Dynatrace Reviews

• Full stack monitoring for several customers
• Trusted consultancy
• Development lifecycle support
• Showing app problems during the testing phase

Full insight on app bottlenecks, mainly in production. This is very useful for the development lifecycle, too.

Dynatrace is a powerful tool for full stack monitoring with APM capabilities and AI root cause problem analysis. This helps our customers with their digital transformation and gaining insight into their infrastructure.

• AI root cause analysis
• Smartscape
• Autodiscovery and correlation of logs
• Infrax
• User XP, etc.
  

• Container log monitoring
• Multi-customer accounts on one server
• API photo third-party tools integration

It helps customers to understand performance, problems, and user behaviour. I implement an APM solution from Dynatrace to different customers in different industries, such as banking and telco.

It provides a better understanding of what is going on. It helps developers fix old and new problems, helps businesses to understand conversions, statistics, and service health.

• AI
• Ease to configure agents.
• All performance views through every application and system.
• Automatically identifies logical architecture and transactions.

• Improve Dynatrace for the following industries: telco, eCommerce, and banking.
• Needs better visualisation for the service health model, which contains different modules, services, devices, etc.

My primary use case is troubleshooting production issues to see which endpoints are mostly calling and get some logs about them.

It's performing well. We use AppMon, and whenever any production issues occurs, we get a time window from the customer explaining, "This time it is a software failure."

We actually did some training on the AppMon UI, then it almost never failed on us. We could trace back exactly where the issue occurred. We came to the Dynatrace event to understand more about it, and see how we could learn more to perform our troubleshooting better.

It used to take a lot of time to troubleshoot. Now, with Dynatrace, we can actually see the logs anytime we want. I can just find the problem. It has improved performance from a time perspective.

The most valuable feature the solution offers right now is the PurePath. When we see a web request, and something failing, we can drill down using PurePath. Then, on PurePath, we can get to the database SQL statement. So, it is a very cool thing. We have our logs and all the stuff, but this is an area that stands out.

The AI thing is a boost, but it is not in AppMon. It is in Dynatrace. If AppMon could also incorporate it, that would be great.

The main thing is more about the dashboard. Currently, it does not keep the snapshot data. It only keeps it for a very short duration. Because of that reason, we cannot get more reports. If we can somehow option a way to preserve the data and keep it for a longer time, or have that feature, that would be good.

It is always requiring us to update the Dynatrace client. There are some issues with Dynatrace. Many times I thought there was a production night deployment and we would do a smoke test. Therefore, I started Dynatrace, and suddenly it says your client needs to be updated. Then I had to go do that two or three times. So, there are some glitches in it.

In the future, Dynatrace should actually try to resolve those issues with AppMon. The new Dynatrace version, I think will not have these issues, because it will be only browser based. So, there will be no need to install anything on our machines.

I sometimes see issues with the loading of the data. If we give you criteria, like you want to see the last 15 days of data, it has a lot of requests in it. To refresh, it will take a lot of time. Therefore, we actually narrow it down to a particular instance or event.

My main purpose is to troubleshooting issues, so this way I know exactly what time it happened, then I can just narrow it down to that. However, if you want to see a month's data, it keeps on spinning. Here is an improvement which needs to happen, which is the case with all applications or tools. There is a lot of data, and either we have to change the way we are logging or the application needs to be enhanced.

For some reason, we wanted to create a report about what is the maximum used end point or the maximum called end point. Also, we wanted to create a certain dashboard at that time. Myself, with a DevOps engineer, we called the technical support team, and they helped us create that graph. We got it, actually.

We have used production logging. We have our own custom logging system, where we read the logs and transfer to the database. We have a nice UI for it too, but it does not scale well. It can read the log, but it can read only those logs which we added.

Most of the time it works, but it is very slow. If we want to trace back, for example, to find out what happened in the previous week, we cannot get that data.

The DevOps engineer worked extensively on it. I do the troubleshooting.

It saves a lot of time.

It is the best solution that I have seen so far.

AI is like a new feature or benefits, and it is a cool thing. We have not tried it, but I really like to see it working. It is a great program, and it automatically makes a trendline baseline. Whenever something goes wrong, it can send an alert. There is also a web check feature.

Currently, we do not have a baseline. If AI is there, it can see the trend. Based on the trend, it can send notifications. It is also integrated with various platforms, like social platforms, so we can also get alerts from there.

Most important criteria when selecting an APM solution: 

We look mainly for how it will scale and what are the features currently available. 

I provide this information to the decision-makers.

We use Dynatrace to detect where we can improve performance. We use AppMon to do that. We're just getting started, in the past six months is when we started using Dynatrace, so we don't have definitive results yet, but we have definitely identified problem points that we can work on.

It's given us a lot better insight into how our application performs.

The fact that it can really analyze what parts of the application are slower than others.

I like that the new version has aggregated Waterfall, but I'm told that it's not gonna come to AppMon. I would like that to happen to AppMon.

I would give AppMon an eight. And the reason I don't rate it higher is that the learning curve on the tool is... You have to have some experience with it to be able to figure out where to find things, and the best way to get to things. But once you know that, it's a really good tool.

I would recommend Dynatrace. I don't have any problem recommending it.

I haven't had any problems with it working.

We have a pretty small environment, so we don't have scalability problems.

We had training from them and they're all been knowledgeable. I'm happy with the training that they provided. Their support people are responsive.

We really didn't have anything. We went to an APM because we had a concerted effort to improve application performance. Dynatrace seemed like it was the best solution for the problem. It covered what we wanted and more.

It was complex, but well-documented. Getting AppMon set up has a lot of moving parts, but they're all documented and it went relatively smoothly.

There was SOASTA and one other.

I don't have any personal experience with AI in IT, but I can see that, as environments get more complex, it will definitely help with finding problems.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, on our ops side it would help because they use that to dig out the root cause of problems.

When we look at a vendor we're mainly looking to see that their product does what we want it to do, that we can analyze performance problems and that it gives us good feedback on where we can improve things.

Currently we use it for monitoring various systems, performance settings. It does very well for that, so I can say we're really happy with it.

It's close to real-time, so it's very accurate.

There are some features that are specialized towards our industry, but more along the lines of: Say you have a group of systems in a homogeneous environment and you'd like to find out if any are differing in their configurations, versus the rest of the group, I think it would be helpful if the AI would help bring that forward. You can already define a group of servers or machines, so if the AI would pick up on this group of machines, that they should have a standard configuration and say, "Some of these machines don't have that standard configuration." It would raise a problem or an alert. I think that would actually be very helpful.

So far, the solution seems very stable. I haven't really seen any crashes or downfalls and I haven't seen it cause instability towards anything else.

We haven't seen any adverse effects due to scalability.

I haven't had to use technical support, personally; I can't speak for anyone else at the organization.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, so I can't speak to whether it was complex or not. I did go through some initial training on OneAgent, and it looks extremely straightforward. I can't imagine it being too complicated.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, I think the role of AI for IT's ability to scale in the cloud, and managing performance, is very important because as large platforms grow, it's going to be extremely important to be able to pinpoint those problems and help find root cause analysis, that much faster. You're going to have that many more logs, and data, and code to flow through. A small subset of people just isn't going to be able to do it effectively.

We have used a small, limited set of siloed monitoring tools. In previous jobs, they were homegrown, so they were only as effective as we could make them be, which was only as effective as we had time to make them be. There was a balance because we had to fix what was going wrong and also try to build the tools to find what was going wrong. It was a tough balance to find. Switching jobs, we've used tools like Splunk alongside Dynatrace, alongside a couple other tools. They're all different tools used for different tasks, so I'm not sure if you can quite compare them side to side. It seems like the new Dynatrace has quite a few new features we're quite interested in.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to top level data, that would be extremely helpful. That way, everything is concise, to the point, and in one location. Team members wouldn't have to go through different pages, different locations, and memorize where they would have to go and find what data they were looking for. They could find it all in the one place, very quickly and very easily.

The benefit would be that if you had everything in one place, you could save time looking for answers. Time is money, and when you are running into an issue, in an industry like ours, where seconds are basically hours compared to what most other companies have, it's an extremely important thing to have information at your fingertips, in a good location too. Having all that in one location and having the data immediately right there is what every company is really looking for.

I would give it a nine out of 10. I haven't seen everything out there, but it's up there.

If a friend was looking to adopt an APM solution, I'd probably steer them towards Dynatrace, just from personal experience. It's one of the only ones that I've had experience with, it's been generally very good. And seeing the direction they're going, it's a very good direction. It's where it needs to go.

Our primary use case for the Dynatrace OneAgent solution would be OpenShift migration or OpenShift transformation, as part of our business is thinking about going the microservices route. The challenge that we have of course with the OpenShift world is, we lose the visibility that we had in the standard virtual machine with Dynatrace AppMon. That's where we are looking to potentially use Dynatrace as a solution.

We are trying to maintain parity between what we were able to see earlier with AppMon, and that's what we are trying to see in the new world. It should give us at least the same level of experience, if not better. That's what we are looking for.

The most valuable feature of that solution would be the level of visibility that you get. I haven't seen anything that gives us that level of visibility yet. I've been speaking with Red Hat as well, they also recommended Dynatrace as a solution, so that's what we are looking at right now.

One piece that we think that's missing is, there were thread names that were missing in analytical information in the Dynatrace solution, versus the AppMon solution. The AppMon solution gives you that information, and it is very helpful for connecting dots and bringing all the pieces together.

There is another challenge, which is in case of the Managed solution. In our old solution we could simply export the data as session data, and that would be imported and seen. Now, if we are using the Managed solution, then giving someone access to that solution is a challenge. We can handle it, but it's different than taking screenshots and saving that information the way we used to. The copy/paste features that were there in old application - because it was a fat app - were nice, compared to browser-based app, because you cannot really use those features anymore. There are pluses and minuses that we see.

We have done PoCs. I don't know whether I can speak in an educated fashion about the stability of this solution. But when we did a PoC for over a month, we did not see any issues with stability. The PoC was more of a SaaS, but we are potentially looking at the Managed solution.

We haven't encountered any scalability issues so far, but we were operating on a very small scale, so scale was not a test. Rather, feature, functionality, and parity, that's what I was trying to pull up. But we are having those discussions on a regular basis from feature/functionality perspective that we would like to see in Dynatrace.

I'm working directly with sales and engineers from Dynatrace. They have been very supportive. They are very knowledgeable. They are always available. We have a very good relationship with them. Last Saturday, seriously, someone was with me on the phone at noon trying to help on one of the issues. So they're very helpful.

With the Dynatrace solution, as this is still in PoC, I'm the first person involved in this. For AppMon, somebody else was doing that earlier, and I took that on on.

Setup with Dynatrace is much more simplistic. We've made a comparison matrix of other products, older products, and this one. That was one of the first items we were comparing. Ease of setup, of course, is great.

We did have other vendors on our short list before eventually going with Dynatrace. What made Dynatrace stand out from the crowd was feature functionality. That and the level of information that we are getting.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is one of the areas that we are looking into in 2018. We are definitely thinking about that, it's something that's on our radar. I believe that it is definitely important. I have seen some features presented by Dynatrace AI. But we are trying to do little more. I'm still exploring the AI option, to understand it much better from the Dynatrace perspective. But we are probably going to supplement that with some of our own analysis as well, at this point in time.

We have used siloed monitoring tools. Of course, the challenge is, when you're trying to put one single story together, it becomes extremely difficult. Importing and exporting data from one tool to the other, bringing everything together, trying to tell a story, the amount of time spent on that is humongous. You generally don't have that time. That's the main challenge.

If you had just one solution that provided real answers, and not just data it would definitely a great benefit - to have a solution rather than having data. Because then you're not relying on your best analyst, but you're going to present that to anybody who can read that information essentially and say, "Hey, here is the problem. This is how I go and fix it." Or, I would know which team to call, or which developer to call, because I could clearly see it on the screen. That visualization is very important. I think that would definitely help.

When it comes to selecting a vendor we have a lot of criteria. Vendor management within our company typically goes through those criteria. What I would say is, ability to understand our industry and resolve our problems, and understand what's critical to us and respond to that. Those are definitely important features that we are looking for from vendors.

I would rate Dynatrace, right now, about eight out of 10. There are a few features that we are really looking to get, and I'm having discussion with sales about that on a regular basis. Once we see those - those are our minimal set of requirements - I would be really happy.

We are using it essentially for health check monitoring on the application that I work on.

It saves your reputation once you have a product out there in the market and what you are doing to keep it up and running. You have to make sure it is out there and the key benefit would be to keep your reputation.

It gives you a great level of detail into whatever the issue is: Using troubleshooting and getting to the root cause.

We do not have any web monitoring with Dynatrace, so this is something we are looking at. At the moment, we are using another vendor products for most of our web solutions. We are looking at how well Dynatrace works with web solutions as we use Akamai for most of our web monitoring/solutions.

It has been a pretty stable product. 

It is pretty scalable. We are using it on most of our platforms, which are on a big scale and across the globe. The company that I work for is a global company, and the products that we use it on scale.

I have not used Dynatrace technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I was not there at the time.

If I had one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be to save time while troubleshooting.

The siloed monitoring compared to Dynatrace: Dynatrace is more widespread, so you get to have diversity in every aspect of what you are monitoring. Whereas, siloed is more of being concentrated in a particular area, then you have to put the puzzle back in versus a non-siloed approach where you can get to the root cause directly.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Scalability
• How accurate the troubleshooting and monitoring are.

We primarily use it to monitor application performance and end-user experience. 

We are happy with the solution.

It has given visibility to how an end user utilizes and experiences our service offerings.

There are different solutions and I have used many of the different solutions. However, I would say the ease of deployment and use.

Since things are getting more complicated, it is nice to have artificial intelligence to correlate issues and events to come up with root cause.

I would like to see internal synthetic tests in the next release, which is already on the roadmap.

Not with Dynatrace SaaS or managed product. 

We did have some scaling issues with the DC RUM or Data Center Real User Monitoring. Just with the overall volume that we monitor in a company that I used to work at. We had a hard time being able to scale DC RUM to it, but the Dynatrace product by itself seems to scale pretty well.

I use technical support all the time, generally by email. I would say they are very responsive and generally give us the correct solutions.

We have used the silo monitoring tools in the past, the challenges we faced were correlating the metrics across different silos.

We were using other tools that Compuware and Dynatrace have had in the past. This just led us to using the more updated Dynatrace product solution now.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

In-house (myself).

Do a PoC and see if you like it.

We looked at IBM Tealeaf for the replay functionality, most recently. That is about it.

Dynatrace has more end-to-end performance monitoring metrics than we found with other tools.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit for my team would be to solve problems quicker, and maybe, prevent problems before they happen.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Their ability to support the product.
• Their ability to keep up on new technology which needs to be monitored.