Dynatrace Reviews

We have quite a big application that is used by almost every single person living in this country. This application is quite mission-critical. So, it was very important to detect problems as soon as they appear anywhere in the application. Dynatrace was able to show us the problems immediately without even knowing the application, code, etc. It showed us all the problems, and we have been able to present reports and solve problems very quickly.

The agent deployment is the most valuable. You don't need to do any configuration. You just deploy the agents, and it can automatically detect your infrastructure. That was the greatest feature that we saw in Dynatrace. If there is any database, it can detect it automatically and present everything to you.

It required minimal setting, and after we deployed a couple of agents, the very next day, we had the full picture of the internals of the application, and all the problems were visible straight away to us. There was no need to go and search and do a couple of things. It was quite impressive.

When it comes to monitoring, we did the integration with VMware vCenter, and we were able to see some good stuff. The VMware vCenter integration was really great, but what we really missed was the integration with the network management stuff such as Cisco ACI. We wanted to see integration in that area, but it was not provided by Dynatrace. So, the main feature for us is integration with things like Cisco ACI. If they can bring that one in, with vCenter in there, it would be a total solution. It would be absolutely incomparable to anything else in the market.

We used Dynatrace almost six months ago. It was the latest version at that time.

It is extremely reliable.

We didn't have to contact them because it was so great. The solution was taking care of itself. For example, if there was any problem, we would shut it down, and the next day, when you try to figure it out, it would have got resolved by itself. That was quite impressive. So, we didn't have to call technical support at all.

There is absolutely no configuration that you need from any technical person. Our engineers are very junior, and they don't really know how to configure an agent or play with the configuration file. They're not familiar with that. We just deployed the agents, and these agents went and detected which is the application server, where are the logs, and what are the processes. 

We approached them and told them we want to try it. They were very cooperative. They sent us a link to download the software and the license. We did everything ourselves. They just came to do a quick onsite demo of how things work, but we had already figured out ourselves how it works. So, it was quite interesting.

We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good.

We have been a long-time user of Broadcom CA APM. In addition to Dynatrace, we tried Elastic and AppDynamic. 

Dynatrace gave us the license for around six months. We were quite impressed with it. It was very impressive, but unfortunately, due to financial reasons and the network management interface integration, the management decided to go with Cisco. We got a better deal with Cisco, and it was bundled with some of the other stuff that they were looking for, such as network monitoring, network management, etc. Our manager really wanted to see the network management interface integration, and it was available in AppDynamic, and that's why they went with it, but if it was for me, I would have gone with Dynatrace. So, we got a good deal with Cisco and went with AppDynamics. They've just bundled the whole solution and given it to us. We are standardizing on AppDynamic right now.

It is the best solution in the market. I can't believe the people classify it at the same level as the other leaders on Gartner Quadrant. It is way advanced than anything else. You can't find anything that is exactly like this.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 because it is just missing the network management interface integration. I would rate all other solutions that I've seen a six out of 10.

We use Dynatrace as an analytics and monitoring tool. It is on-premise at the moment. We're looking at using the cloud-based one in the next year or so. We're in the process of migrating over to the cloud-based one.

The Davis artificial intelligence built-in program is valuable. It keeps all the information about the systems, connections, service calls, and requests in its database. It looks at response times and keeps everything in check with baseline figures. If anything goes outside of that baseline, it reports based on that. If the performance starts degrading, it reports on that. Before something breaks, it tells you that it is going to break, and that's the most useful feature of Dynatrace.

It is useful for analytics, web performance, end-to-end coverage of a user experience, and database analytics. It is absolutely a monitoring tool that is worth having. The visibility that it provides is a unique feature of this product.

Its price, for sure, should be improved. Its price is quite high. Other than the price, there are always improvements to be made as technologies change. When we move into cloud-based technologies, Dynatrace will also have to adapt so that they can monitor those as well. It should have the adaptability to quickly transform to monitor those new technologies.

I have been using Dynatrace for the last six years.

Currently, we have around 2,000 to 3,000 users. It is very extensively used. We are covering all our production systems and major revenue systems with Dynatrace. It is our primary monitoring system.

Their technical support is brilliant. They are online 24/7. You go into a chat window, and you talk to their support people. They can connect directly with your system and monitor it. They even tell you if something is wrong. It is the best support that I've ever had on any monitoring system. It is not just you monitoring it; it is them monitoring it as well at the same time.

Its installation is extremely easy. You just install an agent on the server. You can just follow the default installation. As long as you've got your system set up and your architecture set up to connect those agents into your Dynatrace cluster, everything is done within minutes.

I do it by myself. I'm a systems administrator. I take care of its deployment and maintenance. I build the system, and I connect the system to other systems. Any user who is trained on how to do it will also be able to do it.

Its price is quite high. Although it is worth it, it would be better if its price is reduced.

They base their prices around licensing. Their prices are based on agent licensing and consumption licensing. Both of these can be a bit cheaper, but if they are the best in the market, as I consider them to be, I assume that their prices will be higher. They are delivering the product for that price.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. There is no better product on the market. 

I love Dynatrace. I might be biased, but I would give it a nine out of ten.

We have some states that use the solution for the whole monitoring of their infrastructure. It's used largely in the main court, state courts, and federal courts.

The dashboard is the most useful aspect of the solution. 

The deployment itself is very easy and straightforward. You can do the deployment in a transparent mode for the applications and containers and it's a very simple operation.

The solution's interface is good.

We haven't had any issues with support.

The solution offers capable configuration options. 

The solution offers integration with other solutions.

The pricing of the product could be improved. It's still very expensive compared to other solutions, although it is the best one. Even being the best, it could improve the price or the business model. There should be more flexible ways of charging the customer. They could have more price models and more options.

I've been working with the product for about three years already.

Up until now, the stability of the product has been okay. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable in terms of performance.

The solution scales well. It's one of the most scalable options. If a company requires a solution that can expand, this is a good option.

We use it for organizations with 6,000-7,000 employees.

These are pretty new implementations. Therefore, up until now, there is no demand for my customers to scale or expand. However, I do believe that in two or three years they will definitely need to.

The technical support is quite good. There is also very good documentation on the solution if you need it. Overall, we've been quite satisfied with the level of service we've been provided.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's nice and easy. A company shouldn't have any issues with the implementation process.

While it depends on the use case, in four to six hours we can typically do a deployment.

Typically, staff or three or four resources is enough in order to handle the deployment and maintenance of Dynatrace.

As implementors, we can handle the installation for clients if they require it.

The pricing could be less expensive, although I do see the value of the solution and its feature sets. However, with more flexibility in terms of licensing, the solution could be more attractive to more customers.

Our clients also evaluated AppDynamics from Cisco.

The main difference was the implementation and the end-to-end management for the monitoring, including the simple way to find and do the correlation of some issues, such as identifying calls and making correlations through their monitoring system. This is the biggest advantage nowadays that customers can see from Dynatrace as opposed to AppDynamics.

We are partners and implementors.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

I'd advise others to plan the requirements well and be aware of integrations that could be more complex. Training the operational team well is also important. With a good operation team, you can take advantage of the tool in many ways.

In general, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate the solution at a nine.

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.

When we started with Dynatrace we were an on-prem organization. We used it in the early days as an APM, the way most people used it.

Our usage of Dynatrace has grown over the years, not as much in terms of capacity as in usability. It is now used by three departments within our organization. It originally started with just my group, which is IT, and then we rolled it out to development because they saw the advantages of being able to identify code bottlenecks in existing code. We've rolled it out to operations and they use Session Replay to troubleshoot customer-specific issues. And the sales department also uses it to gauge productivity and how many visits we get to a particular page, how many times people watch a particular video, how many take a certain practice exam, etc. 

Those use cases are all in addition to its core use, which is to help us keep our infrastructure running. 

We're currently using the Dynatrace SaaS, the Dynatrace ONE product. We're not using anything in the old, modular product. It fits very well for us. We are a cloud organization. We're all Azure now. We migrated from on-prem to cloud about three years ago.

The automated discovery and analysis definitely help us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint underlying root cause, both from a code perspective as well as an infrastructure perspective. When we get an alert, or we're seeing a degradation in performance, Dynatrace will lead us down the path: Where do we need to look first? It will tell us that it has analyzed so many trillions of dependencies and that it thinks that the problem is "here," and it will point to a query or a line of code or perhaps to a system or to a container that is not functioning properly. Depending on what the problem is, it saves us an enormous amount of time in troubleshooting and identifying problems.

I estimate it has cut our mean time to identification at least in half, if not more. Before, we were relegated to combing through logs. We would take Splunk, look for the error, find out where it was occurring, how many times it was occurring — do all that type of investigation that you normally need to do. We don't have to do that anymore because it's all automated. 

And as far as decreasing our mean time to repair goes, it's closer to 60 to 70 percent. The reason is that we don't need to take such drastic troubleshooting time. We take its recommendation, and the time that we spend is checking that Dynatrace was right. We'll test out a quick fix in dev and then take it to QA and then push it to production. In some instances, it does reduce our MTTR by anywhere from 60 to 70 percent, although it really depends on the problem.

I operate an entire stack on four people, and the only way I'm able to do that is by automating as much as I can and having tools that I can rely on to reduce time-dependent tasks. Dynatrace has allowed me to function and keep my people productive without working them 24/7. Dynatrace works 24/7 for me.

Another thing that Dynatrace gives us is very deep visibility, not only into user actions but systems interactions. How are the systems relating to each other? Are the right systems talking to the right systems? When we first deployed Dynatrace five years ago, it showed us, through its Smartscape tool, that we had servers talking to servers they shouldn't be talking to. That was quite an eye-opener. I've noticed that a lot of companies are trying to copy what Dynatrace came out with in its Smartscape, but to me, it is the best visualization tool of your app stack and network that you'll ever put together, and you don't have to do anything. The system puts all that together. You deploy your one agent, it maps out the system, and you can see everything from application to network to infrastructure connectivity. It depends what you want to see, but it's all Smartscape'd out. You can tell what traffic is going in which direction and where it's going.

In addition, when I first started using Dynatrace, I had a routine. I would come into the office early and go through all of the night's activities. I would check for any problems we had: Was anything broken, were there any active alerts? With Dynatrace Davis, I started getting those reports automatically, through Amazon Alexa, and I do that on my drive to work. Instead of having to go in early and spend time in the office, I'm able to stay at home a little later, have breakfast with the family. Then, when I'm in the car, I invoke Alexa to give me my Dynatrace morning report, which will include my Apdex rating, any open problems, and a summary of closed problems. It's probably one of the least advertised aspects of Dynatrace, and one which I think is among the most highly efficient tools that they offer.

The amount of time we have to devote to maintaining Dynatrace is next to nothing. The time that we spend in Dynatrace is actually using it. We're using it to look at what's happening, what's going on, is something broken, or do we have an alert? We go in to find out what's wrong. Maintaining it is really almost nonexistent.

Another advantage is that it is much more of a proactive tool than it is one for putting out fires. Of course, it helps us tremendously if we have to put out a fire, but our goal is to never have a fire. We want to make sure that any deployments that we put out are fully tested in all aspects of use, so that when things are fully deployed, there isn't any need for a rollback. In the last three years, we've had to roll back a production deployment once. I don't attribute that all to Dynatrace, but I attribute a large part of it to it.

It has increased our uptime because we find out about problems before they're problems. The one goal that my team has, above anything else, is to know about problems before the customer does. If the customer is telling us there's a problem, we have failed. We are so redundant and so HA-built, that there is absolutely no reason for us not to be able to circumvent an issue that is under our control, and to prevent any type of a work stoppage or outage. We can't help it if the internet goes down or if Microsoft has a core problem, but we can certainly help by making sure that it's not our application stack or our infrastructure. I would estimate our uptime is better by at least 20 percent.

In the end, it has decreased our time to market with new innovations and capabilities, because anything that reduces time-to-produce decreases time to market. Once the code has actually been developed, it's in testing and deployment and that's where my window of efficiency is. I can't control how long it takes to build something, but I can control how long it takes to fully test it and deploy it. And there, it has saved us time.

Before we had Dynatrace, and a lot of the processes that Dynatrace has helped us put into place, everything was manual. And the more manual work you have, the more margin for human error you have.

The most valuable features really depend on what I'm doing. The most unique feature that Dynatrace offers, in my opinion, is Davis. It's an AI engine and it's heavily integrated into the core product.

The Session Replay not only allows us to watch the user in 4K video, but to see the individual steps happening behind the scenes, from a developer perspective. It gives us every single step that a user takes in a session, along with the ability to watch it as a video playback. We can see each call to every server as the user goes through the site. If something is broken or not running optimally, it's going to come up in the Session Replay. 

We also use the solution for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. We are in the process of converting from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, but that is in its infancy for us and will grow as our Kubernetes deployments grow. Dynatrace's functionality in this is really good. 

We use JIRA as well as Jenkins. We have a big DevOps push right now and Dynatrace is an integral part of that push. We're using Azure DevOps, and tying in Dynatrace, Jenkins, and JIRA and trying to automate that whole process. So Dynatrace plays a role in that as well.

In terms of the self-healing, we use the recommendations that it provides. I'd say the Davis engine runs at about 90 percent accuracy in its recommendations. We have yet to allow automated remediation, which is our ultimate goal. It's going to be a bit before we get comfortable with anything doing that type of automated work in production. But I feel that we're as close as we've ever been and we're getting closer.

User management is extremely — and I hate to use the word "easy" — but it really is. And it's a lot easier today than it was when we first started with Dynatrace. We create a lot of customized dashboards both for the executive teams and management teams. These dashboards are central to their areas of oversight. It used to take quite a bit of time to create dashboards. Now it even has an automated tool that takes care of that. You just tell it what you want it to present and everything falls together. It has templated dashboards that you can customize.

The single agent does all of it. Once you deploy the one agent to your environment, it's going to propagate itself throughout the environment, unless you specifically tell it not to. It is the easiest thing that we've ever owned, because we don't have to do anything to it. It self-maintains. Every once in a while we'll have to reinstall the agent on something or a new version will come out and we'll want to deploy it, but for the most part, it's set-it-and-forget-it.

I would love to see Dynatrace get more involved in the security realm. I get badgered by so many endpoint protection companies. It seems like a natural fit to me, that Dynatrace should be playing in that space.

I'd also like to see some deeper metrics in network troubleshooting. That's another area that it's not really into.

We're in our fifth year of using Dynatrace. We were the very first paying customer for the new platform, Dynatrace ONE. We used it right at launch.

The stability has been phenomenal. I'm not going to say that Dynatrace has never had an outage, but I've never had an outage where Dynatrace wasn't available for me. It's always been there. It's always there when I need it. It's always on. Our uptime is five-nines, and we do attribute a large portion of our ability to maintain that figure to Dynatrace.

In terms of scalability, we don't have anything that it can't do. As we add to our infrastructure, it scales. Yes, every time we add a node, we're going to spend more. But it's up to me to decide if I want to monitor everything or a set of everything. My philosophy is to monitor all of production. Anything that is deployed to production is being monitored by Dynatrace. 

From a dev and test perspective we don't monitor like that. We keep a secondary Dynatrace instance that we use in the event that we need to troubleshoot something in development, but for the most part, our Dynatrace usage is relegated to production. And that's for cost reasons.

We have four environments in our builds. We have production, where we cover everything. We have a development environment, which is a subset of production, with different copies. We have QA, which is where everything goes from development for final testing. And then we have staging, which is the final step before it's pushed to the production clusters.

As we add to production, we add to Dynatrace. That is always going to be the plan. We will not deploy anything to production that doesn't have Dynatrace on it.

I don't get involved in the minutiae, but from what the guys tell me, with Linux servers you don't even blink. They have to watch Windows servers a little bit more because it's more intensive. Windows itself doesn't tend to perform very well when you first build. You've got to massage it and get it to where you want it to be. Dynatrace helps us with that, but Windows is more finicky.

We have about 50 users of Dynatrace between infrastructure, development, operations, and sales.

Their technical support is the best ever. I know I sound like a broken record, but we get chat support on the Dynatrace site, not from some guy in India, but from a high-level tech in the US who has all the answers to the questions. That person is not like some first-level guy who's going to ask you if your machine's booted up. The techs can answer our questions and, if they can't, they open the ticket and get back to us later. It's the best support model I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

We were using New Relic at the time. We were having a lot of frustrations with that in terms of its dashboarding capabilities, and the amount of time that my people had to spend keeping it updated and running correctly. We started looking at other products and we ended up settling on Dynatrace. Aside from its major capabilities, what Dynatrace ended up doing for us was to assist us in our migration to the cloud, because it gave us the sizing recommendations and the baselines that we needed to formulate what we were going to start with in Azure.

New Relic was the primary APM at the time and we were just very frustrated with it. We started looking at other products and really didn't see much of a difference in the competition, differences that would warrant going through the change, until we came upon what was then called Ruxit and is now called Dynatrace.

The biggest difference was that the other solutions required overhead. My biggest complaint was the amount of time we had to spend with these tools, because they're supposed to save you time, not take up more of your time. Dynatrace was the first one to actually complete that promise.

We ran hybrid for a year, collecting data on both ends, using Dynatrace both on-prem and in the cloud, and now it's all cloud.

The setup is really not much different, whether you're an on-prem organization or a cloud or even a hybrid. It's still the one agent. I have no experience with their AppMon product, so I can't tell you how much easier the new product is versus the old. But I can tell you that this product that we have been using is the easiest thing we've ever had. The only comment I got from my systems team is, "Why didn't we get this sooner?"

I am not the norm when it comes to policy and procedure. I tend to buck the trends a little bit. If I have a new product that I feel is going to be advantageous to the company and my team as a whole, then once we've done our due diligence, we will just deploy it. I know that larger companies with different criteria and regulations have to follow different channels and paths, through security and infrastructure and storage, etc. But ultimately, as long as you have "air-cover," and by that I mean an executive sponsor who believes in what you're doing, then you really should be able to get it done with minimal effort.

We were fully up and running in a week. It took me longer to remove New Relic than it did to deploy Dynatrace. We only needed one person to deploy Dynatrace. One of my systems people took care of it. I took care of the administrative stuff, creating the initial dashboards and getting the payments set up and so forth, but my systems people took care of the actual deployment of the one agent.

I didn't hire any contractors or deployment services. I signed up for Dynatrace's free trial and we went to town.

From a monitoring-tool perspective, Dynatrace has saved us money through consolidation of tools. We used to use a number of tools: PRTG, Pingdom, and we used to pay for an additional Azure service that we don't pay for anymore. And we used to use Splunk for log mining and now we don't. Just in the tools that we eliminated it has saved us $30,000, but there are more soft dollars that I could add to that.

I'm not sure how you come up with an ROI because it's pretty much all soft dollars. It's a line item in my budget that doesn't have to grow unless we grow. We have not experienced a base-price increase from Dynatrace.

Dynatrace is not the cheapest product out there and it's not the most expensive product out there. In our business, you get what you pay for. 

Dynatrace has a place for everybody. How you use it and what your budgetary limitations are will dictate what you do with it. But it's within everybody's reach. If you're a small organization and you have a large infrastructure, you may not be able to monitor the whole thing. You may have to pick and choose what you want to monitor, and you have the ability to do so. Your available funds are going to dictate that.

The only additional costs that I incur are for additional log storage space, which is like $100 a year.

My advice would be to compare and compare again. Everybody's offering free trials, and I know that they're a pain to do, but compare the products, apples for apples. Everybody's going to compare costs, but be sure to compare the functionality. Are you getting what you pay for? Are you getting the bang for your buck out of what the product is returning to you? If all you need to know is "my server's down," you can probably get by with the cheapest thing out there. But if you want to know why the server is down, or that the server is about to go down and you need to do something, then you want a product like Dynatrace.

I go to their Perform conference every year, and it's amazing to me to see the loyalty and dedication from the customer side. It's like a family reunion every year when we go to Perform. I hope we have it next year.

From a core-product perspective, Dynatrace is doing everything that we ever asked for. Everything that we've ever wanted to monitor, it has always been there first.

My use cases are typically working in conjunction with our business partners. For the most part, I get questions from the business as to what our conversion rates are on the eCommerce website. E.g., what the typical user journey looks like, especially when they're doing AB testing. They like to sort of double verify that in Dynatrace with a user session tracking to see which users are taking which path. 

I often get diagnostic questions about things like latency. Somebody on the business side will perceive some latency on one of our pages, then give me a call to use Dynatrace to go in and do a waterfall analysis of the page load to see if it is in fact loading more slowly than it has been in the past.

Since we are a 24/7 support shop, our primary job is to make sure that revenue keeps going in through the site and the site itself works. We have categorized issues into three tiers: Priority 1, 2, and 3. Depending on where a given issue falls, the Dynatrace alert is generated and sent to my team, then prioritized into one of those three categories. The response then to that issue will fall into a bucket for that type of priority. 

My primary use of the tool is to keep revenue coming into the business and to use it to help our business team in running their site analytics and web performance tools. They have things like Adobe Analytics that provide them with one layer of data. We use Dynatrace as another railroad metric to both confirm the Adobe Analytics data and enhance it in certain places where Adobe won't give us the answers that we need. In terms of metrics, we've had roughly about 120,000 unique sessions per hour on our website. So, we're capturing a lot of session data and real user data, and all of that data is kept in user sessions. We can look this information up by user ID to tag any given session that we want to find by date/client. E.g., if the user said that they had an issue last Thursday at 11:00 PM, then we can just do a search on their email address, go through all their sessions, and find the one that they mentioned, then dig directly into that one.

It has completely transformed the way that we do eCommerce from a couple of different perspectives. The first one is that we are really tied in with our business users to a much greater extent than we were in the past. A lot of the Dynatrace data is data which not just the technical team wants to see and to work with, but it is data that the business team wants to see as well. It has sort of facilitated a better communication stream between my business partners and my team to allow us to go back and forth on different aspects of the website. We didn't have that in the past. 

It has also built more solid relationships between the application development team and my support team because they will often have questions after new releases as to how those new releases affect different areas of the site. So, we have constant sessions with those guys in standing meetings on a biweekly basis to go through different aspects of what a release has done to the website, how we can use Dynatrace to track differences from one release to the next, and see if there is any latency as a result.

There are about 24 dashboards built, not only for my eCommerce support team, but I've also built dashboards for our development, business, analytics, and senior management teams that allow them to log into the product. Without having to know much about Dynatrace, they can just click widgets on the dashboard that I've customized for them to get to the information that they need. This saves me a lot of time because I don't have to go in and investigate every single issue that crops up. I can go in and just ensure that there's a dashboard available for diagnosing that type of issue and point the user who is interested in it to that dashboard.

After the dashboards, the Davis AI engine is fantastic. We're able to set thresholds within the Dynatrace application for what acceptable load times are for our web pages or API callback times. Davis actually monitors what those thresholds are and notifies me, not only when the thresholds are violated, but when they are either over or under the threshold. Then, it makes suggestions for tuning those thresholds based on what it sees in real user actions. Therefore, I'm never dealing with outdated data. Every day Dynatrace is updating what the user experience looks like and letting me have that compared to my benchmarks, which is super useful.

It's super easy to manage, especially the SaaS solution. We deploy the JavaScript through Tealium, which is one of the tools that we use to deploy tags to our website. Whenever we get a new version, or if we/Dynatrace create it off the Dynatrace JS, then we just deploy it through Tealium and that goes out to every page on our website automatically. Our users' browsers then start getting that new payload dropped into their browsers the next time they visit the website.

We use both Session Replay and synthetic monitors:

• A Session Replay is primarily for our customer support operation. We sometimes have customers call in to complain of issues with the website, and it's really useful to be able to look a customer session up and replay it in its entirely so you can see exactly what happened during that user journey. You can even find the point that the user is calling in to raise an issue, so you can dig down and resolve it. We record every single user session on the site. We don't have a limit on the number of sessions we capture because it's just so useful for our customer service folks to be able to do this. It's worth the trade off for us.
• Synthetic monitoring is set up on a couple of different levels. My primary synthetic runs every five minutes, every day, 365 days of the year. It is a simple, single page pane that tells me whether the website is up or down. If it is down, then an email distribution gets emailed and a pager text goes out to whoever is on call at that time to let them know that the site is down. We also use synthetics for the user journey testing. When new features go in from development, as part of our QA process, we'll often set up Dynatrace synthetic that simulates what that user journey should look like. We will then allow the synthetic to run every given set of minutes (whether it's 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or half an hour), to collect data on what that user journey looks like. This allows us to go in and run our reports against that synthetic module rather than against real user search.

Some of the analytics that you get in, e.g., a waterfall analysis of a web page could be clearer. A lot of that is not directly attributable to Dynatrace. Sometimes a vendor will implement a tag or JavaScript plugin that's named something entirely different than what it does. This makes it difficult to track that from the waterfall list, figure out where exactly that component is, and dig more into what it's doing. Dynatrace could probably improve a bit on that waterfall layout to make it clearer as to what exactly is there. It does a wonderful job of telling you what loads and when, but it could be improved in terms of telling me what exactly it is loading.

We have been using it for about 18 months. We first installed it last year in January. 

It is remarkably stable. They push out new releases of the SaaS application every two to three weeks. Dynatrace has a super active development schedule on their side. When they push out the release to us, all we have to do is push our JavaScript component back out to the website to allow it to go out to our users' browsers. Dynatrace has never gone down a single time in the 18 months that we've been using it. It's never been down when we needed it, and it's always collected the data that we need to analyze when we go into it.

Dynatrace itself doesn't really break, but the website does on occasion lose connectivity with a given API vendor, whether it's a payment processor or one of our other API pieces. Dynatrace is very good at alerting us when that happens, but we're not using any sort of self- healing capacity for that. What we do is we get alerted when those APIs aren't available or when a web page has an issue. My team gets alerts on a 24/7 pager basis, then we go in and investigate to resolve them.

The solution has given me a better view into uptime, in terms of how much downtime our website has. However, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud solution is remarkably solid. We rarely have downtime. Even during the holiday season for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we've had zero percent downtime for the last two years. From one perspective, it does let us know when the site is down using the synthetic monitor. The good news is that it has not had to give us much data because the site just doesn't go down.

We have 96 users logging into Dynatrace right now.

Our primary eCommerce environment is Salesforce Commerce Cloud. That is where we have the agent list SaaS solution implemented. We also have internal API servers within Azure, where we've implemented user agents to track them. We have not encountered any limitations in scaling to cloud-native environments with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We've had remarkably smooth deployments.

We have not scaled up to any other environments at this point.

It is fantastic. You don't even have to pick up the phone. You can submit a Jira ticket from directly within Dynatrace to the support team. Those Jira tickets are categories based on the component of Dynatrace that you're looking at. You actually get a live agent chat within the tool, so you're not only submitting a ticket and getting a case number, but you have the support rep right there in the chat session to walk you through it. It's the only product I use that has a similar interactive of an online health system.

We had AppMon, which is the previous version of their tool, before upgrading to Dynatrace. The first thing that we did was upgrade our on-prem AppMon solution to a solution that our Dynatrace agent setup in our DMZ on the network, then we added user agents on each of our API servers. This has morphed, as of last October, into a SaaS agentless solution that we run through a JavaScript snippet on our website. Every page on our website has a bit of JavaScript with a tiny JavaScript module that deploys out to the browser. For every user who visits our website, Dynatrace then collects metrics on what those user's actions are during the session and gives us reporting tools so we can check performance on the website.

We have used other monitoring applications, like SolarWinds and Gomez, in the past. However, they have all been replaced by Dynatrace at this point.

From the infrastructure perspective, what we have installed is the user agent on our API servers. So, we have six API servers set up in an Azure load balancing pool. There are three active at any given time. It was super neat when we installed the agent, because we actually went out and had lunch after the installation. When we came back, Dynatrace had generated the Smartscape view of not just the API and the different services they connect to, but it had crawled our entire network and found everything that it recognized from SQL Server databases to .NET Servers and API services. All of that stuff showed up in a sidenav automatically without our having hands on anything whatsoever. It provides a good quick view in the morning when you come in and just flip to that view right away, because it will flash in "red" for any given service or platform that is having a problem, then you can zoom to that problem and look into it right away.

Being able to capture every single user session on the site and work with our customer support team has been a huge return on investment for me. Of course, the additional support on top of Adobe Analytics to be able to try things, like website conversion, is also a huge return on investment.

The time to diagnose has decreased on average by 34 percent in its implementation. That is primarily because Dynatrace not only alerts you when something goes wrong, but the Davis AI also gives you suggestions as to why it may have gone wrong. This gives you a head start on triage and resolution.

Because the Davis AI gives us such a head start on problem identification, this leads into triage and diagnosis. Our diagnosis time has gone down significantly. We can find, identify, and get problems triaged more quickly than we could in the past by approximately 25 percent.

The only limitation with scaling to cloud-native environments is licensing. It all depends on how many DEM units you're willing to license. The more of DEM units that you purchase, the more user data you can collect.

We did compare it with several other products in the market when we did our due diligence before purchasing an APM and SaaS solution. Dynatrace came out just leaps and bounds beyond the pack. We're very happy with the results we're getting with it today.

We compared Dynatrace with AppDynamics, Opsgenie, and New Relic.

We do not use the solution for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. It was on our development roadmap for this year, but I think COVID-19 has probably pushed it to next year. While it is something we will be doing, we're not doing it now.

We have not yet integrated the solution with our CI/CD and/or ITSM tools, as it was on our roadmap for this year. We are a GitHub and Jenkins shop, and Dynatrace has plugins for both of those tools. One of the very next things we want to do with the tool is plug it into our CI/CD process so we can have sort of a hands-free built. We want to allow our builds to run through the entire pipeline and be managed by these three tools, then allow Dynatrace to do the reporting on the deployment and the resulting difference in the web application based on that new format.

My advice would probably be to start with the SaaS implementation to get a feel for Dynatrace, what it does, and what it can deliver. Then, based on results with the SaaS platform, evaluate installing the onsite on-prem solution. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. They obviously work best when you use them together, but there are some instances where our firm does not need an on-prem solution and may need just the SaaS application. Vice versa, there may be some firms that just need the on-prem solution and don't need the SaaS cloud based solution. In my opinion, it is best to start with SaaS, then based on what you discover with SaaS, decide whether you need on-prem.

I would give Dynatrace a solid eight (out of 10). It's beyond the expectations that I had when we purchased and installed it. As I went along and learned more about Dynatrace after the implementation, I was impressed with how much the tool does. Another aspect is not just how much it does, but how easy it is to do it. The AI engine runs 24/7/365, providing input. The dashboards make it super easy for my users to use as well as myself. 

The analytics that it provides are very easy to read. You can present them in pie charts, bar charts, or single table data. There's just a myriad of ways you can display the data that you get from Dynatrace to make it more consumable for users. 

We are using the solution in the operations space.

Our primary use case is production monitoring of complex business critical systems. Another use case would be performance testing of critical releases.

The solution uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery, which helps our operations. It reduces the cost of ownership of managing Dynatrace as a tool set, ensuring that we're able to maximize the value from Dynatrace and monitoring is available. That's a big plus.

An example of how it helps is we are more proactive than we were previously, though we're not quite where we want to be. Engineers are talking more with the operations people, which is closing the loop. Our teams are becoming more customer centric.

The platform is very good at identifying potential issues, but each problem that surfaces in most cases still needs to be qualified and quantified by somebody who understands the system. Complex application problems, not infrastructure, surfaced by Dynatrace still need to be reviewed by somebody who understands the application logic or system architecture. For somebody who understands the platform though, issues can resolved in minutes as opposed to hours.

We have the ability to detect user action response time slow downs and their consequences, along with the back-end calls to third-parties. We are heavily dependent, for a number of products, on back-end service calls to other suppliers. Using Dynatrace, we are able to measure the performance of those third-parties. 

We are also using Dynatrace to right-size the infrastructure, especially on private cloud where we have to provision the resources upfront to save costs. Dynatrace helps us by finding how many resource we are utilizing and identifies how many resources we need to maintain for the level of performance and scalability that's required. This has helped us right-size in about 50 percent of our cases, leading to a reduction in cloud resources by 50 percent.

The solution helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. This helps with performance testing because our performance test teams are more aware of how product features are performing, which helps to prioritize our testing. It creates test cases so we're able to do more testing. Because Dynatrace helps us define the cause more quickly, this speeds up the time between test cycles.

The end-to-end trace is valuable for us to be able to assign responsibility to the right resolver group very quickly.

The user experience allows us to be able to gauge customer experience and understand the performance impact of our platform.

It has a very nice interface with an easy way to visualize the data that we need, making it quickly accessible. It is very easy to use.

As a platform consolidating tool, it covers 90 percent of the needs for most applications. In that respect, it presents a very high value for us.

We have used synthetic monitoring functionalities to poll. Mostly, it's around service availability and key functionality of a website from different geographic locations. 

The real-user monitoring is mostly used to gauge the difference in performance for multitenant applications, This is so we can discern if there are any local network or client-facing issues when we do a comparison between each customer. It is quite important for us to be able to identify a client-side issue, as opposed to a feature managed problem, because we're essentially providing managed services of business applications.

Dashboarding and having different templates available for more business reporting, or even other metrics, would be useful.

With Dynatrace, we use one tool where we would have used many, but we still have had gaps.

Three years.

It has very high availability.

When we started, we were measuring uptime in a different way, and then Dynatrace started measuring uptime based on services, as opposed to infrastructure. Initially, because we started using different metrics for availability, it showed us that we weren't available as much as we thought we were. This helped us to have better conversations with customers and improved availability from the customer perspective over time. 

We have 115 users, which includes Level 2 and 3 supports, service design, product management, cloud infrastructure management, software developers, software testers, and product architects.

We are only in an early phase at the moment regarding the use of Dynatrace. Currently, we are only using it on two critical platforms. Going forward, we're looking to expand to nine critical platforms.

Our adoption rate across the portfolio is low because we're still in a pilot phase trying to build out our business cases.

The technical support is excellent and very fast. Not only do I get a quick response, but they're also able to close the request off very quickly and satisfactorily with a fix.

Some of the feedback I get from our team, who are familiar with other tools: "Compared with other tools, Dynatrace support is excellent." 

The feedback that I get from people is that the initial setup was very straightforward and easy. It was amazing what information we got in such little time after deploying the agent.

In most cases, the deployment is quick. It takes a couple of hours.

For high-risk applications, which are business critical or high complexity, we would deploy Dynatrace. For medium-risk applications, we would consider using Dynatrace. It comes down to cost qualification for medium-risk applications.

The solution has decreased our mean time to identification. It has saved us from 10 minutes to a couple of hours.

Consider volume because that is where you will get the most benefit. Doing a point solution is not cost-effective.

There are additional Professional Services costs which ensure the solution is configured with meaningful names so you're getting the most money for your investment.

It is the easiest platform to manage in comparison to the competition, like Elastic Stack, New Relic, AppDynamic, Nagios, or Prometheus.

Without a doubt, I'd recommend Dynatrace for business critical applications and anything that's driving revenue.

Biggest lesson learnt: To recognize the most value from the information that Dynatrace provides, you need to make it available to everybody in the DevOps group. There is a wealth of data which can be exposed, manipulated, and consumed by other systems, not just what's visible in Dynatrace. This can also be used for inputs into other upstream platforms.  

Understand the demands within your environment and plan a pipeline, then discuss with Dynatrace. 

We're aware that there are use cases for notifications that can be used for triggering self-healing or autoscaling, but we are not using those yet.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

We're a health plan, a health insurer. We're not a big one, we have about a million members. We are growing through adding new business and we're looking to expand into the government programs: Medicare, Medicaid. Right now we provide individual and family, large corporate, self-insured, and a couple other types of health plans. 

We are headquartered in Minnesota, outside of Minneapolis. We have a data center in Minnetonka and one in another suburb. We do most of our work on-premise. We don't have much in the cloud for our core backroom applications. We use a package from a company called HealthEdge in Boston, to do our claims processing, membership, enrollment, etc.

Our main use case is application performance monitoring, right at Dynatrace's sweet spot. First, we wanted to know what the performance of our healthcare and our health claims processing system was. Then we wanted to be able to segment it by where the transaction response time is spent. We also wanted to get into the deep dive of the Java profile, because HealthEdge is a Java application that runs on several JVMs. We wanted not only to get into the Java code but to get into the SQL that's created to call into the database, which is where the response-time problems are. 

We're using Dynatrace SaaS now. It's the newest version.

Since we have the OneAgent feature available, we have real-user monitoring. So not only do we know the response time and availability of the synthetic route, but we know what real users experience on our website. If our service desk gets a call, which seldom happens — but let's say you, as a member, had trouble with something — we can go back and find exactly what you did and why the response was poor. We've used that many times to find errors. JavaScript errors caused by a setting in Internet Explorer were the latest ones that were annoying the members. But members don't call our service desk and say, "Hey, your website sucks." So we have to look at the data and say, "Geez, why does Internet Explorer have these huge JavaScript errors?" And then we find out.

We found an error where developers used a Google API that was supposed to find a Medicare workshop by loading a Google Map and help a member find a place where they could go to a Medicare workshop. The API had so many calls an hour and we saw that, usually, about 45 minutes after the hour, that transaction was failing. It turned out that we'd used the 1,000 allocated calls and, when, the hour turned over, it worked again. It integrates all things monitoring, from an application perspective: synthetic, real users, and Java deep-dive.

Dynatrace provides us with a huge benefit for triage because by the time a Dynatrace problem is open, AI has identified all the components and where the response-time issue is or where the failure is. It's really mindless. We don't have to try to pull out a map and figure out how the application looks. 

And Dynatrace has a feature called SmartScape. I don't use it a lot because their AI is so good that I've never had to go dig through it myself. But if I were to go through it, it would go from data centers to hosts to processes to services and applications, to show how they're all linked together. So it has a topology view. We use that sometimes when we're doing performance testing, which is something another part of my team does. They need to know which pieces are involved and this helps them know that. 

But from a day-to-day event-management and IT operations-center perspective, the Dynatrace AI is what has identified the failing component. The dashboard has all the problems. They open up these problems, which are already events in our ServiceNow environment, and these problems have the call-path and everything else laid out in them. So I've never had to dig into the Smartscape to figure out where my failure is. The Dynatrace AI has done that for me.

What we found early on in our HealthRules environment was that the response-time problems were, 99 percent of the time, in the type of SQL that we throw at the database, because the DBAs would say, "It's not the database, it's the bad SQL." Dynatrace helped us focus immediately on that and get away from: "Is it the network? Is it the server? Is this too busy?" There are all the different things that the vendor wants to throw at you. I went up to Boston to help the vendor a year or two ago. I took them right through the code and the response times and said, "Here's the piece of SQL that makes this particular function slow." Dynatrace was able to do that. We got there in minutes. They said, "Well, your server might be too busy, it might be your network," and I could say, "No, it's none of that. Here's the response time of that transaction and here is the decomposition of it. The thing runs for 13 seconds and spends 12 seconds on this one piece of SQL. I think that's where your problem is." Dynatrace was a huge help there.

The solution has decreased our MTTR by well over 50 percent and maybe by as much as 90 percent. It enabled us to identify some things, first of all. Before, it was endless war rooms, and not really an identification. Dynatrace has driven that almost to zero. When the problem is opened, we know the root cause.

As for mean time to repair, since we know what we need to repair, we can point the developer right at it. It has decreased that by 50 to 60 percent.

It has also dramatically improved our uptime. One of the biggest problems we have with the JVMs, of course, is garbage collection and memory saturation. A memory leak will develop and Dynatrace will show the memory increasing steadily. It will create a problem and they'll work on the problem proactively, and either fix it or schedule graceful downtime. If they have to shut down the environment, they can stage through the three different servers in a type of HA arrangement. So without any disruption to the client, we've been able to fix things that would have turned into major outages of the whole environment. It's a definite help on the preventive side.

In terms of time to market, the guys who work on our web portal interface, who are in-house, were early adopters of the technology on our team and learned what works and what doesn't. Dynatrace has significantly decreased their time to market. They're not really part of the development cycle, but the way they use it and the things they say about it and the reports they've made indicate that it has probably cut nearly 50 percent of the development of their portal code.

It has also helped us with consolidation of tools. We got rid of some New Relic and we got rid of some older tool which was a great, early innovator in this space, but it was acquired by CA or Microsoft. We were still paying licenses for that and were able to consolidate it. We were about to buy a network tool to help us with ACI conversion on our network side, a tool that would mainly tell us who an application is talking to on the and network. We use Dynatrace to do that, so we saved tens of thousands of dollars in not acquiring that tool. We also took the synthetic work that we paid an outsourced company to do for us and we converted all of that. Once we had Dynatrace in the house, we could do it ourselves and that saved $20,000 to $30,000 a year. There's probably more, if I were to look at it, that I could do with Dynatrace. I have to focus on the core system right now, but I think they'll get it in the SNMP monitoring space soon, if they're not already there. And the plugins on the ActiveGates have a lot of capabilities we could use. We already monitor our VMware environment with it now.

We've started to use the Apdex score in all of our communications. It's a standard metric that's used for websites to indicate how they're performing. That idea is baked into Dynatrace and we've built on that throughout our company. The weekly service quality reports that are produced and sent via email to all Dynatrace users are starting to get some notice. They show, from the web portal side, what the Apdex is. Is it acceptable, tolerating, or unacceptable? It shows the percentages of the time of use and where they're coming from. It also shows it geographically and what type of browser most of your users are using. It shows how much of it is mobile versus desktop, which has proved very valuable to our digital experience people. Things like that are a huge benefit, and those are things I didn't even know existed when I bought it.

In addition to just the monitoring of the HealthRules ecosystem — which is typical BusinessWorks, Oracle Databases, and JVMs for transactions — we do a lot of web monitoring. With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place. We actively synthetically monitor our websites from two or three geographic locations. Our business is in nine States, so we're not international by any means. We sell health insurance to members in Oklahoma, Kansas, North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota. We monitor those synthetically.

It also instruments .NET, and BusinessWorks out-of-the-box.

It has an integration with ServiceNow, which is great. Dynatrace creates tickets for things and its AI finds root cause. We have integrated that with our ServiceNow to generate events and incidents, so that all of our event management will be done in the ServiceNow Developer. We're working on that now. In terms of the self-healing aspect, we don't use Dynatrace to do that, although we could. We've gone down the path of trying to use ServiceNow's Orchestration. But we may come back to Dynatrace for that, depending on how that works.

In addition to ServiceNow, there is a CMDB integration, so when a Dynatrace problem is discovered, the Dynatrace ID correlates to a CMDB and that's how we open an incident or event. We don't need to do the correlation. If an event turns into an incident, then the correlation is done automatically with the Dynatrace ServiceNow application, which is in the ServiceNow store. It syncs up the CMDB's entries, the CIs, with the Dynatrace IDs so that all of the different pieces of the response-time puzzle that Dynatrace has, can be assigned to a CI in our CMDB. We are actively working on improving our discovery in CMDB, as it's not the most robust. Dynatrace is a huge help there because the OneAgent discovers all these things for us. So it helps with ServiceNow discovery as well.

The Dynatrace panel generally lets you know how many users it affects, and how many transactions or events in that application it affects. We don't use that a lot. That's beyond our capability right now, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be quite useful to assign severity from that.

Around the way licensing works, I would like to put it everywhere in infrastructure-only mode and I want it to be reasonable to do that.

From a technological standpoint, there is the OneAgent versus plugins they have. They called them security gateways when they first came out. They're the way that the OneAgents talk to local active gates, which communicate out to the Dynatrace cloud to store all the performance data. Instead of every agent going out to the cloud, there's just one spot and security likes that. But they've leveraged those security gateways and renamed them ActiveGates, and now there are different web plugins we can run on it. Sometimes the plugins are designed for things where you put in an agent, Like an Oracle instance of Exadata, or an Oracle appliance. We can't put a OneAgent on that. It's not a standard Linux or Windows OS, so the ActiveGate solution is better there. Sometimes the development of those seems to be running very fast and it's not complete. They don't yet function quite as easily as the OneAgents do. But I have hopes that that's going to get better. We have tried the MQ, the Citrix, and the Oracle ActiveGate plugins. They could be sharper. It's the right direction to go. It just seems like it could be smoother.

I have been using Dynatrace for close to three years in my current company, and before that I used the earlier versions of Dynatrace, DC RUM, at a previous job.

I had one problem early on with WebLogic where Dynatrace was not stable and it would actually affect the ability of one of the WebLogic components. It was instrumented because we thought we needed it to be, but it didn't need to be. When we decided not to instrument it the problem went away. 

But that's the only stability issue I've ever had with it. That was the only time it's caused an outage or been responsible for high resource consumption. Typically the OneAgent is well under 1 percent CPU utilization and takes very little memory.

It's used constantly by several teams. They use the Dynatrace mobile app on their phones to get notified of problems in the environment before ServiceNow even notifies them. Our platform services team, which is the team responsible for the HealthEdge environment — if we were a bank, it would be all the backroom functions. It is where you pay claims, enroll members, credential providers and maintain all that stuff. That support team has it on their phones. Our portal team also has the mobile app, so it's used constantly. I hear about it when it's not available, or if there's something odd going on with the mobile app.

It could handle a much larger environment. I add ActiveGates mainly for redundancy. I don't think I need as many as I have. I could scale it out very large. I don't see any limitations. I've never had a problem with that other than my checkbook.

We've tried scaling it to cloud-native environments a little bit. We have a few things that are off-premises, like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce, which are in the cloud. We have a cloud-based application that does provider credentialing, as well. We don't have anything that we own in the cloud, so we can't instrument AWS or anything like that with it.

Tech support has generally been pretty good. We get good response. They have a thing called Dynatrace ONE and I find the tech support to be best if I engage it through a chat window on Dynatrace. There's a place, right in the tool, where you can get a hold of a Dynatrace ONE person and they'll look at your problem right away. That seems to work better than the old model of calling support or sending an email, because you would go back and forth. "Send me more doc. What about this? Send me that." The Dynatrace ONE agent gathers everything he needs and, once he has all that, if he doesn't know what the problem is, at something like a level-one triage, he'll open the incident for you and it's done. I like that part. The traditional send-them-an-email, open-a-ticket-online takes too long. The Dynatrace ONE agent available through chat is a great concept. I encourage my team to use that rather than opening a problem. And that's included in the standard licensing.

For our deployment, we did the first 40 in less than an hour. That required a part of one guy, and he maintains it all now. We have close to 200 nodes with OneAgent on them and four ActiveGates, synthetic monitoring, and plugins for MQ and Citrix, among other things. That takes three-fourths of a person on my team. I've federated the support for a lot of the stuff on our portal side. Our portal team developers fell in love with it so much that I just let them run with it and install it as needed. I give them more and more administrative rights. If you add their time, it works out to the equivalent of about a person.

We have close to 100 users. Some of them are just management who use the reports. Some of them are the portal team who are administrators, just like my team, and the majority are in IT. We're starting to take it out to our sales organization, as they're interested in the response time and other things.

We see ROI in performance tuning — improving application performance — big-time. We have teams using it constantly to make our digital experience better, performance-wise and availability-wise. Another part of my group is load testing. They use it as they do their load tests. They use LoadRunner to build a load test and use Dynatrace to monitor after every new release of the HealthRules code to tell them what's better and what's not. There is a huge ROI on load testing and performance testing.

There is also incident response, preventative incident response. We even had the CIO come into my boss's office one day and he was able to say that Dynatrace saw a problem and it was fixed and we didn't have an outage. And he looked at him and said, "That's how it's supposed to work, right?" What the CIO had been promised for 10 years, he finally actually saw an instance of it "in the wild" where we preemptively discovered a problem and fixed it. That's a huge win.

Also, reporting and analytics — to know what the response time is, and how many users use it, just the simple things — are huge.

I'm not sure how to estimate how much Dynatrace has saved us overall. But it's had to have saved us on the order of millions.

We license it for two environments, typically all of production and all of one lower environment, usually our staging environment. If there is a downside to Dynatrace, the only thing I can think of would be the cost. If it were cheaper, I'd have it in all my environments. I don't think they're charging more than it's worth, by any means. It's just that good software costs money.

They have the OneAgent which you buy and install. You can run that in infrastructure-only mode and pay less. The cost is a bit funny, it's calculated based on the memory size of the server you put it on. Sixteen gigabytes of memory, for instance, is one host unit and a host unit costs you, say, $1,000. (I don't recall what the actual cost is, I'd have to look at our contract). There's a switch they've added for infrastructure-only mode, which will cut that cost to about one-sixth or one-seventh of the cost of a full host agent. You won't get the deep-dive response time metrics, but you'll get the infrastructure stuff, which sometimes is all you want.

In addition to the host agent fee, which was the first thing I bought, based on the memory size of the server, the other is in metrics that we collect through the ActiveGate plugins. They charge you per metric.

So the three principle things they charge you for are OneAgent, how many metrics you collect through the ActiveGate, and digital experience monitoring units, or DEM units. Those are basically the cost of the synthetic things, per test. Those things are quite reasonable in cost. The biggest cost is the OneAgent.

The cost to get us up, my first allocation, was under $100,000. My first PO was for about $60,000 and it covered almost our whole production HealthRules environment. We started out with 40 host units and we've grown to 200-plus, and we're a small place. Down the street is a health-related business and I think they have 20,000 host units.

We started by looking at industry reviews and selected the top four or five up in the upper-right quadrant: Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, and we had a brief look at what at that time was a CA product, or it might've been BMC.

We evaluated the four of them on paper and then brought two in for a trial, a proof of concept: Dynatrace and AppDynamics. Ultimately we selected Dynatrace.

There were several advantages to Dynatrace. Dynatrace was new. Its presence in the cloud was nice, but I could also run it on-prem if I wanted to and, at the time I didn't know which way I was going to go — which way I'd be allowed to go by security. AppDynamics was cloud-only at the time.

For installation, Dynatrace was trivial compared to AppDynamics. AppDynamics had an engineer onsite for two or three weeks and they still couldn't meet all of our use cases, which were pretty simple. I did them first. Then I went to Dynatrace and they said, "Well, download it, install it, and call us If you have any questions." And I thought, "Well, geez, don't I get any hand holding or anything?" It turned out that it was because I didn't need it. It was that simple. You download it, install it, and it injects itself. You can control it. It was just engineered for ease of use, by far. So the installation was night-and-day different. 

We have a lot of TIBCO BusinessWorks code around that that we wanted to instrument, and with AppDynamics we had to go into every business process and change the startup. We had hundreds of them and that was a real pain. We had to select which ones and do the work, whereas with Dynatrace, it would discover. Dynatrace has a concept called OneAgent, which you install on the server and it discovers things that you can monitor. You just click on them and say, "I want these monitored," or "Don't monitor these." It takes care of all that work and that was a huge difference. I didn't need a huge staff to maintain it. I didn't need a lot of time from the support teams — because they don't have it — to help me with monitoring. We were able to do the monitoring ourselves.

Then, once it was up and running, the use cases were pretty simple. One was to create a business-level dashboard of response time, and I don't think AppDynamics ever got that out for me. 

Dynatrace is easy to use from that perspective. It's easy to install and maintain. I have a small team and one person is my Dynatrace SME, but he does other things as well, so it's not even a full-time job.

I've been doing this for close to 30 years. I've worked for software vendors and I've worked for major companies and now I'm at this small healthcare organization. The "holy grail" has always been the ability to decompose response time and Dynatrace has done that and integrated all of my APM needs in one tool. That is the biggest benefit to me. I can do application performance, from web to Java deep-dive, in one place. That's probably why it costs so much.

If you're thinking about Dynatrace, consider how easy it is to install and maintain. It has broad coverage and it's easy to use. I don't know how the rest of the market even competes anymore; it must be on cost.

As an APM tool, I'd probably rate it at nine out of ten. There are a few rough edges, but I think that's mainly because they're trying to do the right thing too fast.

We have several uses for Dynatrace. Most of the time, we use Dynatrace for looking into potential site problems, investigating reported issues, and trying to replicate those problems in a test environment using the information provided by Dynatrace. 

We use Dynatrace for performance monitoring. Quarterly, we will specifically see if there's anything that we can optimize on the front-end of our website, so that's what you see and interact with on the web page. 

We also use it to get ahead of any potential problems in our stack. E.g., if Dynatrace is indicating a problem, we will look into it and determine if it's affecting users. Depending on its impact, and usually if it's impacting customers, we can use that information to decide on what we need to work on next to benefit the customer experience.

I use the tool as more of an analyst. I will use Dynatrace to show where systems need to be fixed, etc.

This solution is SaaS. We use Google Cloud Platform, where we just use their compute engines as far as our hosts. We also have a few services that are on-prem. Dynatrace works fine with both of them. 

The solution helps our DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. We recently got a staging environment implemented with Dynatrace. We are mainly using it for load testing at the moment. Dynatrace has been detecting failures, letting us know immediately what types of failures are occurring so we can catch them before releases. Our developers have been able to identify bottlenecks and other types of problems that they would not have been able to before by just using standard logging and analytics tools.

The solution give us 360-degree visibility of the user experience across channels, which is a great benefit. We're in eCommerce as a retailer. We are selling across multiple channels and platforms. We have a mobile app and a website. We even have other services which we may instrument with Dynatrace in the future. As far as our website and mobile app that we have instrumented with Dynatrace, it has all been very positive. 

The solution has decreased our time to market with new innovations/capabilities because we have been able to quickly identify areas that we can improve for new features and gather that data from Dynatrace. Then, we have been able to verify that our new features and releases are working as expected.

The User Sessions Query language has definitely been the most helpful with its key user actions and user session properties. Using those together, that has completely transformed how we're able to identify customers and their problems on our site. It has made a very big impact over the year.

Using synthetic monitors, we monitor our websites. We have two main domains. There are several plain HTTP monitors, then there are actual browser based monitors that emulate browser behavior. We use both of those types. We have several mobile browsers emulated under synthetic monitors that we use. Those ping our website every 15 minutes. On some of these synthetic monitors, we use multiple data centers to get an idea of geographic availability. We also monitor some of our third-party providers using our synthetic monitors. We monitor our customer support live chat server, which is hosted by a third-party, where we are given alerts if that system were to go down. We are also monitoring an email capture API that's a part of our website.

With user session queries, the main thing that we use that for (and the most valuable), is when we get a problem. If we get some type of a report, obscure problem, or Dynatrace reports a problem, we go straight to using the User Sessions Query Language to find sessions with Session Replay, then we replay those sessions to figure out exactly what the customer did and what conditions may have caused the problem to gauge the impact of the problem itself.

We also save user sessions queries into dashboards, then create different dashboards based on different projects to try and gather data. E.g., last year, we redid a part of our website and used Dynatrace sessions queries and Session Replays to verify that our customers were not having any problems or being confused by their experience. We wanted to verify that, which is one way that we've used the User Sessions Query Language along with the dashboards. We've also created some other dashboards that return custom metrics for us, which goes along, in some cases, with user session properties and user action properties. In that way, we're able to get a very granular look at certain statistics where it would be more difficult to get those numbers from our traditional analytics suite. 

The solution’s ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is a bit off. I have found that even though Dynatrace detects a problem and gives you a count and estimate of impacted users, this number is usually much higher than is actually the case and not fully accurate. E.g., I recently noticed an error. Every time someone would experience this error, Dynatrace would create a new problem and it would say, "Several hundred people were impacted." However, using Dynatrace's own tools (user Session Replay), then going back and actually tracing through these requests, we found much fewer people were actually impacted. In some sessions that Dynatrace said were impacted, when you view the Session Replay videos, you could see that the customer was not impacted in any meaningful way.

The solution’s ability to visualize, understand our infrastructure, and to do triage is helpful. I wish that you could do user session queries with those host level metrics and be able to create custom graphs the same way you could with user session data. They're both part of Dynatrace, but they don't feel like they're integrated together well. E.g., we're having an issue that has to do with just HTTP codes and we would like to marry that up with a user session query turning that into a dashboard. We can't currently do that because the User Sessions Query Language does not have access to the HTTP errors or HTTP status code data that is part of the hosts and infrastructure package. Otherwise, if you're just focusing on the infrastructure part it, I think it does a good job.

I have been using Dynatrace since February 2019.

I have noticed a few times where data collection did get interrupted. It was two or three times within the past year. Obviously, it's our monitoring system and we don't want that to go down at all. However, three times for no more than 30 minutes each time is pretty good.

The scalability has been able to meet all of our needs. We have not encountered any limitations when scaling Dynatrace with the Google Cloud Platform.

In the past 365 days, we have two websites that we monitor with Dynatrace, including mobile apps. We've recorded over 23 million sessions for Rack Room Shoes and 8.1 million sessions for Off Broadway Shoes. 

There are three users who are active users of Dynatrace:

1. The user experience architect, who is designing new interactive features and studying customer behavior
2. The product owner, whose focus when using Dynatrace is on the metrics, dashboards, and the user experience as far as using user sessions, queries and Session Replay. They may troubleshoot or look into problems as well.
3. The back-end architect, who looks into certain problems and figures out with Dynatrace where they're coming from. They use information from Dynatrace for writing more detailed support tickets.

I have noticed a few problems with the service before. I reached out to support and the system did appear to resolve itself on its own (after there was a problem). Then, the support staff couldn't see any further issues. The solution’s self-healing functionality works.

We ran into a problem where the Dynatrace JavaScript agent is returning errors, and it's very apparent that there's a problem. However, the customer support will ask us for seemingly unnecessary details instead of looking at our dashboard through their account to see what the problem is. They ask us for a lot of details not really related to solving the problem. As a result, we still have a few issues that were never resolved. They're not major issues, but they're frustrating.

The technical support is below average. They've solved some of the problems that we had, but it took several weeks to resolve almost each problem we had when they probably should have been fixed within a day or two.

There was an initial implementation of AppMon (another Dynatrace offering) before the current Dynatrace SaaS offering.

Dynatrace has definitely made an impact. We were never able to get granular data with any of our other solutions. They were all very disconnected and separate, whereas Dynatrace seems to have good integrations with our entire stack. There haven't been any problems getting additional data now that we have Dynatrace,

It is very easy to use and set up. It did take some customization to get it working for our sites, but after that, it's been pretty easy and straightforward.

The initial setup is complicated, but it's much less complicated than similar systems that I have used in the past. For Dynatrace's setup, maybe there were problems with how our web application was initially developed before I joined Rack Room, because there were a lot of features related to error reporting. It would report errors for things that weren't actual problems, etc. You have to configure it to get around those types of problems, but it's usually fine afterwards.

Over the past year, we've been tweaking Dynatrace. It's been a slow phase-in rollout as far as how much we rely on the data it's giving us back. 

I was involved in the initial implementation.

The solution has decreased our mean time to identification by about three days.

The solution decreased our mean time to repair by around a week.

There has been a huge increase in uptime. It's hard to say by how much for certain because we've made other development practice changes.

It is a great platform. We found a lot of value in setting up user session properties and user action properties, then being able to use them to identify individual problems/customers. We use that to sort of streamline the whole process of finding and fixing problems.

Biggest lesson learnt: Customers do not always behave as expected.

I would rate Dynatrace as an eight (out of 10).

We use it to follow up user experience data. It's all banking applications. For example, when you're viewing your account, you open up your mobile app and the click you do to view your account is measured in Dynatrace. It's stored and we are checking the timing at each moment. 

We are also following up the timing differences between our different releases. When we have a new version release, we are already checking within our test environment to see what the impact of each change is before it goes to production. And we follow that up in production as well.

In addition, we are following up the availability of all our different systems. 

And root cause analysis is also one of the main business cases.

So we have three main use cases:

1. To follow up what's going on in production
2. Proactively reacting to possible problems which could happen
3. Getting insights into all our systems and seeing the correlation between these different systems and improving, in that way, our services to our end users.

We use the on-prem solution, but it's the same as the SaaS solution that they are offering. They have Dynatrace SaaS and Dynatrace Managed, and our is the Managed. Currently we're on version 181, but that changes every month.

The dynamic microservices for Kubernetes is really value-added because there is a lot of monitoring functionality already built into Kubernetes Docker. There are also free things like Prometheus which can display that. That's very good for technical people. For the owner of the pod itself, that's enough. But those things don't provide any business value. If you want business value from it, you need to extract it to a higher level, and that's where you need the correlations. You need to correlate what is between all these different services. What is the flow like between the services? How are they interconnected? And that's where Dynatrace gives added value. And the fact is that you can combine these data, which are coming from Kubernetes, and include them in Dynatrace, meaning you have a single pane of glass where you can see everything. You can see the technical things, but you have the bigger business value on top of it, as well.

Before Dynatrace, we were testing just by trying out the application ourselves and getting a feeling for the performance. That's how it very often would go. You would start up an application and it was judged by the feeling of the person who was using it at that moment in time. That, of course, is not representative of what the actual end-user feeling would be. We were totally blind. We actually need this to be able to be closer to the customer. To really care about the customer, you need to know what he is doing. 

Also, incidents are resolved much faster by using Dynatrace. And that's for front-end, because we actually know what is going on. But it's also for server-side incidents where we can see the correlation. Using this solution our MTTR has been lowered by 25 percent. It's pinpointing the actual errors or the actual database calls, so it goes faster. But, of course, you still have to do it. It still needs to be implemented. It doesn't do the implementation work for you.

Root cause detection, how the infrastructure components interact with each other, helps. We know what is going wrong and where to pinpoint it. Before, we needed to fill a room with all the experts. The back-end expert would say, "I'm not seeing anything on the back-end." And the network expert would say, "I'm not seeing anything on the network." When you see the interaction between the different aspects, it's immediately clear you have to search in your Java development, or you have to search in your database, because all the other ones don't have any impact on the performance. You see it in Dynatrace because all the numbers are there. It really helps with that. It also helps to pinpoint which teams should work on the solution. In addition to the fact that it's speeding up the process of finding your root cause, it's also lowering the number of people who need to pay attention to the problem. It's just a single team that we need to work on it. All the rest can go home.

It has decreased our mean time to identification by 90 percent, meaning it only takes us one-tenth of the time it used to, because it immediately pinpoints where the problem is.

Dynatrace also helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and to shift quality issues to pre-production because we are already seeing things in pre-production. We have Dynatrace in our test environment, so we have a lot of extra information there, and DevOps teams can actually work on that information.

Finally, in terms of uptime, it's signaling whenever something is down and you can react to the fact that it is down a lot faster. That improves the uptime. But the tool itself, of course, doesn't do anything for your uptime. It just signals the fact that it's down faster so you can react to it.

The most valuable aspect is the fact that Dynatrace is a correlation tool for all those different layers. It's the correlation from the front-end through to the database. You can see your individual tracks.

One of the aspects that follows from that is the root cause analysis. Because we have these correlations, we can say, "Hey it's going slow on the server side because a database is having connection issues," for example. So the root cause is important, but it's actually based on the correlation between the different layers in your system.

Dynatrace is a single platform. It has all these different tools but they are actually all baked into the OneAgent technology. Within that OneAgent — which is growing quite large, but that's something else — you have the different tool sets. You have threat analysis, memory dumps, Java analysis, the database statements, and so on. It's all included in this OneAgent. So the management is actually quite easy. You have this one tool, and you have server-side and agent-side which are ways of semi-automatically updating it. We don't have to do that much management on it. Even for the quite large environment that we have, the management, itself, is quite limited. It doesn't take a lot of time. It's quite easy.

The solution's ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is great. It's exactly what we need. The severity impact is based on the users, the availability, and the impact it has on your business.

We also use the real-user monitoring and we are using the synthetic monitoring in a limited way, for the moment. We are not using session replay. I would like that, but it's still being considered by councils within the company as to whether we are able to use it.

We are using synthetic monitoring to measure the availability of one of our services. It's a very important service and, if it is down, we want business to be notified about this immediately. So we have set up a synthetic monitor, which is measuring the availability of that single service each minute. Whenever there is a problem, an incident will be immediately created and forwarded to the correct person. This synthetic monitoring is just an availability check in HTTP. It's actually a browser which is calling up a page and we are doing some page checks on this page to be sure that it is available. Next to the availability, which the synthetic monitoring gives us, we also measure the performance of this single page, because it's very important for us that this page is fast enough. If the performance of this single page degrades, an incident is also created for the same person, and he can respond to it immediately.

Real-user monitoring is a big part of what we are doing because we are focusing on the actual user experience. I just came from a meeting, 15 minutes ago, where we discussed this issue: a slowdown reported by the users. We didn't see anything on the server side but users are still complaining. We need to see what the users are actually doing. You can do that in debug tools, like Chrome Debugger, to see what your network traffic is and what your page is doing. But you cannot do that in production with your end-users. You cannot request that your end-users open their debug tools and tell you what's going on. That's what Dynatrace offers: insight like the debug tools for your end-user. That's also exactly what we need.

Most of the problems that we can respond to immediately are server problems, but most of the problems that occur, are front-end problems, currently. More and more, performance issues are located on the machine of the end-user, and so you need to have insight into that. A company of our size is obliged to have insight into how its actual users are doing. Otherwise, we're just blind to our user experience.

Dynatrace also provides a really nice representation of your infrastructure. You have all your servers, you have all your services, and you know how they communicate with each other.

While it gives you a good view of all the services that are instrumented by Dynatrace — which is good, of course, and that's what it can do — in our case, our infrastructure is a lot bigger than the part that is instrumented by Dynatrace only. So we only see a small part of the infrastructure. There are a number of components which are not instrumentable, like the F5 firewalls, switches, etc. So it gives a good overview of your server infrastructure. That's great, we need that. But it's lacking a bit of network segmentation and switches. So it's not a representation of your entire infrastructure. Not every component is there.

The solution's ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is great. In my opinion, it could be extended even more. I would like it to be more configurable for the end-user. It would be nice to have more business rules applicable to the severity. It's already very good as it is now. It is based on the impact on your front-end users. But it would be nice if we could configure it a bit more.

Another area for improvement is that I would like the alerting to be set up a little bit more easily. Currently, it takes a lot of work to add alerting, especially if you have a large environment, and I consider our environment to be quite large. The alerting takes a lot of administration. It could be a lot easier. It would not be that complicated to build in, but it would take some time.

I would also like the visual representation of the graphs to be improved. We have control of the actual measures which are in the graphs, but we are not able to control how the axes are represented or the thresholds are represented. I do know that they are working on that.

I have been using the Dynatrace AppMon tool for six years and we changed to the new Dynatrace tool almost three years ago.

We haven't had any issues with the stability of Dynatrace, and it's been running for a long time. We use the Managed environment, so it's an on-prem service, but it's quite stable. We are doing the updates pretty regularly. They come in every month but we are doing them every two or three months. First we do them in the test phase and then in the production phase. But we have not experienced any downtime ever.

For us, Dynatrace is scalable and we haven't seen any issues with that. We did need to install a larger server, but that's because we have a managed environment. You don't have that problem if you go with the SaaS environment. We don't see any negative impact on the scale of our products, and we are already quite large. It's quite scalable.

In terms of the cloud-native environments we have scaled Dynatrace to, we are using Dynatrace on an OpenShift platform, which is a Docker Kubernetes implementation from Red Hat. We have Azure for our CRM system, which Dynatrace monitors, but we are not measuring the individual pods in there as it is not a PaaS; it's a SaaS solution of course.

As for the users of the solution, we make a distinction between the users who are deploying stuff and those who are managing the Dynatrace stuff. The latter would be my team, the APM team, and we are four people. The four people are installing the Dynatrace agents, making sure the servers are alright, and making sure the management of the Dynatrace system itself is okay.

The users of the tool are the users of the different business cases. That includes development and business. There are about 500 individual users making use of the different dashboards and abilities within Dynatrace. But we see that number of users, 500, as a bit small. We want to extend that to over 1,000 in near future. But that will take some advertising inside the company.

I use Dynatrace technical support on a daily basis. They have a live chat within the tool and that comes for free with the tool itself. All 500 of our users are able to use this chat functionality. I'm using it very frequently, especially when I need to find out where features or functionalities are located within the tool. They can immediately help you with first-line support for the easy questions and that saves you a lot of time. You just chat and say, "Hey, I want to see where this setting can be activated," and they say, "Just click this button and you will be there." 

For the more complex questions, you start with tickets and they will solve them. That takes a little bit longer, depending on how complex your question is. 

But that first-line support is really a very easy way to interact with these people, and you get more out of the tool, faster.

We purchased the Dynatrace product because we had some issues with our direct channels, our customer-facing applications. There were complaints from the customer side and we couldn't find the solution.

There were also a number of our most important applications that needed more monitoring. We had a lot of monitoring capabilities on the server side and on the database side, but the correlation between all these monitoring tools was not that easy. When they came up with a problem they would say, "Hey, it's not the mainframe, it's not the database, it's not the network." But what was it? That was still hard to find out. And we were missing some monitoring on the front-end. The user experience monitoring was lacking. We investigated a number of products and Dynatrace came out as the best.

We kind of grew into Dynatrace. Our initial scope was quite small, so it was not that complex. Currently, our scope is a lot broader, but it is not complex for us because we have been working with the tool for such a long time. Overall, it's quite straightforward. If you're starting with this product from scratch and you have to find out everything, it can take some time to learn the product. But it's quite straightforward.

We started with the AppMon tool, which was the predecessor to the current tool. Implementing that went quite fast because it was a very small scope. When we changed to the Dynatrace Managed it took us half a year. And that's not including the contract negotiations. That was for the actual implementation: Finding out all business cases and all the use cases that we had, transforming them into the new tool, and launching it live for a big part of our company. That took half a year.

We hired some external experts from a company in Belgium, which is called Realdolmen. They really helped us in the implementation. They had experience in implementing Dynatrace for other companies already, so that really helped. And I would advise that approach. If you're doing it all by yourself, you are focusing on what your problems are, while if you are adding an external person to it, who is also an expert in the product itself, he will give you insights into how the product can benefit you in ways you couldn't have imagined.

The issue of whether Dynatracec has saved us money through consolidation of tools is something we are working on. There are a number of things that we are replacing now by things that are already present in Dynatrace. If you currently have a lot of different tools, it will save you money. But Dynatrace is not the cheapest tool. Money-saving should not be your first concern if you buy Dynatrace.

It depends on your business case, but as soon as you are at a reasonable size and you have different channels to connect within your company — mobile and web and so on — you need to have a view into your infrastructure and that's where Dynatrace provides real benefits. It's not for a simple company. It's not for the bakery store around the corner. But as soon as you hit a reasonable size, it gives enough added value and it's hard to imagine not having it or something comparable.

"Reasonable size" depends a bit on your industry. But it is connected with the number of customers you have. We have about 25,000 concurrent customers, at a given moment in time. As soon as you have more than 1,000 concurrent customers, you need this tool to have enough analysis power. It gives you power for tracking the individual user and it gives you the power to aggregate all the data, to see an overview of how your users are doing. This combination really gives you a lot of benefits.

It is quite costly. Dynatrace was the most expensive, compared to the other products we looked at. But it was also a lot better. If you want value for your money, Dynatrace is the way to go. 

In my opinion, the product is extremely good and comparable. We did compare it to AppDynamics and New Relic and we saw that Dynatrace is actually the best product there is. If you are looking for the best, Dynatrace will be your product.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from Dynatrace is that application performance monitoring is very complex, but the easiest part of it is the technical aspect. The more complex thing is all the internal company politics around it. We see a lot of data and if you are targeting some people and say, "Hey, your data bridge is going slowly," they will respond to it very defensively. If they have their own monitoring tools, they can say, "Oh no, my database is going very fast. See my screen is green." But we have the insights. It's all data, and gathering the data is the technical aspect. That's easy. But then convincing people and getting people to agree on what is obvious data is far more complex than the technical aspects.

The way to overcome that is talking. Communication is key.

I'm a little bit skeptical about the self-healing. I have heard a lot about it. I have gone through some Dynatrace instances where they have this self-healing prophecy. I think it's difficult to do self-healing. We are not using it in our company. There is a limited range of problems that you can address with it. It's only if you definitely know that this solution will work for this problem. But problems are always different, every time. And if you have specific knowledge that something will work if a particular problem arises, most of the time you can just avoid having the problem. So I'm a little bit skeptical. We are also not using it because we have a lot of governance on our production environment. We cannot immediately change something in production.

We are using dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment, but the self-healing is a little bit baked into these microservices. It's a Docker Kubernetes thing, where you have control over how many containers or pods you want to spin up. So you don't need an extra self-healing tool on top of that.

In terms of integrating Dynatrace with our CI/CD and ITSM tools, we are working on both of those directions, but we are not there yet. We have an integration with our ITSM tool in the sense that we are registering incidents from Dynatrace in our ServiceNow. But we are not monitoring it as a component management system.

We are not doing as much as I would want to for these Quality Gates. That can be improved in our company. Dynatrace could help with that, but I would focus on something else like Keptn, or something else that integrates with Dynatrace, to provide that additional functionality. Keptn would be more suitable for that, than the Dynatrace tool itself, but they are closely linked together. For us, that aspect is a work-in-progress.

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of 10, because it has really added value to my daily business and what I have to do in performance analysis. It can be improved, and I hope it will be improved and updates will be coming. But it's still a very good tool and it's better than other tools that I have seen.