Dynatrace Reviews

We are using AppMon UVM and Dynatrace synthetics, which we recently implemented. We are looking forward to using the new releases of Dynatrace in the future, where the use cases then will look at the following:

• User actions
• Analyzing PurePath to see what the user is doing.
• Transactions on our website since we have an eCommerce website.
• Availability and response times
• Drill down to see if there are any issues
• Gather old clients.

Being able to identify quickly what the problem is. It allows you to better utilize and focus your talent, and tell management that you are not only looking at problems, but how you can ultimately make the product better for the end user.

Business Case: In our implementation, AppMon and UVM are fairly infantile. The implementation was less than six months ago which means that we have been able to scale down some of our infrastructure. Not needing as much infrastructure to run compared to what we have been running in the past. From this perspective, it has been cost effective in allowing us to scale down infrastructure.

It allows us to make better business decisions based on what we are seeing, not what our customers were telling us was going on, but what we are actually seeing. Using this, I have been able to identify what the customers are experiencing. It allows us to optimize our site, our eCommerce solution, to better suit the needs of our customers. We can actually see what they are seeing and almost feel what they are feeling, because of the eyes that we have into their experience. It allows us to better code and better develop, allowing us to be able to optimize our website based off what we are seeing the customers truly experiencing.

The ease of use. Being able to readily identify a problem and be able to get someone there to fix or manage it properly and quickly. Our eCommerce website deals with users and time is critical. One of the best things, we are able to identify problems quickly and are able to resolve them.

They have had years developing this technology. When we go through it and we use it on a day-to-day basis, we see some things and think, "Hey, if they just had this, man this application would be a lot better." Then, in the next release, it comes out and it happened. We are using AppMon 7.0.15 right now, so AppMon 7.1 is coming out. Everything that I have identified in the version that I have as needing to be improved/fixed has already been addressed in the newer versions. Therefore, I can't think of anything that they have not addressed.

One of the things that find to be a challenge is I tell everybody that you almost have to be a private investigator to try to figure out what it is you want and how to get it. What I would have wanted was a solution that makes that process less cumbersome. 7.1 has already identified that. The Dynatrace solution has already identified that because of the way that PurePaths were looked at in Dynatrace compared to what they were looked at in AppMon. That would have been the one thing that I would have said, "If this product could be better, it would be from that perspective," but they have already identified it. They have already come up with the solution because I was not the only one that thought of that. Other people have thought of that using it, and they said, "Okay, this was a gap in Dynatrace, that gap has already been closed." That was the one thing that I had and they have already identified it.

We have not had any stability issues with it at all. This has been the most stable solution that I have worked with. I have been in IT for over 22 years and the solution that we have implemented here in the last six months has been the most stable solution that I have worked with in all my 22 years in IT.

It is limitless when it comes down to being able to scale up or even scale back, if we need it to. 

I have definitely had to use technical support. The technical support team, customer service team, and Dynatrace altogether have been the best team that I have worked with industry-wide. Whenever I have a problem, most of the time they are hounding me for more feedback on the problem than me having to hound them. They have been great. I have a monthly call with technical resources, and I also have sales resources on a monthly call. Whatever our need is, they are there to help us, hold our hand, and walk us through it. It has been amazing.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. I will not mention any particular names, but the challenges have been that they are silos. It does not give you a holistic view of everything that is going on in your application as compared to a solution like Dynatrace which allows you to see from start to finish. With Dynatrace, you get a complete holistic view of the application, and it helps you not point fingers, but be able to identify visible problems.

I was hands on in the setup of the solution. Initially, it seemed a little daunting. Once we started working with it, it was a very easy solution to implement and put in place.

The vendor that we brought in to help us move our platform from Legacy to NextGen was using Dynatrace in their dev testing. So, just for amount of consistency, we continue to use Dynatrace, and we can see why they chose Dynatrace to use as their dev testing. It was the best tool out there. I do not know what tools they have considered in the past, but I know that was the one that they brought to the table and it has proved to be a valuable tool for us.

I would recommend to give Dynatrace a call if you are looking for an APM solution.

AI is the solution of the future. I say the future but actually right now moving into the future. It is interesting looking at some of the applications using AI to solve problems, like betas, and being able to integrate that with Alexa for things like adding voice control to identify and solve problems. I think going forward it will be the way that IT works.

It would be invaluable to have one solution which would allow you not only to gather data, but to be able to make intelligent solutions based off of that data. It would be industry changing.

Most important criteria when selecting an APM solution: Cost is one of them, but we also needed something that did not just collect data. We needed something that provided a true benefit. If I am going to spend my day focusing on what a user is doing and what is that user's experience like on my website, then I need a application that can go and figure out the things that I am not seeing and what I am missing, so the tool that I am using provides the information right now. What I have seen from Dynatrace is that it takes that to a totally different level.

Our company primarily uses the AppMon product and we have it divided up in different business units: line support, corporate systems support in our organization. We primarily use it to monitor internal HR applications, enterprise document applications, anything that involves Java, database SQL. We're trying to monitor and make sure that we're tuning performance.

We have an initiative going on this year, high-availability, so we're trying to get as many applications in our organization to be monitored through this tool as, much as possible, to make sure they're all running most efficiently and performing the way that the management would expect.

So far it's going well. Quite a learning experience for us.

The dashboard gives us something to show managers and our business where the problems are. That's really been eye-opening for them. They can see, yes, this tool has been a good investment. They can see where the problems are and how we can take advantage of it for making those necessary corrections, so it's been helpful to us.

I like the end-to-end monitoring - we can see. Also the user experience, that's been really helpful for us because a lot of times things just aren't detected and I hear from the users. This isolates some of the issues from their experience, so that's definitely been useful for us. 

We're also starting to learn some of the Synthetic monitoring, hoping to do some performance testing in the future.

We'd like to see them continue to develop the AI, what they introduced today here at the Perform 2018 conference, with the whole Synthetic monitoring. I'm glad that they're starting to merge a lot of the tool-sets into one to make it easier.

There's definitely been some challenges around stability, as far as PurePaths sometimes. Also the history, we've got so much data being built. We have to be careful to keep a short amount of history available to our users, so it's been challenging.

I think the design is pretty scalable. It's pretty easy to add additional nodes if we need to. Also, it's easy to migrate changes from one environment to another. That makes it so you can scale it. I think it's met our expectations for scalability.

I personally have not used tech support, but we have other people on the team that do engage with the vendor more avidly and they've said that support has been pretty adept at meeting their needs, time-wise. We're pretty pleased so far with the way the vendor has handled problems we've proposed to them.

We've used SiteScope for monitoring a lot of our web applications. I know we've used Tealeaf and Splunk. They're great tools but there's quite a learning curve there. 

This one, Dynatrace, seemed to be a little bit more straightforward. It's certainly more robust in what it can do as far as the end-to-end monitoring. You can also see how big these conferences are, like here at Perform 2018. There are a lot of other users for networking who are familiar with this tool, so that's helped us adopt it a little bit more easily and to push that incentive towards our directors.

SiteScope is limited. It doesn't do Angular apps as much. It doesn't do single-page apps, so it's more just one web page; it's easier to write scripting for that. But when you have something that goes through a whole set series, it's been challenging. With Dynatrace it has been a little easier to monitor those types of situations. That's the primary reason.

I would like to see them improve on their licensing and the cost. It's been a challenge for us because the way they have it broken out right now, you have to buy it by units. It's hard for us to know where to put those units because our company is broken up into all these different business units, so it's been challenging in that sense. I just would like to see them improve that model a little bit.

I wasn't really involved in the process, but when we saw what the tool is capable of, it certainly went to the top pretty quickly. It has met most of our expectations since we purchased it. 

I do believe that they evaluated one other vendor, product but I don't remember who.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance is certainly a big thing going on right now. It's very important to us. I want to make sure that there's not only learning when there are issues, but also that there is taking action automatically to correct it. That's where the intelligence is at, and once you program it in, it knows how to fix the issue and you don't have to troubleshoot and find out what the issue is. That's a big initiative that's going on, it's very important to us, this AI.

In terms of one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to just data,
any solution that could tell us, definitely, when there's something going on across our organization - not just in one area, one department - something that could tell us from each point when there's a communication such as sign-on; we want to know if it's something with the network, it's something with the area that supports that application, or if it's something on a host server. Something that tells us, all the way across the board what the issue could be. That's what we're driving towards.

I'd rate Dynatrace about a nine out of 10. There are some things that they need them to improve upon, but they are pretty close to the top.

Talk with them, go out and seek, look at all the options you have. Make sure that you talk with your business and discuss what is most important when you're looking to invest toward performance issues. Look at a tool that spans across the company, that can meet multiple areas of needs, not just your own.

Dynatrace is doing it very well. It offers the customer a holistic view of the application or website, starting from the front-end services to the back-end services. Mainly, they are focusing more on application performance. 

For sure, they have it for server monitoring and network performance monitoring, but mainly they are focusing on application and AI capabilities when it comes to application performance monitoring.

They are very good when it comes to APM. 

It has AI capabilities for anomaly detection. Also, they are a fully automated solution, so it's easy to use when it comes to deployment. In general, they have root cause analysis, monitoring the components, and monitoring the application. They use information to connect the issues, detecting problems, and finding LiveOps analysis.

It would be good to extend the visibility to cover more infrastructure monitoring capabilities and more network performance capabilities.

I have been using it for five years.

It is a stable product. 

Moreover, there is a support team. Honestly, they are doing very good when it comes to communications and documentation, so you can easily troubleshoot and diagnose issues.

You can also easily reach out to their support team. For the components themselves, it's quite stable. There aren't many parts when it comes to Dynatrace components or the platform itself. So, it's the best solution.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten because it is an agentless solution. It is scalable; you can deploy the agent wherever you want. 

We have Enterprise businesses as our clients. It can be offered to small businesses, but it would be pretty expensive. Technically, there is no problem with that. But, it's all about the cost or the price.

We can reach out to them directly through chat services within the platform itself, or we can contact their partners globally. Dynatrace would be able to help you directly, and also let you contact the enterprise support team. So, it's quite good when it comes to support.

Positive

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy. 

It is fully automated, so it was easy. 

The deployment model can be both on-premises and on the cloud. 

The deployment depends on the component. Overall, it can be done in less than one hour, or two hours maximum; you will be able to finish deployment when it comes to the main components, like the analysis server or admin server. But when it comes to agents, it depends on the customer's environment. It may take hours or weeks. So, it depends on the prerequisites and the customers themselves.

The cost savings can add because they are focusing on the end-user experience. Currently, all businesses are all about the user experience. So once you have such a tool, you just want to make sure that users are satisfied. 

When they are satisfied, you will gain benefits. So when it comes to return on investment, by keeping your customers satisfied, it's worth it to invest in such a tool. It gives you clear visibility of the user experience or user behavior so you can improve your business.

It's not cheap, for sure. Dynatrace targets enterprise customers, banking, government entities. So for sure, it's not cheap, and it's a little bit expensive. So, I would rate the  pricing a seven out of ten, with ten being expensive. 

Now, here comes the comparison to other APM competitors like AppDynamics and IBM; yhey are within the same range. They are all targeting top-end users.

Dynatrace has an AI engine. It collects numerous metrics from the customer's IT environment. The AI engine then correlates and analyzes all of these collected metrics and transactions to offer some capabilities to the customers.

However, my recommendation depends on the use cases or pain points for the customers. For application visibility or end-user experience, I would recommend Dynatrace.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven 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.

Dynatrace is a very good solution to monitor both application performance and the underlying infrastructure. It's good to analyze all the relationships with Smartscape technology. It's very useful to understand all the dynamic relationships of the application stack, including all the hardware and dependent components. We always use the latest version. 

We deploy it on-prem and on cloud. The SaaS solution is deployed on AWS.

The infrastructure manager or application or database manager will be using this solution. You can also have a CIO or CFO type of dashboard since there's business value and you can monitor the components. You can decide what is the total output provided by those applications.

Smartscape is a valuable feature. They also have a technology named PurePath. PurePath is the distributed tracing data. Previously, we called it distributed tracing. Including all the stacks, you have the full visibility of your solution, the impact of the hardware, and all the operating system dependencies. You can analyze if you have any software change which has impacted your performance.

They're doing vulnerability assessments of the application stack by using OneAgent. It's a never-ending story if you are trying to be sure your application is also secure. So, they could improve in that area, but they have started doing that.

They could definitely add additional components since the technology is driving from different perspectives. So, they should follow up with all the new components and new versions of the suite.

The price could be lower.

I've been using Dynatrace for two years.

I haven't seen any instability. Even their SaaS platform is always up and running. We haven't seen any issues on-prem since their components are already clustered. You can implement multiple servers to have the solution.

It's very scalable for tens or hundreds of servers. We didn't see any scalability issue. Some customers have over 10,000 applications monitored by Dynatrace.

We had several calls to their support organization, but we have had a very good response from them. Even the Mission Control functionality within the solution is handling most of the log collection. They can reach your server to understand the situation, and they can do a dynamic upgrade of the solution. So, it's very good and very powerful.

I would rate them 5 out of 5.

I'm using alternatives in several customer cases. Dynatrace is the best solution in the market, but because of the price restrictions and also the relationship of vendors, we use other selections in certain environments.

Setup is very easy, and it's easy to implement. I would rate setup 5 out of 5.

Since I'm representing different use cases and different customers, we see different needs. For all of them, including having a SaaS-based approach or having on-prem deployment, it's always a matter of minutes to get some results. The amount of servers is always changing. But we are mostly targeting SaaS customers who have hundreds or thousands of servers for their application stack.

I'm the business development manager and also the pre-sales of the solution in our company. I'm mostly doing the POCs and also leading the implementation since it's very easy. Mostly, I'm in front of our sales and also including the implementation timeframe as the customer success manager for the customers. 

The amount of people needed for deployment and maintenance depends on the size of your environment. If your environment is not up-to-date, your environment is not handled by the operations team. This is not the case for Dynatrace.

Our customers have seen ROI. It's very high. I would rate it 5 out of 5.

Dynatrace is usually paid on a yearly basis. You can also have an upfront three-year contract and pay each year, and you will have better pricing. Pricing is always dependent on the industry and the region. Since we are in Turkey, we have a very big push from customers for the discount levels. It always depends on the customer and their project situation.

There are additional costs to the standard licensing fees. If it's a SaaS-based approach, then all the platform cost is included. But if it's on-prem, you have some additional costs. Their pricing structure is a little different if you are using it on-prem without Mission Control.

I would rate them 4 out of 5 for pricing.

Our customers evaluate other solutions like New Relic APM. If they need to have it on-prem, they are mostly including Instana and sometimes Cisco AppDynamics.

Dynatrace has great output and very successful implementation in most cases, including the microservices, the new technology components, and the monolithic architectures of classic Java and .NET applications. They are very good technically but usually very expensive. That's why customers are always evaluating other alternatives to understand what is the final cost of the project.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

My advice to those looking to implement this solution is to include Dynatrace in their evaluation and try to understand if the other solutions can have similar results with their footprint. It depends on the environment. If it's mostly a newer environment like microservices and just Kubernetes or that type of environment, they can also have some outputs with Instana. But if it's monolithic and there's old stuff in their environment, they can have some outputs with AppDynamics. 

Dynatrace includes all of the technologies from old to new. They are very powerful. So, I strongly suggest having them in the evaluation period.

In the six months that we were using Dynatrace, it was a proof of concept.

It's used for full-stack monitoring, automated instrumentation, APM, and byte code injections, as well as infrastructure performance monitoring and the virtualization layer.

We really liked the OneAgent technology automated instrumentation. It is impressive, better than the competitors, AppDynamics.

We like the on-premises platform and the horizontal scalability.

In the next release, other than the price being reduced, I would like to see some improvements in open telemetry support, the open standards support.

They could also develop an observability platform where you could have the ability to inject events, locks, and traces.

We have been using Dynatrace for six months.

We used the Dynatrace managed service. It was the latest version when we used it.

The stability was fine. We did not encounter any issues. It was working as designed and expected.

It's a scalable solution with a true cluster platform that can be expanded. It works very well.

We have 200 users in our organization who are using it.

We are satisfied with the technical support.

We were using AppDynamics and CA APM in the past.

It was a straightforward installation.

It took two to three days to configure and do the proof of concept.

We had a team of two or three to deploy this solution.

We completed the installation ourselves.

Financially, Dynatrace was a lot more expensive than AppDynamics.

Our business case wouldn't resolve, which is why we decided to renew the licenses with AppDynamics.

Dynatrace should reduce their pricing. It should be cheaper.

We are no longer using Dynatrace because it was too expensive.

If the price were reduced then we would use this solution again.

For those who are interested in using this product, we would recommend it.

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

We use it for our development teams to make sure we have development feedback loops. We run about 50 different development teams and development streams. It is very important for us to keep on top of our deployments. We ran about 950 deployments and the tool gives us the flexibility to ensure that we are staying as close to those deployments moving forward.

Before we had the tool we had no visibility into the user experience and capturing what was going on inside the browser. We utilized tags so we knew how many times people were doing certain things, but we did not know how the performance was, if users were satisfied with what they were doing, and if we were serving up errors. We had no ability to correlate anything that was going on in our back-end systems and what users were doing. Being able to have that viability and that insight into what is going on for our customers was immensely valuable across the board from the development perspective all the way through to higher level business people.

One of the reasons that we are going into the new Dynatrace platform. We have a lot of data. With that amount of data and my team being very small, we are not specifically developers, we do incident management and problem management. The administer of the Dynatrace tool makes sure the monitoring is out and available for everybody where it needs to be. We do not have time to look at all the data, and with all the AI and automatic stuff being able to do management zones when that coming to us soon, a lot of the feature sets which are moving forward will make my job so much easier. I will not have to work 60 to 65 hours a week to ensure I am getting stuff to the developers so they can do what they need to do.

Dynatrace is staying up with IoT and a lot of the cloud solutions, which is really going to be helpful for us in the future.

The most valuable things that we have seen are the user experience and capturing what the users are doing inside the browser, and being able to equate that back to the business and telling them how much of their company is doing what. Also, what the performance time is, so we can give that back to our developers and make sure that the developers are spending time on what they need to spend time on to make sure that they are noting performance of the website.

Stability and scalability have been issues right now. My understanding going forward, and I am cautiously optimistic, is that we will not have these problems anymore. I would really like for that to be the case. We are a large company. We do a lot of microservices. We are going into the cloud. We are doing a lot of different things. We use PCF and Docker. We do a lot of the different technologies. The ability for us to scale the solution is going to be very important, especially going forward, because we are exploding in size. We are supposed to grow at least two times in the next year.

Session replay availability is going to be the most amazing game changer for our company. We are very heavy into user analytics. There is a completely separate segment inside of our company that looks into things like user tagging and making sure that we are gathering who is doing what inside the site. The session replay ability and the ability to send that over to the call center to say, "Hey, we know, say this," or an automated response to our users to say, "Hey, we have a problem on our website clipping coupons", or pulling in some kind of eCommerce would be absolutely pivotal. It would absolutely change the game inside the company.

We have had some struggles with scaling. We are on our way to the new platform, the new Dynatrace platform, which will alleviate some of these pains. We were not expecting the level of adoption that we got with the product. We brought it in thinking a few of the teams in a segment of our company would want to use it. Everybody jumped in on it and jumped in on it really quickly. Therefore, we quickly ran into scalability issues, but we are working on alleviating that going forward.

We were on AppMon, and AppMon has its own monolithic drawbacks. On the new platform, we will not have any these problems. We can scale in the cluster horizontally.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale into the Cloud and manage performance problems is very important. We were hitting a problem with our scalability issues but now we are going larger. Part of the problem is we have so much data and we have no idea how to use it all. We would find blind spots and be able to help and do what we can when the issues came to us. If we had the issues telling us when there were problems before development and before call centers got the problems, we could retroactively go out and get the problems before customer call centers had problems. We have a problem inside the company that we have so much data and we have no idea what to do with it all. AI will help solve that issue and help move us forward. It could pull the stuff that is problematic, the most performing or non-performing issues, in areas where we want to see certain things.

We have used support quite extensively. We have had many very imperative tickets with them, and they are very supportive. They are very good with communication. They are very transparent in issues, what they need to do, and how they need to fix certain issues and problems. We have worked very closely with a lot of the support. We get a lot of offshore support from the Austrian development teams and a lot from the Polish development teams. Anybody they could pull in to make things happen and to make the pain go away for us, they do it, and they do it very well.

I have used Wiley, though not at this company.

We used to use AppDynamics. We did a PoC for CA Wiley. Before we brought in Dynatrace, we did a PoC with all of them. We just got rid of AppDynamics (out of our environment). They did not allow for the deep dive visibility. 

A lot of the problems that we had with products like AppDynamics was it got us to a certain point, then we were not able to see any deeper. It would dump us in something they called a metric browser, then we just got metrics, but we did not see what was going on in the underlying code. 

In Dynatrace, we could decompile the source code. We could see the things on the fly. We could see what is actually going on inside the tool. It has been very helpful. We did this thing with the Wiley tool, but it was just way too immature and they were not even close to even having any of the conversations that we wanted to have. 

I was involved in the initial setup, but I have done it before. I have done it on multiple different sites so probably done three stand ups so far: two at the prior company and one at this one. It is not bad. It was easiest with this company, because this company had a level of technical maturity that was not available in the other ones. If you have companies that are doing things like continuous delivery, having built pipelines and having the ability to do these things, it is a little bit easier. I have a feeling that the companies that are more technically challenged, the initial setup is going to be a little bit harder. 

Our main problems were around security and network, but those are hurdles that almost everybody has got to get over and build. It was not bad.

The vendor team tried to help during implementation. A lot of the struggles were not with the product. It was more with the way that we do things inside the company, so it was internal struggles from the company side. The product was always there and I could always reach out for support, if I needed additional help.

Look at your audience. Who is the audience that is going to be consuming your data? If it is going to be primarily developers then you want to be able to push this out through the business, there is no other solution. If you want your developers and people to actually see what is going on inside the code and be able to fix and proactively fix stuff before it happens, this is the solution that you want.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The vendor needs to be very future facing. We jump on technologies. We are a huge company with over 400,000 employees. We jump on new technologies within days or weeks of it coming out. This is not the best strategy in most cases and most larger companies tend to stay away from change. I have been in production environments where we have upgraded and changed the version of one of our most pivotal production servers within two days of it being released from the company. This is not usually the best thing. 

Dynatrace does a good job to make sure they stay out in front of the new technologies. We have had to ratchet back our development teams and tell them, "You need to wait at least a two or three weeks before you jump on the newest version, especially going into production." We know that most technologies inside of Dynatrace that they will move with us to make sure that we are keeping up with our development teams.

We wanted to replace the previous APM, which was a first generation product, so that was our use case for purchasing Dynatrace.

Its performance has been wonderful.

One of the benefits - and I think it's because of one of the features that Dynatrace has, which is PurePaths - is that we have been able to diagnose, a lot faster, some of the issues that we have encountered in the past, when it comes to performance. We've even encountered two issues where we had to go back to software companies and tell them "You've got a problem with your software, and this is where it lies." Dynatrace was the one that helped us with that. We haven't completely removed the war room but we're expediting some of those war room diagnoses.

The customers just bought into it and just love it. They love the ease of use and the dashboarding that we have been able to set up for them. Everything that we have done so far has been a success.

What I like about it, is how it auto-discovers everything rapidly; within a matter of seconds you get to see the business transaction and how it's mapped within the product itself. That surprised the customer, but when we were starting to give them some of the dashboards in matters of minutes, after that, they were even more impressed with that feature.

We're not quite there yet, but the thing I would like to see is to really have that view of how issues relate to the business. Often enough, the tools that IT have for IT stop at the IT level. They cannot go into the business level part. They can't understand, because they don't have the information that the business needs to provide them with - for example how much an hour of downtime costs the business. For us, in IT, it's an hour of downtime, but it equates to money and equates to hours lost and equates to a lot of things, and often enough we don't have that information. This is where I would like to see us going. I think having a tool that can do that, and help us out with that information, I think would be helpful.

I don't play with the tool itself, I could ask some of the guys that do, they would be able to tell you more about it, but at this point I haven't heard anything that was a showstopper.

Stability has been great. I can't say enough about being able to upgrade and not even worry too much about the fact that it's going to be stable. I'd like to maybe see a little bit more about HA and disaster recovery. I feel that's a part that, at this point, we haven't been able to focus on - maybe because we didn't need to - but it's something that I would like to see more of.

I haven't hit that one yet, and I have to eventually, so I'm hoping scalability is going to be good.

I've never had to use technical support.

The only time that we really needed support, we actually engaged with, not a guardian, but the next level, which was a consultant. He came to work with us and help us out, deploying some of the stuff that we needed to do.

I wasn't involved directly in the setup. I oversaw the project that did. It didn't seem complicated, but honestly I can't say for sure.

I don't think the limitations are technical at this point, honestly. My limitations are more to do - and maybe it's because of the nature of the job I have - but they have to do with pricing. It's a little bit pricey. It's a very good tool. It's worth the price, to a certain degree. But it's hard to justify when it's that costly.

CA and AppDynamics.

It was a close race between AppDynamics and Dynatrace, but the views, the dashboarding, the clarity of the views, was a lot better. When you looked at it, it was easy to actually see what you needed to see.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, I'm not there yet. I wouldn't be able to answer you honestly on that one.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. The challenge associated with them is mainly integrations. We still have plenty of these tools, but the reality of it now is that they all have to talk to each other in order to get more information out of the monitoring. It's not enough to just see an alert, you need to correlate that to an application, you need to correlate that to a business model. And all of that is done only if you can have the tools talking to each other. Unfortunately, most of the time they don't talk well together.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, the benefit, from a manageability perspective, would be that I could concentrate my workload and my workforce on working with one product, therefore having one expertise. Now, I need to have several people understanding several products and, unfortunately, because they can't be hands-on most of the time, they don't have the expertise, or when they do have the expertise on one product, they can't develop it on the other products. For sure, from a workforce perspective, right there you've got a big advantage.

The main criterion we had for an APM was that we wanted to see an end-to-end view of our business transactions, which is something that we've never had and that the business has been asking for for years. That is the main criterion that pushed us to actually go this route. The first tool that we purchased was really hard to manage, didn't fit the bill that well, and that's when we moved to Dynatrace.

I would definitely say look into Dynatrace. One of the things that really dazzled me was that the minute you installed it you started seeing something coming out of it. and just that makes it so much easier. You don't have to wait. When you have to wait to see the results, it's not good.