Dynatrace Reviews

Currently, we use Dynatrace to monitor the PCF Cloud Foundry. We just started using it. So far, so good.

We do not have an effective tool to monitor the PCF Cloud Foundry. Dynatrace closes that gap. We have tried using different tools to monitor Cloud Foundry, but they were all ineffective. 

It helps to show you the performance. It also shows you where the problem is, automatically trying to find the problem. It helps to show where the problem is and isolates the issue. 

The installation and configuration were very straightforward and nice.

There was one issue with the installation, but the we resolved the issue. It was some issue with the proxy, and we resolved it.

An additional feature that we could use is the rollover. If we could rollover to different datacenters, then it would satisfy our requirement. I.e., if one datacenter fails, then we could rollover to another datacenter.

Right now, they can rollover to a multi-node cluster. Generally, they require a multi-node in the same data center. Our requirement is because we want something in case of a catastrophe, like an earthquake, and the data is possibly wiped out. We need a way to automatically roll it over to another datacenter. 

This is not offered at the moment.

So far, stability has been very nice, and Dynatrace runs on the Linux system.

It scales well. 

The only thing is we do have requirements where if one datacenter fails, you need to switch to another datacenter. On this front, Dynatrace was not built. They have active to active standby, but from our talks with Dynatrace, they are not built between datacenters. They need to be logged in at the same datacenter, and if they are logged in at different datacenters, there might be some issues. That is one thing they need to improve on: Datacenters which are geographically located. So, when there is a issue in the datacenter, they can just automatically rollover to another datacenter. 

We used technical support. We just start configuring the system and the initial installation. We had one issue when we tried to enter one agent and it just does not work. We got to work with the highest level of support, but it took a while to get there. Initially, we did not get to that level. This is considering maybe it was just after the New Year, and it took a little bit longer than we expected to get to the highest level of support. 

We do use multiple monitoring tools in our organization, including size scope, BPM, and CA APM. We also have RUM and several different monitoring tools. 

We chose Dynatrace, because it is good at monitoring the PCF and also the performance platform is very nice. 

The initial setup was straightforward, very easy and nice. 

AI is very important with the increased complexity of the IT system. IT is very hard to pinpoint the root issues of a problem with AI. It would help you to analyze the issues and let you get to the root issue faster, because people with experience are rare, and with AI, it helps bridge this gap. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be using only one tool where you do not have the complexity of managing more tools.

Most important criteria when looking for an APM solution: 

1. I need it to monitor all the different applications. We have a diverse suite of applications, and it needs to support all the different applications. 
2. It has its own stability and is well supported.
3. It needs to be scalable. 

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.

My use case for Dynatrace is monitoring, including server monitoring. I use the tool to analyze what's wrong with the server, detect high memory utilization and any IO network problem, and monitor network traffic.

I use Dynatrace to find errors and the root causes of the errors, including information on which carrier is giving slow response times.

Dynatrace has multiple features that I need, but I love that you can analyze traffic, including any bottlenecks. I also find the tool user-friendly and has an easy-to-navigate interface.

Dynatrace is also easy to integrate with other tools.

For a new user of Dynatrace, the tool is not easy to understand, so this is an area for improvement. Initially, you'll need an expert to advise you on monitoring and analyzing data. Before using Dynatrace, you need to learn from an expert.

I've been using Dynatrace for three years.

Dynatrace is a stable tool.

Dynatrace is a scalable tool. In terms of scalability, it's an eight out of ten.

I consulted the Dynatrace technical support team one year ago and had a pleasant experience with the team. I'm rating the support a ten out of ten. It was excellent.

Positive

My company went with Dynatrace because it's a very popular tool in the market for server monitoring. Most of the companies where I'm based use it.

The initial setup for Dynatrace was easy, though it was the client who installed it, and I only accessed the URL. Deploying the tool took two to three hours.

I have no information on the cost of Dynatrace.

At the moment, I'm using Dynatrace.

More than fifty people use the tool within the company.

I'd tell anyone planning to use Dynatrace for the first time to review the tutorials and check how to analyze data on the tool.

I'm giving Dynatrace a score of eight out of ten because it's not easy to understand the tool entirely if you're a first-time user.

I'm a Dynatrace customer.

Regarding the use case for Dynatrace, currently, my company is working on a UK-based project in the telecom industry. I'm working as one of the leads on the Dynatrace side. The project has three vendors supporting it as it's a massive project.

My role in the project is installing new agents, giving support for any BAU issues that arise, and creating dashboards. My company works with different vendors, such as IBM and TCS. It's the vendors that support RUM (real user monitoring) and licensing. On the other hand, my company handles agent deployments and gives that over to the application team. Whenever there's an issue, I assist in finding out the root cause and fulfilling requests such as creating new dashboards, customizing dashboards, etc.

One of the most valuable features of Dynatrace is that it offers good visibility. It's better than other APM tools. You're not required to use a different technology when you have Dynatrace because it will work whether you're hosting it on Windows or Linux.

For example, Dynatrace can do full-stack monitoring for a particular server if you use it on the Windows platform. Whatever application is running, you can monitor it thoroughly, even the services, processes, and environment.

I also find the minimal configuration and one-time deployment of Dynatrace valuable and that you can do both infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring on Dynatrace. You can also restrict the feature. For example, if you don't want to do infrastructure monitoring, you can limit that feature.

What needs improvement in Dynatrace is its dashboard. Creating dashboards in Dynatrace is good, but compared to Grafana, which is integrated with Broadcom DX APM, the resulting dashboard in Dynatrace isn't as clear. The Dynatrace dashboard needs to be more graphic.

Since I'm not using the latest version of Dynatrace, I cannot share what additional feature I'd like to see from the solution. I would need to use the latest version first to see if there's anything I'd like added to it.

I've been working with Dynatrace for the last three years, and I'm still using it.

Dynatrace is a very stable solution.

Dynatrace is a scalable solution.

My team reaches out to the Dynatrace technical support team whenever there's a connectivity issue, an issue with dashboard creation, or a log that needs clarification. I used to contact the vendor via email and create a request for the Dynatrace support team.

Support is good, but it needs a faster response, so I'd give it an eight out of ten.

Positive

I prefer Dynatrace over other APM solutions because it's the best in the market, except when compared to the visualizations in the Grafana dashboard. Dynatrace has a host-based deployment, so unlike other solutions that require you to create supporting files and packages based on the application and server, in Dynatrace, as long as the application runs on Windows or Linux, that's it. You don't need to gather files or do anything else. Other APM tools require you to select the application type, and then you need to download the right package. You need compatibility when you use other APM solutions, which is a big headache, unlike Dynatrace, so I like Dynatrace better.

Dynatrace is easy to deploy. It won't take more than two minutes to deploy one agent, but getting approval, summarizing the changes, and the change request concerning the service ticket getting approved is what's taking longer.

I deployed Dynatrace, so it was an in-house deployment.

A different team handles the licensing for Dynatrace.

I evaluated Grafana and Broadcom DX APM.

I'm working with Dynatrace. I'm using an older version of the solution.

Within the company, eight people use Dynatrace.

The solution is straightforward to maintain.

Even if I have three and a half years of experience with Dynatrace and a total of eleven years of experience with other APM solutions, my only advice to new users or anyone looking into implementing Dynatrace is that it's a good tool. However, I still need to dig deeper into the solution to give more advice.

My rating for Dynatrace is ten out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for user happiness monitoring. Basically, we look at how well we'll use it to run some arbitrary metrics over the website's behavior. I'm trying to understand how the user experience is going. Therefore, we're doing user experience monitoring. We're also using it for monitoring and listening, where we fire off specific test cases against that site with it. 

Typically, it does quite a lot. We can also do health monitoring of the actual service hosts, and servers, and dependencies.

Dynatrace provides us with the ability to actually map out the whole ecosystem and our websites and services that exist within it. You have that whole picture even though it's now a distributed network of products and things. We use Dynatrace to just monitor the health of that ecosystem and manage, and identify where the dependencies are. In doing that, we can also look at hotspot monitoring, so that we can determine bottlenecks within our system. We can use it to follow metrics to help us figure out how fast things should occur, to identify slowdowns of speed - or potential slowdowns - which can cause us to have those little mysterious bugs where suddenly the user experience drops out because something three or four levels down is not behaving itself.

Basically, it's a lot of use cases based on the user experience. There's lots of user monitoring. Lots of looking at where they're entering the sites from, where they're exiting the sites from. The behaviors can sometimes help us detect failures in our overall user experience. It's a lot of user experience management that's assisted via AI. We can use AI to develop, identify, establish, buy, and build trends so that we can look forward to purchasing requirements. Ideally, the AI will make it that we can identify where the system is going to fail in the future. We're still working on that side of things, but we're getting there.

The ability to play back individual user sessions is very helpful. I can look at what people actually do when they interact with our product when I use that website.

The solution has a lot of use cases based around the user experience that helps us make a better product.

The AI is great. In the future, we hope it will help us predict problems before they arise.

They provide a lot of quite useful training equipment for training materials for it. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The solution is very easy to manage.

You can set access fairly easily so users can see only parts that are relevant to their roles.

The solution is quite stable.

The product scales well.

Technical support has always been quick to respond. 

It does do nice dashboards.

Due to the fact that you doing a lot, you have a problem with the learning curve. We're really looking for ways to make this product more accessible. That comes back to training and also having the information within the system presented well. Right now, quite a lot of time is spent learning the idioms of the system.

That said, they work very hard on taking the edge off it. However, the reality is that it will take time to learn. It does take time to come up to speed with this product. Most of the problems I've had are just a lack of familiarity with the product so far.

I haven't pushed it far enough to discover that my answers are not met by the product fully. I still need time to explore it before giving it a full review. 

I've personally been using the solution for about seven months or so. It's been less than a year so far.

The stability of the product is very good. It's rock-solid. there are no bugs or glitches. We haven't had any issues at all. 

The solution can scale quite well.

Basically, the way it works is you put in it, you put an agent into each of the deployments you're using it to monitor, and then it just gathers data. It doesn't really impact the operations of things. The majority of its work is actually done by the parent in the cloud.

We have one or two administrators and various people in the company have various levels of access. We have quite a fine-grained control over what people can see, however, at the same time, we can provide some useful information to them to know what they need so that they can know what they actually do need to know to do their jobs.

We haven't been in touch with technical support lately. However, when we have contacted them in the past, they have been helpful and responsive. We're quite pleased with their capabilities so far. 

I wasn't actually involved in the deployment itself. It was a case of just coming in and seeing it was available for various use cases.

However, looking back, it's a relatively straightforward process. It's often as simple as installing an agent with your deployment, and it takes off from there. My understanding is the deployment was very seamless and quite quick.

There's definitely a maintenance contract with it. It's a case where you subscribe to it, and they provide regular updates. You've actually subscribed to a service and there's regular maintenance happening organically.

We got a lot of support from the vendor. There was a lot of ongoing support from the vendor at that time.

The solution is a SaaS. If we were to stop paying the subscription entirely, the service would end shortly afterward, based on the contractual arrangements we have with them. Assuming we were not to renew our contract, the facility would just go away.

I was not a party to the actual license negotiations or costings. I can't fully answer to the exact cost, to any degree of certainty, other than to say it's not a free product. It's a business. I believe that we have been getting value for money. We do have to watch how we use it. We have to watch that the costs are not substantial. We do restrict where it's actually deployed and how it's deployed. That's part of our management strategy and that's kind of informed by a budget. That said, I'm not aware of the actual budget numbers.

App Dynamics is a product in a similar space. 

It compares well to other instrumentation tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.

We're a customer.

We tend to use the most up-to-date or stable version of the solution. 

I would recommend Dynatrace as an application performance management tool. It does its job quite well. I am able to see a wide range of the application I'm looking at, and what other applications it is interacting with. We do get quite a lot of information, which allows us to better understand what's going on. I would recommend exploring an IPM tool. I haven't used one of the IPM tools yet. 

I'd be interested to see how it handles a security event or security incident and event management. That is a bit of a gap for me at the moment. I'd love to know if it does that. There are other tools available, however, it is kind of nice to be able to sort of stop in one spot.  

I need to learn more about the tool. I was kind of running up against my limitations with the tool, rather than the limitations of the tool itself.

I'd rate it seven out of ten, simply due to the fact that I still need to explore it more. 

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! 

Primary use case would be RUM for real-time monitoring. 

It has performed really well. Earlier, we were documenting how long each transaction was taking, because we had a service which was pinging different sources. Therefore, we had to go into the logs and see what the response time was for each step. Now that Dynatrace is instrumented, we are getting alerts any time the service time is not the baseline. Then, you look at the PurePath, and it really helps you drill down to where. You can work with other managed groups and tell them this is the timeframe when we saw the issue, "Did you see your CPU load go higher?" That is where I am finding it really useful. 

When our service response time was not matching the baseline, we realized that our Oracle TNS was getting too many pings, so Oracle recommended to us to utilize more persistent connections, so this is where Dynatrace really helped us narrow it down. Therefore, we are changing our call to use more data sourcing and connection calling. That is the real business benefit that we have received.

The real-time monitoring, which we are getting, is amazing. 

PurePath: It is really good. You can drill down and see what the baseline is. If it is five seconds and I am not happy with it, I can go into the PurePath and look at each step, then see where I can improve my performance.

I do not like the performance of the UI. It is really slow. I get a problem, but by the time I can drill down and figure it out, it is getting late because the performance is slow. When it is performing well, I know right away and I know how to react. 

Basically, our database list is running out. They have a maximum connection counts per second, and that is where we are running out of count. We were exceeding that count, so Oracle increased it to 200, and that is what Dynatrace gave us. In some situations, I have seen the UI is slow on our end.

Also, we were getting alerts, like the CPU was pinging, and it came in the middle of the night, and it was a development server. So, the next day I wanted to look at it, which process caused it, and sure enough Dynatrace gave me the details, but it does not give the user running the process. Most of the processes are very obvious what is running, like JVM is running, Java, or what websphere is running. But for this process, I had no clue. I involved a Dynatrace consultant, and he had no clue. Then, as a team, we did not know what to do. It was not happening often, so one night I was lucky enough, the monitoring alert came when I was online, and I quickly logged into the server to the top, and sure enough the process was running, and the process was running as route, so I know the groups which can run processes. 

That is how I figured out the process, and they looked into it. They figured out what the issue was, but just looking at Dynatrace I couldn't have figured it out. Therefore, I asked them if when they give these results that when they have CPU consumption in the processes, if they could also have the user. That would help.

Once screen replay comes in, that will be even more useful.

It is stable, but slow. We have a managed solution. We do not have a set solution. 

Scalability is pretty good.

I am more from the development team. We have a monitoring team, which is actually supporting Dynatrace with the help of Dynatrace's guidance.

Feedback about the technical support from our monitoring team has been pretty good. Our monitoring team is totally taking it in well. They are learning on their own. 

We have a lot of siloed monitoring tools; as in, we still have them. They are good alerting tools, but they cannot really measure response time levels and do the PurePath analysis, which Dynatrace is able to give us. This was the real challenge we had. They would say, "Why don't you record the response time for each step in the log file and we can monitor that," but I did not like that way of doing it. Dynatrace has very graphical interface, therefore it beats those tools. 

We used and are still using Nimsoft. The alerting is pretty good, and it integrates well with our issue management tools. Now though, Dynatrace integrate well with ServiceNow, and we are in the process of moving to ServiceNow. 

I am in the development. We just instrumented it on my servers. 

We had major issues, and it was not Dynatrace. It was how Dynatrace and Voz garbage collection were interacting, so IBM got involved and had to upgrade us. Now, it is doing a real good job, but that is how I got pulled into Dynatrace. 

There is a license issue where if we increase the memory we have to up the licenses. I was unaware of that going in. I thought it was scalable without all the paperwork behind the scenes.

I would recommend Dynatrace because I have seen Nimsoft. They do not have this graphical interface, and a graphical interface helps. Otherwise, with CP utilization and memory utilization, you would have to go to capacity planning to have them share their graphics. With Dynatrace, we can just bypass all that and just use it to see all the details. 

I would really recommend this product. 

We are not yet using cloud.

The primary use case for the solution is our application performance and the stability of our application. It really helps provide stable customer-facing applications and we use it continuously monitor our performance.

It is really working well for us and we are negotiating an extended contract right now for the next three years.

Once we started adopting this tool, it become an integral part of our business goals. As an industrial manufacturing company, the big investment and the interest area for us is to have our presence in the e-commerce platform, with stable and performing applications. This is a very critical business goal. 

A monitoring solution like Dynatrace is becoming a very integral part of that particular solution chain. Be it the CDN platform, or commerce platform, application performance monitoring is becoming a very critical piece.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the visibility. It creates visibility - from when the user starts interacting with our application - all the way back to our database calls, our network path, everything. 

The triaging is amazing. And at the same time, it provides depth, all the way to what kind of a method, what variables are inside those methods. Without getting too into the technical, the depth it gets to, pinpointing the problematic area - where exactly the problem is happening - is amazing. That's the best you can get from this tool.

From the Dynatrace SaaS platform, they talk about the APIs. The approach they take is, "We create the APIs, you use them however you want." I like it, that gives us flexibility. But at the same time, if your company does not have a huge number of APM specialists, or it does not have the time and resources available to spend on these kind of technology developments, it would be helpful if there were out-of-the-box solutions available from the platform. I would certainly consider that, because that would make us go to market much faster, rather than redeveloping our own solutions based on those APIs. 

So I would like to see more out-of-the-box solutions developed on those APIs.

And then, we would still have the flexibility to use the APIs if we needed to extend.

What we have right now, is fairly stable because it's not like we're getting an update every year, or every two weeks. When we evaluated the SaaS/Managed services, that's a big question we asked, because if your run-data is going to update you every two weeks, it means worrying about my performance monitoring solution now, rather than worrying about my application. That was a real concern we had. 

The first question we asked is, "Is there an option for us to turn it off? Can decide when we want to update our solutions?" That's an insurance policy for me. If it does not work out for us, we would always have an option. That's a real concern for us, even now. But since we have that insurance, we have an option to turn it off, if we don't want to have it updated every two weeks, I think we are ready to take that risk now.

It does scale really well. We started with monitoring a very limited number of applications, and then we started expanding our scope, and we have kept on adding more and more applications under this portfolio.

We actively use the Expert Services from the vendor. They are certainly very knowledgeable on the solution. The challenge is how do we map our business requirements and business challenges with the solution. Obviously, they do not understand our business challenges, so if we are able to provide the proper feedback to them about our business challenges, they can really map the solution to our problems.

They have solved our problems most of the time, as quickly as possible. Some of the time they solved the problem, but it took some time to solve it. That's the reason I give the solution an eight out of 10. The Expert Services is really helpful for us.

We were referred by one of our vendors. It was more like an architectural review service that we had engaged. When they came out and reviewed our architecture, they made a lot of recommendations on the architectural changes, and the way we need to adapt our commerce platform. 

One of the major recommendations we got from them is, "You really need to start investing in your APM strategy, because that's going to benefit you in the long run." And then we started investing in a very limited amount, to see the return on investment. We saw the value, and then we started increasing every investment on this area.

I was involved in the initial proof of concept, and setting up of the solution. The solution is very straightforward. Setting it up, and then getting it implemented, and then adoption are really complex.

We had our own shortcomings on the technology side. At the same time, I also felt like even Dynatrace has to mature in its offering. They are in the industry as an APM leader, so they should be able to come and say, "Hey, if you are in this vertical, these are the industry best practices. If you follow this, this would be the right path." 

I think that's something Dynatrace has to evolve. Rather than just concentrating on the solution side, they should focus more on the business side. For example, they should say, "For your retail, this is how your application performance monitoring happens. If you're in the manufacturing industrial segment, this is how the application performance monitoring happens, these are the key metrics you should look for."

We went automatically with the referral to Dynatrace. We already had enterprise APM solutions available, so they started competing with the Dynatrace. From time to time, we still evaluate other vendors, but we are still sticking with Dynatrace for two reasons. 

First, they have always been ahead of the market. When we started thinking, "Okay, we want to do a DevOps strategy, and continuous deployment, continuous integration. Dynatrace has an offering which will fit into those particular requirements." 

And the second one is, they have already spent three years with us, so they know our business, they know our business strategies, and our business goals. I've not really had appetite to go back and start investing my time and energy with a new vendor to bring them on board and then teach then everything that I have already taught to the Dynatrace guys.

Regarding the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale into the cloud, and monitor performance management issues, the way I look at AI is this. When we started this journey three years back, it was more like problem-solving. We have a problem, and we need to identify the root causes and how do we solve it? That's what it was three years back. 

In three years, a lot of things have changed. Now it's all about, how do you proactively monitor it, and how do you solve it, and then the self-healing techniques and the like. So even without a developer looking into it, how do you solve the problem? That's the big thing I'm seeing from our organization's point of view on AI. The second point is, we are also starting our DevOps initiatives, and then the continuous integration platforms, and continuous delivery platforms. The AI platform, and the new Dynatrace, is becoming a critical value in that as well.

In terms of siloed monitoring tools, our team has not used them, but our enterprise had other application monitoring tools. The challenge with those are that some of them are really concentrating on your networking site, some of them are concentrating on your specific application-oriented issues. You are not able to get one big picture, or a single pane of visibility into every application or every service that's involved in that application. That's where I think this particular solution helped us a lot.

If there is one solution, it reduces the complexity. If you bring one solution, there would be some learning curve to adopting the solution, but in the long run it's going to really help to reduce the complexity. From my team's point of view, they would be able to go much deeper, picture a "T" shape, rather than a horizontal. Otherwise, you would need to learn one tool for this particular technology, or for this application, and another tool to support another application. So if there is one tool, they could go all the way, and there would be a lot of productivity improvement because of that.

As far as selecting a vendor goes, what's important to us are two things. First, are they stable enough. Is the company stable enough to do business with them, because we are a 100-year-old company, so we value the continuity of the business. Second, how visionary are they in their market, in that industry? We don't take too much risk on any evolving technology. We wait until the technology evolves and matures. That's a very critical thing. 

We always look for how strong they are in that industry, how long they are in this industry, what their track record is, and what their future looks like.

My advice is, involve all the stakeholders from day one. Bringing everyone on board from day one, and get everybody onto the same page, what they want from the solution. That is very critical. It takes some time to get it to a maturity level, and then adoption. That means you start adopting it, and then six months down the line, if your business or a different team comes back and says, "This is good, but it's not really making any sense to me," then the whole six months, whatever you invested, has really gone to waste. Or you need to redo things one more time for them.

So I would say, identify all the stakeholders who will be consuming this solution, and then start engaging with them on day one. Even if they are not going to be part of the solution, or consuming these services, from day one, identify all of them and keep them engaged from day one. That will be very critical. We made that mistake and we learned from that.