Dynatrace Reviews

The company uses it for a lot of things. Obviously, we're using it mostly for application monitoring, and that covers both application performance and availability. We're using it for checking how things are performing and making sure that they're running and running properly and there aren't errors or issues. That would be the main thing. 

We're also using it to monitor servers, do some infrastructure monitoring, make sure there're enough servers are running and that they've got available disc space for monitoring CPU and memory, et cetera. 

The solution is stable. 

I find that the AI on offer is useful, as it's good at identifying problems. You do need a bit of customizing, however, even in its sort of vanilla form, it's pretty good at identifying problems and the root causes of those problems and whatnot. 

The installation process is straightforward.

They're generally going in the right direction and they're quite responsive to feedback. You can vote on features and whatnot. If enough people vote for a feature, they'll get it put in. 

The solution could be more seamless. The user interface could be better and they could offer more integration. 

We'd like it to be more user-friendly, which, in our case, might be a big ask as we have a fairly complex environment. 

How long I've used the product depends on which version you would classify as the product. The current one, under this name, has only been out maybe three or four years. However, I also used the older version before that, and that was something called AppMon. Therefore, I've used it for a while at this point. 

The solution has been very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

I can't really comment on the scalability as we're in a relatively small environment. We don't have a massive number of servers on-site. I am aware of people that run it in massive environments, however, I can't make a comment on what it's like as our site is fairly small.

We might have ten or so active users. 

Technical support is very good and very responsive. We're quite satisfied with the level of service on offer.

Before Dynatrace there was another Dynatrace product called AppMon. Before that, we used to use the company's own solution.  

The initial setup is easy and pretty straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

The main issue is that, due to the fact that it covers so much space, the navigation can be long-winded. It can take a lot of clicks to get into where you want to go, however, it's covering a lot of information.

On the site that I'm on, on the Dynatrace site, there's really just me that's doing the technical side of Dynatrace. I'm the one that's keeping Dynatrace itself running and whatnot. That said, even in bigger environments, there's probably only one or two people that are looking after Dynatrace itself. It's really solid in that regard. 

I don't really get involved in the commercial side of things and therefore cannot speak to the aspect of licensing, such as pricing. We might be on a three-year contract that gets renewed.

While my organization is a reseller of Dynatrace, I actually also work on it myself. 

While the deployment model that we're using is on-premises, there is a cloud-based version of it as well.

We're always using the latest version of the solution. It gets updated automatically, and therefore it's pretty much the latest version.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall.

I would recommend Dynatrace to others who are looking into implementing it.

APM monitoring and troubleshooting for any kind of technology.

This has improved our organization because any kind of technology, even legacy equipment, is now monitored.

The user experience monitor is a real added value.

It would be nice to have a simplified monitoring feature for non-Java applications.

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.

We are monitoring business critical applications which provide prepaid vouchers for different customers.

We can see all the degradation of services in real-time, then we know exactly what the root cause of degradation is.

Service discovery with artificial intelligence automatic anomaly root cause detection, and problems replay.

• Custom reporting is still missing. 
• PurePath exports was a great feature in AppMon, but it is sometimes missing in Dynatrace.

• 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.

It's performing well. We typically use it for its intended purpose: application monitoring, identifying trends of release-over-release of our solutions, of average response time, impacts, server metrics. 

Specifically, for the subteams that I'm on, it's very much allowed us to get real insights into the impacts of our changes. It's allowed us to see pre- and post-metrics and be able to provide dashboards for our business. It's been extremely valuable.

One aspect of development is the concept of continuous improvements. There are key screens in our applications. We get identification, through Dynatrace on its own, that these are our top ten slow preforming screens. They choose to invest in optimizing those, and then we can show them the outcome through all the dashboards.

In the AppMon, offering, currently, would be just the PurePath analysis, being able to deep-dive into call chains.

The session replay. That's probably the biggest. I think that's the struggle right now, the ability to reproduce the customer's behavior. "Oh, I had a spinning wheel," or "I observed a error." And you're wondering, "Okay. How? How did you do that?" and they say, "I don't remember." Being able to replay exactly, the exact screen movements and everything, it's very indicative of a good feature.

One of my key focus areas does deal with performance testing, and Andy, here at the Perform 2018 conference, had a good session on performance testing. But it was a lot of utilizing a custom thing he built and "hooks" there, but they should make hooks into some of the more modern performance testing tools a little easier. I think that would go a long way.

We actually experimented with Managed initially, very early in its introduction, and it very much came off as a beta product, because some of the core capabilities were just generally throwing errors. But in what I've seen in the demonstrations here at the Perform 2018 conference, it has gotten a lot more polished. The AppMon part itsself is also better polished. So, I think it's the nature of trying to rewrite from the ground up.

I know, at least from an AppMon perspective, there's very much a limitation on memory and things of that nature. I think with the move towards the Managed product that they have some better opportunities there from a scaling perspective.

I, myself, have not directly used technical support. We have a team that actually focuses on directly tooling. They're typically a go-between with support.

Custom, home-brew.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, I think AI is significant when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, especially in regards to shifting the need for manual observations, and in terms of identifying system degradation, etc. I think it's extremely valuable in terms of being able to anticipate potential issues, as opposed to the typical reactive identification of issues. I'd rather an AI system find it before a customer communicates such.

Regarding one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to just top-level data, I don't think that's a possibility. Unfortunately, I don't think that there's always a one-solution-fits-all to any problem.

If a friend said he was looking to adopt an APM solution I would tell him, "Use what we have available in the enterprise, which is Dynatrace."

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.

We are using this to find and troubleshoot issues with our applications, whether there are application issues with IIS or Tomcat, database or network issues. We also use Dynatrace to chart errors and monitor server health (memory/CPU/disk).

As we have grown, we have increased our licenses to be able to use this across most of our products to help troubleshoot problems in production. We have also used Dynatrace in our performance testing environments to get ahead of issues before they make it into production.

The ability to take each individual request and dive in to inspect what methods and calls are being made is extremely helpful. We can tell which application is serving the error, where the errors and performance issues lie, whether those are on the application server, database server, network, etc.

I would like to see the Business Transactions made easier, so you can distinguish users and companies (this can get very hairy for a large multi-tenant application). 

We should be able to easily simplify both the charting and slicing-and-dicing of user metrics with cookies that contain customer/user information.

We have used Dynatrace since they were their own company (before Compuware bought Gomez and spun both off into the company now known as Dynatrace) and the earliest version that I remember was version 2. We first got Dynatrace as a fire-fighting tool when we were having issues with one of our products. It helped us solve those problems, and has helped many times since.