Dynatrace Reviews

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.

To look at the full transaction flow, from the customer all the way through back-end systems, for problem analysis, triage, performance optimization.

It does it really well. The more visibility you have through the agent implementations, the deeper you can get down through the stack and identify what you're looking for and how to fix it, find it, tune it.

The Managed SaaS is going to simplify things a lot and allow us to consolidate a lot of tool sets. We are going to be able to get rid of some of the old Legacy monitoring tools and replace them with something much better that puts everything in one place.

The stuff that's coming with the new pieces around the Dynatrace Managed SaaS implementation. The ease of implementation there is significant. We've spent a lot of time with AppMon and DC RUM - that's a lot of time to set up, configure. With Managed solution, you just drop it in and everything pretty much auto-instruments, which makes life a lot easier.

One of the things that I was talking about with Simon earlier was getting mobile native replay. They don't have a timeline on it yet, but that's one of the key things we're looking at, to get rid of one of our incumbent products that does replay. 

Also, extended support for some of the agents, the one-agent technologies under Managed. We've got some old legacy platforms that don't have one-agent support yet.

The Managed solution is much more stable. We've been running that environment for about six months now and it hasn't had hiccup yet. We had problems with AppMon before. We've taken AppMon beyond it's stated capabilities. We are running 2,400 agents off of a single server in a single system profile, which is well beyond the stated capacity. I think the stated agent cutoff limits are 1,200. We passed that like a year ago. We measure the internal workings of AppMon to make sure it's not going to fall over, but we hit those thresholds almost daily now. So we are throwing data out just because it's over capacity.

Managed, we can scale it out massively. AppMon doesn't scale well. That's the other piece, why we're looking at Managed, because we're already over capacity there. We've got to move stuff to the other platform, to Managed, so that we can get the horizontal and the vertical scale ability, and get away from our "problem child" on the other side.

We use tech support. How I would rate them depends. So some of our problems are quite complex, because of how we've stressed the system to the extent that we have. So, we've had some stuff on the AppMon side that's because we're well beyond the usable limits. They help where they can, but in some instances it just is what it is.

On the Managed side it's been pretty good. Stuff gets turned around pretty quickly. With them being able to do the remote management from the back-end, they are able to fix stuff up if they need to.

In terms of response time, relative to the complexity of the problem, I think it's reasonable. Some of our problems have been not normal. But the normal stuff, they turn it around fairly quickly. We don't pay for Premium support either, so you get what you pay for. They are usually quite responsive, and we've got really good connections into most of the folks back in the labs, so it works out well.

With the company I'm consulting with now, they had Dynatrace before there was a desire internally to look at some AppDynamics stuff. They did a bit of a bake-off and decided that it wasn't the right way to go just because of the capabilities and features. So it's always been on that side of the Dynatrace stuff. 

But I've used New Relic and AppD and the IBM Application Performance Monitoring solutions, so I've seen lots of them, and Dynatrace is definitely the better of them all, by a long shot.

Set it up myself. It took 20 minutes. Put a piece of hardware in, run two scripts, done.

We ran into a bit of a technical issue where we had to engage the support guys. They identified the issue, fixed the scripts, and then the people after us didn't have to deal with it. I think we were one of the first Managed on-prem implementations; maybe, not the first, but one of the few. So we weren't doing a normal implantation I guess, so little hiccups, but they were quickly resolved.

I think is role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is a big game changer. That's one of the reasons that we're looking at moving a lot of our stuff from the legacy AppMon over to the Managed platforms, so we can take advantage of that and get rid of some of our more archaic event management, event lifecycle, alerting-type platforms. A lot of that stuff doesn't add the value that it should. So we are looking at the AI engine and the anomaly detection to basically replace a lot of that manual effort.

These archaic solutions are all siloed monitoring tools. That's one of the things I presented on here at the Perform 2018 conference yesterday, about all the data silos across all the old platforms, and being able to pull them together into Dynatrace so you can get that single pane of glass. The siloed solutions all had their own purposes, but the data was not inter-relatable. You'd have OS monitoring tools, and even AppMon, DC RUM, Synthetics; they all have great data, but they're not tied together.

The immediate benefit of just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, would be you could look at it in one spot. Even one of our groups that came to us a couple weeks ago said, "Oh yeah, we are going to do a new native mobile app and we're going to use this piece of freeware from Google and this piece of freeware from there." And I said, "Okay, so how are you going to pull that all together?" And they said, "Well, you can look here, and then look it up there..."  And when I said, "Why? We already have a solution that does that," they said, "But, they're free tools", and I said, "Yeah, free necessarily isn't always the best option."

In terms of vendor selection, I think one of the key things with Dynatrace is that they are very open to influence on product development side. So, we've influenced them fairly heavily on development and capabilities for Citrix and DC RUM. They've given us integration and support components around some odd technologies that we've got, and they have always been very open and accommodating to going after and developing capabilities around the stuff that we are looking for, which has been good.

I rate it an eight out of 10. I don't know if it could ever get to a 10 because there are always going be anomalies and idiosyncrasies that, commercially, it doesn't make sense for them to cater to everything. There is stuff that I'd like it to be able to do but commercially it just doesn't make sense. But, at the same time, they are evolving into things that need to happen as technology advances.

In terms of advice to someone who is research this type of solution, I get pulled on from the Dynatrace Accounts team regularly to do those sorts of conversations. I'm a pretty firm believer in the products and what they can do. I highly recommend them to anyone who is looking at them. I've used the competitive - or non-competitive - products that are out there, so it's pretty clear for me as far as why it's the right choice. I'm happy to have those conversations with them to take them down that path and let them understand the why's and what decisions they should make.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using Dynatrace for six months.

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

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

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

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

We are satisfied with the technical support.

We were using AppDynamics and CA APM in the past.

It was a straightforward installation.

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

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

We completed the installation ourselves.

Financially, Dynatrace was a lot more expensive than AppDynamics.

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

Dynatrace should reduce their pricing. It should be cheaper.

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

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

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

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

We 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.

Our primary use case is, we're using AppMon as our main tool for capacity and performance, my team is in charge of all of application performance. 

For us AppMon is unbeatable in the market. We have tried to find other vendor solutions because of the pricing - we're trying to save money - and we couldn't find any other tool that gives us the same amount of information in terms of performance and root cause analysis.

It performs very well if you right-size the infrastructure where you have to deploy it.

I won't say that it improved how our organization functions, but it has improved the time that we need to detect problems; not only before going into production, but problems in production.

Problems in production took us a long time, before, to find the real cause. With this tool, we find them in a very short time. In matter of minutes, we know what the problem is. We are in the banking industry, and in the banking industry you can't allow yourself to be offline.

For us, it improved our SLAs with the business side of our company.

The memory dumps, the tracing, and PurePath. All the tracing that you can do with the tool is, for us, our life. It's our daily job and it saves us a lot of time looking for performance issues.

Something that we have been talking about with the people, here at the Perform 2018 conference, and with the project manager is: On the one hand we have Dynatrace, on the other hand, we have AppMon. We know Dynatrace is more powerful, with a lot of functions, but there are some core functions AppMon has that Dynatrace needs. Our main use is AppMon and we have not gone to Dynatrace because we don't have those specific functions that we need.

If Dynatrace changed it and included all those functions, we would definitely go to Dynatrace, but without them, we stay with AppMon.

At the beginning we used a small infrastructure and we had some problems. With enough capacity it performs very well.

We feel quite comfortable with the scalability, because we have a very huge environment. We have more than 10,000 agents installed, and we have scaled from the beginning. Right now, we have bought a lot more agents because we are deploying microservices and, for us, it works.

They were helpful. They pinpointed exactly what the problem was, because for us it was a strange behavior. It was not downtime, but we lost metrics sometimes, and not always at the same time. We found that it was because the lack of capacity of the servers where we installed the server part of Dynatrace. 

We did not have to wait for answers from them.

We used an in-house developed solution and we had another solution, CA Wily. We decided on Dynatrace because of the features. Dynatrace has a lot more features than what we had and at that time.

We were in CA Wily and we tried, I think, something from IBM at that time. We decided to go with Dynatrace because it was the best for us. In the nine years that we've been with Dynatrace, from time to time we research the market to find out if there's any other solution. In IT, there's always a lack of budget, you should save cost whenever possible, but in those years we haven't find another one.

We discovered the AI capability of Dynatrace previously, and we are willing to go  there, but we haven't gone there yet. We think it's important because right now we have a team of six or seven people working with this, and the AI would allow us to use those people in other tasks, rather than looking for performance issues.

We have used some other monitoring tools in the past and still are right now. We have a lot of them, to give what Dynatrace provides in just one app. That's a challenge because our organization is big. A problem of being big is that deploying a lot of tools is very difficult and it's not the same as deploying only one tool. Deploying only one tool is easier than deploying more than one and keeping up to date with the new versions. With several tools, it's very difficult. For us, that's a key factor of Dynatrace, not only the AppMon but the whole suite gives us a lot of information that, if you want to have it without Dynatrace, you would have to have a lot of tools installed.

The immediate benefit of one solution that would not only give data but real answers, would be time savings.

Our most important criteria for working with a vendor are that they meet our technical requirements and give us support; and support in Spain, and in Spanish, that is very important for us. We like to work with companies that understand us and work with us, who will be partners.

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10 because, as I said, there is no other like this right now. Probably, there are some things that other tools could do, but not everything together.

We have been using Dynatrace for almost two years now. Our primary focus is to understand where the critical bottlenecks are. We have a wide range of applications running on technologies right from mainframe: the client server, cloud, Node.js, etc. 

In order to accommodate all these things, we were looking at one simple product which would help us with all these issues that we were facing. Before choosing Dynatrace, we did a survey of the market to understand what other products there were. 

We ended up choosing Dynatrace because of fantastic capabilities, which it provides. Our business is critical to our customers. With a variety of technologies and different groups, we are experiencing more diverse issues.

The issues are identified well ahead of time because there are a series of operations that form the upstream and downstream applications. The earlier we catch an issue in one of the upstream applications, we can handle it and put a mechanism in place to effectively handle the downstream applications. Without that in place, if something breaks in upstream, then we are definitely sure that some application in downstream will be affected. This is really critical.

PurePath. In addition to routing mechanisms, they have set up the latest profiles and the latest threshold for alerts that go to several teams, including development, support, and infrastructure teams. This helps us be ahead of the game before something happens.

A couple of things that we have actually pointed out in the past:

1. The log analytics, which OneAgent should be carrying forward.
2. Getting the data out of Dynatrace and consuming it in development for other analytical purposes. The analytics feature provides us some information, but is limited for now. We want to see how we can consume the data further down and have analytics guys look at the datacenter information.

We have been running it for more than two years now. We have never had issues with the platform. One hiccup was the front-end server being low in memory because many users logging and running a wide range of reports. So, we limited that to some information by moving some of our users to the platform. In terms of stability, we have never had any issues.

It is scalable. We initially started with fewer agents because we just wanted to have the development team working with this new product. Therefore, we started small and have not had any issues scaling up to what we have. We never had any incidents because of it neither in VM or physical boxes.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is definitely very important. The sheer volume of data we are creating from across all these systems is one of the critical pieces of the enterprise window that happens from 4:00 to 7:00 PM EST, where we send out all the NAV updates to various clients including NASDAQ. There are a variety of products which have their own limitations and quality of information. It is necessary to focus all the important technologies into a single source so we can follow the timelines and know exactly who is going to call us.

With the new managed OneAgent, that is what we're looking at. Currently, we are on AppMon, so we need the AI metrics in place at least until the process of OneAgent to manage the elements that is there. Then, we will see the critical elements and information.

We had to use technical support before, primarily in the areas of adding additional features to the product. For example, we have some applications in Python. We do not have support for Python, which is not really the product, but more adding features on top of the product.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past and some of them are already part of the infrastructure vertex system. Then, some are home grown, so we have a good system which is homegrown and looks at various metrics. It is a challenge because we have to write one solution which can handle everything, and our timeframe and resource constraints are a long process in writing. 

I was not involved right at the beginning. It was not complex at all. We had the Dynatrace agent helping us in person with the issues.

Look at Dynatrace. It has helped us by reducing the number of incidents that we have had in the past. It is a robust solution that would help anyone get to the solution and resolution pretty fast.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It came down to a critical component because we have numerous applications with different problems from apps or databases. Before the APM platform for narrowing down the problem became a critical issue, so at this point it was narrowing down and pointing to the exact core component. That was very critical.

Our primary use case is our mobile applications, to make sure that we’re doing end-to-end transaction tracing for both of our mobile apps.

Its performance is fantastic. We have found so many issues with the code and with development; also, with our microservices on the back-end, that we’ve been able to alleviate and optimize. It’s been totally fantastic.

It increases productivity first of all, and it makes our troubleshooting efforts more efficient. We don’t do the war-room thing, I hate the war-room thing. A lot of the time, when there’s an issue, before they can even assemble the war room, I’m telling them, "Okay, the problem is here, you need to fix this and then we’re good to go."

For me the service workflow and the dashboards are the most valuable features, simply because I can know what’s going on in my infrastructure within five minutes, versus two hours.

Can it talk to me? 

But seriously, the additional feature I would like to see: I did like the old dashboards, the legacy 6.3 for example; the way we were able to do the dashboarding in the client. I would like to be able to see that in the new version of Dynatrace. Other than that everything else is far superior to what we had before.

I think stability is fantastic. I work very closely with our SE. He and I have developed a very good working relationship. We exchange ideas and he helps me as far as knowing what’s coming up. What’s available, or will be coming up in the future. Then I help him in terms of, this was a custom config that we had to implement, and we feed off of each other.

The only issue with scalability that we’ve had - and it’s not a Dynatrace issue, it’s more an internal issue - is the fact that the data going over the satellite costs a lot of money. What we’ve ended up having to do is to implement separate data centers on each one of the ships. So instead of having one place that everything goes to, we have 40. That’s the only thing as far as scalability is concerned.

I wanted to be able to have a separate managed node - because we have the on-prem SaaS solution - so have the managed node on each ship disburse that data to the shore without causing the data overhead.

Our tech support guy is amazing. What I try to do, because I know how I am and I get irritated when someone comes to me and I know that they haven’t even tried to look. They’re just saying to themselves, “Oh, she knows, let’s ask her.” That’s annoying to me because I have a lot that I have to do throughout the day. What I try to do is, I go to the Dynatrace support site, I’m on there every day watching the videos, looking at the articles, reading the white papers. It’s very extensive. The majority of the time I find what I am looking for. If I don’t, I know that I can call Jeff and say, “Hey, I’m looking for this I can’t find it, can you help me?” 

It’s a running joke between him and me because he’s our SE - I don’t want to get him in trouble. Technically, I know I’m supposed to call tech support, but if it’s something real quick that I know he’s going to know, I’ll just say, “Hey Jeff, how do I do this?" Or, "I have been looking on the tech support site and I’m getting annoyed, I can’t find it. I know you know. How can I find this?” Then he'll say, "Oh, just do this, and this, and this." He gives me step by step, and then within 15 minutes, the problem’s been resolved.

In terms of regular tech support, I haven’t had any issues. I have a really good working relationship with them, even the tech support guys, they know me. When I submit tickets, they say, “Oh, hey Danielle.” I’m always reading, learning, asking questions. I tell them, "I know I’m being a pain. I’m going to ask you anyway. How do I do this?" They know it’s me, and they respond right away.

AppDynamics, and I’ve also worked with New Relic and I’ve also worked with Wily, which was horrible.

I used to work for the government and we used use CA Wily at the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. We used Wily and I hated it, it was awful. Just basic monitoring functionality, we had to write custom code for it. 

Then I went to Office Depot and there we switched from AppDynamics to Dynatrace. I was part of that implementation as well. My reaction was, "Oh my God, what is this?" I was totally engaged and at the time I was a WebSphere admin. I wasn’t part of the set-it-up implementation but I was an actual user. Once we got the Dynatrace software on my particular environment I ran with it. I loved it. 

From there I came to Royal Caribbean and we were still using New Relic at the time, I was miserable. I talked to my boss, and he had already been looking at and scoping Dynatrace. I just told him, "Look dude, we’ve got to get Dynatrace. Office Depot is using Dynatrace. This is all the stuff that we can do with it." At the point he was sold and we brought it to RCCL. I’ve been using it ever since.

I was involved in the initial setup. The funny is that I worked at Royal in 2014. I implemented the initial - we call it the "legacy" - Dynatrace environment, which is version 6.3. I did that implementation and then I left and went to work at Carnival, hated it there, and then came back to Royal Caribbean and then implemented the new version of Dynatrace.

Setting up the new Dynatrace was different because I was used to the level of complexity. One thing I’ve noticed is that everybody complains about the level of complexity with Dynatrace. Even with the surveys, what I said is, you have to know your infrastructure. That’s one of the things that Dynatrace really forces you to learn and know. They’re a monitoring company. They don’t know how we’ve written our applications, they don’t know how we’ve implemented our microservices, they don’t know what connections we have going into our database. We have to know those things in order to be successful with the set up.

Once you know those things... We’ve automated the entire install practice and we’ve automated the entire implementation process. That’s simply a matter of us or me saying, "Okay, we need architecture diagrams, we need service workflows." I need to know how these calls are being made so that way I can correlate them, and I can write the scripts to do the implementation and then we can get it done.

I know they looked at AppDynamics, I know they looked at New Relic. There’s this new company called Datadog that they’ve been looking at. It’s nowhere near the functionality that Dynatrace offers.

In terms of AI, I love the base-lining Dynatrace provides us. It baselines the application over a seven-day period; we have it at the default of seven days. The artificial intelligence is so amazing because it can automatically track each transaction and their response times: how much CPU they use, how much memory, resources that they use. If there’s any deviation from that Dynatrace will tell me like right away. If there’s a deployment and the deployment has increased response time or is taking up CPU or has caused a memory leak, I can say, “Hey guys, you need to look at this, it’s this function on this page in this microservice, in this docker container. You need to go here, you need to fix it, it’s not going live.” It has just increased our productivity off the charts.

We were using siloed monitoring tools before this. The challenge with them is simply the silos themselves. We had separate database monitors, we had separate service monitors. We have a project called Apogee, it’s a routing-type technology. It had its own monitoring. And then we had separate monitoring for the front-end, separate monitoring for the mobile apps. Now, with Dynatrace we have consolidated all that monitoring into one central location.

Regarding one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, we’re already using it now. Like I said, we’re monitoring our SQL databases, we’re monitoring our microservices infrastructure, we’re monitoring our front-end we’re monitoring our mobile apps. It has increased our productivity, we’ve been able to optimize all of our applications. As a matter of fact, I just got a call from our VP because there’s a specific project for the mobile app that we’ve implemented this in. Now, he wants to put it in the rest of the enterprise. Based on what we’ve done for the mobile app project, he wants to roll it out to the entire enterprise.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is, are they going to answer my call, because I’m very engaged. If I call you it’s because I have a question. I’m not going to call you unless I absolutely need to, which means that when I call you, you had better either answer the phone or call me back. I am very big on that. Like I said, Jeff has been fantastic, Dave is our sales manager, Chuck Billups is our customer success manager. Between the three of them, if I have an issue, within 15 to 20 minutes I have an answer.

In terms of advice, make sure you know your infrastructure. Make sure you know your applications. So often in the IT industry we see people who say, "Yeah, I’m an architect, I’m a senior engineer. I’m a senior developer." Then, if you ask them, "Okay, what’s the service workflow of this service?" or "What’s the workflow of this application?" or "What’s the workflow from this server to that server?" They can’t tell you. You absolutely have to know those things in order to be able to implement Dynatrace successfully.