Dynatrace Reviews

The primary use case is performance, capacity, and availability management along with user experience monitoring of 20 systems on a variety of technology stacks. User experience monitoring and optimisation of system performance and workflow. It has created good visibility on these topics for audit and compliance purposes, supporting adoption of a DevOps culture and practices within the team. 

We have FACT, COLLATE, and CODIX iMX technologies as well as in-house developed Java and .NET applications. These are hosted on Windows and Linux OSs and primarily on SQL Server and Oracle RDBMS. 

It has created total transparency between technology and business on all aspects of systems and performance as well as being a proxy for network performance through user experience monitoring. This followed a major performance degradation of our primary frontline system, which highlighted inadequacy of infrastructure focus tools, e.g., Nagios and Zabbix. It helped detect and remediate several performance issues on systems on both vendor supplied packages as well as in-house developed systems. It also improved InfraOps and development teams understanding of system behaviour and performance characteristics.

• AI
• Auto-discovery
• Automatic baseline
• Synthetic monitoring
• Log Management
• Drill-downs
• Root cause analysis
• Apdex
• PurePaths make system management simpler, better, and faster. 

I would like more flexible data export functions and APIs. The end user experience data is very useful to the solutions team to determine actual system usage and misuse. Flexible, easier data APIs would allow us to export the data more easily to other analytics platforms to enable this analysis as well as enable storage of this data for longer term analysis since DynaTrace only holds user data for 35 days.  

When we use the Dynatrace API to extract the data it only allows for 5000 records or less, and the data is not sufficiently granular for our needs. 

Dynatrace can be configured to continually send user session data to a HTTP Webhook endpoint. Our user session export sends JSON data for all monitored user sessions to the configured HTTP endpoint(postgresql db).

The data is sent in bulk to improve performance, with a flush every few seconds to keep the data rate near real-time.

The data format is one JSON document per line, so we must split the data by line to get valid JSON documents.

We are raising an RFE with DynaTrace to have this data more easily accessible via API

Nine months.

It is very stable with frequent updates and feature expansions. 

It is very scalable. Agents limit its own consumption, no longer impacting server hosts.

Our experience was very good. Online help via in-app chat was very helpful. Excellent webinar and online training was provided.

A host of open sourced tools, which could not get beyond basic infrastructure resource monitoring. We needed APM and UEM.

It is easy to get the basics, but more complex when you want more complex metrics and dashboards. E.g., we mapped IP addresses so we knew which corporate campus end users were connecting through it.

We used both. IT Ecology was the vendor. They had excellent knowledge and were able to transfer knowledge to our staff.

Good.

It's more expensive than other solutions, but worth it. We use full APM monitoring on our primary systems, but only resource monitoring on lesser systems. We shift licenses around our environment when a deeper dive into lesser systems is required.

We did not really evaluate other options. AppDynamics could do the job, but we had access to an experienced Dynatrace service provider which enabled us to accelerate implementation, rollout, and knowledge transfer.

Anecdotally, it is not as user-friendly as AppDynamics when it comes to configuring dashboards, etc. However, I do not have personal experience with AppDynamics and cannot say for sure.

From an operational perspective, monitoring systems. We've primarily deployed it in production to give better awareness to application support teams of how their apps have been doing. We do have it deployed in pre-production as well, and are actively pursuing these cases in that space as well. It's just easier to sell to executives from the operations side first.

Mean time to resolution is probably the biggest improvement. Also, operational awareness is probably one I haven't touched on too much. I think in the past a lot of teams really didn't have a comfortable feel for how well, or not well, their applications were performing. You would get log files, things like that, just a small amount of perspective. In a lot of cases, people complaining was their first indicator of a problem and, really, nobody wants to be in that situation.

We started using this product about five years ago, and with AppMon. That was one of our first big wins, getting these big TV dashboards up all over the place. It really gave executives confidence that we did have things under control. At least we knew what was going on. It wasn't always the green check-mark up there, but we knew when there was a problem, before people called in and told us there was one. So that was a huge benefit.

• End-to-end visibility of the applications, since we have them instrumented. Understanding where the hotspots are in the applications. 
• Quick Fault Domain Isolations: When people are having a problem, understanding where to look, and letting all the other people go back to their day jobs. 
• The UEM feature, User Experience Management: Understanding how users are perceiving the application and then connecting that back into back-end systems to understand why things have gotten slow and then dealing with things.

Over the last year, one of the things we've had a challenge with is, we've used AppMon for so long, people are quite comfortable with it. We had a pilot of Dynatrace SaaS up and running for about a year, trying to transition application teams over to it: "Try this new tool out," - especially at microservices-based applications. And a lot of the features at the time that were in AppMon were not yet available, or worked differently, so we had some challenges in internally selling it. Since then, a lot of those features have been added into the new platform, and I'd say in some cases have leapfrogged over where AppMon is.

The one thing people really liked that we can do in AppMon is executive dashboards and, until recently, you couldn't even create the business transactions you need for the data at the back-end of those dashboards. But if I had to ask for one thing it would be: In the new platform, give me the ability to do dashboarding in the way it's done in AppMon, and I think that would bridge a lot of the missing pieces. If I could do the same type of executive dashboards on the walls, they would be happy.

As far as the new tool goes, we haven't had any issues with stability at all. I'm really impressed with the way they've architected it and made it much more scalable than the AppMon solution. 

We've had some challenges with AppMon in the past, mostly due to the top-end Dynatrace server not having an HA solution, which they're addressing now with the new version. So that's a big win for us as well. 

These things, when they first started out, were kind of neat and cool but they were never considered mission critical early on. Fast forward a few years to now, and nobody can afford the Dynatrace solution not being online. People are using it to support their apps. It is considered mission critical. So having HA built in, making this stuff rock solid, is very important to us.

So as far as AppMon, we knew where there were ceilings in the product. We've got a pretty big company and we hit some of those scalability limitations early on, to the point we were running about eight AppMon servers just for production load alone. One would never handle it. 

The thing that impressed me about the new Dynatrace Managed offering is that people are seeing, here at the Perfrom 2018 conference already, about 100,000 host limitation, at this point. But that's more than enough for us to handle our entire production infrastructure, so I'm looking forward to actually collapsing all of the AppMon stuff into one big solution where I can see, end-to-end, any app offering. Even if it crosses lines of business, you get full visibility. So I'm very impressed.

I wouldn't say we need to call them that often, the solution does not require a lot of hand-holding from that perspective, but we've had it for five years so there are always a few bumps in the road. We've had to call in for a few things, and they're really very professional. If we've needed to escalate issues, we've never had a problem doing that. Always been able to get to root cause, and in every case, been satisfied with the outcomes.

Five years ago, Wily Introscope was in place for a lot of our WebSphere infrastructure. At the time, we were actually looking at it more as an infrastructure tool. The guys supporting WAS, whether it be in Windows, AIX, Linux, or z/OS, needed something to give them a lot more visibility into what was going on, and Wily at the time just wasn't doing it. 

Wily Introscope was only lightly used at the time, but it just wasn't giving them the depth they needed. Realistically, nobody was using it. We had a product that was sitting there, unused. At the time there really was no APM-type thinking at all. It's kind of by chance since we moved to Dynatrace to satisfy that first requirement.

Since then, we've flipped it on its head, and we use the tool that much more from the app perspective. And that's really the way to do it. And we had no problem making that shift at all. We could still satisfy what the WAS team needed to do with the tool but get a lot more value out of it by giving app teams a lot more perspective. We've been able to get 500 percent more value out of it just by putting it with app teams as well.

One of the challenges, when we were looking through all the different solutions out there was, which one supported all of those things to give you that big picture? And Dynatrace met the mark. 

I was only loosely involved in the initial setup. At the time we brought Dynatrace in, it was one of my peers in the same larger group that was doing the evaluation. I was in the background, watching it. I then ended up inheriting the whole thing about a year later, so it was kind of good that I did have some visibility into it.

Overall, the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We did a bake-off against some of the competitors at the time, and it was pretty clear Dynatrace was the best fit for our organization.

I know AppDynamics was one of the other ones we were evaluating, and IBM's offering, ITCAM. And given the different types of technologies we had to deal with, specifically mainframe, Dynatrace really stuck out as the one tool that could handle all the requirements we had at the time. And since then we've actually grown the use cases up quite significantly, and are even more happy with it.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, the role of AI - when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance properly - is huge. We saw it when moving to Dynatrace AppMon and started the Gen 2 platform and wondering how did we deal with problems just a few years ago without tools like this? Now we've gone into the Gen 3 platform space and really, with apps exploding from the perspective of complexity - as it's impossible to manually understand where all the moving parts are at any one time, where to look for a problem if it happens - AI really rolls all that up in a way that makes it useful, and we don't waste time trying to dig through things like we would have even with AppMon. So it's immensely important.

We still use siloed monitoring tools to some extent, and we've used quite a few of them. They have their place for what they do but, in reality, we've had to look at other aggregation-type tools and bringing feeds from each of those together. Let's say a Windows Server monitoring tool can tell you the CPU is higher, but it doesn't give you any perspective on what the actual impact is for the user of the app that's sitting on it. And that one server might only be a small cog in the wheel of the overall app. It's great at telling you what it does, but it doesn't go any further than that. You really need something that aggregates all those things together and has perspective. And that's really what app teams want. I think those tools are better served in the operations space, but then that's where they're stuck, they'll never go further than that.

If there was just one solution that could provide some real answers, as opposed to just data, the benefit would be that looking in multiple tools definitely slows you down. The fact that a tool like Dynatrace can bring all those things together and really help pop problems up right into your face is a huge time-saver. I don't know anyone that's got extra time on their hands at this point, so anything that helps us save time and get us to a resolution of a problem faster is of huge importance. Looking back, a few years back, trying to look at multiple tools to help us figure out problems, teams could spin for weeks because we'd have no idea where to look; classic war-room scenario, where everyone's pointing fingers at everyone else in the room, "It's not my problem." Dynatrace has really done a lot to help us get rid of those types of scenarios and be productive, really addressing actual issues.

I give it a nine out of 10. Compared to the other solutions out there, I'd still say it's top breed. It's great to see they're doing a lot more with the product on a big scale. But there are a few things they need to knock off the list to hit that 10; it's not perfect, but it's really, really good.

In terms of advice, the one thing that I've seen from other app teams internally: Do a PoC. It's much better to see your data in the tool than trying to demo it with easy travel or someone else's app. You just don't get the perspective of what they're looking at is some cases. Set it up, kick the tires, and give it a try, and that will win most people over.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We use Dynatrace both on-premises and in the cloud. Our use cases involve monitoring application performance. We are also able to see how the underlying infrastructure is performing.

This monitoring capability gives us the ability to measure the end-user experience.

We have other use cases, as well, but this is a summary of what we do with it.

There are several features that we find very valuable.

The setup is automated, so you don't have to do any configuration. There is very little manual intervention required.

Once it captures the data, it is able to dynamically analyze the packets and determine a probable route. This is a feature that we use very heavily.

Support for cloud-based environments needs to be improved. There is a challenge when it comes to monitoring cloud-native applications. This means that we have to use other tools that we integrate with Dynatrace. If there were another approach to monitoring things automatically then it would be a fantastic feature to add.

Some of the results that we were being given by the AI engine were not a proper output based on what the data input was.

These days, we are seeing that AIOps is becoming more predominant. As such, I would like to see more of the features in Dynatrace, expanding it from a purely monitoring solution into a full-fledged AIOps solution.

I have been working with Dynatrace for approximately nine years.

With respect to stability, this is not a system that gives users access to the low level. Rather, they interact with the agents. That said, we have had some stability issues with a number of our agent deployments for our customers. One example is that the AI engine was not giving the proper output, based on what the input was.

This is a scalable product but you ought to have multiple instances to scale it.

We have worked with their technical support team on a couple of specific areas, and I would rate them a four out of five.

We have not had to contact support for applications that use simple technology, like Java. However, when it is a complex system such as an ERP or a cloud-based application, sometimes the integration requires that we create specific plugins to capture the data. These are the types of things that we have worked with technical support to resolve.

We have worked with various competitors' tools. Some of these are AppDynamics, New Relic, Datadog, Splunk, and others. There are a lot of other tools on the market.

Nowadays, we are working with a lot of different customers and our preference is to implement Dynatrace over the other solutions. The three main reasons for this are the features in general, the ease of implementation, and specifically for the AI capabilities.

The initial setup is straightforward, although it depends on whether the application enrollment is heterogeneous or complex. The initial planning can take some time but the actual installation and setup is not a big process.

The number of staff required for deployment depends on how many applications we're going to configure. If it's only a few applications then you don't need many people. However, if a customer tells us they have a hundred applications that need to be installed in a month's time then obviously, we need more people to help with the deployment.

As product integrators, we deploy this product with our in-house team. We have a good set of people who are trained and certified in Dynatrace.

Over the time that I have used this product, I have worked with several versions. I am now working on the latest one.

The advice that I typically give to my clients is that you shouldn't think that it will do everything. In order to implement it properly, we need to clearly understand what are your specific use cases are, and then work on those.

Use cases can be related to an environment, a technology, or a platform. If it's a cloud-native service, for example, then you won't be able to use Dynatrace because it can't even be installed. You won't get anything out of that. This is an example of how it is not suitable for every situation. The feasibility depends on what you want to use cases are.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have some states that use the solution for the whole monitoring of their infrastructure. It's used largely in the main court, state courts, and federal courts.

The dashboard is the most useful aspect of the solution. 

The deployment itself is very easy and straightforward. You can do the deployment in a transparent mode for the applications and containers and it's a very simple operation.

The solution's interface is good.

We haven't had any issues with support.

The solution offers capable configuration options. 

The solution offers integration with other solutions.

The pricing of the product could be improved. It's still very expensive compared to other solutions, although it is the best one. Even being the best, it could improve the price or the business model. There should be more flexible ways of charging the customer. They could have more price models and more options.

I've been working with the product for about three years already.

Up until now, the stability of the product has been okay. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable in terms of performance.

The solution scales well. It's one of the most scalable options. If a company requires a solution that can expand, this is a good option.

We use it for organizations with 6,000-7,000 employees.

These are pretty new implementations. Therefore, up until now, there is no demand for my customers to scale or expand. However, I do believe that in two or three years they will definitely need to.

The technical support is quite good. There is also very good documentation on the solution if you need it. Overall, we've been quite satisfied with the level of service we've been provided.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's nice and easy. A company shouldn't have any issues with the implementation process.

While it depends on the use case, in four to six hours we can typically do a deployment.

Typically, staff or three or four resources is enough in order to handle the deployment and maintenance of Dynatrace.

As implementors, we can handle the installation for clients if they require it.

The pricing could be less expensive, although I do see the value of the solution and its feature sets. However, with more flexibility in terms of licensing, the solution could be more attractive to more customers.

Our clients also evaluated AppDynamics from Cisco.

The main difference was the implementation and the end-to-end management for the monitoring, including the simple way to find and do the correlation of some issues, such as identifying calls and making correlations through their monitoring system. This is the biggest advantage nowadays that customers can see from Dynatrace as opposed to AppDynamics.

We are partners and implementors.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

I'd advise others to plan the requirements well and be aware of integrations that could be more complex. Training the operational team well is also important. With a good operation team, you can take advantage of the tool in many ways.

In general, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate the solution at a nine.

We are using the solution in the operations space.

Our primary use case is production monitoring of complex business critical systems. Another use case would be performance testing of critical releases.

The solution uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery, which helps our operations. It reduces the cost of ownership of managing Dynatrace as a tool set, ensuring that we're able to maximize the value from Dynatrace and monitoring is available. That's a big plus.

An example of how it helps is we are more proactive than we were previously, though we're not quite where we want to be. Engineers are talking more with the operations people, which is closing the loop. Our teams are becoming more customer centric.

The platform is very good at identifying potential issues, but each problem that surfaces in most cases still needs to be qualified and quantified by somebody who understands the system. Complex application problems, not infrastructure, surfaced by Dynatrace still need to be reviewed by somebody who understands the application logic or system architecture. For somebody who understands the platform though, issues can resolved in minutes as opposed to hours.

We have the ability to detect user action response time slow downs and their consequences, along with the back-end calls to third-parties. We are heavily dependent, for a number of products, on back-end service calls to other suppliers. Using Dynatrace, we are able to measure the performance of those third-parties. 

We are also using Dynatrace to right-size the infrastructure, especially on private cloud where we have to provision the resources upfront to save costs. Dynatrace helps us by finding how many resource we are utilizing and identifies how many resources we need to maintain for the level of performance and scalability that's required. This has helped us right-size in about 50 percent of our cases, leading to a reduction in cloud resources by 50 percent.

The solution helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. This helps with performance testing because our performance test teams are more aware of how product features are performing, which helps to prioritize our testing. It creates test cases so we're able to do more testing. Because Dynatrace helps us define the cause more quickly, this speeds up the time between test cycles.

The end-to-end trace is valuable for us to be able to assign responsibility to the right resolver group very quickly.

The user experience allows us to be able to gauge customer experience and understand the performance impact of our platform.

It has a very nice interface with an easy way to visualize the data that we need, making it quickly accessible. It is very easy to use.

As a platform consolidating tool, it covers 90 percent of the needs for most applications. In that respect, it presents a very high value for us.

We have used synthetic monitoring functionalities to poll. Mostly, it's around service availability and key functionality of a website from different geographic locations. 

The real-user monitoring is mostly used to gauge the difference in performance for multitenant applications, This is so we can discern if there are any local network or client-facing issues when we do a comparison between each customer. It is quite important for us to be able to identify a client-side issue, as opposed to a feature managed problem, because we're essentially providing managed services of business applications.

Dashboarding and having different templates available for more business reporting, or even other metrics, would be useful.

With Dynatrace, we use one tool where we would have used many, but we still have had gaps.

Three years.

It has very high availability.

When we started, we were measuring uptime in a different way, and then Dynatrace started measuring uptime based on services, as opposed to infrastructure. Initially, because we started using different metrics for availability, it showed us that we weren't available as much as we thought we were. This helped us to have better conversations with customers and improved availability from the customer perspective over time. 

We have 115 users, which includes Level 2 and 3 supports, service design, product management, cloud infrastructure management, software developers, software testers, and product architects.

We are only in an early phase at the moment regarding the use of Dynatrace. Currently, we are only using it on two critical platforms. Going forward, we're looking to expand to nine critical platforms.

Our adoption rate across the portfolio is low because we're still in a pilot phase trying to build out our business cases.

The technical support is excellent and very fast. Not only do I get a quick response, but they're also able to close the request off very quickly and satisfactorily with a fix.

Some of the feedback I get from our team, who are familiar with other tools: "Compared with other tools, Dynatrace support is excellent." 

The feedback that I get from people is that the initial setup was very straightforward and easy. It was amazing what information we got in such little time after deploying the agent.

In most cases, the deployment is quick. It takes a couple of hours.

For high-risk applications, which are business critical or high complexity, we would deploy Dynatrace. For medium-risk applications, we would consider using Dynatrace. It comes down to cost qualification for medium-risk applications.

The solution has decreased our mean time to identification. It has saved us from 10 minutes to a couple of hours.

Consider volume because that is where you will get the most benefit. Doing a point solution is not cost-effective.

There are additional Professional Services costs which ensure the solution is configured with meaningful names so you're getting the most money for your investment.

It is the easiest platform to manage in comparison to the competition, like Elastic Stack, New Relic, AppDynamic, Nagios, or Prometheus.

Without a doubt, I'd recommend Dynatrace for business critical applications and anything that's driving revenue.

Biggest lesson learnt: To recognize the most value from the information that Dynatrace provides, you need to make it available to everybody in the DevOps group. There is a wealth of data which can be exposed, manipulated, and consumed by other systems, not just what's visible in Dynatrace. This can also be used for inputs into other upstream platforms.  

Understand the demands within your environment and plan a pipeline, then discuss with Dynatrace. 

We're aware that there are use cases for notifications that can be used for triggering self-healing or autoscaling, but we are not using those yet.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

We have several uses for Dynatrace. Most of the time, we use Dynatrace for looking into potential site problems, investigating reported issues, and trying to replicate those problems in a test environment using the information provided by Dynatrace. 

We use Dynatrace for performance monitoring. Quarterly, we will specifically see if there's anything that we can optimize on the front-end of our website, so that's what you see and interact with on the web page. 

We also use it to get ahead of any potential problems in our stack. E.g., if Dynatrace is indicating a problem, we will look into it and determine if it's affecting users. Depending on its impact, and usually if it's impacting customers, we can use that information to decide on what we need to work on next to benefit the customer experience.

I use the tool as more of an analyst. I will use Dynatrace to show where systems need to be fixed, etc.

This solution is SaaS. We use Google Cloud Platform, where we just use their compute engines as far as our hosts. We also have a few services that are on-prem. Dynatrace works fine with both of them. 

The solution helps our DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. We recently got a staging environment implemented with Dynatrace. We are mainly using it for load testing at the moment. Dynatrace has been detecting failures, letting us know immediately what types of failures are occurring so we can catch them before releases. Our developers have been able to identify bottlenecks and other types of problems that they would not have been able to before by just using standard logging and analytics tools.

The solution give us 360-degree visibility of the user experience across channels, which is a great benefit. We're in eCommerce as a retailer. We are selling across multiple channels and platforms. We have a mobile app and a website. We even have other services which we may instrument with Dynatrace in the future. As far as our website and mobile app that we have instrumented with Dynatrace, it has all been very positive. 

The solution has decreased our time to market with new innovations/capabilities because we have been able to quickly identify areas that we can improve for new features and gather that data from Dynatrace. Then, we have been able to verify that our new features and releases are working as expected.

The User Sessions Query language has definitely been the most helpful with its key user actions and user session properties. Using those together, that has completely transformed how we're able to identify customers and their problems on our site. It has made a very big impact over the year.

Using synthetic monitors, we monitor our websites. We have two main domains. There are several plain HTTP monitors, then there are actual browser based monitors that emulate browser behavior. We use both of those types. We have several mobile browsers emulated under synthetic monitors that we use. Those ping our website every 15 minutes. On some of these synthetic monitors, we use multiple data centers to get an idea of geographic availability. We also monitor some of our third-party providers using our synthetic monitors. We monitor our customer support live chat server, which is hosted by a third-party, where we are given alerts if that system were to go down. We are also monitoring an email capture API that's a part of our website.

With user session queries, the main thing that we use that for (and the most valuable), is when we get a problem. If we get some type of a report, obscure problem, or Dynatrace reports a problem, we go straight to using the User Sessions Query Language to find sessions with Session Replay, then we replay those sessions to figure out exactly what the customer did and what conditions may have caused the problem to gauge the impact of the problem itself.

We also save user sessions queries into dashboards, then create different dashboards based on different projects to try and gather data. E.g., last year, we redid a part of our website and used Dynatrace sessions queries and Session Replays to verify that our customers were not having any problems or being confused by their experience. We wanted to verify that, which is one way that we've used the User Sessions Query Language along with the dashboards. We've also created some other dashboards that return custom metrics for us, which goes along, in some cases, with user session properties and user action properties. In that way, we're able to get a very granular look at certain statistics where it would be more difficult to get those numbers from our traditional analytics suite. 

The solution’s ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is a bit off. I have found that even though Dynatrace detects a problem and gives you a count and estimate of impacted users, this number is usually much higher than is actually the case and not fully accurate. E.g., I recently noticed an error. Every time someone would experience this error, Dynatrace would create a new problem and it would say, "Several hundred people were impacted." However, using Dynatrace's own tools (user Session Replay), then going back and actually tracing through these requests, we found much fewer people were actually impacted. In some sessions that Dynatrace said were impacted, when you view the Session Replay videos, you could see that the customer was not impacted in any meaningful way.

The solution’s ability to visualize, understand our infrastructure, and to do triage is helpful. I wish that you could do user session queries with those host level metrics and be able to create custom graphs the same way you could with user session data. They're both part of Dynatrace, but they don't feel like they're integrated together well. E.g., we're having an issue that has to do with just HTTP codes and we would like to marry that up with a user session query turning that into a dashboard. We can't currently do that because the User Sessions Query Language does not have access to the HTTP errors or HTTP status code data that is part of the hosts and infrastructure package. Otherwise, if you're just focusing on the infrastructure part it, I think it does a good job.

I have been using Dynatrace since February 2019.

I have noticed a few times where data collection did get interrupted. It was two or three times within the past year. Obviously, it's our monitoring system and we don't want that to go down at all. However, three times for no more than 30 minutes each time is pretty good.

The scalability has been able to meet all of our needs. We have not encountered any limitations when scaling Dynatrace with the Google Cloud Platform.

In the past 365 days, we have two websites that we monitor with Dynatrace, including mobile apps. We've recorded over 23 million sessions for Rack Room Shoes and 8.1 million sessions for Off Broadway Shoes. 

There are three users who are active users of Dynatrace:

1. The user experience architect, who is designing new interactive features and studying customer behavior
2. The product owner, whose focus when using Dynatrace is on the metrics, dashboards, and the user experience as far as using user sessions, queries and Session Replay. They may troubleshoot or look into problems as well.
3. The back-end architect, who looks into certain problems and figures out with Dynatrace where they're coming from. They use information from Dynatrace for writing more detailed support tickets.

I have noticed a few problems with the service before. I reached out to support and the system did appear to resolve itself on its own (after there was a problem). Then, the support staff couldn't see any further issues. The solution’s self-healing functionality works.

We ran into a problem where the Dynatrace JavaScript agent is returning errors, and it's very apparent that there's a problem. However, the customer support will ask us for seemingly unnecessary details instead of looking at our dashboard through their account to see what the problem is. They ask us for a lot of details not really related to solving the problem. As a result, we still have a few issues that were never resolved. They're not major issues, but they're frustrating.

The technical support is below average. They've solved some of the problems that we had, but it took several weeks to resolve almost each problem we had when they probably should have been fixed within a day or two.

There was an initial implementation of AppMon (another Dynatrace offering) before the current Dynatrace SaaS offering.

Dynatrace has definitely made an impact. We were never able to get granular data with any of our other solutions. They were all very disconnected and separate, whereas Dynatrace seems to have good integrations with our entire stack. There haven't been any problems getting additional data now that we have Dynatrace,

It is very easy to use and set up. It did take some customization to get it working for our sites, but after that, it's been pretty easy and straightforward.

The initial setup is complicated, but it's much less complicated than similar systems that I have used in the past. For Dynatrace's setup, maybe there were problems with how our web application was initially developed before I joined Rack Room, because there were a lot of features related to error reporting. It would report errors for things that weren't actual problems, etc. You have to configure it to get around those types of problems, but it's usually fine afterwards.

Over the past year, we've been tweaking Dynatrace. It's been a slow phase-in rollout as far as how much we rely on the data it's giving us back. 

I was involved in the initial implementation.

The solution has decreased our mean time to identification by about three days.

The solution decreased our mean time to repair by around a week.

There has been a huge increase in uptime. It's hard to say by how much for certain because we've made other development practice changes.

It is a great platform. We found a lot of value in setting up user session properties and user action properties, then being able to use them to identify individual problems/customers. We use that to sort of streamline the whole process of finding and fixing problems.

Biggest lesson learnt: Customers do not always behave as expected.

I would rate Dynatrace as an eight (out of 10).

With Dynatrace, my company pretty much utilizes it to try and catch performance issues before certain issues get created on our online banking platforms, as well as for technical performance issues in our internal systems and to make sure that our users get the best experience. The aforementioned details consist of three use cases. Obviously, my company stopped using some of Dynatrace's features since we started getting a few issues as certain services have gone down or been degraded. With Dynatrace, my company receives pop-ups on our site in terms of an alert to which we can react if needed, and it helps us minimize any negative impact on our clients or business stakeholders.

With Dynatrace, I think I like its ability to dive deep down into each service and application at the code level. You can see Dynatrace interacting with other applications, so it gives you a good understanding of where things go wrong. I think it is just that Dynatrace gives you great observability on your platform.

With Dynatrace, there is nothing that I would like to see improved in the product right now. Dynatrace pretty much fits in and meets all the checkboxes or requirements of my company. I know that a new product from Dynatrace will be launched soon, and my company may plan to move to it, so I think all the requests from my company's end related to Dynatrace may actually get covered in the new product.

From an enhancement perspective, I would like Dynatrace to focus on areas related to cognitive AI since it can help its users better understand their problems. With AI-related enhancements in Dynatrace, I can talk to the tool in English. Instead of getting some codes from the tool, Dynatrace can tell me the problem in a normal and understandable English language. If I am not mistaken, the aforementioned AI-related area may actually be released in the new version of Dynatrace.

I have been using Dynatrace since 2013, making it almost ten years.

It is a 100 percent stable solution.

Dynatrace is a highly scalable product since it is a SaaS-based application. As it is a SaaS-based application, you can deploy ActiveGate wherever you need it or closest to your environment.

Though I cannot check the list of the users who use the solution and don't have access to see the number of old users, many people use the solution. It would be close to around 300 users presently who use Dynatrace.

The solution's technical support is extremely good. If in our company, we are stuck with something, Dynatrace's technical support team is always quick to respond, and they always have answers to our questions.

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with SolarWinds and Applications Manager from ManageEngine. I predominantly use Dynatrace.

The pros of Dynatrace are that you are able to drill down to see in-depth how your application is performing, how your host is performing, and how your business services are performing, right from the cloud level down to the codes. The con of Dynatrace is that, at times, because it has so much information, it becomes difficult to see the root cause of your problem, and then you have to dig around to find the root cause.

The initial setup of the product is a relatively easy process since it is a SaaS-based platform. Previously, with Dynatrace, my company had it deployed on an on-premises model. Currently, when my company deals with the setup processes of the product, it is really easy since you just install the agents on your server or on your hosts, after which the product starts to do what it needs to do, and then you can just create your dashboards and alert systems. If you understand the application, the setup phase is a really simple process.

The solution's deployment and maintenance processes are handled by a team consisting of four members for both South Africa and the UK, and they also readily function as a support team. In terms of deployment and product administration, you can know how to utilize the tool from a much broader base.

Owing to the fact that Dynatrace is a SaaS-based product, there isn't much maintenance required. My company only subscribes to the services provided by the solution, and Dynatrace looks after the maintenance part, a major reason why only a small team is required to administer it.

I recommend Dynatrace to those who plan to use it since it is a Rolls Royce of monitoring tools with which you can't go wrong. Dynatrace gives you exactly what you want. There are no comparisons to Dynatrace with any other tool out there in the market.

Dynatrace is a brilliant product.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

My use case for Dynatrace is monitoring, including server monitoring. I use the tool to analyze what's wrong with the server, detect high memory utilization and any IO network problem, and monitor network traffic.

I use Dynatrace to find errors and the root causes of the errors, including information on which carrier is giving slow response times.

Dynatrace has multiple features that I need, but I love that you can analyze traffic, including any bottlenecks. I also find the tool user-friendly and has an easy-to-navigate interface.

Dynatrace is also easy to integrate with other tools.

For a new user of Dynatrace, the tool is not easy to understand, so this is an area for improvement. Initially, you'll need an expert to advise you on monitoring and analyzing data. Before using Dynatrace, you need to learn from an expert.

I've been using Dynatrace for three years.

Dynatrace is a stable tool.

Dynatrace is a scalable tool. In terms of scalability, it's an eight out of ten.

I consulted the Dynatrace technical support team one year ago and had a pleasant experience with the team. I'm rating the support a ten out of ten. It was excellent.

Positive

My company went with Dynatrace because it's a very popular tool in the market for server monitoring. Most of the companies where I'm based use it.

The initial setup for Dynatrace was easy, though it was the client who installed it, and I only accessed the URL. Deploying the tool took two to three hours.

I have no information on the cost of Dynatrace.

At the moment, I'm using Dynatrace.

More than fifty people use the tool within the company.

I'd tell anyone planning to use Dynatrace for the first time to review the tutorials and check how to analyze data on the tool.

I'm giving Dynatrace a score of eight out of ten because it's not easy to understand the tool entirely if you're a first-time user.

I'm a Dynatrace customer.