspective, Dynatrace below the dashboard is very good compared to other monitoring tools. The dashboards are a really cool feature when I get to talking to clients. I ask them, "Why Dynatrace?" Because I need to push the tools that I have in my application. Then, they explain the monitoring of Dynatrace, saying the rate of the updates and features. They want to go with Dynatrace.

Introduce a cool feature called "all monitoring", or something like that. It briefs an entire session for you, monitoring and replaying that entire session, so it becomes very easy. A cool feature which I can sell to my customers, which can drive more customers to Dynatrace.

For stability, our customers have no complaints. 

We increased our Client to experiment with the tools, so we could find the right tools. Some of my previous customers whom we encourage them to switch to Dynatrace, they had no complaints.

I do not talk to technical support. Our clients talk to Dynatrace. All our clients inquiries are directed to Dynatrace.

My job is not to rest because my whole platform's aim is to move on to next to the tools, like finding out what is right for their environment. Initially, if I would ask them to go for Dynatrace. Then, after using it for approximately one month, I can tell them to find out what they like and what they do not like. They can go on from there.

AI is very important. The world is moving toward an automation. In the future, it is going to be a new Ops world. There is no resource for sitting on the operations side, so there will be an AI which will be doing all the work.

When we implement the solution, the developers just supply the code and all the automation that happens behind them. That is what they expect. For example, it needs to do its work in a formulation, then determine what kind of resources you need for that and what kind of servers we need for all that. Thus, AI is going to be a big thing.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers and not just the data,  the immediate benefit for the team is they do not have to spend time. So, the first thing is I don't have to bang my head about what is happening and where to find the solution. If I have something to use, which solves my problem. My life becomes easier.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They should be very stable. Like most of the products in market, when they do updates, they break down. This will usually cause a slow down briefly to customers. This is where we will see if the product is stable or not. 

The vendor should avoid rapidly giving updates every month without doing testing, because if you see in the past with AWS (for example) when they released the patches for the Spectre and the Meltdown problem, it affected almost every company around 20 to 30 percent of the parts went down. The companies did not know that the patch was up like that. Transparency is important, and also, test the solution before you actually implement it.

We primarily use it for performance monitoring and to track down solutions to ongoing issues.

Its performance is great. We previously had AppMon, and AppMon is a little bit difficult. But we're PoC-ing Dynatrace, and we love it so far.

We spend less time tracking down what's truly a problem and looking for problems, and more time actually solving the problems.

• The ease of use
• The ease of installation
• The simplicity of actually getting data out of it
• The artificial intelligence

It's more than just dashboarding. It actually tells you when you have problems, so you don't have to go set up anything. It automatically figures it out. The artificial intelligence is by far the most useful thing I've seen.

Without the AI, I don't think we would be able to grow at all. As we continue to grow, our environment gets more complicated and there are "segmented people" who know little pieces of it. The AI allows one item, the software, to be able to understand everything and provide all the data.

To me, dashboarding is still a little bit sketchy. I'm definitely of the mindset that the problem cards are just more than enough. But when you're making that transition from AppMon, which is very dashboard-oriented, over to Dynatrace, which is no dashboards, there needs to be something in between so that business buys in a little bit. To me, setting up the dashboards is not that easy to do.

There should be something that would help transition, especially customers like us who already are heavily into AppMon. I would transition my dashboards over so that we don't have to recreate them, because recreating them is very difficult in Dynatrace. I get that they're two different systems, but any legitimate company that is doing that... 

If you're starting in one or the other, you're totally fine. But if you're porting over... My boss has to do a whole business case on why she wants to do it, and it's really hard to say, "Oh, the dashboards that you had on the team that you were using, you're not going to get over here." Or, "You have to re-create them all over again." People are going to ask questions about cost, who is going to do that. Although the tool automatically does that, business hasn't seen it yet. So it's a really hard sale. I would love to see some kind of integration so that we can say, "Okay, we transferred at least 80% of your dashboards over."

I haven't had it long enough to truthfully rate stability. We've had AppMon long enough, about two years, and that's been rock solid, minus any upgrades. Every time we do an upgrade there's some instability. When it's not being upgraded, it's perfect.

Scalability is great. My biggest concern when we first put it in was the resources that it would take up, network traffic that it might create. But it seems perfectly scalable to any environment. Even on some of our heaviest use servers, it doesn't seem to affect anything. So to me, it can be put on any environment and keep growing.

We have a guardian. We don't actually call technical support. We have somebody on-prem. He's knowledgeable and almost always available. Whenever he's in the office, he's available. Even outside the office, he's pretty available.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I took this over from my boss, and she was involved in the initial setup. I was kind of thrown into it, so I was a little worried about that. But it's been pretty easy.

I'm involved in the switch from AppMon to Dynatrace. To me, that's the biggest upgrade we've got. For AppMon, I did training courses. We did one-on-ones with our guardian from Dynatrace. Even with those, it was still a very complicated tool to learn. With Dynatrace, we picked it up in minutes. It was very intuitive. That's what I can't believe. I almost wish we didn't waste the time doing the training for AppMon. I would have just gone straight to Dynatrace.

As for a tool that would not only give data, but real answers, it would make things even quicker. I actually think that's what Dynatrace does for us right now. It tells us the answer to what the root cause is. It doesn't actually fix it, which I'm hoping it will eventually do, but it actually gives us the right answers right now. That is better than what we had before, which was somebody would go in there and try to find the problem. They may not have gotten to the root cause, so they would put a temporary patch on it, and then it would come back again. Now, we seem to be getting to the root cause every time.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are knowledgeability and the future vision, which, to me, is the most important part of Dynatrace. They're not thinking about, "Here's a tool for today, and we're just going to keep improving it slightly." They already have a master plan for where they want to go, and the tool reflects it. It shows that they're just thinking way ahead.

I'd give it a nine out of 10. I think it's virtually perfect. There are some bugs in it. Sometimes things get hung just for second, and you have to refresh something. Also, they aren't necessarily intuitive, but to me, they're just going to get better over time.

My advice is, start directly with Dynatrace Saas. Don't start with AppMon. Don't do the other older solutions. Just go straight in. Even if you have on-premise, SaaS is much better to start with.