Dynatrace Reviews

We use the tool for performance analysis, root cause analysis, issue identification, and understanding the impact of technical glitches on business. We use performance dashboards and business dashboards.

The product helps us identify issues in the application and get to the root cause immediately. We can understand why a client experiences slowness, whether it is due to DB or some issue at the front end. It could also be an issue relating to their zone. We can also use the tool to understand the impact of the technical issue and the loss to business.

PurePath is one of the best features. We can add tags to the dashboard that we create. Synthetic user creation is also a good feature.

PurePath must be more robust. Dynatrace detects problems at a higher level. When we select a time zone and identify the problems, we should get a detailed analysis of the impact directly. We shouldn’t have to drill down to get that information since the solution already has the details of the exceptions. We have to create tags for some log-ins. It should be handled automatically to reduce tagging.

I have been using the solution for four to five years.

I rate the product’s stability an eight out of ten.

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

While designing the business dashboard, I encountered various bugs that impacted my work. There were many tickets and conversations between me and the support team. It took a reasonable amount of time to solve the issues.

Neutral

I have used Nagios and PRTG. I started using Dynatrace because my company decided to switch to it.

I rate the ease of setup a seven out of ten.

The solution is not cheap.

It’s definitely a good tool. It is a perfect combination of technical and business. It enables us to identify and make dashboards related to hardware, application, and business. Overall, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

We are old school, we don't have proper documentation on how our application interacts with the downstream components. We tried CA Wily, that didn't provide a solution. We had CA Wily for three years, but when we deployed AppMon it gave us the complete picture, how the application interacts with downstream components, the application flow.

Based on that, my development team is developing the application automation diagram using the app map. It's like reverse engineering I guess.

It's really helping out. The term we call the mean time to repair, that has improved a lot. Before we had a "command center" type of setup. We had all the dashboards on the screen and five to six people sitting in front of the computer. When there was an issue they used to call a "bridge" meeting and everybody would login to the bridge.

The AppMon solution helped the OCC, the operations guys, to pinpoint one problem area and to call the specific group, instead of opening the bridge for everyone and asking them to join there.

The mean time to repair and the resource utilization time, they are totally reduced deploying APM.

The Transaction Flow diagram and the class and meta level information, those are really key selling points in the automation for AppMon. Also, the meta level instrumentation and the dashboards that most of the people use in our organization. 

Most importantly the back-end components. Most of the back-end components that the application connects to; nobody knows how our application interacts with, for example, the DataPower Gateway. But AppMon really provides that information for us. So finding the gaps is the key here.

One thing I'm missing and that is the JMX from the MBeans, it's missing completely. 

Also the reporting. We have a load testing team, they completely rely on the reporting for analyzing the data. They should have a template to create a report and they should have something to auto-deliver the report into your email box. 

They also need to develop how to capture the JDBC and MBeans metrics. That is something they're lacking. Also integration for the extension to DataPower and MuleSoft Gateway.

The other feature that Dynatrace should have is - from what I see in Dynatrace in our PoC - when you auto-upgrade the agents, the JVM or the application has to be restarted. But if you have something like an "auto-attach" feature, to attach the agent for the running process, it would not require a JVM restart. That would be nicer. That is a killer point.

We haven't seen it that much but it's promising. We haven't had any downtime.

We have a small portion deployed right now, but they're planning to go enterprise-wide, we're thinking about 8,000 to 10,000 agents, so probably at that time we'll know the scalability. But the small one we have right now, it's good. It's doing well. The UI is faster, people like it.

We used tech support one time. We did in Fabric. We have internal cloud, called C3. So C3 and Fabric, we had a little bit of an issue, we called the support guys to fix it so and they were knowledgeable.

I have used HPE Diagnostics, CA Wily. I'm now doing a PoC with Dynatrace and AppDynamics.

With CA Wily, the problem was the complexity of our environment. It's not the tool, we have too many security layers. CA Wily, there's a breaking point. When we have the agents on multiple servers, it's not creating that link because of the security. But Dynatrace, I don't know how they did it, it's really awesome.

We switched because of the Transaction Flow diagram. There is a complexity in CA Wily that it is not able to integrate into our security layer, whereas AppMon can. That's the main thing that's missing. We were looking for that flow diagram. Nobody knows it. The developers call it but they really don't know what the main functionality is that's behind it: How the Apache layer connects to application server, and the application server connects to the different services, and the services to the back. Nobody knows it unless you have proper documentation. Proper documentation is very difficult to get in any organization. 

Upper management really liked the Transaction Flow diagram. No matter what, that's the key.

Comparing AppMon to Dynatrace, I like Dynatrace very much because of the ease of use. AppMon is complexity. You need to know more to use the tool. The adaptability comes when you have a nice GUI that is easy to navigate. I saw that in the Dynatrace SaaS model. 

When I'm looking at AI, the problem identification and anomaly prediction is important. It's good to know, beforehand, when the problem is going to happen. The anomaly detection is the key area, and part of the AI I think.

If we had a solution that gives you an alert that said, "This is your problem, this is how you're going to solve it," that would be really awesome. Pointing out a problem to a specific group is a key point. That would really help, instead of globally alerting everybody, alerting upper management. If before they know it, you can solve the problem that would be nice.

When looking at vendors, we have a key set of requirements. Among them are container health monitoring, flow diagram. Also extension monitoring the non-Java applications, or non-supported applications, because Dynatrace works mostly on the .NET or Java applications. There are applications out there which are non-Java based like PeopleSoft. At least we can see the interaction with those components, but it would be nice to see what's going on inside those external components. That's what I'm looking in future releases, more support for things like PeopleSoft.

I would rate Dynatrace an eight out of 10 compared to other tools. The amount of data it provides is awesome. Other tools work on a sampling methodology but Dynatrace captures all the RAM sessions that are running. It's more data, but they have the filtering options so I can pick the data I want. Capturing all the data gives me more insight into what's going on, I can compare a bad response to a fast response, that type of thing. Capturing all the data is awesome.

I've worked with HPE Diagnostics, I've worked with CA Wily, now I'm doing a PoC with Dynatrace and AppDynamics. Compared to all these products Dynatrace stood out.

We have hundreds of applications in our organization which are currently instrumented. We define business transactions and provide real-time monitoring for these applications.

Overall, I'd say we're pretty satisfied. However, as a larger corporation - our environment is very, very large, we have over 15 production servers and a total 20-plus Dynatrace AppMon servers - it's increasingly difficult to manage as our environment grows out. It's simply because our team is not fully staffed to support such a large environment, and to do the maintenance work with all the upgrades from 6.5 to 7 to 7.1. We have some challenges where our hardware that we are using today is hosting one servable host with two different Dynatrace AppMon instances, which is not, I guess, a typical setup. So sometimes it's a little bit challenging with the support, but we work through it.

As an administrator for the AppMon servers, we see the benefits every day when we help business teams to figure out some of their problems, troubleshoot to root cause. When we hear of these cases where we save business teams or application support hours or days of figuring out problems, that's probably what we're most proud.

Definitely HA, because we have so many applications that are dependent on AppMon that it has been deemed critical. Any downtime, it just affects so many users. So that's one of our key asks for the future.

Stability is where the "fairly satisfied" comes in. I think it's also due to our environment and having multiple servers hosting dual instances of AppMon, where we've seen a few challenges. We do work with the vendor. However, because we've had instances of down AppMon servers, although we can recover fairly quickly, one of the key pieces that is missing is having high availability. I believe it's coming in 7.1, so it's on the roadmap, we just wish it would be sooner.

As an organization we keep growing, because everybody wants AppMon. Even within my last two years, since I've joined the team, I think we've added four new production servers and probably eight to 10 including dev and QA. However, instead of having two very large Dynatrace servers, we had to scale out laterally. 

We've had challenges. I would say it's not scalable, because we've had to move large applications that were in a shared environment to their own separate Dynatrace server instance. Those are some of the challenges we do have.

Support has been very good. We are in constant contact with our sales engineer. 

They're very responsive, and anytime we do have an issue and raise a concern, we get immediate feedback. We have a good relationship with Dynatrace.

I was not involved with the initial setup. But since I've been there we've upgraded from 6.3 and 6.5, and we're currently rolling out, I'd say, 90% of our environment is at 7, we're just missing one server. I would say the upgrading is fairly straightforward. It was just a lot of work, due to the size of our environment.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, that's the direction that we're already going, and I don't think we can avoid it. It's something that for us, as a large organization, we will need to leverage. I think we will adopt it, hopefully, sooner rather than later.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers and not just data, the immediate benefit would be that we'd be able to do more work, free up our time to do other tasks. Also, as a trickle down effect, the more time we have to do other people's requests - we have hundreds of applications in our organization  - so the trickle down effect would benefit all teams.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are stability of the product, and HA is definitely on the list due to our nature of our business. Also, new features being added on, that's always a big plus.

I would give it a solid eight. Again, it has a few features lacking or which haven't been there since the inception - the HA - because we've gone through three or four upgrades. When we lose our one server, we might lose two server instances, so it affects more applications.

I'd definitely say sign up for the trial, test it out in your test environment, and get your business users and app support teams involved quickly just to see the benefits. Just being able to look at the PurePaths; the first time I saw PurePaths I thought, "Wow. This is a pretty powerful tool."

Dynatrace is a strategic application performance monitoring tool. We use it for every use case related to monitoring applications. We use the SaaS solution to monitor on-premises.

We also use Dynatrace for monitoring third-party applications and our own applications.

Dynatrace has the most features compared to other products we looked at. However, the best thing, in my opinion, is the support from the Dynatrace team. They provide a success manager and a team of engineers who are quick to answer questions and provide help. They even assign architects and engineers to ensure our productivity with the tool.

Dynatrace is a complicated tool that requires time and investment to fully understand. It's not something you can simply turn on and use. You need a dedicated team to use it.

So, the only challenge is that it's an extensive tool that requires a significant amount of time to learn.

Moreover, Dynatrace delivers new functionality every month. They have a space on their website where you can request new features, and they actively monitor it. They provide feedback and ask questions about the requested features. Suddenly, those features appear in the product. Dynatrace is really good at incorporating user suggestions. So, there's nothing that I want to add that they haven't already considered.

I've been using Dynatrace for about three to four years. We are using the latest version since it's a SaaS solution. It's always up to date.

Dynatrace has been very stable without any issues. I would rate the stability a solid ten. 

Dynatrace is massively scalable. I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

We have around 200 users using this solution in our organization.

The support has been exceptional.

Positive

The initial setup is actually really easy to install. It's a quick process. You can turn it on and load the SaaS Dynatrace solution in just five minutes. 

However, there is additional configuration and tweaking that may take years to optimize fully. The interface configuration is not easy; given the tool's complexity, it requires time to become familiar with it.

There is maintenance involved. Dynatrace releases patches every two to four weeks. The only painful part there is the agents we run on-prem and on our servers, it needs the agent the application needs to restart.

So, sometimes you delay the update to minimize disruption but the patches are sent to us every month.

Dynatrace is expensive, but it offers good value for the money. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with one being cheap, and ten being expensive. It is not cheap; it could always be cheaper. 

The license has recently changed to a yearly subscription model. So, it's an annual subscription. We pay even more to have an engineer as part of our team for two days a week. It incurs an additional cost.

I would say to go for it. You won't regret it. Dynatrace has been an awesome product. The complexity of Dynatrace arises from its vast array of features and settings. It takes a considerable amount of time to learn and understand all the options it offers. 

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

Our primary use case for this solution is for checking site vulnerability to see if the applications are up or down and if they're running fine.

This solution has helped our organization by allowing us to check for site vulnerability and performance, which in the end helps us save money.

The most valuable features for me are the dashboard panels because they enable you to monitor multiple applications in one single site.

In the next release, I'd like to see more portables included regarding the screens.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

I would rate the stability of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. There are some 50 people using this solution in our organization.

I would rate the technical support of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Positive

The deployment process was easy as the vendor just had to give us access.

My impression is that their pricing plan is moderate.

Our deployment model is on-premises.

I would rate this solution as a whole a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

The primary use case is for application performance management. So, we are using it to identify outages of different parts of the application as well as how we can make the application more efficient and rightsize it.

We can see down into the layers, such as with databases. We can see database queries which are causing problems. 

We can see CPU usage for different containers. I can do a run and see what errors exist in containers which are causing problems. We can rightsize containers on the fly and understand what is happening with our Docker, microservices, etc.

The most valuable feature is it has AI in it. The artificial intelligence (AI) engine in it is able to do alerts and some good analytics. During outages, it is able to identify and correlate where the actual root cause of a problem is. This connectivity allows us to be able to see a bit further into the application down through the layers. If it is a problem within AWS, a problem within a container or something that a user did. We are able to see and coordinate that, then we are able to tell the developers how to fix it.

The GUI has the most room for improvement. Sometimes, it can be a little cumbersome to find things and be able to create your own views, or be able to dig in and understand where things are.

Some additional features would be the ability to break out some of the permissions and allow some additional or different ways to tag services, events, and different things which run. We want to push down the ability to do that, so developers and other folks can get in there. Currently, more permissions are needed to be able to do certain things, and we want more people to be able to use it, own it, and understand it.

We don't put very much stress on it. We could probably stress it some more, but we don't have enough systems right now on it to stress it. For the most part, the ships don't cause as much stress. 

We are going to have it on about 40 ships around the world which will run it independently of our AWS platform. Those are don't stress it too much. We will probably stress it at a certain point, along with AWS, but we still very much growing the platform.

It can scale very well and very high. We don't need it to scale as much right now. It is able to absorb a lot of the systems that we have with the agents and and the API Gateways. It seems like it can scale very well when we need it to, so scalability is good for us right now.

If we needed technical support, we usually call our account team to help us figure out where the errors are, whether it is something with an agent or management servers.

It is pretty easy to integrate it into the AWS environment. You give it a username and password and it asks some basic permission. It can pull a lot of information very quickly. We are able to correlate more and provide more data for it. So, it was easy to integrate it into that environment.

We have it running on AWS. It integrates pretty well there. We have it on Red Hat Linux servers, as well as Windows servers. We have it running on VMware where it integrates very well. It understands these productions and understands our platform. It is able to read into Docker containers and all the databases that we run. However, it is limited as far as how many of a certain type of database that we can have, but for the most part, it runs pretty well and integrates very well.

It has been doing a good job of alerting us to issues. It has been very helpful and effective at identifying how we can do things to make our infrastructure and application a little better.

We considered AppDynamics, Datadog, and Crashlytics. We even considered things like Splunk for different pieces of it.

We chose Dynatrace because we needed something which could run both on AWS and VMware on our ships that might lose their Internet connectivity. This product gave us the flexibility of being able to do both. Dynatrace had the ability to run independently, so we could access it while it retains information.

A PoC is the best way to go. Put it against an application and go through the paces of tagging, analyzing, and alerting on it. You can understand what it does and how it does it. Give it a very complex application, so you can see how well it works.

We use the on-premise version because we have it running on VMware. We also use it on AWS to manage our systems on AWS for production and for our non-production environments.

It is one of the core enterprise tools that we use for detecting incidents and paging out to teams when a problem happens. Ideally, it is proactive. This is what we are looking for and what you would expect with Dynatrace: To be looking for things that are going south and getting people on the phone to deal with them beforehand. With a large enterprise, where we are, there are a lot of different teams on the phones, so Dynatrace is hopefully giving us where in the large ecosystem of the application the problem actually is. Therefore, basic use cases, but this is what Dynatrace is good for.

We do have the pockets today where teams have started to get better at giving us a cohesive view. We use AppMon a lot to fuel the metrics that we have. Therefore, we are starting to create dashboards on top of AppMon that pull together information from a few sources and actually provide that cohesive view. We are just now starting to proof of concept it with some of the business teams to see if we can get traction and start to fill in some of the gaps that we have.

PurePath is a very staple thing for it, because within one transaction all the way through you can see the bits and pieces from when the user first came in to the database. We have mainframe components and a lot of middleware layers as well. To have one place where you can see the entire flow all the way up and back is invaluable and it saves lots of time.

It looks like they are actually fixing the issues in version 7. Therefore, I am real excited to get it in, because the core problems that we are having, the newest version seems to be fixing. If we can get out of actually having to handle every problem, it can let teams start to get steam on their own.

The stability has been wonderful for the couple of years that I have been involved with it. It has really been the key tool of choice that anytime anything goes down anywhere, it is typically the tool that is shown on the big screen in front of everybody or shared through a Skype session. It is getting to the point that the CTO of the organization knows the tool by first name and will look to have it brought up, because it is so consistent, reliable, and a cornerstone for solving problems. 

This one I would defer to my team a little bit, but I do hear a few gripes scalability-wise. It is a very good tool, and we have got it to do what we need to do. However, I do know that for the size of our organization, we're talking thousands of agents and hundreds of applications, it does get to the point where the servers themselves that house Dynatrace are at a point where, in some cases, they are just too big for one machine, since you have to have an entire application ecosystem all funnel into a single system. One of the things we run into is, when we deploy agents, it is a bit finicky sometimes about how that happens. We have had to put in measures to make sure that applications do not get an upgrade for Dynatrace until we specifically quarter them off, making sure that we have a very careful process to troubleshoot them because we have had several instances where applications have had issues after an upgrade.

I have a very good team who are very good at this, so from my perspective, I would say is Dynatrace is one of the few companies where it seems their people are still ahead of my team in terms of troubleshooting things. Some of the other applications that I have, I feel like my guys should be paid by the companies that troubleshoot. The Dynatrace support team that we have is great and the staff that we have had onsite has been consistently good.

My company has used siloed monitoring tools. We do not actually try to get rid of those best of breed tools, but there are some obvious problems with them. Today, a network tool does not use the same terminology as a database tool, and the database guys do not talk the same language as the app teams. Thus, very frequently there are very silent organization or we will have huge gaps between these things. Not only do you have a conversational barrier between teams, you will frequently have whole sections of the network that are not monitored or people who think, "Well that's not my side, the network is good," and the database guy will say, "My side is good and the database is fine." However, there is obviously something in the middle that is not there. That siloing is very damaging to working on a big team trying to fix things quickly. 

Before Dynatrace, it was a smaller list of niche tools. Dynatrace was the first tool that started to slice horizontally through all the different silos and provide feedback.

I was not at the company three years ago for the initial setup.

I would wholeheartedly recommend the platform as it is, but looking for someone who is just getting into it and does not have a lot of experience, Dynatrace 7 seems to be easier to get into than AppMon was before. So, it is a great starting point today.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit to my team would be two things, and they are both on the business end of what we do. Today, our business customers are very frustrated with the ecosystem that we have in place because there are so many complex components. They really want a solution where they can see what is the actual impact for the people who are trying to use the application. If I am trying to go in and check a balance or trying to buy something, they really want to know how many people are being impacted by that today. Then, what actually is the technical problem behind the scenes, but so often, we have a lot of technical problems, but we have a really hard time prioritizing what those are as a cohesive solution. If our business customers could say, "80,000 people are impacted by incident A, but only 200 people are affected by incident B." This would provide an entire view that would be so much better for trying to prioritize development teams to fix problems, and we don't have this typically today. 

We are in AppMon 6.5 today. We have people on my team who are sort of a tiger team that have to get involved whenever there is a performance problem because there is almost an art form to using AppMon today. What I have seen so far of Dynatrace and the OneAgent today, it removes a lot of the AppMon art form. I see a lot of value in moving to 7.1 later this year. I am very excited to see when some of our teams, who are not as familiar with Dynatrace but know the application, can start using the application more.  Hopefully, it will reduce and back off the need to constantly bring in my Tier 3 team as super experts and help and to maybe focus more on key problems, letting teams deal with things themselves. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Having a company that has been around for a while and has multiple products that we can leverage cost of scale.

With Dynatrace, my company pretty much utilizes it to try and catch performance issues before certain issues get created on our online banking platforms, as well as for technical performance issues in our internal systems and to make sure that our users get the best experience. The aforementioned details consist of three use cases. Obviously, my company stopped using some of Dynatrace's features since we started getting a few issues as certain services have gone down or been degraded. With Dynatrace, my company receives pop-ups on our site in terms of an alert to which we can react if needed, and it helps us minimize any negative impact on our clients or business stakeholders.

With Dynatrace, I think I like its ability to dive deep down into each service and application at the code level. You can see Dynatrace interacting with other applications, so it gives you a good understanding of where things go wrong. I think it is just that Dynatrace gives you great observability on your platform.

With Dynatrace, there is nothing that I would like to see improved in the product right now. Dynatrace pretty much fits in and meets all the checkboxes or requirements of my company. I know that a new product from Dynatrace will be launched soon, and my company may plan to move to it, so I think all the requests from my company's end related to Dynatrace may actually get covered in the new product.

From an enhancement perspective, I would like Dynatrace to focus on areas related to cognitive AI since it can help its users better understand their problems. With AI-related enhancements in Dynatrace, I can talk to the tool in English. Instead of getting some codes from the tool, Dynatrace can tell me the problem in a normal and understandable English language. If I am not mistaken, the aforementioned AI-related area may actually be released in the new version of Dynatrace.

I have been using Dynatrace since 2013, making it almost ten years.

It is a 100 percent stable solution.

Dynatrace is a highly scalable product since it is a SaaS-based application. As it is a SaaS-based application, you can deploy ActiveGate wherever you need it or closest to your environment.

Though I cannot check the list of the users who use the solution and don't have access to see the number of old users, many people use the solution. It would be close to around 300 users presently who use Dynatrace.

The solution's technical support is extremely good. If in our company, we are stuck with something, Dynatrace's technical support team is always quick to respond, and they always have answers to our questions.

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with SolarWinds and Applications Manager from ManageEngine. I predominantly use Dynatrace.

The pros of Dynatrace are that you are able to drill down to see in-depth how your application is performing, how your host is performing, and how your business services are performing, right from the cloud level down to the codes. The con of Dynatrace is that, at times, because it has so much information, it becomes difficult to see the root cause of your problem, and then you have to dig around to find the root cause.

The initial setup of the product is a relatively easy process since it is a SaaS-based platform. Previously, with Dynatrace, my company had it deployed on an on-premises model. Currently, when my company deals with the setup processes of the product, it is really easy since you just install the agents on your server or on your hosts, after which the product starts to do what it needs to do, and then you can just create your dashboards and alert systems. If you understand the application, the setup phase is a really simple process.

The solution's deployment and maintenance processes are handled by a team consisting of four members for both South Africa and the UK, and they also readily function as a support team. In terms of deployment and product administration, you can know how to utilize the tool from a much broader base.

Owing to the fact that Dynatrace is a SaaS-based product, there isn't much maintenance required. My company only subscribes to the services provided by the solution, and Dynatrace looks after the maintenance part, a major reason why only a small team is required to administer it.

I recommend Dynatrace to those who plan to use it since it is a Rolls Royce of monitoring tools with which you can't go wrong. Dynatrace gives you exactly what you want. There are no comparisons to Dynatrace with any other tool out there in the market.

Dynatrace is a brilliant product.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.