Dynatrace Reviews

We are monitoring around 200 applications. We use Dynatrace for that. 

Dynatrace is great. With Dynatrace, we have a solution for every sector. Sometimes, there are a lot of problems to maintain every aspect of every software. So, when we found Dynatrace with its one solution in one unique place to monitor for other problems. We are using Dynatrace for prediction and staging for every step of our development cycle. So, we love Dynatrace

We moved to Dynatrace, because we were looking for one solution that could provide the real answers, not just data. That is what we wanted: One solution that would give back our reporting and a lot of benefits that we can find with Dynatrace. The benefit for our company is that we have one direction and one main solution.

This is more consideration to the performance issue with Dynatrace mainly because we have no dodgeball with jobs reporting and you can easily see performance on this application of this sector.

Dynatrace came up with a solution for everyone. It helps us to streamline fixes by easily showing bugs and what needs to be improved in a big system. We have seen overall improvement due to Dynatrace.

Mainly navigation needs improvement. It is easier to follow a flow. Following the flow of the admin now is not easy.

The UX/UI needs improvement. It is not easy to learn. 

I really want to use the new Dynatrace dashboard.

I know the IT team, who installed Dynatrace, maintains it. They sometimes have had small problems in which Dynatrace is not available because the server is overloading, but they are working on it. 

We are moving our application and our server to the cloud.

I have not used technical support.

We used Admon.

At the beginning, when we started to use Dynatrace, we had Dynatrace and we stayed with the other solution. Naturally, Dynatrace took its place in the workplace, in the app. and in every other sort of solution.

Use Dynatrace now.

AI could be the most beautiful part of Dynatrace's future. We really want to use it. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Have a good solution.
2. Have good support.

There are a lot of solutions on the market, but Dynatrace brings an application suite that is very good. So, for now, we will stick with Dynatrace for a long time.

I use DT for identifying performance bottlenecks on the DB, mid-tier and front-end, which is built on .Net platform.

The performance testing is executed using the LR tool, where the DT headers are added. Once the test is completed with the filter criteria in dashboard, we are able to segregate the transactions having slow response time and root cause.

For one of the trading applications, we were able to identify the slow performance query which was resulting in overall performance degradation of the GUI. The Query involved multiple joins and clause which when executed by multiple users slowed the overall DB response time. From the DB Chart in DT and DB Dashboard, we were able to arrange the Query within the SP against slow response time/execution time. Analysis resulted in optimizing the query resulting in improved performance.

The dashboard customization based on the performance metric requirement is one of the most exciting features in DT. I am able to customize my dashboard based on the test requirement and it helps me to focus on the area that really needs close monitoring.

I would suggest to have more rich client features on Appmon as soon as possible. I agree most of the things can be done using Appmon, but users (like us) are bit hesitant to use Appmon compared to the Client.

We have about 150 servers to be monitored and manual monitoring is a pain. We use Dynatrace to help our team in monitoring server health, CPU utilization, application errors.

Previously, the team had to do manual monitoring but now we have Dynatrace to alert the support team for immediate assistance.

Alerting mechanism and drill down to the error details using PurePaths.

I like the auto email alerting feature the most, as it is set up based on the application error or condition.

Current issue is adding a new resource or removing an old resource. It would be helpful if we could include group distribution email IDs for alerting.

The most important features are the ability to see trends in performance and also to aid in diagnose any performance degradation in the web applications and utilize the tool to provide a faster solution and faster root cause analysis to the problem.

While monitoring our site, I noticed over a period of time that our west coast users would see degraded service every night around 10pm. Ultimately, I was able to use the tool to prove to our CDN provider that they had an issue with their routers in the west coast that had to be corrected to solve our performance issues. Without the Compuware tool, we would not have been aware of the issue nor been able to prove the issue to our service provider.

One are that I could see improvement is a better data collection and management. At times I saw that there was a ton of data available, but that also meant a ton of data to cipher through and analyze to evaluate. I often had to utilize Compuware engineers that specialize in data analysis to help gather and diagnose the data that we collected.

I've used their products for four years.

I don't recall ever having issues with stability. It is a very stable SaaS solution.

I've never had any issues with scalability, but scalability comes with a cost directly associated to how much you scale out your solution.

At times customer service could be really good, but most of the times I thought that this is a huge area where a lot of improvement could be made. They offer a great way to open service tickets online, but if you want to call in and get a live person to diagnose issues it is very hit and miss.

It's the same as customer service.

I did not use a different solution, but most companies I have worked at have instituted a number of different monitoring solutions and so there isn't a one size fits all solution for all monitoring and reporting needs.

Deployment was usually straightforward, but at times it could be complicated by whether or not to add additional data base servers and configuration of making sure that everything talked to each other through firewalls, etc.

Initially getting set up and configured was some what complex and took a bit of a learning curve. Once you set everything up, the software runs itself practically, but takes continual monitoring and tweaking to ensure that you are getting the most out of the product.

We utilized account managers and expertise through Compuware to aid in any questions we had regarding implementation.

The return on investment is the cost savings in developer's time in troubleshooting, analyzing, and finding the root cause of application issues and coming to a resolution. Unfortunately the business often found it hard to equate savings to something that they couldn't see. But having a major issue right before renewal helped keep the software in the short term as there was not another solution that offered what Compuware did for root cause analysis of the web applications.

The product was already in place when I started my position. I had looked at other products later and most of them were cheaper, but they lacked the full end to end solution and were not as robust.

Their products are fantastic, but the issue isn't the product, but the price for the product and also getting developers and business to value the importance of the data that is collected. Some businesses run their web ecommerce around metrics gathered on performance where other companies fall behind and don't give it as high of a priority.

I would recommend that you understand the business requirements for performance, uptime, consumer experience, and what is ultimately the most important thing you want to deliver.

My primary use case is application performance monitoring.

The move valuable feature is the AI engine, which is amazing.

The reporting could be better.

I have been using Dynatrace for around three years.

Dynatrace is very stable.

This solution is definitely scalable.

I've had no issues with technical support.

It was very, very, very easy to set up.

The pricing is not bad, but it could be better.

Dynatrace is best-suited for large enterprises. I would advise those looking into implementing this solution to do the training because it's not easy to understand without it. I would give Dynatrace a score of nine out of ten.

Our primary uses for this solution are Production monitoring and RUM (Real User Monitoring).

Since implementing this solution we have gained stability, with 100% uptime.

The most valuable feature is the RUM. Finally, we have 100% visibility on website performance, including third-party sources.

This solution would be improved with the addition of annotations for automated custom metrics creation.

Our overall stability has improved with this solution.

Our primary use case is performance improvements and understanding the customer struggle. Dynatrace gives us real-time data that we can use within the office to display data.

• Greater insight into the customer experience and front-end user experience. 
• Bespoke dashboards and reports which help our business to grow.

• Bespoke business transactions providing greater performance insight. 
• Adaptable business transactions which can accommodate new developments.

• Needs a greater meta data capture.
• Usability on the front-end for non-technical people. Although, it does prove great support and problem solving collaboration.

Application process monitoring, and user-experience monitoring.

It's used for monitoring inside of applications, like JVM thread-level applications, plus the user. I monitor usage statistics, performance statistics, plus the user satisfaction level.

We got to know which modules of my application are used more by the customers, as well as which modules of my application are very slow. It has helped with my overall my performance statistics.

There are different phases of product development. In the testing phase I was not able to determine if things were going fine or what was going wrong in my application. But using this tool, I got to know - even before the customer got to tell me - this or that particular module was not working. 

Using this tool, I got to know the moment he got a page-out error on his screen. It told me, for example, a person in the US is facing this particular issue. Because the alert came, we worked on it, we resolved it and things were easy.

The moment he called us we just said, "Yeah, we have already acknowledged that issue and we have resolved it. You can just try it again." The person was happy. The customer's satisfaction has improved, overall.

We also got know many internal code bugs which could have caused memory leaks or other issues which we were not able to catch during that development phase.

We also got to know, on the network level, where the latencies were. If you go via Google, what Google says is that you have a number of things on which you should measure your performance. One is if there's an error or not. Dynatrace tells you whether is an error or not. Second is saturation, whether something is getting saturated. You should be aware of what is getting saturated. Dynatrace even tells you that. The third is if there is a latency. Network latency is also told to me by Dynatrace. So these are three things I got out of Dynatrace.

The performance features are most important ones. That would include reporting, you get reports on your performance data.

The next is the alerting feature. For example, my applications are going out on some thresholds. So I get alerts, according to the thresholds I set. I get that data via emails as notifications. That is another feature that we primarily use and we like from Dynatrace.

Also, it's easy to use. The usability is better in Dynatrace.

The fourth thing is: my customer is facing some issue. The linking is very good in Dynatrace. What happens in other monitoring tools is the linking is not proper. In those solutions, a person has to manually link many of the layers and what is happening in them, while in Dynatrace you get that from the very first visit. For example, if a person is visiting your website, from there it will traverse you to the end. If the application is a Java application, it will traverse you there, to the Method level. So that linking and traversing is better in Dynatrace.

If Dynatrace is capturing everything in your application, it has to "sense" that information, and that sensing needs sensors which we have to include in our applications. The more you apply sensors - the more details you want  - the more you have to increase the level of sensing. If I increase the level of sensing, my application's performance goes down, because something is there that is, again and again, checking each and every thing in the application. So that load on the applications increases.

So, many times my applications used to crash because Dynatrace was working on them. So that was a negative point. We had to remove some sensing; either we had to reduce the sensing or we had to remove Dynatrace immediately. So that is one thing we don't like about Dynatrace.

And the second is dashboarding. The dashboarding in Dynatrace is not very good. We have used other monitoring tools like AppDynamics. We are also using AppDynamics for some of our products. If I compare Dynatrace with those monitoring tools, the dashboarding is not as good. If I have to create a dashboard it takes me time, the experience is not that good. The automatically generated reports are good, but the dashboarding was something we were expecting but did not get.

Also, sometimes it happens that we are not able to capture things. For example, if a person is logged in from India, from the city of Mumbai, and is using a Chrome browser, and his email ID is xyz@abc.com. But what happens is, Dynatrace just fetches two pieces of the information, not all of it. Sometimes it gets it all, sometimes it doesn't. So that also came into picture.

The last and the most important, which we did not like about Dynatrace - and that's why we switched to other monitoring tools recently - was the support. We were not able to get proper, good support from Dynatrace. We had to raise a lot of tickets and then, one fine day their people would eventually come around and resolve the issues. The input we had to give them was very high. Support was very bad for Dynatrace, especially in the India region.

When you go for a monitoring tool, there are two types. One is SaaS. The SaaS version means that the monitoring tool is not deployed on your servers, they are deployed on their servers. The second one is on-premise.

We were using the on-premise and we were using very good servers for the Dynatrace deployment. Stability didn't come into picture. The version that they gave us was very stable. There were was no code bugs. Actually, there were some, but those were fixed immediately.

As far as on-premise was concerned it was fine.

Scalability was fine. We were using around 100 application licenses, 100 Java licenses. On that scale it was able to handle everything. There was no reason to scale it up. I'm not sure if it could be scaled up to 500 or 600 licenses. We didn't do that. It was able to handle the load in the one tier.

I rate tech support very low. The technical support was not that good. They were not very attentive whenever there were issues, even the critical ones. We were not able to find the proper support from their end so I don't rate it very well. A one or a two out of five.

Initially, we were using New Relic. But, after that we switched to Dynatrace because of the amount of functionality, the amount of troubleshooting it was giving us was more. That's why we shifted from New Relic to Dynatrace.

But once we saw the negative points of Dynatrace, we recently shifted from Dynatrace to AppDynamics. We are in a process of shifting all applications from Dynatrace to AppDynamics.

It was straightforward. It was was easy to add up. It was not complex at all, while the other monitoring tools are more complex than Dynatrace. Dynatrace was not that bad.

The licensing for Dynatrace is high. If you want to go for monitoring solutions, then why Dynatrace? If you have a particular budget, you can go for many other monitoring tools - apart from Dynatrace - and they can help you more and give more data than Dynatrace can.

And secondly Dynatrace also comes with a lot of issues, which I have mentioned elsewhere in this review, which can easily be rectified using other tools. It's not worth the money that you spend for Dynatrace.

Initially we were using New Relic itself. Dynatrace was one thing that we were evaluating. ManagingEngine was a new one at that time from what I recall but, I'm not sure which ones were part of the evaluation, because I was not totally a part of the PoC.

Apart from that, if you want to use on a system level, you can use Nagios, that's freeware. It's also good but, again, it is just a system monitoring tool. It's not an APM. So if you wanted to go for APM, then only New Relic. It was the one competitor for Dynatrace, at that time.

In terms of implementation, it's quite easy, now that there are many automation tools. So just integrate Dynatrace with the automation configuration tools. Just ask Dynatrace which integrations it has, for example Chef, or Puppet. If you integrate, the configuration will be easy.

Also, the configuration needs to be standard. The standards should be set initially. There should be a standard protocol; that needs to there. If that's not there, then issues may arise later on. These are some things which are advisable when you work with Dynatrace.

I would rate Dynatrace a six out of 10. When I consider all the negatives plus the positive points which I have already discussed, I end up at six, including the licensing and everything.