Dynatrace Reviews

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We use Dynatrace both on-premises and in the cloud. Our use cases involve monitoring application performance. We are also able to see how the underlying infrastructure is performing.

This monitoring capability gives us the ability to measure the end-user experience.

We have other use cases, as well, but this is a summary of what we do with it.

There are several features that we find very valuable.

The setup is automated, so you don't have to do any configuration. There is very little manual intervention required.

Once it captures the data, it is able to dynamically analyze the packets and determine a probable route. This is a feature that we use very heavily.

Support for cloud-based environments needs to be improved. There is a challenge when it comes to monitoring cloud-native applications. This means that we have to use other tools that we integrate with Dynatrace. If there were another approach to monitoring things automatically then it would be a fantastic feature to add.

Some of the results that we were being given by the AI engine were not a proper output based on what the data input was.

These days, we are seeing that AIOps is becoming more predominant. As such, I would like to see more of the features in Dynatrace, expanding it from a purely monitoring solution into a full-fledged AIOps solution.

I have been working with Dynatrace for approximately nine years.

With respect to stability, this is not a system that gives users access to the low level. Rather, they interact with the agents. That said, we have had some stability issues with a number of our agent deployments for our customers. One example is that the AI engine was not giving the proper output, based on what the input was.

This is a scalable product but you ought to have multiple instances to scale it.

We have worked with their technical support team on a couple of specific areas, and I would rate them a four out of five.

We have not had to contact support for applications that use simple technology, like Java. However, when it is a complex system such as an ERP or a cloud-based application, sometimes the integration requires that we create specific plugins to capture the data. These are the types of things that we have worked with technical support to resolve.

We have worked with various competitors' tools. Some of these are AppDynamics, New Relic, Datadog, Splunk, and others. There are a lot of other tools on the market.

Nowadays, we are working with a lot of different customers and our preference is to implement Dynatrace over the other solutions. The three main reasons for this are the features in general, the ease of implementation, and specifically for the AI capabilities.

The initial setup is straightforward, although it depends on whether the application enrollment is heterogeneous or complex. The initial planning can take some time but the actual installation and setup is not a big process.

The number of staff required for deployment depends on how many applications we're going to configure. If it's only a few applications then you don't need many people. However, if a customer tells us they have a hundred applications that need to be installed in a month's time then obviously, we need more people to help with the deployment.

As product integrators, we deploy this product with our in-house team. We have a good set of people who are trained and certified in Dynatrace.

Over the time that I have used this product, I have worked with several versions. I am now working on the latest one.

The advice that I typically give to my clients is that you shouldn't think that it will do everything. In order to implement it properly, we need to clearly understand what are your specific use cases are, and then work on those.

Use cases can be related to an environment, a technology, or a platform. If it's a cloud-native service, for example, then you won't be able to use Dynatrace because it can't even be installed. You won't get anything out of that. This is an example of how it is not suitable for every situation. The feasibility depends on what you want to use cases are.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for both Dynatrace and AppDynamics is for application performance monitoring (APM). The main reason for having application performance monitoring is, when we see something is running slowly, we can immediately look to see where the issue is at before our systems crash on us. So, one of the major roles it plays for us is the ability to keep our system performing in peak shape.

Our ability to see issues coming, then quickly isolate and correct problems was our main use of Dynatrace. We are not there yet with AppDynamics. It has been ten months, and we are still spinning our wheels trying to set it up and figure out how it works.

When collecting data with Dynatrace, we saw every single transaction that happened in real-time. Whereas, with AppDynamics, they take snapshots, and we only see a tenth of the information that we did with Dynatrace. While the information is there, if an issue with an application happened in-between snapshots, it would not be readily identifiable. You would have to go hunt and peck for it. We don't have time for that.

Using Dynatrace, we collected application metrics within three hours, in most cases. The majority of our triage were within three hours, then we were able to discover the root cause of issues.

With Dynatrace today, you have a single agent. You stick it on a server, and it doesn't matter if it's Linux, Windows, etc. It is a single agent and executable. You run it, and it injects itself into your collecting data. This is compared with AppDynamics, which on some of servers, we have had to install as many as four different agents and configure them all individually, trying to collect the same type of information.

The dashboarding for Dynatrace is ten times easier to set up and has more options of what you can put on it, especially if you are in a single payment class environment.

With Dynatrace in our environment, the managed server required root access to run. As a government agency with tight security, this has been an audit concern for us. A major area of improvement for Dynatrace would be to make it so the program does not need root access to perform. AppDynamics does not require root access to the servers. Once they are set up and configured, they can set their end run without root access.

The number one area of improvement for AppDynamics is to simplify their agent install. Instead of having four or five different agents to get all the different things that you need with different pieces of information, they need to figure out how to put theirs into a single agent, like Dynatrace has done.

We have not found AppDynamics in our environment useful at all. We are struggling to try and make it work. AppDynamics is for applications that are static. In our government agency, we are too dynamic. Everything is changing constantly, and AppDynamics does not work in this type of environment.

The stability for Dynatrace is probably 85 percent. We had enough issues where one of the services would just stop running, then we would have to restart it. Not very often, but it happened.

With AppDynamics we haven't been able to use the system long enough to determine its stability.

Dynatrace is very scalable. We grew it over the 12 years that we had it. So, that has proven that it is scalable. 

AppDynamics is scalable as the environment grows. However, we are still in the product's infancy, so we haven't seen this happen yet.

A company with a single application over multiple locations, like a retailer, but only needs to worry about one application and monitoring it, this is the perfect fit for AppDynamics. If you have an organization with more than 40, you definitely want Dynatrace. AppDynamics is not a viable product for an organization with lots of applications.

On a scale of one to ten, my experience working with the AppDynamics onsite people and offsite support is maybe a five. I feel that they don't want to take responsibility for the areas that AppDynamics is lacking in. When things don't work in which they were sold, then they want to tell us that it is our environment more than their application not functioning correctly. 

Whenever we had issues with Dynatrace, you could get Dynatrace support on the phone, and they were all over it. They would get into our machines, then take screenshots or look at the performance of the systems while it was running. They wrote custom patches to help us resolve issues that we had. I would rate the support that we receive from Dynatrace as a ten out of ten. 

We have been using Dynatrace since 2007 and AppDynamics for just about a year. We have not been using them concurrently. Dynatrace was not renewed, and management decided that we would use AppDynamics. This decision was beyond my control.

With Dynatrace, the installation and setup were a piece of cake. It could be accomplished usually within fifteen minutes, and definitely, within a half hour of deciding to do it. 

A big difference that we found between the two vendor is in setting the system up and getting them ready for production. With the latest version of Dynatrace, it took three days and we had it in production. We are still trying to get AppDynamics in production since last May.

With our Dynatrace system, it required three servers and the program when we installed it on the servers. It was straightforward. You just clicked, clicked, and clicked as it went through the setup, then you were done. 

With AppDynamics, we are now on eight servers to make it function like it should. We are ten months into it now, and we're still trying to get it right. We have AppDynamics folks onsite to help us with it. It is just difficult to implement. There is so much to it. 

I sat down with one of their architects to decide how many servers that we needed, how they need to be spec'd out, etc., and that is what we built. Then, when we stood it up, and it didn't work, some other personnel from the AppDynamics team came in to look at it. They said, "None of this is correct. You are on the wrong this and that." 

Thus, we did not have consistent information and support from AppDynamics when implementing the system. However, it is up and running now.

Our annual costs were about the same for both AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

When learning Dynatrace, we brought in Dynatrace people to come onsite and take my team through a week long training. We did that two or three different times. They offered this type of training. They also have online training out on their community that I could set up for my team members. The effectiveness of that training was about 75 percent. 

With AppDynamics, they have provided some online training. The take away from it (from my team) has been maybe 10 to 15 percent. The training is geared more towards sales than using the product for what it was intended. It boasts the features and selling points of the AppDynamics product instead of the ins and outs of how to use it once it has been installed in our environment.

I would definitely recommend Dynatrace. I have the benefit of having used it for so many years. It takes less infrastructure to set it up initially. It's a single agent engine. You just set the agent up and run it, then it configures itself. It goes out and finds all your processes with everything that's running, configuring itself. The simplicity of the infrastructure and simplicity of setting it up, then actually using it, along with setting up your dashboards to monitor your metrics is much better. There are more features than the AppDynamics dashboarding.

I would rate it Dynatrace as a ten out of ten. 

At the point of where we're at with our AppDynamics experience, I would rate it as a five out of ten.

The primary reason for choosing any APM solution, it comes through the interface, is to find out the gaps between the application life cycle when someone makes a transaction. Then, we will not know what is causing it to come back so late, delayed, or with latency. We just want to know the pain points of it. That is why we have chosen this APM solution. So far, it is doing a good job, except for some flaws, but that is fine. 

When Dynatrace shows us an entire lifecycle. I can go back to my document and see A points to B, then B points to C, and so on. I can then back and see that I plugged it in every box to see how it is behaving and how the product is dynamically showing the AI behaving in a single place, like on a single webpage. This helps us to see the troubleshooting points or what is hiccuping. This is where we go. We reboot, fix it, or do whatever it takes for it to be taken care of.

The PurePath is one feature, which I actually like. When I have a problem that is being detected by the alerting profiles, I just go in and see what the part is talking to, then what its dependencies are. For example, if a middleware application is behaving weird, then has to be sampled by different databases back-ends, or mainframes, we just keep looking at those PurePath to see what it is talking to rather than going back to my library or my documents to see what exactly the architecture design was. The PurePath helps me a lot.

1. To improve in Dynatrace the log analytics, this is the first thing that has to be enabled. 
2. We are using Splunk or Sumo Logic as an enterprise logging tool. We have been there for a long time, since even before the Dynatrace was. There were Splunk APIs that have been exposed, and we can grab the data from there. Dynatrace also has APIs, but they are unfriendly APIs. If they were friendly like Splunk or Sumo Logic had, we might integrate that same data on a single webpage, then start showing these internally. That would be a great help of a feature; friendly APIs.

Artificial intelligence depends upon business to business. If you take a travel industry, like airlines, not every month will remain the same as in the next 12 months. Our busy seasons would be around summer, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year (two bottleneck seasons). If you come back and are replicating that scenario of traffic of those issues, or those latency of responses being triggered, it will not be the same as in the rest of the months. When we are plugging in the AI, we need it to have in mind this for each and every business, that the AI implementation should be different.

What happened was when there was an AI sneak peek to our portfolios for our company took an average of the last three months, which would not work for us. If it is taking an average of the first three months, say Jan, Feb and March. Our systems would be quiet because we are not handling our bottleneck capacity of traffic. Then, when it comes to April or May, that is where our busy business season starts. The AI takes the alerting profiles of the first three months, then tries to implement on those next three months, or the next coming 24 hours, and then it just screams a lot.

The AI should be tweaked for the last full year, like smart scheduling. That would help us.

Dynatrace solution is pretty much stable. 

Last time, when there were upgrades being made, the alerting profiles had been wiped off, then we had a gap. When Dynatrace made the latest upgrades, newest patch upgrade, or firmwares, the existing alerting profile, which says, "Call me when you see this," or "Call me when you see 10% of these," had been wiped off. Someone has to redo it again. Except that, it has been fixed in the next release. 

The scalability of the solution is good. We initially started with the first three major critical applications, which is where I was introduced to this tool. Right now, they are moving on to the top 21 applications, which is going to be good scalability. They did well.

I have not contacted any customer solution or support.

Since we are still on the warranty period, we have still Dynatrace guardians on-site. I can go in and say, "Hey, this is what is happening," and he will get me a solution, or he will say, "Hey, you are doing this wrong. You have to do this." If not, he would say this feature is not yet released, and we are going to have it in next Q release, or whatever. Dynatrace guardian is the first point of contact if I have to ask any questions, he would be the guy.

We never had a centralized application for performance monitoring tool before Dynatrace. 

Everyone has Sumo Logic. Someone has Splunk. Someone has Tealeaf. Someone has Riverbed. No one had a consistent idea of what another team was doing for monitoring solutions. When enterprise monitoring took place, that was where a centralized solution needed to come in. 

For example, if I was sending a transaction to a different team, and I called it as a transaction, but someone else named it with a Tealeaf ID. There was a disconnect in naming conventions. 

When the APM solution came into place, I now know what to call it and they know what to expect from me, so we are on the same page. This helps us in shortening down the time for triaging an issue.

The capacity planning was complex. Everything else was easy.

Our infrastructure setup has been there for quite a long time, then we already had JVMs who monitor our process. We needed to evaluate what options and what benefits were coming down on our plate, then what was a repetitive task which was already being done by other JVMs. We had to evaluate those on different boxes, different portfolios, etc. Then evaluating options were a little tough because we were already using some things and we had to do something new basically from scratch again. This took some time. After we had experience with the first three major applications, we knew what to do with the next 21. 

If I had a colleague interested in purchasing Dynatrace, I would ask these questions:

• What are you using these days?
• What are you missing? 
• If you have that missing point as well as what you already have, why not go for Dynatrace?

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be fixing the issues first. It takes a lot of time for us to dig back where the actual issues on the code base are, especially if it is a network or infrastructure-related. To get answers for most of it, we can fix our issues faster on a priority basis.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: Show me what I am not seeing. If you ask me, I am an engineer. I do not want to see the eyes on glass all the time. I want a solution which does it for me. I know how to set my thresholds and throttles. For example, if there is an issue, an exception, or a false exception which is coming in, I know my application:

• If it comes 100 times a day, don't worry about it.
• If it comes five times a minute, don't worry about it. That is the business clients calling improperly.
• If it happens 500 times in a five minute timeframe, then send me an alert.

That is the something which I like a lot regarding the synthetics of application performance monitoring. When I am not seeing and I am being called when there is an issue, which I set my own rules, that is a good idea. That is the great thing and a driving factor for having an APM solution. 

My use case for Dynatrace is monitoring, including server monitoring. I use the tool to analyze what's wrong with the server, detect high memory utilization and any IO network problem, and monitor network traffic.

I use Dynatrace to find errors and the root causes of the errors, including information on which carrier is giving slow response times.

Dynatrace has multiple features that I need, but I love that you can analyze traffic, including any bottlenecks. I also find the tool user-friendly and has an easy-to-navigate interface.

Dynatrace is also easy to integrate with other tools.

For a new user of Dynatrace, the tool is not easy to understand, so this is an area for improvement. Initially, you'll need an expert to advise you on monitoring and analyzing data. Before using Dynatrace, you need to learn from an expert.

I've been using Dynatrace for three years.

Dynatrace is a stable tool.

Dynatrace is a scalable tool. In terms of scalability, it's an eight out of ten.

I consulted the Dynatrace technical support team one year ago and had a pleasant experience with the team. I'm rating the support a ten out of ten. It was excellent.

Positive

My company went with Dynatrace because it's a very popular tool in the market for server monitoring. Most of the companies where I'm based use it.

The initial setup for Dynatrace was easy, though it was the client who installed it, and I only accessed the URL. Deploying the tool took two to three hours.

I have no information on the cost of Dynatrace.

At the moment, I'm using Dynatrace.

More than fifty people use the tool within the company.

I'd tell anyone planning to use Dynatrace for the first time to review the tutorials and check how to analyze data on the tool.

I'm giving Dynatrace a score of eight out of ten because it's not easy to understand the tool entirely if you're a first-time user.

I'm a Dynatrace customer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have used Wiley, though not at this company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The primary use case is we have customer-impacting production issues, so we have to get in there and quickly find out the root cause. It used to take days because we did not have an APM tool. With Dynatrace, we are now able to identify the root cause in 15 minutes. It has helped the entire operations of our company. It is working really well.

PurePath is the best. I have never seen it before and the way it is helping is really cool. It is eliminating lots of hops we go through to find the cause and reach out to the person. Now, we know exactly which line, which method, and which program needs fixing, so we directly go to the right developer and the guy comes in fixes it. Then, in the next week at least, it is done. 

I am looking forward to new Dynatrace features coming out. However, I am still hoping for more.

It is 99.9% stable. For the 0.1%, there were too many users who were using the client. This was the problem. So, we had to move to the business rich client, then the issue was gone. 

We scaled from 300 agents to 800 agents in six months. There were no issues at the server level, which is pretty good.

We have used the problem management, which is available on the management support community site. We have used that. 

Dynatrace is my first APM tool. We were previously using CA Wiley. With Wiley, we did not have the ability to get inside the process. We were outside. Now, with the Dynatrace, we are getting inside the PurePath, which is a great help. 

I helped my administration to do the initial setup. It was very easy.

If you are looking to implement it, go straight ahead. Don't even think about it, just use it. 

When it comes to IT's ability to scale to in a cloud and manage performance problems, now that we are activating more agents of Dynatrace, AI is going to be tremendously helpful to us. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be the ability to add up more applications into the performance support, then help more applications with the fewer number of resources in our app.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. The sales rep with their technical team coming to see us and giving us a demo is the key. We need to understand exactly what level of depth they have.
2. We need security in place.

Considering the application and what we are using at the client site. We have a user interaction related application where users fill in their information, and they are processing the formality and completing the business transaction. The business transaction generates a policy or a report out of all the services. This is from the user interface point of things. 

Other than that, they are that second aspect of us in elite services called back-end services. There is no actual user interface with these services for the end user. There are some other applications, which will be calling the services. At the client side, we are monitoring Layer 2. One service that we use it for: What are the issues, what are the problems, and what are we facing for services.

Similarly, when the user interaction is there, what are the challenges users are facing and how we can proactively use Dynatrace and get the problem resolved. That is what the current setup of Dynatrace offers our client base.

1. The deployment configuration and everything is simple. It is not that complicated. That is critical, because that saves time. Whenever something goes wrong, since in deployment everything is easy, you are saving time solving the issues. 
2. The user interface. The user interface is like a type of dashboard. You can use the tool as an end user into the tool interface, which is good. This is simple, not complex as where to find something. Any layman, if you give them the tool, who has knowledge of how to use an internet browser will be able to use the tool if you just explain it in a few words. It is intuitive.

Mainly, if the user rarely utilizes user monitoring, this is the biggest feature. Because when the user has an issue, we have configured the alerting so the error or the incident will go to the respective team. Then, the team can contact the user once they see that they have an issue and ask if they can them resolve the issue. That is the key thing, because that helps with revenue loss. This is the key feature that we see.

There is a limitation on timeframe. Now, if you look at the dashboard, it will state five minutes, then 15 minutes, then one hour, then six hours, and finally 24 hours. I would like them to provide a set of options defining the business hour.

In the morning from 5AM to 6AM is my business hour. If you could give me that option, it would be easier for me instead of just lasting one business hour to finish. This would be a cool feature. 

A lot of organizations are 24/7, but they will be mainly looking for limited data for their business hours. My business hours are about 12 hours, which is when all my analysis is done.

We had only two or three major downtimes. We were able to resolve those in less than eight hours. These were not big, major downtimes that we experienced for the solution.

We have used technical support many times, because there are some issues which we were not able to figure out based on the information provided. There are some things, which we need the technical support team's help in making the changes, and also before changes are made. There should not be a case where we make a change and certain features get disabled, or certain featured get enabled.

We have used technical support in the past, but the support is limited. Though, I have never had an issue that the technical team has not been able to solve. I show them the problem, then they see the problem, and solve it. That is what is very successful for me: no back-and-forth with support.

Support can ask in a list what information they want from me and what problem I am facing, then I will explain it. This will help us to solve problem more quickly than just chatting.

Before, I came to that account, they had a network monitoring tool. They also had some JV monitoring tools, so two different things. There are some network-related issue you can take from the network monitoring tool, some with a JVM and some you need to take from Java.

For the end user, application, or web tier, the monitoring was not there.

I have used, as a part of my team back home in India, CA Wiley. We did a PoC implementation with it. I did a PoC of Wily in 2005.

The deployment was simple, as well as the upgrade.

The first upgrade was little bit complex because you have a data you need to maintain. With an initial deployment, you are starting from scratch and have nothing to worry about. When you upgrade, you need to plan well in advance what you want see.

We needed to do see what was intact, because when we moved from 6.1 to 6.3, the migration tool that they had, it was not quite solid or sound. Now, they have a good migration tool whatever they developed.

The challenges that we face were not that big just minor challenges, since we did a PoC with the tool. Therefore, we could migrate easily with minimal impact on the end user.

When I came in the picture for this particular engagement, the client had already done a PoC with Dynatrace. However, if I say Dynatrace right now, it is a total different flavor, as I am currently using AppMon.

When I came here and I was working another engagement, I attended some training for DC RUM which was a Compuware APM to Dynatrace. Now, it has totally changed since when I started using it for deployment. Everything is fine. As compared to the Wiley, it is not an apple to apple comparison. 

Make sure your application team or the development team is going to use the tool. If your application or development team is not going to get any benefit in the sense of not being involved in this particular APM monitoring, then the benefit will be less. For example, if you implemented a solution and your monitoring team is using it, then to achieve the full-fledge benefit, your application development team should use it, because during the development itself they will see that these are the challenges we are facing. They will fix the problems during the development instead of in testing.

This will save time for any application for release, because the development team will fix the problems before the release of anything. This is the foremost thing that they need to consider whenever they are going for the solution.

The other thing is an organizational point of view. You need to have some center of excellence, which will be dedicated for the APM. It is not okay for some part-time people to just be looking on. There has to be a dedicated team if you have this tool in your organization.

Only then you will get whatever you are expecting out of this tool.

AI's playing the key role in the way all the monitoring solutions are going now. They are computing all this information which is available and providing information it for human beings to try to solve problems.

The AI is playing a key role otherwise just imagine. Previously, you would need to analyze all the logs for an error and coming out with the solution would take hours. Nowadays, because of the AI, the log analysis and everything has been done in backing. You can use your experience logic, take that information, and solve the problem.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be time to resolve issues that would be useful for the team. To solve the problem for the end user, because from his point of view, the problem should be resolved quickly. So, this is definitely an advantage for the end user as it is for the team.

Support team could use the information and will be able to pinpoint the issue, who the user is, and where their location is. When we have these issues with this technology, the issues will be resolved more quickly because you have the information regarding what went wrong, what is the error, and what stage the problem is at.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: What is their market share? Where are they standing? Are they a leader or they just initially starting? Because based on the customer's budget, if they want to sell out or work with a type of market leader's solution, then we will definitely look at that particular area.

However, there are some company that might not want to sell out. We see this in some companies, which are in their startup faze. The investment will be minimal, but the challenge is that you won't be able to get the features that other companies at the top are offering.