Azure Monitor alternatives and competitors

Our company is a FinTech financial institution. We expose financial APIs for major FinTechs in the US. Basically, we are a bank and have a lot of applications running behind the scenes. APM is super crucial to our organization. We need to be able to interact, understand, and get a holistic or 360-degree view about everything going on in the organization. This view includes the infrastructure and the application sides. 

The solution helps developers get a holistic view of their application performance under the AKS environment. This is especially important in lower environments where developers need to interact with everything from performance to logging perspectives. In the very early stages, the solution gives developers a quite good overview about how they are developing products and how they can make them work more efficiently. 

The solution is on-premises at our own data centers. We have an additional, hybrid installation with Amazon that includes a private cloud. 

We have 150 engineers who use the solution for applications running under the Kubernetes environment. 

The sky is the limit because the solution is a very flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need to monitor applications. There is nothing that you cannot do with it. Every day, our developers or SRE teams are adding additional features with the ability to think outside the box and configure whatever they want. 

The solution is the most common, major tool for FinTech or high-tech companies. Every technology company using Kubernetes is using the solution. 

The setup could be made easier for new users because it requires a bit of advance knowledge or experience. 

I currently manage our teams that use the solution. Previously, I had hands-on experience with the solution. 

The solution is stable with no reported issues. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have not needed technical support. 

The setup is not too complicated. If you have experience with the solution, then setup is an easy task. I rate setup a five out of ten. 

The basic configuration and deployment parts are easy. The more complicated part is creating the benchmark and alert behind it to make sure it gives us what we need from the application side. Customizing the solution for our needs takes more time. 

We implemented the solution in-house. We have a big devops team and a big SRE or platform engineers team. This is their bread and butter and they create Terraform infrastructures or services for a living.

If you use the solution, then you will definitely realize ROI. 

The solution is not expensive. In comparison to the pricing of New Relic or Datadog, the solution is basically free. 

We use several tools to accomplish our goals including the solution, New Relic APM, Datadog, Elasticsearch, and Amazon OpenSearch. 

New Relic APM and Datadog are closed box legacy tools. You cannot reconfigure them to do whatever you want. We use them because they have certain abilities but they cannot be customized for our specific needs.  

The solution is an open box Kubernetes tool so we have the ability to play with it. 

Make sure that you have dedicated manpower to configure and manage the solution. It requires handling, not necessarily on a daily basis, but it definitely requires someone who is focused and has expertise with the solution. 

Know in advance what you want to gain from the solution. Don't jump in to configuring or deploying before knowing what you expect from it. 

I like the solution very much. I think it is a major tool, especially in advanced environments. The open box provides a lot of flexibility and gives a very holistic view of the entire Kubernetes environment. 

Integrating with the Rancher management tool gives the solution even more abilities. There are several tools that we use behind the scenes to ease the process but the solution on its own is a very good tool. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

It tells me everything I need to know. It tells me what the transactions are. The AI provides you with advancements or degradations in what is happening. 

It gives me visibility into everything, from transactional logs to services and processes to the OneAgent installed on the box, which tells me it's talking to systems that are in development and it shouldn't be.

The most important takeaway is simply the compute. Simply understanding how much, or, the resource adoption across the board. Back in the day, for example, I would need 128 gigs of RAM to run SQL. You don't need that any longer. Having the performance and true metrics of what's going on, as well as scaling your environment to its optimal performance.

Dynatrace works perfectly.

Having OneAgent is the most valuable feature of Dyantrace, as well as the monitoring.

What is web interaction as it relates to Synergy, or when it comes to using web-based, phone-based, or apps published on end-user devices, it's fantastic in terms of performance, and code. Even if you run the release and discover that the update you just released is causing a degradation in performance, auto-release will restore the old code without missing a beat.

I believe that something related to IoT devices should be improved.

I have been using Dynatrace since 2018. It's been four and a half years.

We are using both a SaaS and an on-premises version.

It is both on-premises and hybrid.

They are hosted by Google, Microsoft Azure, as well as AWS.

Dynatrace is a stable solution. It's rock solid. We have never had an issue.

Dynatrace is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We have an application, management, and support teams looking into things. We have our help desk and service desk looking at various dashboards. Certain dashboards are being examined by our developers. It is frequently used by between 60 and 80 people.

I believe we are currently using all of the functions and features. It's operational, it's production, it's living and breathing.

I would rate the technical support a four out of five.

Positive

We were looking at Dynatrace at the time, and then there was AppDynamics or something like that, I believe, which Cisco eventually purchased. Dynatrace's maturity level at the time far outstripped that of anything else on the market.

In 2018 it was a superior product.

The initial setup is straightforward. I'll be up and monitoring in four hours. The on-premises installation was a little more difficult due to network firewalls and so on. Overall, it went well.

This solution can be deployed and maintained by four people.

For us, the most important thing was to get OneAgent out everywhere. Once we had the OneAgent in place, we began building out, and understanding what applications are present, and start developing the monitoring aspects. Not just from conventional RAM CPU calculations, but truly looking at the applications, and examining the Java functions, as well as the MongoDB functions.

Having all of that information and being able to create dashboards to communicate it not only to the higher-ups but also to the developers doing the development, who must understand that they must be very smart with their code.

We are a consulting company. Within our organization, we have a Dynatrace division. However, for this installation, in particular, we collaborated with Dynatrace on product implementation.

We saw a return on investment. The downtime has been reduced, which is significant in and of itself.

I would rate the return on investment a five out of five.

I am not aware of the licensing fees.

We evaluated AppDynamics.

I would recommend following the instructions. It's easy to understand.

Nothing is very perfect. I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

We basically use Elastic APM for our metrics to look at our performance. Whenever people say that there's a latency of more than a certain amount, then we just open this APM and see why exactly the latency is high. We can choose that data set, and then we can go deeper. 

The solution allows us to track performance via metrics.

We're able to see where latency is happening. 

The solution allows us to dig deep into data.

There needs to be less boiler code. That's where I see a solution such as Dynatrace as being very good. We need to just deploy the Dynatrace and then it just uses all the TCP packages et cetera, to figure out what the endpoint to endpoint mapping is. It can give more insight into performance.

I can see mistakes in annotations. If a developer uses a different annotation, these performance metrics are not in the portal. When I go to the portal, I do not see many insights on the endpoints or where there could be latencies. I'd like overall fewer mistakes.

The solution needs to use more AI. Once the product onboards AI, users would more effectively be able to track endpoints for specific messages.

I do not have more than six months' experience with this solution. I'm a senior engineer here and I just was looking at a few issues in our system, and then I could see that how we are doing this APM integration.

I may not be able to comment on the stability as that is something DevOps should know. My understanding is that it is stable. That said, in use cases, it lacks insights features. 

I came to this organization from a financial background. In all the major banks, capital markets, they use this ITRS Geneos. I have experience in that tool.

I don't have any details in terms of pricing. It's not an aspect of the solution I am familiar with. 

I see that there are a few features that are not there in that Elastic APM. I have been looking at another APM that we can use in our C systems.

I am looking into Dynatrace and Azure Monitor.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

With so little experience with the solution so far, I do not have any specific advice to share with others. 

I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten.

The use case for this solution is the same as Azure Monitor. They have the same coverage for the use case. In the end, we switched to Azure Monitor.

It is for the application quality process and the live system support monitoring.

We like the performance of the product. It's very good, very reliable.

All features are all capable to responding to our requirements. There's no problem on this side. 

The solution can scale. 

The initial setup isn't a big deal. Our admins can handle it. 

The solution is quite expensive. 

We've been using the solution for about two years at this point. It hasn't been too long. 

It's stable. It is reliable. The performance has been good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. It's not a problem to expand as necessary. 

We have two or three users on the product right now. 

Previously, we did not use other application performance management products.

We also use Azure Monitor. They are very much the same. However, we've since moved over to Azure Monitor.

It's not as straightforward a setup as Azure Monitor. Then again, we have admins, and they were managing that part. It's not a big deal.

We have two admins that can handle deployment and maintenance. 

The price is an issue. It's quite expensive.

That said, I can't speak to the exact pricing. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using and if it's the latest version or not. 

We'd recommend the product if budgeting is not a concern for a company.

I'd rate it nine out of ten. We were pretty happy with its capabilities.