Dynatrace Reviews

Primary use case would be exposing application performance, and incidents and errors within the application. It has performed exceptionally well.

Understanding and visibility, and the ability to provide the same answers across the different archetypes of support personnel, maintenance personnel, business personnel, executives, middle managers like myself, where we're all telling the same story and we're all working off of that same story, to understand what's going on.

The main benefit has been time, definitely. Over my career I've spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in war rooms picking problems apart, over-analyzing issues, chasing red herrings, and this type of solution, or solution set, not just AppMon but Dynatrace, and even the Synthetic portion, really helps us narrow down what we're looking for.

Capture of 100% of the traffic. Exposure to downstream services, that might not necessarily be new, to everybody who's using applications. It triggers them and captures them and it gives visibility to some pieces that might be forgotten or even obscured.

If it is AppMon, I would really like ease of integration developed into Logstash. The business transaction data doesn't have a natural feed through the GUI, through the configuration. We have to do a little jiggering in between to get it to feed, so I'd like to have that out-of-the-box. That'd be great. We have now, out-of-the-box UEM integration, I'd like to have the rest out of the box as well.

And if it's Dynatrace we're talking about, I really think they're on the right track as it is, because of all the AI and all the session replay and all these fantastic things we've been shown.

And if it's the Dynatrace Synthetic which we also use, I would love to have higher-level analytics across the tests. Where today we get errors and generate them per test, but we have clusters of tests that are for the same application, I'd love to see a little bit more analysis done across series of tests, so that we can have higher roll-ups of actionable information.

This is an interesting question. We've had our challenges in the past because our primary tool over the five years has been AppMon, and AppMon has had a series of evolutions. We started with the 4.2 version and we've come all the way to version 7 at this point. It was never intended to be a high-availability solution or a clustered solution, and some of those improvements have been made more recently. But historically, it was fragile. 

Like I said, I have a very large implementation. Over six thousand agents with AppMon. Some of our servers are very highly loaded, over a thousand agents, and when we talk about our online banking, mobile banking platforms, we drive significant load and it can really impact the viability of the servers.

To be fair, we were pushing the product to its limits, and it even prompted some of the architectural changes within Dynatrace itself, and within the AppMon tool, to allow for larger footprints. But generally, and lately, it's been extremely stable.

The AppMon product hasn't been historically as scalable. That is one of the reasons we're really excited about Dynatrace product, because it was redesigned for scalable environments with scalability itself in mind.

The technical support has been fantastic, even getting right up to third-level support and getting changes overnight. 

A small anecdote: We needed some changes to the UE mobile agent and we needed them in a hurry. And support turned that ask around in two days, which was phenomenal.

And then, I started talking to some of the guys in Boston, Detroit about some of the exciting changes they're making for their support model where they can have off-site guardians. I actually employ two guardians myself at a time. I have them on a one year contract. Putting them in-house has been invaluable.

The idea of other organizations being able to use Dynatrace guardian hours, and doing it piece meal as they need it, is great because not everybody needs as much hand-holding, but everybody needs a little help some time. The response time and the knowledge has been tremendous.

We've used a number of tools. We've used SCOM and Wily Introscope and Groundworks. We've used Nagios, Zabbix. We've used HPE RUM which was terrible. It cost a lot of FT overhead. There have been a few others, I just can't remember them offhand.

A lot of them were siloed, very siloed approaches to monitoring. Some of them have similar approaches, DC RUM is the same as HPE RUM, but the manpower overhead is significant. The challenge there is they just don't talk to each other. And they're not providing the same information to the same people because people craft the output to what they want, and they're not trying to tell the same story. Dynatrace just attempts to tell the truth.

To be honest, I wasn't part of the board of smarty-pants that brought the solution in, but I can imagine the criteria they looked at included breadth of coverage of technologies, the cost, and ease of use. Either way, I thank that team because it changed our lives.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is absolutely crucial. Last year I spent a large portion of my time doing an investigation into AI capabilities for IT operations, and I evaluated several products in the market space. I found they're all very, very immature, but it's an absolute necessity for us going forward. 

We're a very large bank and we have hundreds of thousands of users, thousands and thousands of applications. When you start scaling up to the cloud with microservices, the sheer volume of data is so massive that human beings can't evaluate it anymore. It's not possible. AI is the only way that we're going to be able to move forward into the future with these types of architectures, and still get the value out of the data that we're recording.

I've definitely used so many siloed monitoring tools in the past. The challenge is when it comes to clustering and high-availability - that type of solutioning where we look at strict node-based siloing and then application based siloing. Even then you're limiting yourself to the purview of what's in that container or what's in that application, and if you're not looking outside of yourself then you're really just looking for a culture of "not me," instead of fostering a culture of this is what it is. Let's work together.

If we had just one solution that could provide real access and not just top line data, I think it would probably free us up in terms of manpower and work hours, to allow us to do more value-add things. If all we're doing is working with top level data, then you have to spend a lot more time digging deeper to find your cause or to find actionable insights into the applications, and that chews up manpower. In this day and age, IT overhead really has become "Let's look at the employee first and cut that first." So, if we need to move in that direction, having something that provides real answers helps us to make that adjustment.

I rate Dynatrace an eight out of 10. I never want to give a perfect score because there's always room for improvement. But it's been a great journey for me and I look forward to many more years with it.

I'd recommend you look at Dynatrace. It's really the only one worth looking at.

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

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

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

There are several features that we find very valuable.

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

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

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

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

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

I have been working with Dynatrace for approximately nine years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution in server monitoring, application monitoring, and roam and synthetic monitoring. We have 1,000 Dynatrace users in our organization.

The solution can be deployed quickly on-prem. Once it's deployed, you can use discovery and review the process and service on this application.

Dynatrace would be closer to a perfect tool if it could bring an interface similar to a standard for metrics like Prometheus and Grafana, New Relic, and Datadog, and the way they present these panels. It would help if Dynatrace allowed more features that work with metrics like Grafana or New Relic because the data is there in Dynatrace. Dynatrace collects all the information but some companies consider integrating, for instance, Dynatrace metrics with Grafana.

I've been using this solution for more than one year. It's a SaaS solution, and it's deployed on a private cloud.

Support is okay but could be better and faster. The documentation for the tool could be better. The documentation with Elastic and Datadog is more detailed.

Initial setup is simple but it depends. In the server monitoring, it's only install and discovery. That is very quick. To install with a cloud like OpenShift, it requires some Sandcastle configuration about tokens and operators, but with old data, it's fast.

Two people were required for deployment.

I have a little experience with Datadog, but it doesn't have the power to discover with some libraries like Dynatrace. With Dynatrace, you can discover all libraries and technologies that exist on the market today. With Datadog, that's not 100% the case. Datadog is a very good product but it works differently. Datadog has machine learning, too, but not in all discovery options of SQL and in all layers of our monitoring like infrastructure, service, process, and applications—like Dynatrace. With Dynatrace, 100% of all options are included in your machine learning, in your AI.

For development, Datadog is a little more friendly to your front end and development teams. There are some areas, particularly the Apdex of Datadog, that are more understandable for the development teams. Dynatrace is a little more difficult to understand for development teams. It requires some more learning.

The APM feature in Datadog is easier to understand. It works manually, like New Relic, Grafana, or Elastic. That's more understandable for software development teams.

I tested New Relic between 2019 and 2020. Like Datadog, I tested and did proof of concept for New Relic in about one month. New Relic is strong and the APM is easier for teams of dev to write. The scope of New Relic is like Datadog. It doesn't cover all technologies and all libraries and just works efficiently with all items of applications for work with QA and dev.

I have not tested the integration of New Relic. I know some colleagues that integrated between the tools for the infrastructure coverage in Datadog and the APM coverage in New Relic.

I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10. It's not a 10 because there are some little things that could be enhanced. Otherwise, the product is great.

The primary use case is monitoring and diagnostics for production marketing usage.

The visibility into the application's performance helps the executives and managers by using easy dashboards. Our engineers are also super happy with the ability to drill down and fine-tune based on issues which we have seen. A bunch of issues with OpenID were easily investigated, then we were able to fix them quickly.

It has been a very enabling tool for us, especially for my team. The visibility that it provides through the application's behavior allows us to find trends based on our customized metrics.

• Alerts: The alerting system is really nice.
• The ability to drill down and pinpoint issues.

The new Managed Edition is too complex. I feel like a fish out of water. From the on-premise version to the AWS version, our initial use has been very complex. 

For the integration, I use a hollow testing tube called Performance Center. I would like the ability to integrate with it. This would be a good feature. While I believe it is there, it needs to be fine-tuned.

I'm pretty impressed with the stability. 

With the AWS version, you can access the updates through the browsers, not worrying about the tick line. 

With the on-premise version, you need to use the tick line for updates. There are times when architects, who do not use the product constantly, find their stage and production options out of sync, then they need to have two tick lines on the same system.

There was an issue on-premise. We were trying to troubleshoot a production issue. We had to run a bunch of queries for different time frames to see where the issues were and how recently they had been seen. This crashed the Dynatrace server.

We are now moving slowly moving in installments of the AWS version because our environments are not large enough right now. So, we haven't tested it yet.

I have only heard positive reviews.

We went with Dynatrace because of its ease of use and it is feature-rich. It helps you to drill down into bottlenecks and find issues. When you have highly integrated systems, it gives you an extra lens through your whole ecosystem.

The Dynatrace team helped us with the integration and configuration in our AWS environment.

There have been many advantages in terms of production and issue resolutions.

The product is pricey, but it is feature-rich, which is why we probably haven't looked away from it.

We are also using New Relic. Our product teams keep explore new options to see what is out there.

I prefer Dynatrace over New Relic because there are better features.

I would recommend Dynatrace Managed because it has more features, and go straight for the AWS version because it is simpler to manage. It can also be accessed through the browser. 

We previously used the on-premise version, but have switched to the AWS version, which has more features.

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.

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.

The primary use case is application monitoring. We are using APM to test for performance, bugs, and hoping to resolve the issues faster, and hoping to catch them before we go to production.

It's been great, it has helped us a lot. It can do more, but it's definitely helped us a lot and I'm a big believer in Dynatrace products.

First of all it's mitigating issues before they are in production, and if they do go into production, it's reducing the time to find the issue and actually resolve it. I believe, in the organization that we're in right now, that is challenged for resources and time, a product like Dynatrace helps immensely.

The PurePaths, because that's where somebody who is a non-developer can figure out where the problem is and send appropriate PurePaths, clean charts, or even the link to the developer. The developer can then look at it and figure out exactly where the problem is, this is the piece of code that took the longest time, and then resolve it.

Right now, since I'm primarily an AppMon user, so maybe the Dynatrace product addresses this: The challenge with AppMon is, what if you don't have an AppMon agent on a host, but it talks to the database. It talks to it, but I don't have either a host agent or an AppMon agent on it. That has been a challenge, but I believe the Dynatrace agent, the OneAgent, will solve that, potentially. You ask me three months from now, after we take a crack at the Dynatrace product, maybe my answer will be different, but I'm hoping that addresses some of the issues.

The configuration of the alerts, that's been a challenge in AppMon for me, right now. Some of the alerts are too noisy, but that might be my lack of some configuration. Again, it's just me primarily handling it, so that could be an issue. Somebody asked a question in one of the sessions, here at the Perform 2018 conference, about noise and how many alerts to your problem count, and the person doing the session answered right away saying, "I checked my dashboard before I came to this session and I had one alert on it." So I'm guessing that will resolve itself.

I think I like the direction it's going in, the only challenging part for me is to keep up with the name changes. But other than that, as far as stability, I think I'm happy with it.

I think for the deployments we have right now, it has not been a challenge. My goal is to increase the usage throughout the organization, maybe that's where I'll face some challenges, but at this point there are no challenges.

I have used technical support in the past and they are pretty quick to respond. The other thing is, the APM community is available, Andy answers pretty much any question I post pretty quickly, so I think that group community help is really good.

I have use siloed monitoring tools in the past. When I started at Nemours 17 years ago, I had custom scripts that I would use to apply to various servers. They were on the host level, but the deployment was challenging. How to tie in a CPU alert to application slowness is challenging, because you had to go to the timestamp, look at the log and say, "Okay, this might be the issue." Dynatrace tells you how it is, and I think that's the most important feature.

I'm the primary Dynatrace admin, if you want to call me that, and it was pretty easy. But keep in mind, my skill sets are probably unique in the sense that I understand applications well, so I know how to insert the agent - because we use AppMon - how we insert agent into JVM.

But I believe the new Dynatrace product is probably the way to go, because you don't need to actually talk to the application folks, you just deploy it on the host and you're done. I believe it's definitely going in the right direction. It is complex, it wasn't for me, but I can imagine it being complex for some people.

I don't know if there were any other vendors on my list because we've been users for about 15 years. We started out with a Vantage product that moved to server monitoring, and then we had the Gomez platform, and then you also had Dynatrace, but then they all came under the same umbrella. So we never really evaluated any other vendor. We had some of the free tools we used to use, like  Profiler, but from what I've heard from developers, nothing ever came close to this so I'm a fan.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to just data, we could spend less time on troubleshooting and trying to figure out what the problem is, and actually do our jobs, which is to design, build, and develop software.

The criteria we look for when adopting an APM solution are ease of use, and does it truly get you down to the problem area - and I believe that Dynatrace does - and the third one, it's true for everyone, is the cost.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. I'm not giving it a 10 yet because I would like to see the Dynatrace product in action and truly want to understand it. If we move to Dynatrace, away from AppMon, are we missing out on something?

My advice would be go with Dynatrace.

The one that we recently scripted was just to see if an application was up, it was a very simple script. We had an issue with a vended solution at the university in which the application would just go down and the vendor had said that, "Oh, it never goes down, we have 100% uptime." We didn't have a good way to monitor that before. We said, "Our students our reporting that they cannot log in." With Synthetics, we wrote a very simple script that went to the landing page and tried to type and hit "enter," and that's it.

We have two-factor and some other things that prevent us from going too far into it, and we haven't figured out a technical solution for it, but it's a very simple use case of just making sure that the application is up.

Dynatrace itself is performing well.

We now know when the application is down, as opposed to students opening tickets and letting us know. So it's more proactive.

That it's always running.

From what I've learned today, here at the Perform 2018 conference, there are two things that I really want to see.

Number one, the thing that is preventing MSU from moving forward with Dynatrace right now is that we can't tag our customer traffic with a customizable tag. All of our students have a unique identifier and in AppMon we tag that and we can search by it very easily and it's very useful. But in Dynatrace, you can't yet customize and find people like that, so that's really preventing us. I heard that it's being worked on but I'm not sure when it's coming out.

The second thing that I'd really love to see is - I'm very impressed by all the new features that I've learned about at the conference - and one of the features is "impacted users." I would like to see a rate of impacted users. For example, how long has the problem been going on: 100 users in five minutes. Does that mean that in 3 hours if we don't get this solved, we're impacting x number of people? Understanding the rate at which the problem is impacting people would be a cool feature.

It seems very stable.

With the AI, it seems very scalable. 

We're going through a proof of concept right now, so we work very closely. They're knowledgeable and we get the right person whenever we call.

We didn't have a previous APM solution. We didn't know we needed this solution until we saw it. It was literally students calling in with problem tickets.

I'm just a supervisor, so I sat with our technician during setup. I didn't do any of the actual work, but it seems seamless. It installed in about two minutes. I really wanted to see it. I have to go to the assistant director and, eventually, the director and try to explain why I think we need the new technology.

They went through a whole eight month process. I wasn't there, I'm a new manager, but I understand they had over a dozen companies. They had spreadsheets of all the pros and cons. They went with Dynatrace because it just has more features.

Regarding AI and the ability of IT to scale into the cloud and manage performance problems, we don't have the new technology yet, we don't have the new AI, we have the old AppMon and Synthetics. But it seems like it's very important.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. The university is very old and very segmented and different departments use different tools and we don't all talk to each other. We still have this problem today and we're trying to get more user adoption for Dynatrace. But it's difficult.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, I think that we would spend less time working on things that probably don't matter, like mundane routine operations.

To me, the most important criteria when working with a vendor is responsiveness to issues.

My advice to colleagues would be, do your homework. But, I would be surprised if anybody would beat Dynatrace.

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.