Dynatrace Reviews

We use AppMon to monitor our production system today. We're also looking at ways to get our development teams looking into things as they commit, and identifying performance problems, as soon as we can.

Our team is one of the few development spaces in our organization that actually uses Dynatrace to give us some feedback in terms of performance level, test regions, things like that. We're trying to find ways to get other people involved there.

When I first started, it was about five years ago, I don't really recall what was being done for application performance monitoring. But about three or four years ago they put Dynatrace into place, and I know it's provided a lot of insight, especially when we had production outages, to troubleshoot and quickly identify the problem.

For us, some of the troubleshooting features for development, the PurePath technology. The dashboarding gives us some good insight into some fluctuations in some of the application areas. But, seeing the new Dynatrace stuff makes me think, it could be a little easier.

If there was something that could be done at a local developer's station, something like, "Hey, here's a hint, this thing looks like it might not be optimized," or the like. More development features, to hedge that performance.

Some of the UEM capability interfered a little bit with one of our UIs. Aside from that, I don't think I know of any performance problem with the application.

I don't think we've had any problems with scalability.

I have not called tech support, but we do have a guardian. I know that one of our performance engineers actively works with him to work through any kinds of problems, configuration problems, things like that. We've had good support from them.

I don't know that we use too much in the way of AI to scale our production today. We do use Pivotal Cloud Foundry when we do have some auto scaling-up of some of our microservices. But those things, I definitely think are going to become more commonplace, and more part of everything that we do. 

I think the AI stuff is going to help us going forward, because we're breaking apart some of our bigger, monolithic applications, and building our microservices, so there are going to be things that need to scale up, scale down, based on what someone is doing. So I think that AI stuff is really going to drive a lot of that.

Regarding one tool that could provide not only data but real answers, even with PurePath and things like this, it still takes time, a day or whatever - or expert knowledge of some person - to be able to identify a problem quickly. From what I've seen so far, the AI stuff actually gives you at least five, six, different possibilities at worst case. So, just that insight alone would be a big time-saver for everybody.

When working with a vendor, I think it's really important that they're - I don't want to say available - but responsive. And I think with the guardian service we've been using so far from Dynatrace, it's worked pretty well.

I would rate AppMon a seven out of 10. I think at times it has given some folks some headaches from a configuration standpoint, and a maintenance standpoint, but aside from that I don't think they've really had many headaches with it.

Definitely weigh your options. I know there's some availability for proof of concept with Dynatrace, where they actually work with you, whether it's a guardian service or sales. They will work with you to identify the proper solution and setup for you, so I think that's really a good thing, instead of just dropping some software product on your platform.

Currently, primary use case for the usage of AppMon is what I will call our flagship applications across the bank. We have had it about three years. Adoption was over time, one app at a time. then more and more. All of our major flagship applications now have AppMon dashboards. We do have some SaaS, but that is because the applications are cloud-based solutions. The use case frankly is about improving monitoring, system uptime, and preventing of events. If you have thresholds set correctly, along with alerting, and all the other stuff, your operational teams can find things before the field even notices.

We have substantially lowered incidents in our organization. It is hard to really measure it exactly from a percentage of how many have been lowered. As a general statement, there is no question that the number of incidents and the duration of incidents have dropped. Even if we do get caught blindsided by some infrastructure failure or something, our ability to pinpoint the problem through things like PurePath have dramatically reduced incident time. Whether you want to argue about AppMon, SaaS, or cloud from a business value point of view, that is tangible even for our non-technical people at the bank. They get this.

• The threshold alerting is what makes the difference. 
• The PurePath stuff for deep dive analysis on problems. That is massive as far as having a benefit. 

The dashboard is eye candy, because it's just a screen. It looks nice but the thresholding and alerting is what makes it meaningful because we are a 24/7 operation. As you can imagine, 2:00 AM in the morning, you can't necessarily afford to have a bunch of people staring at glass. We have to have the mechanism of the alerts, which is tied into our others systems, like xMatters. That is how it works for us.

I do not know everything that is in the hopper. What I am about to say could already be in the hopper. I am learning more about so called 7.1, be it SaaS or AppMon. Setting up the thresholds and alerting, it is complicated to understand their use cases. In other words, as a business perspective, you want to say, "I want this to alert under these conditions." However, you have to translate that in terms of all the various settings in Dynatrace. Whereas, it would be easier if Dynatrace just had a button that said, "I want this alerting use case," and I just pushed a button, then it set the 17 values behind the scenes. That would probably be a more user-friendly way. It does not require the user to understand what a threshold is or even what the different intervals of thresholds are. It is just a black box. It is like, "I want this experience," and it just figures out what to set.

The product is evolving, maybe too fast; maybe it is a little bit fragmented of an evolution. It is sort of expected in a way because the company, in my impression, is spending a lot more money. It is a function of the fact that they are growing as a company and revenue is growing, so there is probably a lot more emphasis on R&D and different product development. My expectation is that over time it will become a more unified, stable product. However, generally, from the product itself, we have not had issues with it, like something that monitors the monitor. We have not really had to worry about it.

I have not been aware of any limitations. I know that the older version of AppMon, the so called classic version, had some limits on number of agents per server. However, those limits never really caused a challenge for our particular topology.

As our adoption was in its infancy, we had the physical Dynatrace guardians, local from local areas, if you will, in our city. That was like our support because they were physically onsite. As our own staff became enabled and just basically knew the product, we frankly did not really need support, unless it was a product defect or something like that. In which case, we had a team within our company that was the interface for them.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. A lot of products have obviously been around for years, even before Dynatrace. Typically, they are technology or topology specific. You have got a certain operating system or environment which is the product of choice for that environment: different operating system, different environment, and different product. You will also end up with a whole lot of tools sets, even depending on if you want a synthetic use case, something like Foglight as an example. You just wind up with too many tools. Even this morning, Dynatrace's CTO talked about this very problem. I guess Dynatrace is trying to solve this with one-shoe-fits-all. Which as an organization, who would not want a multi-supported application product that can go across all the topologies, cloud, and everything else?

There was a product we used before Dynatrace. We are a big mainframe shop, so it was a mainframe product. It was really built for the IBM mainframe. Because we were heavily in mainframe and this is going back a few years now, that was the product for choice for mainframe. Then, with web-based solutions, all these applications, cloud, and everything else coming, we needed something else. I do not really quite know how it happened exactly, but somebody talked to somebody who talked to some Dynatrace person. Then, I remember actually going to the very first ever meeting where a Dynatrace person came on our site. They asked me to attend because I'm a big stakeholder and I guess it just went from there.

At the decision time, we did have a senior executive emphasis on the business that there just appeared to be too many incidents and we are a major financial institution with 40,000 employees in the field essentially generating revenue on practically a 24/7 basis. If one of the systems that they use is even down for 10 minutes, that is like $1 million lost. So, there were a lot of events and the timing was right. Whether that was good timing on Dynatrace's part, because we had a problem that we needed to improve, they came into our location, we had a marriage, and we have been with them since. 

I was involved in one of the very first implementations, but I did rely on an infrastructure team that did the physical installation and acquisition of virtual servers, as far as the agents and the nodes. I was physically involved on a team that wrote one of the very first dashboards. This is three to four years ago. It was more about just learning the product, frankly. I look back now and I can close both eyes now. At that time, it took some time getting used to it, but I would not call it overly complex.

There may have been minor things, but that was more our own people trying to understand it. We may have had it, such as, "Let's install this agent on this server," then it didn't work. Then, "Oops." You have to back it out, then three days later, put it back in. A lot of that is teething. I do not see that as a product limitation. It is just sometimes you don't necessarily know what you don't know and kick the tires a couple times. Now, whether the product could have maybe been a little easier? It's hard to say in hindsight.

I don't want to bring up Apple, but you can think of the Apple example. Apple has this idea that you just take it out-of-the-box and turn it on. That's it. That's your extent of configuration. Dynatrace isn't quite like that, but probably for a reason, because the idea that it could just work as is doesn't make sense, because the individual customer environments are just so different. You couldn't possibly have one-size-fits-all. It is almost impossible.

We had Dynatrace guardians onsite. 

I would definitely recommend Dynatrace. I would say not to be fearful and embrace it. It is a combination of personal comfort level in your staff, so I would probably recommend you start with a medium to low profile application and just aggressively implement Dynatrace. Once you get accustomed to it, then go with the all-in adoption. 

It is a great product, but your staff and your people, unless you are completely turnkeying it for someone else, they have to understand it. You implement it, and if people don't understand it and use it, then you are really not getting anywhere. That is probably the key part I would make to any recommendation, make sure you train your people or bring in the guardians or use the guardian for six months.

Our technology is constantly evolving. Obviously, the tools like Dynatrace we do hope and expect, frankly, that they will continue to evolve the AI element. I still think there is room in AI technology. Obviously it is getting better all the time. Voice assistant products are obviously the new thing now. So, there are a lot of changes in that technology. My expectation is that we will get way more sophisticated AI alerting and monitoring capability in Dynatrace and we will be happy to embrace it as it becomes available.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit to my team would be to reduce human interpretation where you have to log on and interpret data. Any automated interpretation on a user's behalf, or operational team, it will be better.

Our primary use case is, we're using AppMon as our main tool for capacity and performance, my team is in charge of all of application performance. 

For us AppMon is unbeatable in the market. We have tried to find other vendor solutions because of the pricing - we're trying to save money - and we couldn't find any other tool that gives us the same amount of information in terms of performance and root cause analysis.

It performs very well if you right-size the infrastructure where you have to deploy it.

I won't say that it improved how our organization functions, but it has improved the time that we need to detect problems; not only before going into production, but problems in production.

Problems in production took us a long time, before, to find the real cause. With this tool, we find them in a very short time. In matter of minutes, we know what the problem is. We are in the banking industry, and in the banking industry you can't allow yourself to be offline.

For us, it improved our SLAs with the business side of our company.

The memory dumps, the tracing, and PurePath. All the tracing that you can do with the tool is, for us, our life. It's our daily job and it saves us a lot of time looking for performance issues.

Something that we have been talking about with the people, here at the Perform 2018 conference, and with the project manager is: On the one hand we have Dynatrace, on the other hand, we have AppMon. We know Dynatrace is more powerful, with a lot of functions, but there are some core functions AppMon has that Dynatrace needs. Our main use is AppMon and we have not gone to Dynatrace because we don't have those specific functions that we need.

If Dynatrace changed it and included all those functions, we would definitely go to Dynatrace, but without them, we stay with AppMon.

At the beginning we used a small infrastructure and we had some problems. With enough capacity it performs very well.

We feel quite comfortable with the scalability, because we have a very huge environment. We have more than 10,000 agents installed, and we have scaled from the beginning. Right now, we have bought a lot more agents because we are deploying microservices and, for us, it works.

They were helpful. They pinpointed exactly what the problem was, because for us it was a strange behavior. It was not downtime, but we lost metrics sometimes, and not always at the same time. We found that it was because the lack of capacity of the servers where we installed the server part of Dynatrace. 

We did not have to wait for answers from them.

We used an in-house developed solution and we had another solution, CA Wily. We decided on Dynatrace because of the features. Dynatrace has a lot more features than what we had and at that time.

We were in CA Wily and we tried, I think, something from IBM at that time. We decided to go with Dynatrace because it was the best for us. In the nine years that we've been with Dynatrace, from time to time we research the market to find out if there's any other solution. In IT, there's always a lack of budget, you should save cost whenever possible, but in those years we haven't find another one.

We discovered the AI capability of Dynatrace previously, and we are willing to go  there, but we haven't gone there yet. We think it's important because right now we have a team of six or seven people working with this, and the AI would allow us to use those people in other tasks, rather than looking for performance issues.

We have used some other monitoring tools in the past and still are right now. We have a lot of them, to give what Dynatrace provides in just one app. That's a challenge because our organization is big. A problem of being big is that deploying a lot of tools is very difficult and it's not the same as deploying only one tool. Deploying only one tool is easier than deploying more than one and keeping up to date with the new versions. With several tools, it's very difficult. For us, that's a key factor of Dynatrace, not only the AppMon but the whole suite gives us a lot of information that, if you want to have it without Dynatrace, you would have to have a lot of tools installed.

The immediate benefit of one solution that would not only give data but real answers, would be time savings.

Our most important criteria for working with a vendor are that they meet our technical requirements and give us support; and support in Spain, and in Spanish, that is very important for us. We like to work with companies that understand us and work with us, who will be partners.

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10 because, as I said, there is no other like this right now. Probably, there are some things that other tools could do, but not everything together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it's tuning and problem resolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is one of the core enterprise tools that we use for detecting incidents and paging out to teams when a problem happens. Ideally, it is proactive. This is what we are looking for and what you would expect with Dynatrace: To be looking for things that are going south and getting people on the phone to deal with them beforehand. With a large enterprise, where we are, there are a lot of different teams on the phones, so Dynatrace is hopefully giving us where in the large ecosystem of the application the problem actually is. Therefore, basic use cases, but this is what Dynatrace is good for.

We do have the pockets today where teams have started to get better at giving us a cohesive view. We use AppMon a lot to fuel the metrics that we have. Therefore, we are starting to create dashboards on top of AppMon that pull together information from a few sources and actually provide that cohesive view. We are just now starting to proof of concept it with some of the business teams to see if we can get traction and start to fill in some of the gaps that we have.

PurePath is a very staple thing for it, because within one transaction all the way through you can see the bits and pieces from when the user first came in to the database. We have mainframe components and a lot of middleware layers as well. To have one place where you can see the entire flow all the way up and back is invaluable and it saves lots of time.

It looks like they are actually fixing the issues in version 7. Therefore, I am real excited to get it in, because the core problems that we are having, the newest version seems to be fixing. If we can get out of actually having to handle every problem, it can let teams start to get steam on their own.

The stability has been wonderful for the couple of years that I have been involved with it. It has really been the key tool of choice that anytime anything goes down anywhere, it is typically the tool that is shown on the big screen in front of everybody or shared through a Skype session. It is getting to the point that the CTO of the organization knows the tool by first name and will look to have it brought up, because it is so consistent, reliable, and a cornerstone for solving problems. 

This one I would defer to my team a little bit, but I do hear a few gripes scalability-wise. It is a very good tool, and we have got it to do what we need to do. However, I do know that for the size of our organization, we're talking thousands of agents and hundreds of applications, it does get to the point where the servers themselves that house Dynatrace are at a point where, in some cases, they are just too big for one machine, since you have to have an entire application ecosystem all funnel into a single system. One of the things we run into is, when we deploy agents, it is a bit finicky sometimes about how that happens. We have had to put in measures to make sure that applications do not get an upgrade for Dynatrace until we specifically quarter them off, making sure that we have a very careful process to troubleshoot them because we have had several instances where applications have had issues after an upgrade.

I have a very good team who are very good at this, so from my perspective, I would say is Dynatrace is one of the few companies where it seems their people are still ahead of my team in terms of troubleshooting things. Some of the other applications that I have, I feel like my guys should be paid by the companies that troubleshoot. The Dynatrace support team that we have is great and the staff that we have had onsite has been consistently good.

My company has used siloed monitoring tools. We do not actually try to get rid of those best of breed tools, but there are some obvious problems with them. Today, a network tool does not use the same terminology as a database tool, and the database guys do not talk the same language as the app teams. Thus, very frequently there are very silent organization or we will have huge gaps between these things. Not only do you have a conversational barrier between teams, you will frequently have whole sections of the network that are not monitored or people who think, "Well that's not my side, the network is good," and the database guy will say, "My side is good and the database is fine." However, there is obviously something in the middle that is not there. That siloing is very damaging to working on a big team trying to fix things quickly. 

Before Dynatrace, it was a smaller list of niche tools. Dynatrace was the first tool that started to slice horizontally through all the different silos and provide feedback.

I was not at the company three years ago for the initial setup.

I would wholeheartedly recommend the platform as it is, but looking for someone who is just getting into it and does not have a lot of experience, Dynatrace 7 seems to be easier to get into than AppMon was before. So, it is a great starting point today.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit to my team would be two things, and they are both on the business end of what we do. Today, our business customers are very frustrated with the ecosystem that we have in place because there are so many complex components. They really want a solution where they can see what is the actual impact for the people who are trying to use the application. If I am trying to go in and check a balance or trying to buy something, they really want to know how many people are being impacted by that today. Then, what actually is the technical problem behind the scenes, but so often, we have a lot of technical problems, but we have a really hard time prioritizing what those are as a cohesive solution. If our business customers could say, "80,000 people are impacted by incident A, but only 200 people are affected by incident B." This would provide an entire view that would be so much better for trying to prioritize development teams to fix problems, and we don't have this typically today. 

We are in AppMon 6.5 today. We have people on my team who are sort of a tiger team that have to get involved whenever there is a performance problem because there is almost an art form to using AppMon today. What I have seen so far of Dynatrace and the OneAgent today, it removes a lot of the AppMon art form. I see a lot of value in moving to 7.1 later this year. I am very excited to see when some of our teams, who are not as familiar with Dynatrace but know the application, can start using the application more.  Hopefully, it will reduce and back off the need to constantly bring in my Tier 3 team as super experts and help and to maybe focus more on key problems, letting teams deal with things themselves. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Having a company that has been around for a while and has multiple products that we can leverage cost of scale.

We developed an application problem. We have had some issues that we can not bind. A lot of people recommended to us using an APM solution. By chance, one of them worked for us.

Now, it has been three years. Fortunately, it helps us to diagnose problem more quickly.

We spend less time investing in problems. We can spend more time on developing new projects. 

We use PurePath to see exactly what the user observed from the web browser to the end of the request to the dialog box. Every step of what they do is very useful for us to diagnose a problem.

The missing feature that we really need to have is session playback, because customers say, "Oh, it didn't work! I have the error page," but it is very difficult to point to exactly what they do. That is why with session playback it will show us exactly where the customer pointed, clicked, or went. This makes it easy for us to see, "Okay, you went there," because before we used the view. Right now, we do not have a user-action type in the reality to follow page to page. Now, with the new future that Dynatrace is releasing, it is exactly what I wanted.

Also, I would like a tool that can give me a one page view of all the problems and issues.

It is stable. I can see it is stable because we do not have any issues with the project that we use it for everyday. We have a lot of people dedicated to using it.

It is easy to scale because every tool that we integrate with the solution we can do so easily. 

I do not deal directly with the support team of Dynatrace. We always have special work to do when we deal with them.

From everything that I have heard about the support team, I would say they provide very good support.

We did not have an APM solution before Dynatrace. Dynatrace was our first APM solution.

We do not use siloed monitoring tools.

It was difficult to initially use the solution, how to use it and where to navigate. After that, they said, "We should some course training for people." 

After people were trained, it is easy. The first time, however, was very difficult for us, not knowing how to get started.

I would recommend Dynatrace. It is amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using Dynatrace for application monitoring. 

In the past, we would spend more time on identifying the root cause and finding the solution. After implementing Dynatrace, we easily see that we are capturing all the exceptions. Just build on the error message, then we usually quickly fix it.

Dynatrace is performing well so far.

We have identified some critical issues, which are not available or recreatable in the Dev or QA environment. They are only happening in production, and they are easy for us to identify in the production environment. We can usually identify issues and fix them.

The data monitoring is good for us, and also the performance monitoring. We have been using both extensively for the last three to four months. We have been capturing all the information and evaluating whether it can be improved or not.

Since we have been receiving alerts from Dynatrace, we go ahead and fix them without the user knowing about them. Sometimes the users never know that they are having issues and they are stuck. So, in 10 minutes, we fix it and business runs as usual without any problem.

I am able to identify issues very quickly.

I just heard about the management zone. I also got some hands-on with the early version. I feel it is a good feature to handle integrating all the services together in one place.

So far, the stability has been good.

Not yet, we started just six months before. Right now, we are on six to seven applications been monitored. 

We started implementing microservices. Microservices means now it is hundreds of services. In the future, maybe in three to six months, we are expecting thousands of services will be implemented. In this way, the solution will definitely help us to identify the entire thousands of services that need to be monitored. So, it will gives us some alert and we build on it.

We did use technical support in the initial phase when we were struggling to get into the tool. We felt they were knowledgeable.

They do have a salesperson we can contact in India.

Our switch to Dynatrace was very internal. We got a different management team, and the new management team came in and decided that we needed Dynatrace now. They had experience with it already. They knew that where we were facing issues on monitoring side.

There were some other monitoring tools, like SolarWinds. However, the new management team felt that Dynatrace would be the perfect for us.

We were and still are using SolarWinds as a monitoring application.

I was not involved in the initial setup or upgrades.

I would recommend doing a PoC.

Before adopting Dynatrace, we were evaluating multiple systems, such as AppDynamics and SolarWinds.

I am not much into the area of AI, but I still see it removing some of the non-value added work which we are doing daily, such as sitting and monitoring the server, which is not a value addition. AI is an area where we get somebody to watch it, we get alerts, then we act on them instead of just going through all the locks. Especially IoT side, even though I am on the development side, still we concentrate on AI and IoT, where we see more focus and we just started learning all those things, and implementing them in our company.

If I had a solution which would give me a real answer, not just a data, the immediate benefit would be a global application and support, because we are working in Asia. Sometimes we get incidences during the US morning when we are not at the office. If I can get the benefit of a solution, which can alert us and solve itself. It is an automation thing where we do not want to wake up late at night and work on the application.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: A vendor should be reachable at any time.