Dynatrace Reviews

The use case is internal applications and vendor applications, mostly all that run on either .NET or Java.

All the prior monitoring tools were based mostly on infrastructure. Everybody was really good at keeping their boxes alive and networks running. However, there was a big exposure point on API failures and no mechanism for service response for those. 

So far, it has been app interoperability and identifying failure cases in call-outs, out of the app to outside resources. 

We still have future issues, because the integration is ServiceNow and that is only a reference. It would appear that actually to get further along you can't use just Dynatrace. You'd now have to contract for services to finish up your integrations.

We are changing our ITSM. If we had continued on our current path, they have no integration to a HEAT ITSM. That would have been a big problem for us. Fortunately for them, Dynatrace went through a review of that last year, and they have decided to go to ServiceNow. However, it does appear that the ServiceNow is a reference platform, not an actual solution. It would be better if some of these API implementations and things were not reference solutions. Looks like the partners were working on that, but the company as a whole is not. They are working on their product primarily. They are in some tough competition with New Relic and AppDynamics, so they have to keep on that. Thus, integrations is the weak point.

Dynatrace has been terribly stable. I have run Dynatrace Managed, which is internal, and I am able to take down individual boxes in the middle of the business day with no effect. The cluster is very stable. I have not had a update with an error at all. Then, through the Spectre Meltdown stuff, my Linux admin has been able to patch and unpatch with no issue at all. The cluster stayed alive the entire time. Basically, since October, we have met 100% uptime.

Scalability is outstanding. Right now, I am running it in a virtual environment. We are running what they call small sets. We are only running at about 20%, because you have to build a minimum set of three. However, it won't tax our environment at all. It will scale sideways. If I have three, I have seven more nodes to go, so I have quite a bit of headroom. So, it will scale great.

Depends on how tough the question is. If I ask them a question about stuff they have not done before, it takes a while. Then, we have uncovered a couple of bugs, and we used to wait for the solution. I have been a good QA for them in some cases. Generally, nothing show-stopping. 

Some of their sprints have had some inconsistent pieces. They generally fix them in two or three sprints after that.

We did not have an APM solution previously.

It was not straightforward. Documentation is slightly in error as far as directory set ups and guidance. We came to our own solution for distributing the disk loads. However, there were two or three different components that worked off the same pathings. A couple of the teams were not aware that when people went outside a stock installation that their assumptions were incorrect across components, and they had to resolve some documentation issues. 

The evaluation was between AppDynamics, New Relic, and Dynatrace. Dynatrace won out for a couple of things. 

1. The AppDynamics engineers never got the solution in place on our environment, and the New Relic product was not able to work sufficiently well with the security solutions through the firewall. The real killer that took it over the top was Dynatrace's promise to work with Asia natively. 
2. The security gateways. No one else works with security gateways. I am able to configure those perfectly well within the banking and FDIC infrastructure to pass audits. With the other two products, you have to allow all your hosts out, and the security gateway solves this for me. Then, of course, we put it on-premise anyway.

Of the three, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic, Dynatrace rates a 10 out of 10.

Look at Dynatrace for these very reasons: the security gateways, the ability to scale sideways, and the ability to identify more internal applications. Do not rely as New Relic did on third-party implementations of just plug-ins. Dynatrace does the plug-ins natively, usually. 

Never go with one solution. For the same reason that you do collaborative work, it is better to have different opinions.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• It has to cover the platforms that we run in the company.
• It has to be an established company that is not too flaky. It has to show an engineering pre-sale staff that is competent. Then, it has to work within our secure environment.

The primary use case is to monitor and make sure all the crown jewel applications are up and running. If there is an error, then I will pinpoint what the error is, take it to the application team and developers, and ask them to fix it.

It is performing well, so far. So well that we actually had a company program wherein we wanted to promote Dynatrace for as many applications as we can. We have our hands on all the tools of Dynatrace, and whichever is the best fit based on the application, we go ahead. 

I can get everything on a single page. 

That varies from product to product. Every product has its charms. I like AppMon a lot. The new solution that they have, the Dynatrace solution, which is integrated with the browser plugin and agentless monitoring. That is pretty exciting. 

I would like to see AppMon also integrated in the Dynatrace portal. There are certain features, which I am not saying are not there in Dynatrace, but I am used to in AppMon. I would like to see something a bit familiar in terms of UI. It could be five to six clicks away (I don't mind), but something familiar would be helpful. 

Stability is pretty good. Comparatively, I do not see too many downtimes, and the response time is good. The communications for any downtime is also pretty much on time.

No scalability issues.

I have used technical support a lot of times, mostly for technical stuff. For example, on challenges that I am facing for configurations based on technical tools. 

They have been pretty helpful and very responsive, Compared to other tools that I have used in the past, Dynatrace's support has always been responsive. 

They were all scattered, because we were getting a lot of information from different tools, but no integration. Also, there were a lot of redundancies, so that is why Dynatrace is good, but there is still a bit of redundancy in Dynatrace as well. A little bit of it across platforms, but overall, it has been better than the other tools that I have used in past. 

Dynatrace has so many different tools, so some of them are a bit complex, like AppMon. However, your OneAgent, your browser plugin, and so on are pretty simple setups. 

We get access to the early access programs. So, we evaluate. We do PoCs, and based on our customer feedback, then we proceed. 

We were working with Catchpoint, because for the synthetic device management, it is simpler for Catchpoint. However, the setup and the configuration were so much easier than Dynatrace that we are still in a bit of debate on what to do. 

If you are looking to implement it, just go for it.

For cloud, AI has been pretty useful so far when it comes to IT's ability to scale. To manage performance problems, we have not actually used it.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be continuous checks for a lot of hardware. There are a lot of applications, so if Dynatrace could provide this, that would be awesome. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:  

• Performance
• Availability
• Scalability.

The company that I work for is huge, growing every day. So, I think availability and scalability were the primary parameters.

We have a new product at Farm Bureau, called Guidewire. We have been using Dynatrace to diagnose as their moving code through the systems. It has been helpful in being able to guide our application staff. This part of the code has been having an issue where we need to look at it, or we have a database call that is malformed and it is causing issues on our database. That is what we have been using it for. 

We recently had a problem. When we went through a triage or a war room type of situation. We were able to use it help us nail down a specific call which was having a problem.

The main benefit definitely is being able to pinpoint problems. I have spent a lot of time in the past on tools that did not work very well. You spend a lot of hours, nights, and weekends with VPs over your shoulder going, "What's wrong?" And, you can't find it. 

What I see in today's tools coming out is that artificial intelligence is very important to help minimize that time and get very specific with where the problems are coming from.

The version that we are on now has the ability to get us in the area of where our problems are. What I see with the new product is that it is actually going to give us a pinpoint. 

Therefore, we will not be spending hours behind the scenes being the artificial intelligence. It will be built in. It will save us a tremendous amount of time this way. 

There are some features that get in-depth into the product and you are having to redo the data across several tiles. You have got cloning at one level, but it would be nice to have cloning at deeper levels. Or, as you are doing the cloning, it would be nice if you could select different options. Then, you are not having to sit there and build dashboards, and spending a lot of time in the cloning area.  

I do not even see this as being a problem. I have seen very little of it being a problem.

What I know about scalability is from the sales pitches, not from experience. From the sales pitches, it looks to be extremely scalable. I have worked with products that when it goes into practice that this is not always the case. I would be interested to see Dynatrace in a very scaled environment. 

In previous places that I have worked, like Ford or General Motors, which are very large environments. I could see where they would need a very large scaled solution.

Mike Ditmar is probably one of the best engineers that I have ever worked with. If he does not know the answer, he is back with you within an hour with the answer. 

General support is same thing. If they can't give you the answer, they are saying, "We will have someone call you back. We will have your S.E. call you back." They get someone for you. So, it is one of the best support structures.

Dynatrace's documentation is great. I love the university. 

I used siloed monitoring tools. My view is a little bit skewed because I used them on the mainframe. The mainframe was developed over 30 years, so they were very developed tools and easy to use. I was one of the first adapters of the Vantage product from Compuware that is Dynatrace's predecessor. I thought it was cool then and that it had all the bells and whistles. 

Now that I have come back into it, today's tools don't even compare. We did a lot of work back then to try and correlate the data. Even Dynatrace 7.0 is a hundred times easier than that Vantage product was and I see the new stuff making that same leap from the 7.0 version.

When I originally looked at Dynatrace, it was because it was something that we could spread across the company. You can set something up for the VP and upper levels to look at that is a summary dashboard. Yet, you can set up that same system for your application developer, so he/she can pinpoint those methods, and you can do the same thing for the database. Thus, you have many different sections of the company in which you can set up specific data output meaning something to them. It does not necessarily have to filter through one team, because you can really clog a team up fast making them the central point. 

I was not involved in the Dynatrace initial setup. For the upgrade, we put it in, and it was done. It was not complex.

I have heard it was great to have the consulting staff help you because you got it right the first time. 

Do a PoC of all of the competitors. Do not go off the sales pitch. Once you see Dynatrace in action, it really has some shining elements that the competitors are missing. They all have, to a certain point, the same functionality. Though, what I see in Dynatrace's new AI stuff really comes into play and it out shines its competitors. 

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is invaluable. The amount of data coming at us these days is overwhelming. I started in a network team with three people, one server, and 100 users. That was manageable. 

In today's world, we support 2500 users, WAN/LAN, and applications which are becoming increasingly cross-platform and integrated. Therefore, you need artificial intelligence to help with it. 

I do not think there is one solution for one company. You pick your top tools and have them work together. For instance, you have a tool that monitors your storage and your infrastructure. You have that same tool in Dynatrace that monitors your apps, but those two talk to one another. So, when we see that blip in storage, then we see the effect over in Dynatrace because it just ran out of space. I don't believe in one tool, you pick your top tools and have them talk.

Primary use case is for application performance management. So far, we have instrumented 19 of the 72 critical applications, and it is performing well.

We display it on a big dashboard, allowing the teams to look at performance for each app within a group. Thus, it has a little bit of competition, if you will, such as my app is green and yours is not. Not only that, it allows us to see issues sooner rather than later and see the correlated issues. This is very important, because where I work many of the systems are integrated, or using the same underlying infrastructure. The tool allows us to see if it is an infrastructural related issue and see what is affected right away.

• Ease of use
• Ease of integration

There were a number of marketing promises that were made, which we do not see it in the tool yet. 

The integration between the web monitoring of Dynatrace and OneAgent. 

On the technical side, it appears good. It does not always translate on the financial side. 

The technical support has been fair. We have Dynatrace folks still working on the implementation stage so we have not used the full tech support. It is in-house support right now. 

My complaint is the feature sets that they promised slips a lot. However, that is software development. 

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. We have had challenges with its integration. 

We did an interview of all the applications and figured out what our gaps are. We identified performance monitoring as a major gap, then we did a number of vendor evaluations and tool evaluations, and our leadership picked Dynatrace. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

Make sure your leadership buy-in is in place. Ensure leadership understands that an APM solution is a fairly expensive, so they know what they are getting into. Tools come and go, but it is the vendor relationship that is important. 

We compared Dynatrace to other vendors. It is cleaner and more compact with good UX/UI.

AI's role is very important when it comes to IT's ability to scale it in the cloud and manage performance problems. AI is the next step in our digital transformation initiative. However, we need to do some simplification of the environment before we can do it.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be people will be much happier. When you have a team that is looking at several hundred applications, if they have to visit eight different tools (or eight different dashboards) to get status, then it is cumbersome. Therefore, you want a centralized solution that allows you to integrate with same products, but not just the same products, any product that whether it is Dynatrace, CA, or BMC. If you are able to grab the data from the siloed solutions into a centralized repository or centralized GUI, it makes it simpler for everybody else.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: How the vendor works with us, and whether or not they are a partner or just a customer. Just trying to get more dollars out of the customer instead of working to be a partner, and both in helping to implement the tool and supporting it after the implementation.

Currently, we use Dynatrace to monitor the PCF Cloud Foundry. We just started using it. So far, so good.

We do not have an effective tool to monitor the PCF Cloud Foundry. Dynatrace closes that gap. We have tried using different tools to monitor Cloud Foundry, but they were all ineffective. 

It helps to show you the performance. It also shows you where the problem is, automatically trying to find the problem. It helps to show where the problem is and isolates the issue. 

The installation and configuration were very straightforward and nice.

There was one issue with the installation, but the we resolved the issue. It was some issue with the proxy, and we resolved it.

An additional feature that we could use is the rollover. If we could rollover to different datacenters, then it would satisfy our requirement. I.e., if one datacenter fails, then we could rollover to another datacenter.

Right now, they can rollover to a multi-node cluster. Generally, they require a multi-node in the same data center. Our requirement is because we want something in case of a catastrophe, like an earthquake, and the data is possibly wiped out. We need a way to automatically roll it over to another datacenter. 

This is not offered at the moment.

So far, stability has been very nice, and Dynatrace runs on the Linux system.

It scales well. 

The only thing is we do have requirements where if one datacenter fails, you need to switch to another datacenter. On this front, Dynatrace was not built. They have active to active standby, but from our talks with Dynatrace, they are not built between datacenters. They need to be logged in at the same datacenter, and if they are logged in at different datacenters, there might be some issues. That is one thing they need to improve on: Datacenters which are geographically located. So, when there is a issue in the datacenter, they can just automatically rollover to another datacenter. 

We used technical support. We just start configuring the system and the initial installation. We had one issue when we tried to enter one agent and it just does not work. We got to work with the highest level of support, but it took a while to get there. Initially, we did not get to that level. This is considering maybe it was just after the New Year, and it took a little bit longer than we expected to get to the highest level of support. 

We do use multiple monitoring tools in our organization, including size scope, BPM, and CA APM. We also have RUM and several different monitoring tools. 

We chose Dynatrace, because it is good at monitoring the PCF and also the performance platform is very nice. 

The initial setup was straightforward, very easy and nice. 

AI is very important with the increased complexity of the IT system. IT is very hard to pinpoint the root issues of a problem with AI. It would help you to analyze the issues and let you get to the root issue faster, because people with experience are rare, and with AI, it helps bridge this gap. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be using only one tool where you do not have the complexity of managing more tools.

Most important criteria when looking for an APM solution: 

1. I need it to monitor all the different applications. We have a diverse suite of applications, and it needs to support all the different applications. 
2. It has its own stability and is well supported.
3. It needs to be scalable. 

We have a platform that is like an automation of DevOps. The company is getting into the DevOps environment and the primary hurdle for them is to choose the right tools. Our customers do not know if they get stuck with one tool if they could not easily move to another one. 

Our platform, what it does, is we give them all the tools that connect to what they want. In that process, initially we integrated the options, like ELK and Nagios into our platform. Then, some of our clients also wanted Dynatrace in it. That is how we got Dynatrace also on our platform. So, we integrated their APIs into our application, so now all our clients can use Dynatrace too. 

The most valuable feature is that I am getting business. My clients ask me something, I go to my technical team and tell them, "They want this and this." From my clients' perspective, Dynatrace below the dashboard is very good compared to other monitoring tools. The dashboards are a really cool feature when I get to talking to clients. I ask them, "Why Dynatrace?" Because I need to push the tools that I have in my application. Then, they explain the monitoring of Dynatrace, saying the rate of the updates and features. They want to go with Dynatrace.

Introduce a cool feature called "all monitoring", or something like that. It briefs an entire session for you, monitoring and replaying that entire session, so it becomes very easy. A cool feature which I can sell to my customers, which can drive more customers to Dynatrace.

For stability, our customers have no complaints. 

We increased our Client to experiment with the tools, so we could find the right tools. Some of my previous customers whom we encourage them to switch to Dynatrace, they had no complaints.

I do not talk to technical support. Our clients talk to Dynatrace. All our clients inquiries are directed to Dynatrace.

My job is not to rest because my whole platform's aim is to move on to next to the tools, like finding out what is right for their environment. Initially, if I would ask them to go for Dynatrace. Then, after using it for approximately one month, I can tell them to find out what they like and what they do not like. They can go on from there.

AI is very important. The world is moving toward an automation. In the future, it is going to be a new Ops world. There is no resource for sitting on the operations side, so there will be an AI which will be doing all the work.

When we implement the solution, the developers just supply the code and all the automation that happens behind them. That is what they expect. For example, it needs to do its work in a formulation, then determine what kind of resources you need for that and what kind of servers we need for all that. Thus, AI is going to be a big thing.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers and not just the data,  the immediate benefit for the team is they do not have to spend time. So, the first thing is I don't have to bang my head about what is happening and where to find the solution. If I have something to use, which solves my problem. My life becomes easier.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They should be very stable. Like most of the products in market, when they do updates, they break down. This will usually cause a slow down briefly to customers. This is where we will see if the product is stable or not. 

The vendor should avoid rapidly giving updates every month without doing testing, because if you see in the past with AWS (for example) when they released the patches for the Spectre and the Meltdown problem, it affected almost every company around 20 to 30 percent of the parts went down. The companies did not know that the patch was up like that. Transparency is important, and also, test the solution before you actually implement it.

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

I think it's doing a really good job.

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

AI, driving problem identification.

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

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

Scalability is excellent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're using it for monitoring our infrastructure, product reservation, so we're making sure that it's up 99% of the time.

We've been using it less than six months. As of now, it's working well.

Because we have a 15-minute SLA, we have to see the root cause of the problem or the alert, what's the issue. It helps us to determine, quickly, as much as possible, to know what the issue is, what the problem is, and where it is. Also, it's helpful when there is a correlation on all, on the whole service and applications.

• RCA (Root Cause Analysis)
• PurePaths, where you can see the stack trace and everything; that helps.

I haven't used it long enough to know what additional features might help. But I am looking forward to the Davis AI feature. That's exciting.

Right now, stability is okay. We haven't had any downtime.

Scalability is good.

We were using some old tools but we're decomissioning them and transferring to Dynatrace. We're also using currently using SCOM. So Dynatrace is an additional tool.

We brought on Dynatrace because it's an in-depth monitoring tool; we needed that. SCOM is not enough for our products, so we took another one for the troubleshooting.

Regarding a single solution that could provide real answers, Dynatrace will help because it will give you a lot of data, based on what I've heard at this Performance 2018 conference. Because we have not yet been using Dynatrace for a very long time, at this conference I have seen that it will be very helpful because of all the data and information that it will give you. It's an end-to-end solution.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are, of course, the cost, the usability, and if it's successful in the market. Also, if it will give us what we need.

I rate this solution eight out of 10 because I'm seeing you don't have to update everything. Once you've applied the one agent, it will be automatically updated if you turn on the automatic update.

I would advise that you check it out and try it.