AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring alternatives and competitors

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.