Dynatrace Reviews

We use Dynatrace as an end-to-end monitoring solution to monitor all our cloud and on-premises infrastructure and applications. We use Dynatrace to monitor everything except storage, backup, and network devices. Our e-commerce front-end applications are completely monitored on Dynatrace.

I like the solution's tracing feature. There's a technology called PurePath in Dynatrace that helps us trace the end-to-end request for a service call. It starts tracing or capturing from the moment a user accesses our website, opens the browser, and clicks on login till it reaches our endpoint, the application server with the database server.

It will capture all the traces, including the number of requests, the response time, the number of calls made, the number of errors, and the root cause of each error. Dynatrace provides real user monitoring with APM.

Dynatrace is not great for network monitoring. Network monitoring can be done with a bit of customization. Although it provides end-to-end tracing from server to application, you don't get end-to-end tracing for network devices because it uses the SNMP protocol to discover them.

It will not get coordinated with the Dynatrace agent. That protocol is entirely different. It would be good if Dynatrace could come up with some feature that can help us pull the network tracing along with the application tracing. Dynatrace could improve the visualization part in log analytics because it is not as great as Splunk.

Dynatrace does very good monitoring for Azure cloud monitoring, but for GCP, it is not as great as Azure. The solution should improve from Google Cloud monitoring.

I have been using Dynatrace for six years.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support is very good and very much available.

Positive

The solution's initial setup is very simple. You never get any monitoring tool as simple as Dynatrace. You just have to deploy one agent, and it's very straightforward.

Dynatrace is easy to install and manage. It is simple and saves a lot of time. It is quite easy to manage, and anyone with basic IT knowledge can be a Dynatrace administrator.

Dynatrace is an expensive solution.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten.

Datadog is Dynatrace's main competitor. It is cheaper than Dynatrace. However, Datadog's instrumentation is manual and time-consuming, and it requires a lot of effort. In contrast, Dynatrace can be set up in half an hour. Setting up Datadog requires a lot of manual effort and is not as easy as Dynatrace. Presentation-wise, Datadog's look and feel are not as impressive as Dynatrace's.

Technology keeps evolving. In my experience, we recently migrated our application from Azure VM to microservices hosted in Kubernetes. Some requirements were there, especially with GCP. Using the solution does not depend on the company size but on the requirement. Whoever uses an e-commerce ordering website must have Dynatrace. I would recommend Dynatrace to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It tells me everything I need to know. It tells me what the transactions are. The AI provides you with advancements or degradations in what is happening. 

It gives me visibility into everything, from transactional logs to services and processes to the OneAgent installed on the box, which tells me it's talking to systems that are in development and it shouldn't be.

The most important takeaway is simply the compute. Simply understanding how much, or, the resource adoption across the board. Back in the day, for example, I would need 128 gigs of RAM to run SQL. You don't need that any longer. Having the performance and true metrics of what's going on, as well as scaling your environment to its optimal performance.

Dynatrace works perfectly.

Having OneAgent is the most valuable feature of Dyantrace, as well as the monitoring.

What is web interaction as it relates to Synergy, or when it comes to using web-based, phone-based, or apps published on end-user devices, it's fantastic in terms of performance, and code. Even if you run the release and discover that the update you just released is causing a degradation in performance, auto-release will restore the old code without missing a beat.

I believe that something related to IoT devices should be improved.

I have been using Dynatrace since 2018. It's been four and a half years.

We are using both a SaaS and an on-premises version.

It is both on-premises and hybrid.

They are hosted by Google, Microsoft Azure, as well as AWS.

Dynatrace is a stable solution. It's rock solid. We have never had an issue.

Dynatrace is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We have an application, management, and support teams looking into things. We have our help desk and service desk looking at various dashboards. Certain dashboards are being examined by our developers. It is frequently used by between 60 and 80 people.

I believe we are currently using all of the functions and features. It's operational, it's production, it's living and breathing.

I would rate the technical support a four out of five.

Positive

We were looking at Dynatrace at the time, and then there was AppDynamics or something like that, I believe, which Cisco eventually purchased. Dynatrace's maturity level at the time far outstripped that of anything else on the market.

In 2018 it was a superior product.

The initial setup is straightforward. I'll be up and monitoring in four hours. The on-premises installation was a little more difficult due to network firewalls and so on. Overall, it went well.

This solution can be deployed and maintained by four people.

For us, the most important thing was to get OneAgent out everywhere. Once we had the OneAgent in place, we began building out, and understanding what applications are present, and start developing the monitoring aspects. Not just from conventional RAM CPU calculations, but truly looking at the applications, and examining the Java functions, as well as the MongoDB functions.

Having all of that information and being able to create dashboards to communicate it not only to the higher-ups but also to the developers doing the development, who must understand that they must be very smart with their code.

We are a consulting company. Within our organization, we have a Dynatrace division. However, for this installation, in particular, we collaborated with Dynatrace on product implementation.

We saw a return on investment. The downtime has been reduced, which is significant in and of itself.

I would rate the return on investment a five out of five.

I am not aware of the licensing fees.

We evaluated AppDynamics.

I would recommend following the instructions. It's easy to understand.

Nothing is very perfect. I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

We are using AppMon UVM and Dynatrace synthetics, which we recently implemented. We are looking forward to using the new releases of Dynatrace in the future, where the use cases then will look at the following:

• User actions
• Analyzing PurePath to see what the user is doing.
• Transactions on our website since we have an eCommerce website.
• Availability and response times
• Drill down to see if there are any issues
• Gather old clients.

Being able to identify quickly what the problem is. It allows you to better utilize and focus your talent, and tell management that you are not only looking at problems, but how you can ultimately make the product better for the end user.

Business Case: In our implementation, AppMon and UVM are fairly infantile. The implementation was less than six months ago which means that we have been able to scale down some of our infrastructure. Not needing as much infrastructure to run compared to what we have been running in the past. From this perspective, it has been cost effective in allowing us to scale down infrastructure.

It allows us to make better business decisions based on what we are seeing, not what our customers were telling us was going on, but what we are actually seeing. Using this, I have been able to identify what the customers are experiencing. It allows us to optimize our site, our eCommerce solution, to better suit the needs of our customers. We can actually see what they are seeing and almost feel what they are feeling, because of the eyes that we have into their experience. It allows us to better code and better develop, allowing us to be able to optimize our website based off what we are seeing the customers truly experiencing.

The ease of use. Being able to readily identify a problem and be able to get someone there to fix or manage it properly and quickly. Our eCommerce website deals with users and time is critical. One of the best things, we are able to identify problems quickly and are able to resolve them.

They have had years developing this technology. When we go through it and we use it on a day-to-day basis, we see some things and think, "Hey, if they just had this, man this application would be a lot better." Then, in the next release, it comes out and it happened. We are using AppMon 7.0.15 right now, so AppMon 7.1 is coming out. Everything that I have identified in the version that I have as needing to be improved/fixed has already been addressed in the newer versions. Therefore, I can't think of anything that they have not addressed.

One of the things that find to be a challenge is I tell everybody that you almost have to be a private investigator to try to figure out what it is you want and how to get it. What I would have wanted was a solution that makes that process less cumbersome. 7.1 has already identified that. The Dynatrace solution has already identified that because of the way that PurePaths were looked at in Dynatrace compared to what they were looked at in AppMon. That would have been the one thing that I would have said, "If this product could be better, it would be from that perspective," but they have already identified it. They have already come up with the solution because I was not the only one that thought of that. Other people have thought of that using it, and they said, "Okay, this was a gap in Dynatrace, that gap has already been closed." That was the one thing that I had and they have already identified it.

We have not had any stability issues with it at all. This has been the most stable solution that I have worked with. I have been in IT for over 22 years and the solution that we have implemented here in the last six months has been the most stable solution that I have worked with in all my 22 years in IT.

It is limitless when it comes down to being able to scale up or even scale back, if we need it to. 

I have definitely had to use technical support. The technical support team, customer service team, and Dynatrace altogether have been the best team that I have worked with industry-wide. Whenever I have a problem, most of the time they are hounding me for more feedback on the problem than me having to hound them. They have been great. I have a monthly call with technical resources, and I also have sales resources on a monthly call. Whatever our need is, they are there to help us, hold our hand, and walk us through it. It has been amazing.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. I will not mention any particular names, but the challenges have been that they are silos. It does not give you a holistic view of everything that is going on in your application as compared to a solution like Dynatrace which allows you to see from start to finish. With Dynatrace, you get a complete holistic view of the application, and it helps you not point fingers, but be able to identify visible problems.

I was hands on in the setup of the solution. Initially, it seemed a little daunting. Once we started working with it, it was a very easy solution to implement and put in place.

The vendor that we brought in to help us move our platform from Legacy to NextGen was using Dynatrace in their dev testing. So, just for amount of consistency, we continue to use Dynatrace, and we can see why they chose Dynatrace to use as their dev testing. It was the best tool out there. I do not know what tools they have considered in the past, but I know that was the one that they brought to the table and it has proved to be a valuable tool for us.

I would recommend to give Dynatrace a call if you are looking for an APM solution.

AI is the solution of the future. I say the future but actually right now moving into the future. It is interesting looking at some of the applications using AI to solve problems, like betas, and being able to integrate that with Alexa for things like adding voice control to identify and solve problems. I think going forward it will be the way that IT works.

It would be invaluable to have one solution which would allow you not only to gather data, but to be able to make intelligent solutions based off of that data. It would be industry changing.

Most important criteria when selecting an APM solution: Cost is one of them, but we also needed something that did not just collect data. We needed something that provided a true benefit. If I am going to spend my day focusing on what a user is doing and what is that user's experience like on my website, then I need a application that can go and figure out the things that I am not seeing and what I am missing, so the tool that I am using provides the information right now. What I have seen from Dynatrace is that it takes that to a totally different level.

We had Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring in place, and we had Gomez. The whole point of that was to really check for system availability, to make sure we knew if the site was going down, etc. Since then, we've put in the full Dynatrace solution to prevent customer impact, some kind of site outage. That's the whole point of having it, so we can identify problems sooner, fix them, and stop the site going down.

We have had a few instances where we found small problems. They may or may not have been a full site-outage, but they certainly would have had some kind of customer impact. We only put the tool in a year ago but we've already got quite a number of things. We've found the product has helped us to identify an issue and we fixed it before there was  any customer impact. So we're seeing the benefit already, which is great.

To use an example, the savings in terms of cost and time. We use it for live monitoring, but we also use it in our performance testing. So that alone, that issue I just talked about, was a performance testing issue, and we would have put that change live without Dynatrace.

Finding that problem in "live", that would have been three or four days of investigation, whereas we found the issue, fixed the issue, reran the tests, all same day. That was days and days and days of cost-savings, in terms of resources, and allowing them to actually do other things that they're there to do.

Being able to identify the blind spots. Before, we had lots of monitoring, but it was all very manual. It was literally taking server logs and dumping them somewhere and someone had to manually go through things. You only monitor what you know about. As soon as we put Dynatrace in, it sprung to life, and we identified problems instantly. The team's reaction was, "Wow, look at that." So finding different parts of the system.

Sometimes you focus on the area where you see the issue, but not necessarily where the root cause is coming from, so you have to go through the full stack and help to identify the problem areas. We've found problems and fixed them in half an hour when it would've taken days before.

I think the one that's coming soon, the customer playback and the session replay. Notwithstanding the challenge we might have around GDPR, and the collection of data - which worries me - what we have quite a lot is, a very specific customer situation or customer problem. Of course, we can see problems in Dynatrace, but we might have a customer call in trying to donate, or trying to create a fundraising page, and we can never recreate the issue.

You don't want to have to go to the customer, "What browser were you using, and what were you doing, what day was it, was it cold outside?" To be able to see exactly what has happened, for us to be able to understand that, gives us extra power really to understand the issue and to fix it. Nine times out of 10, it's probably a really simple thing, that we just need a bit of JavaScript or something to fix.

Also the thing that's really powerful is being able to recognize what the customer's trying to do and contact that customer. And for us again, customer is key. For our Help desk to actually be able to help that customer and say, "We see you were trying to donate," or "We can see this happened to you, we're really sorry, we fixed that issue, please come back, or let us help you on that journey." That's really powerful. In terms of NPS, that's really important to us.

I think that would help with those situations, stop the problem in the first place. But also, if there is a problem, being able to deal with it directly with the customer is fantastic.

It's been stable, I haven't had any problems with it at all.

It absolutely suits us. In terms of the wider bank, within Virgin Money, we can absolutely look to spread it across other applications, which we will be doing. But I think we've probably got the critical ones covered. We can obviously see the benefit, we just need to fight the right battles at the right time to get those things put in.

The team used tech support during the original implementation to make sure that it was going well. And it went very smoothly. 

I don't think we've had any problems with it from a Virgin Money Giving perspective. Having said that, we had experts using it who were already within Virgin Money. So we were able to use that internal expertise to help us to implement it into our solutions, which was helpful. So we haven't needed to call tech support.

This is our first APM tool. We haven't been around that long. I look after a system called Virgin Money Giving, and we haven't been around that long - seven or eight years. It's a really successful business, and as that business has grown and grown, you then see the value in these kind of tools. We managed successfully, we didn't really have many system outages and the like, but we saw the benefit as it has been rolling out across the rest of the bank. It's the first tool we've used.

I was only pointing at people to do the initial setup. I don't come from the technical side, I just run the teams that do the stuff, the proper work. So I was involved in terms of helping to make sure it happens, but not at the level of touching it.

We did look at other tooling, but Dynatrace suits us as a solution.

It was the simplicity. Obviously we had heard lots about AppMon, but we went straight into the full Dynatrace solution. The simplicity of the implementation. We literally switched it on and we could see benefit almost instantly. 

Also it's the full-stack, one solution that can allow you to track and monitor across the whole of our infrastructure. We haven't got a huge, complicated infrastructure, so its probably quite simple for us, versus people who've got huge amounts of different cloud hosting and all that kind of stuff.

Actually having had conversations with Dynatrace, as part of the proof of concept, it feels like they're constantly looking to innovate. Coming here, to the Performance 2018 conference, there are things about which I'm saying, "I can't wait for that to come." And that's really nice for us as a customer, to be waiting for the next thing to come to help our business.

We we haven't really gotten anywhere near the area of AI and IT's ability to scale up the cloud and monitor performance management issues. Having been through sessions here, at the Perform 2018 conference, that's definitely something we need to be focusing on. We're not using cloud in any way, as an organization, other than things like Dynatrace. AI is definitely on our roadmap, but we're not there yet. It's something that's coming up a lot, and you can actually see the benefit.

Regarding a solution that could provide real answers, and not just the data, the immediate benefit for our team would be time and cost. We're running a website that needs to be there 24/7, and because we're Virgin Money Giving, we deal with quite personal things. People are raising money for good causes, things that are personal to them. So if our website isn't available for any point in time, it can be really quite heartbreaking for people, people can't donate to their cause, or give money to the charity they want to. The whole customer experience is really important, so anything that allows us to prevent problems sooner, and prevent system problems, is right for the customer. And that's important to our brand.

In terms of selecting a vendor, for us, because Virgin Money as an organization has important values, we need to find a vendor that has the same kind of values. I think there needs to be a synergy around what we're wanting to do. 

Also the key thing is support. Sometimes you can have third-party relationships, or vendors that sell you a product and then you don't see them again, and you don't really get the best out of that product. So it needs to be an ongoing relationship, and a genuine partnership. It can't just be a "drop the product over the fence then run off with your money," it needs to be an ongoing relationship.

Also important for us is to help, perhaps, influence the future of the product as well, a genuine partnership.

At the moment I'd say Dynatrace is a 10 out of 10 because I can see the benefit. It's early on in the lifecycle of the product for us, but I can absolutely see the benefit already. I think the thing we do need to do is understand more about the potential. I think we've just scratched the surface. As soon as you switch it on, there is so much information that comes to you, that you're all excited about, all that data. But it's just making sure that you're looking in the right places and doing the right things. At the moment, it's a 10 for me, I absolutely love the product, a year in.

My advice is try it. I think we put it onto an application and, within hours, we had really good powerful data, and we could see problems in the data that needed to be fixed. Trial it on an application and see what happens.

Dynatrace is a very good solution to monitor both application performance and the underlying infrastructure. It's good to analyze all the relationships with Smartscape technology. It's very useful to understand all the dynamic relationships of the application stack, including all the hardware and dependent components. We always use the latest version. 

We deploy it on-prem and on cloud. The SaaS solution is deployed on AWS.

The infrastructure manager or application or database manager will be using this solution. You can also have a CIO or CFO type of dashboard since there's business value and you can monitor the components. You can decide what is the total output provided by those applications.

Smartscape is a valuable feature. They also have a technology named PurePath. PurePath is the distributed tracing data. Previously, we called it distributed tracing. Including all the stacks, you have the full visibility of your solution, the impact of the hardware, and all the operating system dependencies. You can analyze if you have any software change which has impacted your performance.

They're doing vulnerability assessments of the application stack by using OneAgent. It's a never-ending story if you are trying to be sure your application is also secure. So, they could improve in that area, but they have started doing that.

They could definitely add additional components since the technology is driving from different perspectives. So, they should follow up with all the new components and new versions of the suite.

The price could be lower.

I've been using Dynatrace for two years.

I haven't seen any instability. Even their SaaS platform is always up and running. We haven't seen any issues on-prem since their components are already clustered. You can implement multiple servers to have the solution.

It's very scalable for tens or hundreds of servers. We didn't see any scalability issue. Some customers have over 10,000 applications monitored by Dynatrace.

We had several calls to their support organization, but we have had a very good response from them. Even the Mission Control functionality within the solution is handling most of the log collection. They can reach your server to understand the situation, and they can do a dynamic upgrade of the solution. So, it's very good and very powerful.

I would rate them 5 out of 5.

I'm using alternatives in several customer cases. Dynatrace is the best solution in the market, but because of the price restrictions and also the relationship of vendors, we use other selections in certain environments.

Setup is very easy, and it's easy to implement. I would rate setup 5 out of 5.

Since I'm representing different use cases and different customers, we see different needs. For all of them, including having a SaaS-based approach or having on-prem deployment, it's always a matter of minutes to get some results. The amount of servers is always changing. But we are mostly targeting SaaS customers who have hundreds or thousands of servers for their application stack.

I'm the business development manager and also the pre-sales of the solution in our company. I'm mostly doing the POCs and also leading the implementation since it's very easy. Mostly, I'm in front of our sales and also including the implementation timeframe as the customer success manager for the customers. 

The amount of people needed for deployment and maintenance depends on the size of your environment. If your environment is not up-to-date, your environment is not handled by the operations team. This is not the case for Dynatrace.

Our customers have seen ROI. It's very high. I would rate it 5 out of 5.

Dynatrace is usually paid on a yearly basis. You can also have an upfront three-year contract and pay each year, and you will have better pricing. Pricing is always dependent on the industry and the region. Since we are in Turkey, we have a very big push from customers for the discount levels. It always depends on the customer and their project situation.

There are additional costs to the standard licensing fees. If it's a SaaS-based approach, then all the platform cost is included. But if it's on-prem, you have some additional costs. Their pricing structure is a little different if you are using it on-prem without Mission Control.

I would rate them 4 out of 5 for pricing.

Our customers evaluate other solutions like New Relic APM. If they need to have it on-prem, they are mostly including Instana and sometimes Cisco AppDynamics.

Dynatrace has great output and very successful implementation in most cases, including the microservices, the new technology components, and the monolithic architectures of classic Java and .NET applications. They are very good technically but usually very expensive. That's why customers are always evaluating other alternatives to understand what is the final cost of the project.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

My advice to those looking to implement this solution is to include Dynatrace in their evaluation and try to understand if the other solutions can have similar results with their footprint. It depends on the environment. If it's mostly a newer environment like microservices and just Kubernetes or that type of environment, they can also have some outputs with Instana. But if it's monolithic and there's old stuff in their environment, they can have some outputs with AppDynamics. 

Dynatrace includes all of the technologies from old to new. They are very powerful. So, I strongly suggest having them in the evaluation period.

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.

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.

Currently, primary use case for the usage of AppMon is what I will call our flagship applications across the bank. We have had it about three years. Adoption was over time, one app at a time. then more and more. All of our major flagship applications now have AppMon dashboards. We do have some SaaS, but that is because the applications are cloud-based solutions. The use case frankly is about improving monitoring, system uptime, and preventing of events. If you have thresholds set correctly, along with alerting, and all the other stuff, your operational teams can find things before the field even notices.

We have substantially lowered incidents in our organization. It is hard to really measure it exactly from a percentage of how many have been lowered. As a general statement, there is no question that the number of incidents and the duration of incidents have dropped. Even if we do get caught blindsided by some infrastructure failure or something, our ability to pinpoint the problem through things like PurePath have dramatically reduced incident time. Whether you want to argue about AppMon, SaaS, or cloud from a business value point of view, that is tangible even for our non-technical people at the bank. They get this.

• The threshold alerting is what makes the difference. 
• The PurePath stuff for deep dive analysis on problems. That is massive as far as having a benefit. 

The dashboard is eye candy, because it's just a screen. It looks nice but the thresholding and alerting is what makes it meaningful because we are a 24/7 operation. As you can imagine, 2:00 AM in the morning, you can't necessarily afford to have a bunch of people staring at glass. We have to have the mechanism of the alerts, which is tied into our others systems, like xMatters. That is how it works for us.

I do not know everything that is in the hopper. What I am about to say could already be in the hopper. I am learning more about so called 7.1, be it SaaS or AppMon. Setting up the thresholds and alerting, it is complicated to understand their use cases. In other words, as a business perspective, you want to say, "I want this to alert under these conditions." However, you have to translate that in terms of all the various settings in Dynatrace. Whereas, it would be easier if Dynatrace just had a button that said, "I want this alerting use case," and I just pushed a button, then it set the 17 values behind the scenes. That would probably be a more user-friendly way. It does not require the user to understand what a threshold is or even what the different intervals of thresholds are. It is just a black box. It is like, "I want this experience," and it just figures out what to set.

The product is evolving, maybe too fast; maybe it is a little bit fragmented of an evolution. It is sort of expected in a way because the company, in my impression, is spending a lot more money. It is a function of the fact that they are growing as a company and revenue is growing, so there is probably a lot more emphasis on R&D and different product development. My expectation is that over time it will become a more unified, stable product. However, generally, from the product itself, we have not had issues with it, like something that monitors the monitor. We have not really had to worry about it.

I have not been aware of any limitations. I know that the older version of AppMon, the so called classic version, had some limits on number of agents per server. However, those limits never really caused a challenge for our particular topology.

As our adoption was in its infancy, we had the physical Dynatrace guardians, local from local areas, if you will, in our city. That was like our support because they were physically onsite. As our own staff became enabled and just basically knew the product, we frankly did not really need support, unless it was a product defect or something like that. In which case, we had a team within our company that was the interface for them.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. A lot of products have obviously been around for years, even before Dynatrace. Typically, they are technology or topology specific. You have got a certain operating system or environment which is the product of choice for that environment: different operating system, different environment, and different product. You will also end up with a whole lot of tools sets, even depending on if you want a synthetic use case, something like Foglight as an example. You just wind up with too many tools. Even this morning, Dynatrace's CTO talked about this very problem. I guess Dynatrace is trying to solve this with one-shoe-fits-all. Which as an organization, who would not want a multi-supported application product that can go across all the topologies, cloud, and everything else?

There was a product we used before Dynatrace. We are a big mainframe shop, so it was a mainframe product. It was really built for the IBM mainframe. Because we were heavily in mainframe and this is going back a few years now, that was the product for choice for mainframe. Then, with web-based solutions, all these applications, cloud, and everything else coming, we needed something else. I do not really quite know how it happened exactly, but somebody talked to somebody who talked to some Dynatrace person. Then, I remember actually going to the very first ever meeting where a Dynatrace person came on our site. They asked me to attend because I'm a big stakeholder and I guess it just went from there.

At the decision time, we did have a senior executive emphasis on the business that there just appeared to be too many incidents and we are a major financial institution with 40,000 employees in the field essentially generating revenue on practically a 24/7 basis. If one of the systems that they use is even down for 10 minutes, that is like $1 million lost. So, there were a lot of events and the timing was right. Whether that was good timing on Dynatrace's part, because we had a problem that we needed to improve, they came into our location, we had a marriage, and we have been with them since. 

I was involved in one of the very first implementations, but I did rely on an infrastructure team that did the physical installation and acquisition of virtual servers, as far as the agents and the nodes. I was physically involved on a team that wrote one of the very first dashboards. This is three to four years ago. It was more about just learning the product, frankly. I look back now and I can close both eyes now. At that time, it took some time getting used to it, but I would not call it overly complex.

There may have been minor things, but that was more our own people trying to understand it. We may have had it, such as, "Let's install this agent on this server," then it didn't work. Then, "Oops." You have to back it out, then three days later, put it back in. A lot of that is teething. I do not see that as a product limitation. It is just sometimes you don't necessarily know what you don't know and kick the tires a couple times. Now, whether the product could have maybe been a little easier? It's hard to say in hindsight.

I don't want to bring up Apple, but you can think of the Apple example. Apple has this idea that you just take it out-of-the-box and turn it on. That's it. That's your extent of configuration. Dynatrace isn't quite like that, but probably for a reason, because the idea that it could just work as is doesn't make sense, because the individual customer environments are just so different. You couldn't possibly have one-size-fits-all. It is almost impossible.

We had Dynatrace guardians onsite. 

I would definitely recommend Dynatrace. I would say not to be fearful and embrace it. It is a combination of personal comfort level in your staff, so I would probably recommend you start with a medium to low profile application and just aggressively implement Dynatrace. Once you get accustomed to it, then go with the all-in adoption. 

It is a great product, but your staff and your people, unless you are completely turnkeying it for someone else, they have to understand it. You implement it, and if people don't understand it and use it, then you are really not getting anywhere. That is probably the key part I would make to any recommendation, make sure you train your people or bring in the guardians or use the guardian for six months.

Our technology is constantly evolving. Obviously, the tools like Dynatrace we do hope and expect, frankly, that they will continue to evolve the AI element. I still think there is room in AI technology. Obviously it is getting better all the time. Voice assistant products are obviously the new thing now. So, there are a lot of changes in that technology. My expectation is that we will get way more sophisticated AI alerting and monitoring capability in Dynatrace and we will be happy to embrace it as it becomes available.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit to my team would be to reduce human interpretation where you have to log on and interpret data. Any automated interpretation on a user's behalf, or operational team, it will be better.