Dynatrace Reviews

I am a Dynatrace consultant, and I work with a partner in South Africa.

Once you have it running, Dynatrace will show you a picture of your environment that nobody else would have, except perhaps for the architect. IT environments are inherently complex, and this will help figure out what you've got in the environment.  

The most valuable feature is the AI. In the older version, it would highlight errors but you still had to figure out the root cause. With the latest version, the AI engine highlights the root causes automatically. 

It would be nice if there were a way that it could be made simpler, given the complexity of the things that we're monitoring. It can get a bit overwhelming. The AI has helped in this regard.

This solution has been very stable.

I am in a small shop so I do not have direct experience with scalability, but I do know that it is one of their design goals. In our company, we have a couple of guys working on huge sites and scaling farms, so my impression is that the scalability is good, or even excellent.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The agent installs and configures everything automatically. In the older one, you had to manually configure everything. Now, you install the agent and you may have to restart some processes, but then it just starts giving data.

In this solution, they try to take a whole lot of complexity and make it look simple. It is not an easy thing to do.

There is a release every month of new features. They are pretty good at implementing things when you log a feature request or enhancement. The vendor is running DevOps and has a high frequency of releases, so you don't normally have to wait for the next major release, provided that there is enough requirement for it.

Quite a lot of the new design in the new version has been influenced by the new privacy rules in Europe. They've had to restrict a lot of what can be seen, in terms of the user's personal data, which can be seen as a good thing. Generally speaking, they've gone from a very open design where you can see all of the database queries and the data, to a more closed system. You can still find that stuff, but you have to turn on a lot of things and implement them. They are not there by default.

I find this a source of frustration because some of the time, the problems are because of the data. For example, someone put in their name wrong or put in an apostrophe. Without seeing the data, you don't know and can't figure out what is wrong. You have to figure it out by looking at it. This is a GDPR thing, however, and it is necessary for compliance. Companies have to decide while consulting with their customers, how much people are allowed to see. Then it can be configured.

My advice for someone who is implementing this solution is to take some time to plan out your operational environment in advance. Try to maintain consistency in naming, because I think that you can get additional value through this planning. You can roll out ad-hoc and it will be fine, but if you take some time to name things then you can get a better picture of your environment.

This is a very good solution, but nothing is perfect.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

We are using this software to monitor an online banking system in a production environment.

Dynatrace has improved our organization because we can see big problems in the most important systems before these issues will be seen by clients.

The most valuable feature is the PurePath analysis. We can see each session, end-to-end, and discover issues.

The user interface needs to be improved.

We run our application on a Windows 2008 to 2016 environment. We needed a tool to give us insight into how our applications were running. Dynatrace was the answer.

Dynatrace gives excellent insight into the performance of our applications. This helps the IT department to respond quickly to problems because the root cause is reported by Dynatrace.

We find almost all of the features valuable, including Integration, Smartscape, and Problems.

The extending of Dynatrace with plugins can be better. 

Our primary use cases are for APM and digital experience management.

The ability to solve production issues quickly is the most valuable improvement for each of our customers. Also, rolling out and maintaining the solution is more than easy and requires very little effort from the customers. This is unique compared to other vendors.

The most valuable features are the speed of deployment without any changes to the monitored environment, and the very well defined and implemented user interface.

Working with the user interface is a pleasure for any customer since it is fast, responsive, and very well designed.

From the other features, the ability to drill down to the code level is often very valuable when doing an analysis of issues. Also, the integrated AI (assisted machine learning) helps to analyze anomalies without the requirement to define and describe your environment.

As the product is evolving quickly and product features are added on a monthly basis, a more transparent roadmap would be more than welcome.

Also, some parts of the business operations, such as pricing, should be improved since the terms are changing and it is not easy to do estimates.

• Operational monitoring: How services ran in the last five minutes.
• NOC screens together with GTM monitoring.
• Troubleshooting of problems occurring in communication between microservices down to the code level.

• Reduced MTTR, thanks to smart problem detection and automated root cause analysis.
• Proactive monitoring of occurring problems and outages warnings.

• Automated dependency identification for HTTP conversations between microservices stack enables monitoring of microservices-oriented architecture. 
• .NET core and Spring code level analysis helps with root cause analysis.

.NET core support to the level of Java (at the moment, it is limited).

Custom reporting capabilities should be extended, because it now has basic charting capabilities. Alternatively, Dynatrace can create a bunch of plugins to popular BI platforms (e.g., Microsoft Power BI). All to allow custom reporting as well as SLA-oriented reporting. 

• Application performance monitoring
• Alerting on infrastructure and application problems, includes user experience.

Dynatrace provides visibility into the application and its performance from the user to back-end services.

• Root cause analysis
• OneAgent automatic updates
• Managing Dynatrace Managed is a breeze compared to AppMon.

• Include network monitoring in more detail for deep dive analytics of network components. 
• Needs more compatibility of platforms out-of-the-box.

We are using it essentially for health check monitoring on the application that I work on.

It saves your reputation once you have a product out there in the market and what you are doing to keep it up and running. You have to make sure it is out there and the key benefit would be to keep your reputation.

It gives you a great level of detail into whatever the issue is: Using troubleshooting and getting to the root cause.

We do not have any web monitoring with Dynatrace, so this is something we are looking at. At the moment, we are using another vendor products for most of our web solutions. We are looking at how well Dynatrace works with web solutions as we use Akamai for most of our web monitoring/solutions.

It has been a pretty stable product. 

It is pretty scalable. We are using it on most of our platforms, which are on a big scale and across the globe. The company that I work for is a global company, and the products that we use it on scale.

I have not used Dynatrace technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I was not there at the time.

If I had one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be to save time while troubleshooting.

The siloed monitoring compared to Dynatrace: Dynatrace is more widespread, so you get to have diversity in every aspect of what you are monitoring. Whereas, siloed is more of being concentrated in a particular area, then you have to put the puzzle back in versus a non-siloed approach where you can get to the root cause directly.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Scalability
• How accurate the troubleshooting and monitoring are.

Primary use case would be problem solving and remediation, and it's working very well.

It has dramatically reduced the time it takes to problem solve webpages and coding problems.

Being able to drill down into the PurePaths, to get to a solution.

We have a couple of one page apps that it has a problem with because it doesn't call to the server all the time. I believe part of that is taken care of in the next version. That was the biggest thing for me. That's one of the reasons we haven't really siloed up too, because of that.

I can't think of any issues we've had with stability.

I love it, I've always been a big fan of the scalability. We haven't scaled up yet but we hope to.

We used a guardian to begin with. He trained us and helped us quite a bit. I think we had him for about six months. He was wonderful.

As for siloed monitoring tools, I don't believe we used any. We did use an alert site, but nothing other than that.

We actually had a production issue on our catalog website. Dynatrace came in and helped us install and problem solve that issue right off the bat. That was our initial outing.

During the initial implementation I was just there as a bystander. We had our infrastructure guys taking care of the implementation. I was just there afterwards to learn how to run it. And if there are upgrades, we hand that off to infrastructure.

When it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud in order to monitor performance management, I can't really comment on the role of AI in that. I'm not involved in that as yet. We are just starting to have a cloud footprint now.

If we had just one solution that would not only provide data, but real answers, the immediate benefit for our team would, of course, be helping the code to be error free, but also speeding it up a bit.

What I appreciate most in a vendor, personally, would be performance in the product, and knowledge; product knowledge.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10, because it's easy to use. I use it everyday now.

Implement it and put it on every server. You have to have it all the way across with the network.