Dynatrace Reviews

We use AppMon and synthetic, especially synthetic for monitoring the users and user experiences, and finding the JavaScript errors. Our working flow is mainly single page application. Therefore, it does help to improve the speed and performance of pages. I am excited about the session replay feature.

We will actually be integrating with Mouseflow, which does the same thing. It is not a big deal to integrate and disintegrate it. If session replay does what Mouseflow is doing, then it is probably our best bet.

It gives more visibility into all the coding (the black screen). It gives a nice screen. You can see ups and downs. You can see where the traffic is getting impacted, more on the convergence side. 

It is a platform that is very well-suited for marketers, but also for technology people. That is the key: the dashboard.

We are waiting on the new features to see how they perform.

So far, it seems good. We are not seeing issues. We are happy with it, and we have in-house based Dynatrace. Now, we are moving to the SaaS-based. We cannot comment much on the SaaS yet, because it is moving, and we are not there yet.

In the context of adding monitoring to all your instances, we have scaled up, because it is a cloud-based solution. It just scales on its own. 

What you need scalability for is around the ease of adding a new platform or new servers to the platform, and that is pretty fast.

I have not spent much time with the technical support. I am an enterprise architect, so the time spent from the technical side is more the DevOps team, and so not much me.

We did use siloed monitoring tools. We used AppDynamics. Our challenges using siloed monitoring revolved around integration. You needed more manpower to manage things. Now, it is just a few clicks, and it scales up. That is the difference.

We switched to Dynatrace based on feedback from the business and the technical team. It was the usability, and how you transform data into a more meaningful presentation or graphical interface.

I was involved with the new setup process. We have Adobe Stack, so we are doing Adobe Stack.

It is pretty straightforward. You just go to the install Dynatrace UI. It gives you the command. You just need to run the command. It is pretty straightforward.

It is so easy. You would probably need technical support if you ran into issues, but it is pretty easy. The agent talks to the cloud solution right away.

I am not sure about the cost, because I was not involved in the initial implementation.

No.

If I had a solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit for my team would be turnaround and evaluation time. If you could transform these into a language that management understands, that would be the key.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems plays a big role. There are various platforms, offerings, services, and applications, which integrate with so many things. You will not need to spend time hooking this to that. The AI will figure it out, which is pretty cool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• How much you really need to know about it. E.g., how easy is it to know about the product capabilities.
• Cost. Everybody thinks about cost.
• From a technology standpoint, the product should not ask you to build using manpower to set up your own infrastructure.

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. 

Currently we use it for monitoring various systems, performance settings. It does very well for that, so I can say we're really happy with it.

It's close to real-time, so it's very accurate.

There are some features that are specialized towards our industry, but more along the lines of: Say you have a group of systems in a homogeneous environment and you'd like to find out if any are differing in their configurations, versus the rest of the group, I think it would be helpful if the AI would help bring that forward. You can already define a group of servers or machines, so if the AI would pick up on this group of machines, that they should have a standard configuration and say, "Some of these machines don't have that standard configuration." It would raise a problem or an alert. I think that would actually be very helpful.

So far, the solution seems very stable. I haven't really seen any crashes or downfalls and I haven't seen it cause instability towards anything else.

We haven't seen any adverse effects due to scalability.

I haven't had to use technical support, personally; I can't speak for anyone else at the organization.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, so I can't speak to whether it was complex or not. I did go through some initial training on OneAgent, and it looks extremely straightforward. I can't imagine it being too complicated.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, I think the role of AI for IT's ability to scale in the cloud, and managing performance, is very important because as large platforms grow, it's going to be extremely important to be able to pinpoint those problems and help find root cause analysis, that much faster. You're going to have that many more logs, and data, and code to flow through. A small subset of people just isn't going to be able to do it effectively.

We have used a small, limited set of siloed monitoring tools. In previous jobs, they were homegrown, so they were only as effective as we could make them be, which was only as effective as we had time to make them be. There was a balance because we had to fix what was going wrong and also try to build the tools to find what was going wrong. It was a tough balance to find. Switching jobs, we've used tools like Splunk alongside Dynatrace, alongside a couple other tools. They're all different tools used for different tasks, so I'm not sure if you can quite compare them side to side. It seems like the new Dynatrace has quite a few new features we're quite interested in.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to top level data, that would be extremely helpful. That way, everything is concise, to the point, and in one location. Team members wouldn't have to go through different pages, different locations, and memorize where they would have to go and find what data they were looking for. They could find it all in the one place, very quickly and very easily.

The benefit would be that if you had everything in one place, you could save time looking for answers. Time is money, and when you are running into an issue, in an industry like ours, where seconds are basically hours compared to what most other companies have, it's an extremely important thing to have information at your fingertips, in a good location too. Having all that in one location and having the data immediately right there is what every company is really looking for.

I would give it a nine out of 10. I haven't seen everything out there, but it's up there.

If a friend was looking to adopt an APM solution, I'd probably steer them towards Dynatrace, just from personal experience. It's one of the only ones that I've had experience with, it's been generally very good. And seeing the direction they're going, it's a very good direction. It's where it needs to go.

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.

Application monitoring: We use the application monitoring of the core Dynatrace products. We mainly use it the demarking, troubleshooting, and monitoring to the PurePath for analyzing where our performance is not up to snuff.

Performance has improved substantially since we started using Dynatrace. We are able to really keep the performance solid with daily monitoring and daily dashboarding. It is a one page view of exactly where we need to focus our attention each day.

The PurePath is the real silver bullet for Dynatrace, but also the ability to create any dashboard that you want for different levels of reporting for technical people, managers, or even executive level. They can get a one page view of what the system health and performance looks like.

They need a capability similar to Tealeaf where you can actually view what the consumer is doing and record the sessions. That is the biggest missing element. Tealeaf has done it before with the Dynatrace product and exploited it, but from what I understand is Dynatrace is now incorporating this feature into a future release.

It is lacking in another area. However, I do not know if it is the way we configured it or not, but it is historical data. I do not like after 60 days or 90 days it gets aggregated to summary data. I would like to be able to analyze specific PurePaths after 30 days or 60 days with real numbers. I believe that is a limitation that we have put in place in our storage. I can't say it is a Dynatrace product problem or not, so I do not have an answer to this.

I do not recall us having any instability problems, so I would say it is stable.

I am aware that we have some limitations, but I could not specifically talk to that.

We have used and still do use some siloed monitoring tools. Looking at one part of the equation, whether it be server health or system health, it does not necessarily impact positively or negatively on performance. Without understanding of what system performance is, you can't necessarily look at what the system health is at the same time.

We used Compuware for many years, but that is part of the Dynatrace family. So, ServerVantage and Compuware were our only products prior to the implementation of Dynatrace, and Compuware was the company that purchased Dynatrace several years ago.

We are more of the user community than the architecture or infrastructure, so I have people that are architects, experts, and guardians who have had to deal with this (not me).

I would recommend implementing Dynatrace. It gives us all the data on all the calls, which is something that is very different from any other APM solution that I have seen or used in the past. 

We have lived without AI for a long time. There is minor AI and there is machine learning, so I would not say it is that important.

Our primary use case for the solution is in our development environment where we look at how new applications rewrite or transaction flows work, and to see what the performance is. Then, we also monitor the same performance in production.

Some of the main benefits are being able to quickly identify when transactions start to slow or run into issues, or hiccups if you will, then we are able pinpoint them. Some of the other benefits are when we are trying to push large loads through in our test environment and everything comes crashing to a halt, then it will pinpoint where the bottleneck is.

Probably what everyone else loves: PurePath. Being able to get down to the individual code level to see where transactions are taking time. It has helped troubleshoot issues immensely and other tools can't provide this.

The messaging layer is not really capturable and measurable right now. We have had this this ask for years. Examples would be like IBM DataPower devices, literally just translates message types. It would be nice to see what the weight is on there to put some sort of measure on them. 

EMS or JMS: Really with JMS base transports, there is not much there. I know a product or two ago, they added a visualization piece, but it does not actually measure anything.

The stability for the solution is pretty solid overall. 

We did have some issues in an earlier version, probably 6.0 or 6.1. We have not had issues in the more recent ones. Thus, stability seems to have improved over the past few years.

The new Dynatrace product looks like it is more scalable. We are currently using AppMon. The tool definitely allows for scalability, but you do need to have decent hardware on one side, then you also have to have the knowledge. You have to be able to implement this type of application and go into its environment. There are different ways to do that with each AppMon agent. It will be interesting to see if the new Dynatrace product resolves these issues. 

We use technical support several times a year. They are always quick to respond. They have been able to handle the majority of our issues. We lay out all of our issues, and the few times they have not been able to help us was just because the product was still in development. 

They are one of the better customer supports that we have worked with in the technology world.

We have used some siloed monitoring tools. Some of the challenges that we faced are integrating with systems external to it, such as ticketing systems.

I do not believe they were using an APM solution before. The need to invest in a new solution was because the development was moving quicker and we had more tight resources. We had to sit there and be able identify if it was quicker than spending the little resources we did have, mainly trying to figure out where the bottlenecks were.

It was selected a while back, and I was not the primary on the project. I know they were looking for something that could get code level information and could measure response times inside the application. They wanted it to break down each step of the way, not just have a large bucket of data, e.g., have the whole thing take four seconds and know each step taken.

At the time of the initial setup, I was a programmer analyst and our team was bringing in several tools. So initially, I assisted a little in the testing and rolling out.

This was probably more than five years ago. It was relatively complex because we were trying to implement into environments that they did not yet support. We wanted to try pushing the boundaries in making it compatible. Therefore, it was not as simple as some of their other setups would be.

First identify which issues, or information, you are trying to get. After doing that, get advice on the solutions out there, including Dynatrace, since Dynatrace is by far one of the leading APMs. Depending on every company's needs, you should definitely always evaluate a few competitors. 

The role of AI is important probably for most organizations regarding IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. However, AI is loose term ranging from pretty basic to pretty complex. The more human interaction is reduced and just the issues are shown and reported on, it helps. Everyone is moving to the cloud and having central transformation along with all those other buzzwords of the year. Obviously, our company is doing the same.

We use it for synthetic monitoring, as well as app monitoring.

It is performing well. It gives us all the things that we are looking for from application monitoring. From an operations point of view, we do not have visibility from the core level, therefore it helps get to the correct root cause of problems fairly quickly.

It provides the whole perspective in a single place when trying to guide the right people to go to the right solution at any given point in time. That is the biggest benefit.

The core level view, but also it all depends upon the instrumentation. The more instrumentation, the better the view gets. 

At the same time, a feature that I am really looking forward to is the OneAgent and the benefits that it will offer. Otherwise, it is pretty solid.

Definitely something to be improved is that OneAgent runs as a route, and not all applications want to run as route. Part of the problem is different technology companies will have various rules, regulations, and policies around what can run as a route. Thus, OneAgent running as a route is a security threat as far as some companies go. Especially in the payment industry, nobody wants to run as a route. Therefore, if they can avoid that and provide something as a non-route solution, that would be excellent.

There are still a lot of unknowns and a lot ahead. We also have a lot of competitors trying to actually sell in many different ways, and every company has a unique pitch when they are trying to sell their product. Good and healthy competition is the way to go, because I would still like to see more benefits from Dynatrace.

Stability is pretty good. I would definitely rate it around an eight or nine out of 10 stability-wise. It is the accuracy of the platform that really matters.

The scalability is good. I work in an environment in a complex ecosystem. It is a big piece of environment, and our hosts were able to handle it without any sort of issues that I know of. However, there could be some other unknown issues that go beyond me.

My technical team probably might have contacted the technical support for installations, setups, and so on. Personally, I have not ever contacted them.

We did use quite a bit of monitoring tools. It goes back to some other products, external products, offering their own way of monitoring. However, it is changing everywhere, the digital transformation, and not all companies are able to cope with the change. The important key thing is how well you will perform in the microservices framework.

We did use plenty of tools, a combination of many different things, not just one thing. You trust so many different products, and you cannot have good integration of all them, because none of them work together. 

Dynatrace solves the integration problem, because it is developed by one single company with a good framework behind the scenes. It is laid out with all the products that it supports in a nice, tightly integrated manner. That is why we went with them.

In the digital transformation that we are having right now, AI plays a key role. It is hard for a human being to think about all the aspects. When you have a proper AI, that is built by good engineers and a lot of resource go behind it, so I trust the AI will help. At the same time, I am also equally worried that it will make people dumb, where people who used to do things the hard way, now they get use this AI product, then slowly stop using their brains. So, we are also thinking about this.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be quality and getting right into the problem. Time savings is important as there is the brand reputation on operations. So, the quicker you solve problems, the happier customers will be. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Our focus is quality and speed of delivery, going through the microservice and that sort of framework. We are looking for a solution that can give insights into both the dev and the ops side. We are looking for features for changing the environment. An APM solution that can provide good balance between dev and ops is what we are looking for.

My primary use case, as a partner, is to help my clients find out what's happening in their environments, what the problems are, where the need is for help, for investment in people, in technology; and how can they reduce the gap between the problems and fixing the solution on time.

I think it's doing a really good job.

Because it is a good product, our customers are happy. We can help them faster than before. We can do more business with them, and we can have them develop better businesses for themselves.

AI, driving problem identification.

I would like to have something more along the lines of the old DC RUM, because we have lot of clients with old technologies, legacy technology, and we really want to integrate it with Dynatrace so that they can use just one single product. So, better integration with legacy products.

Stability is really good. I have never experienced any downtime.

Scalability is excellent.

I have used technical support many times, but it's more an issue of the learning path, it's more being acquainted with the product, features, new features.

It's always the right person, always the right answer, and they always want to help, even connecting in GoToMeeting sessions, even phone calls. Always.

Our clients use lots of solutions, Solar Winds, DMC.

Before, with AppMon, it was so complex, but you got used to it. Now, with Dynatrace, it's a breeze.

When it comes to the role of AI and IT's ability to scale into the cloud and manage performance problems, I think AI is really important. Before, you needed some really expert people to do this job. Some customers have that kind of personnel, but some customers don't and they worry about hiring somebody, training them and then, maybe, that person will leave later and they will lose all that knowledge. Now, as it is automatic, as it is driven by AI, it's easier, it's better.

While I have not personally used siloed monitoring tools, our clients do a lot. They have a lot of trouble as a result, blind spots are common. Also, lack of knowledge, and integrating all those tools into a single one. Sometimes, they are mad, or not very happy, with investment of so much money into so many tools, and very high maintenance.

If you had just one solution that could provide real answers telling you what you need to do and not just the data surrounding it, the immediate benefits of that would be simple implementation, simple management, low cost maintenance, and faster adoption.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, a lot of people use the industry reviews as a reference. But, in practice, customers want a product that is proven, that is easy to manage, that has low cost maintenance, and that they can use in as many scenarios as possible. One solution to rule them all.

I never give anything a 10 out of 10 rating, but I would easily give this an eight given its integration, the stability. Dynatrace is always on the edge of new technologies. You are never left behind. Everything that is new is almost instantly covered in Dynatrace so, we like that.

Just try it. If you try it for one day, it's enough to understand the scope, the really big scope of Dynatrace.