Dynatrace Reviews

We are using Dynatrace for application monitoring. 

In the past, we would spend more time on identifying the root cause and finding the solution. After implementing Dynatrace, we easily see that we are capturing all the exceptions. Just build on the error message, then we usually quickly fix it.

Dynatrace is performing well so far.

We have identified some critical issues, which are not available or recreatable in the Dev or QA environment. They are only happening in production, and they are easy for us to identify in the production environment. We can usually identify issues and fix them.

The data monitoring is good for us, and also the performance monitoring. We have been using both extensively for the last three to four months. We have been capturing all the information and evaluating whether it can be improved or not.

Since we have been receiving alerts from Dynatrace, we go ahead and fix them without the user knowing about them. Sometimes the users never know that they are having issues and they are stuck. So, in 10 minutes, we fix it and business runs as usual without any problem.

I am able to identify issues very quickly.

I just heard about the management zone. I also got some hands-on with the early version. I feel it is a good feature to handle integrating all the services together in one place.

So far, the stability has been good.

Not yet, we started just six months before. Right now, we are on six to seven applications been monitored. 

We started implementing microservices. Microservices means now it is hundreds of services. In the future, maybe in three to six months, we are expecting thousands of services will be implemented. In this way, the solution will definitely help us to identify the entire thousands of services that need to be monitored. So, it will gives us some alert and we build on it.

We did use technical support in the initial phase when we were struggling to get into the tool. We felt they were knowledgeable.

They do have a salesperson we can contact in India.

Our switch to Dynatrace was very internal. We got a different management team, and the new management team came in and decided that we needed Dynatrace now. They had experience with it already. They knew that where we were facing issues on monitoring side.

There were some other monitoring tools, like SolarWinds. However, the new management team felt that Dynatrace would be the perfect for us.

We were and still are using SolarWinds as a monitoring application.

I was not involved in the initial setup or upgrades.

I would recommend doing a PoC.

Before adopting Dynatrace, we were evaluating multiple systems, such as AppDynamics and SolarWinds.

I am not much into the area of AI, but I still see it removing some of the non-value added work which we are doing daily, such as sitting and monitoring the server, which is not a value addition. AI is an area where we get somebody to watch it, we get alerts, then we act on them instead of just going through all the locks. Especially IoT side, even though I am on the development side, still we concentrate on AI and IoT, where we see more focus and we just started learning all those things, and implementing them in our company.

If I had a solution which would give me a real answer, not just a data, the immediate benefit would be a global application and support, because we are working in Asia. Sometimes we get incidences during the US morning when we are not at the office. If I can get the benefit of a solution, which can alert us and solve itself. It is an automation thing where we do not want to wake up late at night and work on the application.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: A vendor should be reachable at any time.

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.

Our primary use case is to combine and transform a lot of metrics from our production environment and utilize Dynatrace to turn that data into knowledge which we can act on to prevent outages, increase application performance, and improve end user experience. This tool enables us to make intelligent, fact-based decisions faster.

With Dynatrace, we have identified and solved "mystery" issues that we have experienced for a long time, including sporadic latency issues on storage volumes and SQL databases not scaling properly when under certain loads. 

We are also monitoring web services and using synthetic web checks to actively monitor specific parts of our production website and production web applications. With the SaaS version of Dynatrace, we started monitoring our VMware hypervisors and that gave us valuable system specific metrics into our virtual environments. Therefore, we have built smart alerts to notify our team of potential problems before they manifest themselves to end users.

I really like how easy it is to deploy and use the SaaS version in our environment. We have a lot of other tools that have plenty of capability but they do not get a whole lot of use because they require a dedicated resource who is an expert to use them. With the SaaS version of Dynatrace, all the admin functions are taken care of by the Dynatrace team (updates, patches, new features, bugs, etc.), and our small shop can focus on getting valuable metrics, alerts, and issue resolution from the product. That is very important because despite how many features and how powerful a product is, it will only return value to an organization if it is being integrated and used regularly for its intended purpose; Dynatrace SaaS makes that easy for us.

As far as more technical features go, we are a small shop and wear many hats in the IT department, so the automatic baselining and AI engine take a big chunk of work off our hands. It collects, analyzes, and summarizes the application and host level metrics (including host log files and hypervisor host details) from VMware virtual environments as well as physical stand-alone servers, then presents that data to us in an easy enough format to help us make better decisions and tune accordingly before our end users inform us of problems. 

In addition, we use the synthetic web checks to emulate the end user experience and availability of our public website and internal web applications, which is a wonderful feature to have access to. 

If I had to pick something to improve, it would be the fact that it requires manual intervention to uninstall the cloud agent from servers you want it removed from. The installation part is the easiest of any Linux tool that I have ever installed, so I do not have a problem with that at all. What I have a problem with, is that in order to 100% remove the product, you will need to manually go to each machine and uninstall the cloud agent. I wish there was a feature that would allow a Dynatrace administrator to remotely uninstall/remove the cloud agent from the Dynatrace management console without having to physically logon to each server to achieve the task.

We use the product in application monitoring. 

The solution offers a better overview of applications. It offers end-to-end monitoring, and the user experience is real. 

Dynatrace needs to improve its configuration. 

I have been working with the product for two years. 

I rate the tool's scalability a ten out of ten. 

The tool's support is hard to reach. 

Neutral

I rate the product's deployment a ten out of ten. The installation and deployment process is brief, but configuring the entire environment, including the agent server and enterprise configuration, is more complex and time-consuming.

Our clients are enterprise businesses. Dynatrace's integration capabilities are good. I rate it a ten out of ten. 

With nothing more than three commands, or a simple dockable container, everything was executed in minutes. In one week, we had enough customizations to be ready for production. 

It would have taken us at least two months to hire another person from SysOps to achieve registration, supervision, alerts, and APM implemented with cheaper or free open source solutions. It was much cheaper and faster to go with Dynatrace.

We had users in a remote office complaining about the latency of the application and were able to determine the problem derived from the configuration of a router with the help of Dynatrace. 

Dynatrace has designed its agents to capture limited stack traces for each transaction executed. It is a product that helps developers, testers, and operations to make sure their applications work quickly and reliably.

We also love the automatic alerts. Dynatrace alerts are based on deviations from the reference metrics which are constantly collected.

The one thing that I do not like about Dynatrace is their Web UI dashboards are very slow. They seriously have to improve their Web UI dashboard configuration and SSL timeouts.

No other provider provides record ingestion, Kubernetes/docker monitoring, and application monitoring for Node.js. Some competitors offer aspects of these, and some offer all these, but not with Node.js. 

Dynatrace was the perfect fit.

Dynatrace was an incredible find! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have AppMon, and our primary use cases are to

• gain greater visibility into our applications and our full stack of technology
• be able to provide our developers with insight into their applications 
• be able to see our systems, monitor them for availability
• really reduce our mean time to resolution, if and when we have problems.

It does really well, it really gives us that insight that we need. We have a large instillation and it does a decent job of handling that. I do foresee us looking at the Dynatrace product long term, to help address a couple of the things that we have some issues with time to time, but overall I would say it's really good.

I think it has improved the way our company has functions because of the insight that we have now into our applications. On top of bringing in the AppMon product to our organization, we've also really been trying to push APM as a culture, trying to get everybody in our organization, developers, to start think about APM ongoing and in the earlier environment, like our system integration environment, our user acceptance testing environment, and our production environment. Having AppMon has provided the visibility and capabilities that we needed in order to be able to drive that culture.

For me, the most valuable feature of this solution is that deep dive that we get out of the AppMon product with the PurePath technology, and the way that the PurePath stack works. It's visibility that we didn't have into our applications before, and it really filled a void that we had within our organization of being able to understand what's going on at that layer.

I've learned a lot during this Perform 2018 conference about the direction and the roadmap that Dynatrace is going with the actual Dynatrace product. One thing that I would like to see is for companies like us - large AppMon customers that have a lot of presence in AppMon, a lot of manually configured things and customizations - would be something that would help us be able to make that journey more easily, the transition from to AppMon to Dynatrace. That would be something that would be really helpful for us, because we do see a lot of benefit, and a lot of new features and things that are really positive in that Dynatrace environment. Now it's a matter of figuring out how we get there.

Overall, stability is good.

We've had some scalability issues with the AppMon product. We're rather large, we have a lot of shared infrastructure, and a lot of shared code. We have one single profile, and we throw a lot of data at it, a lot of applications, we have a lot of agents, so we have had some hiccups in the past with that environment not being able to handle that. But we've worked closely with our contacts at Dynatrace who have been helping us through those situations and trying to improve that going forward.

Tech support is good. They are really responsive to our support tickets. We work really closely. Not only do we have our sales contacts and a sales engineer contact, we have a product success manager as well. We talk to them twice a month, we do calls. We always talk through those open issues, and they're really supportive if there are things that we need to have pushed and escalated, to help us do that.

I've never called, I've opened tickets through the Support Portal, that's the way I've engaged with our support. I'm more on our application business unit side of the house, so not directly involved with the configuration management of the Dynatrace server and environment. I'm more from a usage standpoint, and the configuration of our applications, how we have those set up in the AppMon environment.

We really didn't have a rich monitoring presence in the past, from the distributed environment. We also have IBM z/OS, and we have some tooling there that is meeting our needs. We did have a product before, it wasn't very well adopted in our organization, and that was one of the goals of bringing in AppMon, that it was more usable, more user friendly, have more capabilities, and that we could really push adoption across our organization. I would say that it's helped us to be able to do that.

There was a gap that we had, and one of our big initiatives was availability of our applications, being able to make sure that our applications are available and stable; and being able to have that insight to know when they are and aren't. On top of that, was our customer-first efforts, and really trying to ensure that the products that we are putting out there, whether they're for internal or external customers to use, are really meeting their needs and performance needs.

I was involved when we initially went through the PoC, worked with our sales engineer, and brought the product in. I'm on the business side of things, so not necessarily the configuration of the server, the deployment of the agents, but really the configuration aspect that we need to gain the visibility into our applications.

I don't have any complaints about the installation process. We were able to get it ramped up really quickly. From where we started, the scale that we went to in just a couple, three months, was really impressive to me.

We had some other vendors on our shortlist. Dynatrace was able to demonstrate the full capabilities and functionality, working in our environment. The other aspect was its capturing of all PurePaths, that was really appealing to us as we want to make sure that we get that data so that we have it and we can use it if we need it.

Regarding the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud to monitor performance problems, we don't have a product that has AI right now, but that's something that we're really looking at right now. We're in the middle of PoC on the AI, and capabilities that are built within the Dynatrace product are really appealing to us. We're a large company, and we have a lot of applications, a lot of processes, a lot of hosts, and having something that will automatically detect anomalies and tell us when there are problems, without us having to tell the product when to tell us that there are problems, is something that's really appealing. That is certainly one of the features that we like within the Dynatrace product.

If we had one solution that didn't just give us data, but also real answers, the immediate benefit would be not needing either to have to sit there and watch a dashboard, or to go through the efforts of identifying and programming - within the tool - what is considered bad performance. Something that would detect anomalies, deviations, would certainly free up our time, because we would only have to engage when those things occur.

I think the most important criterion when working with a vendor is having people that obviously believe in the product and know the product very well. We've been very fortunate with the contacts that we've worked with. We have a really experienced sales engineer, and really good sales consultants. We look for ongoing engagement with them, and having them want to ensure that we have a success and ongoing success with the product. We want somebody who is really engaged and feels passionate about helping us get to where we want to get to with a solution.

I give AppMon an eight out of 10. With some of the new things that are coming with the Dynatrace product over the AppMon product, there are a lot of things there. With the couple of the stability issues that we've had throughout our tiers of experience, obviously shoring those things up would help make AppMon a 10. I understand they have a new platform and where they're going with that. I also think the new platform also has solved some of the complexity around it. For AppMon, in order to use the rich client especially, I think you have to be somebody who is in there more often than not. It's not necessarily as intuitive as it could be. The web client has certainly helped with that.

Obviously, find a great partner, find a great associate within the company from which you're looking to implement a solution. But then I would say internally, one of the biggest things that has helped us be successful is, we have a cross-business unit, a group of power users - we call it our APM COE group - that really have a vested interest and a passion around driving APM as a culture in our organization. On top of that, they are working very closely together to continue to innovate and support the Dynatrace AppMon environment that we currently have. That same group is working closely together to look at where we see us needing to go in the future. Where is technology driving us? We've got a really good overall pulse on what's going on within our organization, and how to pick the right solution for the right things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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