We’re using Dynatrace AppMon currently in our environment, and we’re using it for troubleshooting performance issues. We are mainly using it in the performance-testing environment, to try to reproduce a problem if we happen to see one in production, and find what the root cause is.
It's performing well, absolutely.
I’m not sure about the entire organization, but for my quality assurance, the mean time to resolution or to find a problem has been reduced dramatically now. I don’t have a percentage but, we used to take a week or more to troubleshoot an issue, now it can be done very quickly, probably in a day’s time.
PureStack, I just love it. It can give visibility from the end-user perspective right through to the code level. That's the most valuable feature.
Also the UI is amazing. We really like it.
I think Dynatrace is top-notch, it's well ahead of its competitors. I don’t see any features which another vendor or other products have which Dynatrace doesn't. I think Dynatrace is in pretty good shape right now. I don’t really have any features which I’m lacking right now, so it's all good.
In terms of new features, I’m excited about AWS monitoring, that Lambda function, and log analysis. We’re not yet on the cloud, but still it's a good feature. We are actually planning to move to the cloud, and my organization is actively looking for tools which can support monitoring. This will definitely be a value-added feature.
One to three years.
It's not a big concern for us at this moment.
We haven't used technical support.
For deep diagnostics we were using an HPE product or, then, a Microsoft product called Diagnostics. It was difficult to use that tool and connect the dots. It was per machine base, per JVM base, and was not really giving a holistic picture. But Dynatrace is doing that all for us. And PurePath, again, I just love that. That was missing.
I think one of the vendors helped us. We didn’t have any hands-on, but I think we did some Dynatrace University, we’ve been through some videos. And the vendor gave us some training, so we’re fine with that.
I’m a big advocate of AI. It seems that AI can join the dots sometimes for us, and that is helpful. Instead of spending the time to think and connect all the dots, AI can do that for us in the future, and can come up with a solution also. That will be nice.
In my previous company I did use siloed monitoring tools. We used HPE BSM, Business Service Management. There were two piece to that. One was infrastructure monitoring, host monitoring such as CPU, memory, using SiteScope. The other was end-user monitoring, synthetic user monitoring. Also, there was a piece called Diagnostics. The challenge was, although the two pieces, synthetic monitoring and the host monitoring, both were agentless, it didn’t give us the real root cause of issues. Diagnostics did but you had to go and install it, and it didn’t perform very well in production.
In terms of one tool, right now I’m seeing Dynatrace can do a lot of things: the entire DevOps, infrastructure, application performance monitoring, all that can be done using just one tool. Now they just released a new feature for log monitoring. I’m really excited to learn about that. If everything can be packaged in one, that would be nice. You wouldn't have to worry about different vendors and patches. And especially, they have a SaaS model. I’m a big advocate of SaaS. My company is not right there but eventually, I hope, when it gets there, I think you’ll see big use of it, and ease of use.
I think from the organization's perspective, probably the most important criteria when selecting a vendor would be the cost, and the tool, obviously. The tool is very important: quality of the tool, reliability, scalability, all those factors weigh in.
My advice would be, from the tool perspective, to look at this tool and its features: ease of use, scalability, and stability-wise this tool stands out. I understand organizations have a pricing factor, a cost factor. That is something you have to decide on. If you want a low-cost tool, there are different tools in the market, or do you want to settle with the best tool in the market but you'll spend a lot more money. Do your research, work with your peers, your leadership, understand which way they want to go. But definitely, as an engineer, I will always say you should go Dynatrace.