Dynatrace Reviews

Dynatrace facilitates great live performance monitoring, allowing us to easily and visually detect problems before they become a large impact issue to the business. It is not uncommon to detect and quickly use various drill down options such as PurePath to quickly identify and provide initial analysis on problems.

• Creating different dashboards
• Sharing dashboards with edit permissions
• Simple classic but effective UI (unlike some modern UI's out there that have too much white-space)
• Wide variety of dashlets available to monitor various services/components

• Either use less system resources and be faster or use more resources to pre-compute the PurePath on recent X minutes of data
• More flexibility with refresh times
• More UI options

Overall, it's quite stable.

We haven't had a chance to change the scale much and will probably not scale up by any meaningful factor.

Customer Service:

It's great.

Technical Support:

I haven't had to use it a lot.

Overall, it's very easy to setup on the client side.

We currently use Dynatrace in conjunction with another APM tool as well as a synthetic monitoring tool.

I would highly recommend it.

All the capabilities to create dashboards and business transactions has eliminated the gap between the technical stuff and business correlation.

Reduced the impact to critical operation systems. Identified any major impact before getting into production. No down-time after using Dynatrace as APM for PRD.

Solid PRD deployments.

For about 2 years.

No issues.

No issues so far.

Working with an infrastructure team that has given me VM and is not dedicated has delayed the performance of the tool.

Getting better, still working to tune to their eyes.

Excellent, a correct answer every time. Prompt support.

The most important features are the ability to see trends in performance and also to aid in diagnose any performance degradation in the web applications and utilize the tool to provide a faster solution and faster root cause analysis to the problem.

While monitoring our site, I noticed over a period of time that our west coast users would see degraded service every night around 10pm. Ultimately, I was able to use the tool to prove to our CDN provider that they had an issue with their routers in the west coast that had to be corrected to solve our performance issues. Without the Compuware tool, we would not have been aware of the issue nor been able to prove the issue to our service provider.

One are that I could see improvement is a better data collection and management. At times I saw that there was a ton of data available, but that also meant a ton of data to cipher through and analyze to evaluate. I often had to utilize Compuware engineers that specialize in data analysis to help gather and diagnose the data that we collected.

I've used their products for four years.

I don't recall ever having issues with stability. It is a very stable SaaS solution.

I've never had any issues with scalability, but scalability comes with a cost directly associated to how much you scale out your solution.

At times customer service could be really good, but most of the times I thought that this is a huge area where a lot of improvement could be made. They offer a great way to open service tickets online, but if you want to call in and get a live person to diagnose issues it is very hit and miss.

It's the same as customer service.

I did not use a different solution, but most companies I have worked at have instituted a number of different monitoring solutions and so there isn't a one size fits all solution for all monitoring and reporting needs.

Deployment was usually straightforward, but at times it could be complicated by whether or not to add additional data base servers and configuration of making sure that everything talked to each other through firewalls, etc.

Initially getting set up and configured was some what complex and took a bit of a learning curve. Once you set everything up, the software runs itself practically, but takes continual monitoring and tweaking to ensure that you are getting the most out of the product.

We utilized account managers and expertise through Compuware to aid in any questions we had regarding implementation.

The return on investment is the cost savings in developer's time in troubleshooting, analyzing, and finding the root cause of application issues and coming to a resolution. Unfortunately the business often found it hard to equate savings to something that they couldn't see. But having a major issue right before renewal helped keep the software in the short term as there was not another solution that offered what Compuware did for root cause analysis of the web applications.

The product was already in place when I started my position. I had looked at other products later and most of them were cheaper, but they lacked the full end to end solution and were not as robust.

Their products are fantastic, but the issue isn't the product, but the price for the product and also getting developers and business to value the importance of the data that is collected. Some businesses run their web ecommerce around metrics gathered on performance where other companies fall behind and don't give it as high of a priority.

I would recommend that you understand the business requirements for performance, uptime, consumer experience, and what is ultimately the most important thing you want to deliver.

PurePath is the innovation which makes Dynatrace unique.

We used to work on two kinds of projects: banking and insurance. The second had a lot of performance issues, then came Dynatrace which has solved the problems, and our clients felt the difference.

They could facilitate the installation of the agent on server applications for other languages, such as C++.

I've used it for two years.

We had some issues. Our environment is divides into three parts:

1. Presentation with .Net
2. Business with Java
3. Intermediate with C++

Until now, we don't have correlation between the three parts, because we haven't succeeded in monitoring the intermediate part.

No issues encountered with stability.

No issues encountered with scalability.

Customer service is good.

Technical Support is very good.

We used a different solution and switched because Dynatrace was easy to implement.

It was straightforward while implementing Java and .net, but complex in the case of C++.

We implemented it through a vendor team, and their level of expertise was good.

Executing performance testing and supervising the application response with Dynatrace, then collaborate with developers to solve issues.

We also looked at Wily Introscope.

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

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

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

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

This solution has been very stable.

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

The technical support is good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

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

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

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

The user interface needs to be improved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I installed the demo application on an internal server and looked at the functionality of Dynatrace.

Through the demo server, we were able to see the functionality of Dynatrace and plan to apply it to our internal systems.

Through end-user monitoring, we were able to measure the user's perceived performance and build an SLA based on that information.

We hope the next version will have more powerful database monitoring capabilities.