Dynatrace Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have used Wiley, though not at this company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its performance has been wonderful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've never had to use technical support.

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

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

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

CA and AppDynamics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using it in an operational mode, when we have trouble easily getting the root cause, getting the application back up and running. 

Based on that, the product has worked very well for us. We are happy with it.

It's really opened our eyes. We had point solutions where we could see different elements of the stack, and Dynatrace ties everything together. Before, we could never get that full-stack monitoring. It prevents that, "Oh, it's your problem. No, it's your problem," type of an issue, and it allows us to get to that problem.

It also helps us get us the context of the customer experience. What's the business impact of those problems? And we've never had that before. That has been good.

• Ease of use
• The full stack - Everything from the browser, all the way back to the database, and being able to see everything, and really narrow in very quickly on what is the root cause. That's the biggest bang for us.

Where we are struggling is being able to pull that information out and combine it with other contextual information that we have in other sources. Mining that data in a big-data environment, and joining it together and coming up with larger types of analysis on it. Big-data types of issues. We're still blazing a trail, trying to figure that out. But it's not as easy as some of the other things we've been able to do with the product.

Very stable. Very happy with it.

We have a lot of our infrastructure on it, so it's meeting our needs, for our enterprise. We have thousands of agents that are out there in over a thousand applications, and it's meeting our needs with that.

I think it's good. They are very responsive and get back to us. They try to give us workarounds and follow up with us. So, we're happy with that.

We have an infrastructure group and I'm more on the business-unit side, but I was part of our PoC as we brought it in, and stood it up. Generally, it was very easy to get it set up and get going very quickly. It was pretty easy. We used some of the Dynatrace sales team and the engineers to help us get it set up, but in short order, we had it going.

AppDynamics and New Relic were the other two.

We were never able to get AppDynamics working in our PoC. We couldn't get it working on our web servers. New Relic didn't meet some of our shortlist criterion.

Regarding the nature of digital complexity, I think the role of AI is becoming more critical when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. It's because of the complexity and the number of elements that are out there, and being able to completely understand what the problem is. There was a good quote from one of the last keynote presentations here at the Perform 2018 conference: "Let's not chase $500 issues. Using AI allows us to go for those bigger issues," and look for more value, rather than worrying about all the little things that happen. AI would give us the ability to handle that low-level work, very quickly - the auto remediation - get that back up and going. It would buy us time to do higher-level work.

We've used a lot tools at our company, including siloed monitoring tools. Some of the main things we're seeing with them are gaps in the ability to handle emerging technology; things like single-page applications, Angular applications, single sign-on applications, those types of things.

When looking at purchasing an APM solution, we wanted something that was a proven leader. We looked at industry review rankings. Did it support the technologies we develop our applications on? Can it give us that full-stack view into our architecture? Can it tell us what's going on with the customer experience? Those types of things.

If I had a friend looking to adopt an APM solution, I'd really have him take a look at Dynatrace. It's an industry leader. We've had a great experience with them. It meets our needs. They're future-looking. Even though we're not where they are in terms of the capabilities they have, we know we're going to need those capabilities in the future. Great product.

The main use of Dynatrace is development assistance through to live deployment, then proactive monitoring. Afterwards, monitoring of the infrastructure and live site.

Being able to track issues found in live back through environments is particularly useful. 

The obvious benefits are proactive monitoring, but there were the unexpected results we gained from it that brought additional value out of the product:

• Security analysis, i.e., being able to detect when there was malicious activity on the site. 
• DNS poisoning when incorrect traffic was hitting the site.
• Multiple hits to API calls when only one should happen.
• Helping to reduce license costs by reducing calls to specific services.
• Being able to ingest data from other sources and display them alongside, an example being in a third party system that does not allow monitoring, but does have an open API to pull monitoring stats from.

• Memory analysis: The ability to tune an application and stop memory leaks has been invaluable, especially in ATG where sizing is crucial. 
• Dynatrace allows real-time visualisation of what is happening instead of making changes, running a command to pull stats every hour or so. This enables us to make changes in an environment and instantly see the impact.
• Some systems can run low over a period of time. It allows us to predict when the server is going to struggle and proactively stop that from happening.

This is not a simple product. You cannot fire and forget. Maybe not a specific function issue that needs resolving, but certainly an area for consideration upon adoption of the product.

Training is required for all of the people who will be using it, and this should not be overlooked. I would even recommend nominating an SME in each of the three areas covered: user behaviour analysis, development, and infrastructure/operations support.

We have had some issues, mainly in the JS embedded in the page.

None.

We have used them extensively. They are very eager to help.

Reviewed other products, but never switched.

Fairly complicated, but it is an in-depth product.

In-house.

As a user, I can testify that we found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost.

Do not ignore the training!

Yes, AppDynamics, New Relic, and one other.

Being able to dig into code to figure out errors and where response time is slow.

We have setup proactive alerts to notify us when certain conditions are met, such as when we are out of memory or high threads.

I cannot think of any off hand. They are continuously making the product better.

I've been using Dynatrace Application Monitoring and Data Center RUM for three years.

(version 6.0)

I'm not aware of any issues.

No, it is very scalable.

10 out of 10 as they are great to work with.

9 out of 10, but it could be 10 out of 10. They are very prompt and technical. They will work with you to fix any issues.

No, we reviewed other vendors and thought this one was the best.

It was simple to implement.

Dynatrace came in, helped install it and then showed us how to use the product.

We serve multiple customers and everyone wants to use Dynatrace. It has paid for itself. We can now figure out issues so much quicker.

CA was one other options we considered amongst others.

• The more environments you have on it, the better off you are.
• Make sure to work with the programmers as they understand their application
• Get training on how to use Dynatrace so it can be used effectively
• They have a lot of training resources online

We use Dynatrace for a number of internal applications that we track in addition to API calls associated with the API engine. We have a partnership with Dynatrace and I'm a project manager.

We monitor critical internal applications including some public-facing applications. Internal transactions are being tracked and we get immediate feedback from the solution's monitoring which makes a big difference to us.

The value of this solution is in terms of the functionality, and every aspect of the hardware and connection-oriented signals that we get. We use most of the features on a daily basis.

Network monitoring doesn't seem to be a key focus of the company and if that were improved this could be a one-stop solution that would monitor the application. It would be quite useful in the data center environment as well.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, we have around 50 users. 

I am unaware of licensing costs. 

It's a wonderful product and I would definitely recommend it. I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

My primary use cases of this solution are to understand how users are interacting with and experiencing applications and to quickly identify and fix problems.

Dynatrace has reduced our total headcount in operations and the mean time to detect and resolve problems. As a result, those challenging offline times are much shorter, if not non-existent, because of this solution.

The most valuable features are session replay, which allows for full playback of a user's experience; the AI engine "Davis," which does problem identification; and automatic mapping, which gives a visual representation of how applications interact host-to-host or process-to-process.

An area for improvement would be security. In the next release, I'd like to see more network-centric capabilities - Dynatrace is good at the network level, but I have to leverage other network solutions and integrate with them, but a holistic approach including the network as a one-stop-shop would be great.

Dynatrace's stability is solid - it performs updates very often, so it's always the latest and greatest in a good way.

Dynatrace has phenomenal scalability capabilities.

The technical support is phenomenal - they have a call program called Dynatrace ONE, which is like a customer success program on steroids. 

The initial setup was extremely straightforward and fast. The deployment function was also super fast, typically just a few hours at most, with the right tuning.

When used appropriately and applied to the applications that are meaningful for businesses, the ROI is extremely high.

There's a perception that Dynatrace's value could be questioned, but this is down to a lack of due diligence on the front end. When done right, this product always gives good ROI and total cost of ownership.

Dynatrace is really good at keeping some infrastructure details and really good at the application level. I would give this solution a score of ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is the consolidation of observability platforms.

Looking at Dynatrace's automation and AI capabilities, automation is generally a great place to start. In products where there has been no observability or a very limited amount, the automation can give a great deal of insight, telling people things that they didn't know that they needed to know.

Davis will do its best to provide root cause analysis, but you, as a human, are still responsible for joining as many of the dots together as possible in order to provide as big a picture as possible. As long as you accept that you still have to do some work, you'll get a good result.

I have not used Dynatrace for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment in this company, but I have had an AWS microservice cluster in the past. Its ability to cope with ephemeral incidences, as Kubernetes usually are, was very good. The fact that we didn't have to manually scale out to match any autoscaling rules on the Kubernetes clusters was very useful. Its representation of them at the time wasn't the best. Other products, Datadog, for example, had a better representation in the actual portal of the SaaS platform. That was about three years ago, and Dynatrace has changed, but I haven't yet reused the Kubernetes monitoring to see if it has improved in that regard.

Given that Dynatrace is a single platform, as opposed to needing multiple tools, the ease of management is good because there is only one place to go in order to manage things. You deal with all of the management in one place.

The unified platform has allowed our teams to better collaborate. In particular, because of the platform consolidation, using Dynatrace has made the way we work generally more efficient. We don't have to hop between seven different monitoring tools. Instead, there's just one place to go. It's increased the level of observability throughout the business, where we now have development looking at their own metrics through APM, rather than waiting until there's a problem or an issue and then getting a bug report and then trying to recreate it.

It's increased visibility for the executive and the senior management, where they're getting to see dashboards about what's happening right now across the business or across their products, which didn't used to exist. There's the rate at which we can monitor new infrastructure, or applications, or custom devices. We had a rollout this week, which started two days ago, and by yesterday afternoon, I was able to provide dashboards giving feedback on the very infrastructure and applications that they had set the monitoring up on the day before.

As we've only been using Dynatrace in production for the past month in this company, the estimate as to the measurement of impact isn't ready yet. We need more time, more data, and more real use cases as opposed to the synthetic outages we've been creating. In my experience, Dynatrace is generally quite accurate for assessing the level of severity. Even in scenarios where you simply rely on the automation without any custom thresholds or anything like that, it does a good job of providing business awareness as to what is happening in your product.

Dynatrace has a single agent that we need to install for automated deployment and discovery. It uses up to four processes and we found it especially useful in dealing with things like old Linux distros. For example, Gentoo Linux couldn't handle TLS 1.2 for transport and thus, could not download the agent directly. We only had to move the one agent over SSH to the Gentoo server and install it, which was much easier than if we'd had to repeat that two or three times.

The automated discovery and analysis features have helped us to proactively troubleshoot products and pinpoint the underlying root cause. There was one particular product that benefited during the proof of concept period, where a product owner convened a war room and it took about nine hours of group time to try and reason out what might be the problem by looking at the codebase and other components. Then, when we did the same exercise for a different issue but with Dynatrace and the war room was convened, we had a likely root cause to work from in about 30 minutes.

In previous companies where the deployment has been more mature, it was definitely allowing DevOps to concentrate on shipping quality rather than where I am now, which is deploying Dynatrace. The biggest change in that organization was the use of APM and the insights it gave developers.

Current to the deployment of Dynatrace, we adopted a different methodology using Scrum and Agile for development. By following the Scrum pattern of meetings, we were able to observe the estimated time in the planning sessions for various tasks. It started to come down once the output of the APM had been considered. Ultimately, Dynatrace APM provided the insight that allowed the developers to complete the task faster.

The most valuable features for us right now are the auto-instrumentation, the automatic threshold creation, and the Davis AI-based root cause analysis, along with the dashboarding for executives and product owners.

These features are important because of the improved time it takes for deployment. There is a relatively small team deploying to a relatively large number of products, and therefore infrastructure types and technology stacks. If I had to manually instrument this, like how it is accomplished using Nagios or Zabbix, for example, it would take an extremely long time, perhaps years, to complete on my own. But with Dynatrace, I can install the agent, and as long as there is a properly formed connection between the agent and the SaaS platform, then I know that there is something to begin working with immediately and I can move on to the next and then review it so that the time to deployment is much shorter. It can be completed in months or less.

We employ real user monitoring, session replay, and synthetic monitoring functionalities. We have quite a few web applications and they generally have little to no observability beyond the infrastructure on which the applications run. The real user monitoring has been quite valuable in demonstrating to product owners and managers how the round-trips, or the key user actions, or expensive queries, for example, have been impacting the user experience.

By combining that with session replay and actually watching through a problematic session for a user, they get to experience the context as well as the raw data. For a developer, for example, it's helpful that you can tell them that a particular action is slow, or it has a low Apdex score, for example, but if you can show them what the customer is experiencing and they can see state changes in the page coupled with the slowness, then that gives a much richer diagnostic experience.

We use the synthetics in conjunction either with the real user monitoring or as standalone events for sites that either aren't public-facing, such as internal administration sites, or for APIs where we want to measure things in a timely manner. Rather than waiting for seasonal activity from a user as they go to work, go home, et cetera, we want it at a constant rate. Synthetics are very useful for that.

The benefit of Dynatrace's visualization capabilities has been more apparent for those that haven't used Dynatrace before or not for very long. When I show a product owner a dashboard highlighting the infrastructure health and any problems, or the general state of the infrastructure with Data Explorer graphs on it, that's normally a very exciting moment for them because they're getting to see things that they could only imagine before.

In terms of triaging, it has been useful for the sysadmins and the platform engineering team, as they normally had to rely on multiple tools up until now. We have had a consolidation of observability tools, originally starting with seven different monitoring platforms. It was very difficult for our sysadmins as they watched a data center running VMware with so many tools. Consolidating that into Dynatrace has been the biggest help, especially with Davis backing you up with RCAs.

The Smartscape topology has also been useful, although it is more for systems administrators than for product owners. Sysadmins have reveled in being able to see the interconnectedness of various infrastructures, even in the way that Dynatrace can discover things to which it isn't directly instrumented. When you have an agent on a server surrounded by other servers, but they do not have an agent installed, it will still allow a degree of discovery which can be represented in the Smartscape topology and help you plan where you need to move next or just highlight things that you hadn't even realized were connected.

The user interface for the management functions is not particularly intuitive for even the most common features. For example, you can't share dashboards en masse. You have to open each dashboard, go into settings, change the sharing options, go back to dashboards, et cetera. It's quite laborious. Whereas, Datadog does a better job in the same scenario of being a single platform of making these options accessible.

User and group management in the account settings for user permissions could be improved.

The way that Dynatrace deals with time zones across multiple geographies is quite a bone of contention because Dynatrace only displays the browser's local time. This is a problem because when I'm talking with people in Canada, which I do every day, they either have to run, on the fly, time recalculations in their heads to work out the time zone we're actually talking about as relevant to them, or I have to spin up a VM in order to open the browser with the time zone set to their local one in order to make it obvious to them without them having to do any mental arithmetic.

Personally, I have been using Dynatrace since November of 2018. At the company I am at, we have been using it for approximately four months. It was used as a PoC for the first three months, and it has been in production for the past month.

The SaaS product hasn't had any downtime while I've been at my current company. I've experienced downtime in the past, but it's minimal.

To this point, I've not had any problems with the scalability, aside from ensuring that you have provisioned enough units. However, that is another point that is related to pricing.

Essentially, its ability to scale and continue to work is fine. On the other hand, its ability to predict the required scalability in order to purchase the correct number of various units is much harder.

Talking about Dynatrace as a company, the people I've spoken to have always been responsive. The support is always available, partly because of our support package. As a whole, Dynatrace has always been a very responsive entity, whether I've been dealing with them in North America or in the UK.

We have used several other solutions including Grafana, Prometheus, Nagios, Zabbix, New Relic, AWS CloudWatch, Azure App Insights, and AppDynamics. We switched to Dynatrace in order to consolidate all of our observability platforms.

Aside from differences that I discuss in response to other questions, other differences would come from the product support rather than the product itself. Examples of this are Dynatrace University, the DT One support team, the post-sales goal-setting sessions, and training.

We're yet to have our main body of training, but we're currently scheduled to train on about 35 modules. Whereas, last year, when I rolled out Datadog, the training wasn't handled in the same way. It was far more on request for specific features. Whereas, this is an actual curriculum in order to familiarize end users with the product.

In my experience, the initial setup has been straightforward, but I've done it a few times. When I compare it to tools like Nagios, Zabbix, Grafana, and Prometheus, it is very straightforward. This is largely for two reasons.

First, they're not SaaS applications, whereas Dynatrace is, and second, the amount of backend configuration you have to do in preparation for those tools is much higher. That said, if we were to switch to Dynatrace Managed rather than Dynatrace SaaS, I imagine that the level of complexity for Dynatrace would rise significantly. As such, my answer is biased towards Dynatrace SaaS.

In my previous company, it allowed a very small team to manage what was a very fast-moving tech stack. In my current company, it is still very early.

The consolidation of tools due to implementing Dynatrace has saved us money, although it's tricky to measure the impact. The list price of Dynatrace was more than the previous list price spend on monitoring tools because the various platforms had been provided as open-source tools, were provided through hosting companies, or had been acquired as part of acquisitions of other companies.

The open-source applications that we used included Grafana, Prometheus, Nagios, and Zabbix. New Relic through Carbon60 in Canada, as an example, was provided through a hosting company. Also, we acquired a Canadian company or had been acquired as part of acquisitions of other companies, AppDynamics, in a Canadian company, for example, with us in the budget of the previous company rather than our own company.

The hope was that Dynatrace through consolidation would release the material cost of the administrative overheads of tools like Prometheus and Grafana and the cost of hosting infrastructure for solutions like Nagios, Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana, et cetera. This means that it is more of an upstream cost-saving, where we would be saving human effort and hosting costs by consolidating into a SaaS platform, which is pretty much all-in-one.

Dynatrace's pricing for their consumption units is rather arcane compared to some of the other tools, thus making forward-looking calculations based on capacity planning quite hard. This is because you have to do your capacity planning, work out what that would mean in real terms, then translate that into Dynatrace terms and try to ensure you have enough Davis units, synthetics units, DEM units, and host units.

Catching those and making sure you've got them all right for anything up to a year in advance is quite hard. This means that its ability to scale and continue to work is fine but predicting the correct number of various units to purchase is much harder.

The premium support package is available for an additional charge.

At this point, we have not yet integrated Dynatrace with our CICD tool, which is Azure DevOps. However, in the future, our plan is to provide post-release measurements and automated rollbacks when necessary. Even further down the road, there's ServiceNow on the roadmap, which we're currently bringing in from an Australian acquisition in order to try and promote the ITSM side of the business.

There is nothing specific that has been implemented so far, although there have been general degrees of automation. When we get Agile, DevOps, and ServiceNow in place, the degree of automation will increase dramatically. For example, automated rollbacks in the case of deployment failure or change management automation through the current state of the target system are being included in the ServiceNow automation.

The automation that has been done to alleviate the effort spent on manual tasks is still very light because I'm the only person doing the work. I generally don't have time to do the ancillary tasks at the moment, such as creating automations. It's mostly a case of deploying instruments, observing, and moving on. When we come back to revisit it, then we'll look at the automations.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Dynatrace is to make sure you talk constantly with your Dynatrace representatives during the PoC, or trial phase because there is invariably far more that Dynatrace can do than you realize. We only know what we know. I'm not suggesting that you let Dynatrace drive but instead, constantly provide the best practices. You will achieve faster returns afterward, whether that's labor savings, or recovery time, or costs from downtime. Basically, you want to make sure that you leverage the expertise of the company.

In summary, this is a very good product but they need to sort out their user interface issues and provide a more logical experience.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.