Dynatrace Reviews

We use this solution for continuous monitoring in our customers' environments, auditing, and troubleshooting.

This is an easy to use solution and our customers like it.

The most valuable features are the UEM (User Experience Monitoring) and the DEM (Digital Experience Management). It is also easy to install.

I would like to see more default dashboards included, and maybe more possibilities in terms of customization.

The ROI for this solution is fast.

• It is now easier to install and start using it. Installation used to be complicated with AppMon.
• Also, the user tracking and session play are great.

• Autodiscovery of services and architecture 
• User tracking and session (with errors) recording and reproducing.

Searches should be faster. 

• Pricing is still too expensive.
• Their proof of concept is still a bit difficult.

It looks nice. The service discovery and user play are really surprising.

Monitoring production environment at the hardware and application performance level
for evaluation of performance during testing.

• Simplified the way to monitor a medium to big environment.
• Reduced solution time when there are major breaks in the system.

• Alerting on standard or self-defined incidents.
• Integration with other tools in company using SNMP traps.

Make it easier to define applications. E.g., provide an API for applications defined by REST services.

Web banking monitoring: With Dynatrace behind my customers' businesses, we are focusing on real user monitoring, dealing with user sessions, dashboards, and reports for their business.

• Capability to focus on root cause problems. 
• No more war rooms in most cases. 
• Capability to troubleshoot isolated customer complaints with the user session feature.

• User session: Real visibility into what has happened at any time.
• Database transaction and queries.

Better root cause detection and improve root cause categories. In some cases, the root cause points out only a clue of what has happened.

We use it mainly to debug, control performance and KPIs of a tourism company. We can provide dashboards to business.

With Dynatrace, we can be more productive and agile. It allows us to be more accurate when we need to work with bugs.

The ability to go deep into production code. With this tool, we can work with bugs like no other tool can.

The dashboard tool needs to be improved. We need more options, because the look and feel is too old-fashioned.

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.

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 primarily use it for performance monitoring and to track down solutions to ongoing issues.

Its performance is great. We previously had AppMon, and AppMon is a little bit difficult. But we're PoC-ing Dynatrace, and we love it so far.

We spend less time tracking down what's truly a problem and looking for problems, and more time actually solving the problems.

• The ease of use
• The ease of installation
• The simplicity of actually getting data out of it
• The artificial intelligence

It's more than just dashboarding. It actually tells you when you have problems, so you don't have to go set up anything. It automatically figures it out. The artificial intelligence is by far the most useful thing I've seen.

Without the AI, I don't think we would be able to grow at all. As we continue to grow, our environment gets more complicated and there are "segmented people" who know little pieces of it. The AI allows one item, the software, to be able to understand everything and provide all the data.

To me, dashboarding is still a little bit sketchy. I'm definitely of the mindset that the problem cards are just more than enough. But when you're making that transition from AppMon, which is very dashboard-oriented, over to Dynatrace, which is no dashboards, there needs to be something in between so that business buys in a little bit. To me, setting up the dashboards is not that easy to do.

There should be something that would help transition, especially customers like us who already are heavily into AppMon. I would transition my dashboards over so that we don't have to recreate them, because recreating them is very difficult in Dynatrace. I get that they're two different systems, but any legitimate company that is doing that... 

If you're starting in one or the other, you're totally fine. But if you're porting over... My boss has to do a whole business case on why she wants to do it, and it's really hard to say, "Oh, the dashboards that you had on the team that you were using, you're not going to get over here." Or, "You have to re-create them all over again." People are going to ask questions about cost, who is going to do that. Although the tool automatically does that, business hasn't seen it yet. So it's a really hard sale. I would love to see some kind of integration so that we can say, "Okay, we transferred at least 80% of your dashboards over."

I haven't had it long enough to truthfully rate stability. We've had AppMon long enough, about two years, and that's been rock solid, minus any upgrades. Every time we do an upgrade there's some instability. When it's not being upgraded, it's perfect.

Scalability is great. My biggest concern when we first put it in was the resources that it would take up, network traffic that it might create. But it seems perfectly scalable to any environment. Even on some of our heaviest use servers, it doesn't seem to affect anything. So to me, it can be put on any environment and keep growing.

We have a guardian. We don't actually call technical support. We have somebody on-prem. He's knowledgeable and almost always available. Whenever he's in the office, he's available. Even outside the office, he's pretty available.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I took this over from my boss, and she was involved in the initial setup. I was kind of thrown into it, so I was a little worried about that. But it's been pretty easy.

I'm involved in the switch from AppMon to Dynatrace. To me, that's the biggest upgrade we've got. For AppMon, I did training courses. We did one-on-ones with our guardian from Dynatrace. Even with those, it was still a very complicated tool to learn. With Dynatrace, we picked it up in minutes. It was very intuitive. That's what I can't believe. I almost wish we didn't waste the time doing the training for AppMon. I would have just gone straight to Dynatrace.

As for a tool that would not only give data, but real answers, it would make things even quicker. I actually think that's what Dynatrace does for us right now. It tells us the answer to what the root cause is. It doesn't actually fix it, which I'm hoping it will eventually do, but it actually gives us the right answers right now. That is better than what we had before, which was somebody would go in there and try to find the problem. They may not have gotten to the root cause, so they would put a temporary patch on it, and then it would come back again. Now, we seem to be getting to the root cause every time.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are knowledgeability and the future vision, which, to me, is the most important part of Dynatrace. They're not thinking about, "Here's a tool for today, and we're just going to keep improving it slightly." They already have a master plan for where they want to go, and the tool reflects it. It shows that they're just thinking way ahead.

I'd give it a nine out of 10. I think it's virtually perfect. There are some bugs in it. Sometimes things get hung just for second, and you have to refresh something. Also, they aren't necessarily intuitive, but to me, they're just going to get better over time.

My advice is, start directly with Dynatrace Saas. Don't start with AppMon. Don't do the other older solutions. Just go straight in. Even if you have on-premise, SaaS is much better to start with.