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Aternity AppInternals [EOL] vs Dynatrace comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Aternity AppInternals [EOL]
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Dynatrace
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
358
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (3rd)
 

Q&A Highlights

JS
Pre-Sales at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees
Nov 13, 2017
 

Featured Reviews

PJ
Security & Performance Analytics Technical Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Points out the relevant problems in the enterprise and it's easy to understand
The most valuable aspect of this solution is the integration with their other systems. It's easy to understand and it points out the relevant problems in the enterprise I would like for it to have automated updates, the way the product updates itself should be all automated, as opposed to what it…
Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
AI-driven insights have reduced downtime and improved cross-team collaboration
We encountered some challenges while using Dynatrace. Although the initial setup was smooth, fine-tuning alert thresholds and custom metrics took some time. Another challenge was that Dynatrace charges based on host units, so we had to carefully plan our agent deployments. The licensing model is expensive. Additionally, the complexity of setup is an issue. While OneAgent and auto-discover services are powerful, the setup is more complex compared to other tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. These integrations are simple and basic, but Dynatrace setup requires more complexity based on the environment. For new users wanting to use Dynatrace, it is difficult. However, the AI-related solutions and metrics took us to the next level for identifying and fixing things. Dynatrace requires an agent for operation. OneAgent is powerful, but it is also resource-heavy. On lightweight nodes or older systems, the agent can slightly impact performance. If Dynatrace could implement a lightweight agent behavior, we could make things faster. Additionally, if Dynatrace could add a long-term retention policy so that we could store more data and find fine-grained details, that would help us. While Dynatrace managed edition supports on-premises deployment, the SaaS version depends on cloud connectivity. For highly regulated or air-gapped environments, setup and updates can be challenging. Although the initial setup is smooth, if someone wants to fine-tune it and fully understand the tool end-to-end, it could be tricky.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I like it that one can match IPs with the application name."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is the integration with their other systems. It's easy to understand and it points out the relevant problems in the enterprise."
"The product is very useful to find problems in middleware for the application servers, especially agent instrumentation and management is user friendly."
"Browsermetrix, which is real-user monitoring via JS injection and linked back to TTW via cookie. It allows us to see the experience of every user hitting our sites and analyze performance by region, browser, etc."
"Transaction Tracing is the most useful. Being able to have the transaction stitched together so we can see where the problem is has proven invaluable."
"Clicks to root cause - fast & easy to diagnose and deep-dive"
"As an Administrator, before we bought this AppInternals, I didn't have visibility on why items were slow or why an application was not running. This gives us the ability to see what's going on. The application is load balancing. We can now see if its own server has issues or just one specific server has issues."
"The capability of analysing each individual transaction captured to a very low level detail (method call/line of code)."
"Whether it is the server, database, network, or application, Dynatrace provides a consistent unambiguous view of performance."
"Dynatrace helped us with root cause analysis of poor performing components of our applications."
"Scalability is outstanding. It won't tax our environment at all as it will scale sideways."
"Being able to get down to the individual code level to see where transactions are taking time. It has helped troubleshoot issues immensely and other tools can't provide this."
"It alerts us, or can detect, potential problems which are building up."
"The most valuable features are the UEM (User Experience Monitoring) and the DEM (Digital Experience Management)."
"Dynatrace is a single platform. It has all these different tools but they are actually all baked into the OneAgent technology. Within that OneAgent... you have the different tool sets. You have threat analysis, memory dumps, Java analysis, the database statements, and so on. It's all included in this OneAgent. So the management is actually quite easy."
"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."
 

Cons

"Support for PHP, DB and other applications need to be supported."
"The admin dashboard could be easier as it takes a little bit of time to get used to it."
"The technical support is not very good and should be improved."
"It would be great if the solution could offer fixed bundles and more features."
"Deployment and agent patch management is not managed centrally, resulting in a large level of effort to update."
"We'd like to be able to find out performance problems on application class and methods."
"I would like for it to have automated updates, the way the product updates itself should be all automated, as opposed to what it is now."
"They should find a way for report generation from TTW to run quicker."
"Two things that can be improved are the licensing and the Business dashboard."
"We would also like to see all the good data in a single view across multiple tools, so that access to integration is critical."
"The one thing I am really missing is the final Azure dashboard."
"To improve in Dynatrace the log analytics, this is the first thing that has to be enabled."
"Mainly navigation needs improvement. It is easier to follow a flow. Following the flow of the admin now is not easy."
"Provide much better alignment between AppMon and Dynatrace."
"If there was something that could be done at a local developer's station, something like, "Hey, here's a hint, this thing looks like it might not be optimized," or the like. I think more development features, to hedge that performance would be good."
"PurePath exports was a great feature in AppMon, but it is sometimes missing in Dynatrace."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing model is expensive compared to its competitors, but the service it gives to your business, and the data quality, means that it's worth it."
"The licensing model for v9 is better where it is an individual license per server, while v10 licenses are per JVM/ .NET and server instance. The latter model appears to be the model that other APM vendors are using."
"​Make sure your leadership buy-in is in place. Ensure leadership understands that an APM solution is a fairly expensive, so they know what they are getting into."
"Decodes on less used/popular protocols are available, but they should be included. Additional investment should not be required."
"The solution is not cheap."
"Dynatrace's pricing for their consumption units is rather arcane compared to some of the other tools, thus making forward-looking calculations based on capacity planning quite hard."
"I feel the price is good for what the product does."
"Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier."
"The product is pricey, but it is feature-rich, which is why we probably haven't looked away from it."
"We license it for two environments, typically all of production and all of one lower environment, usually our staging environment. If there is a downside to Dynatrace, the only thing I can think of would be the cost. If it were cheaper, I'd have it in all my environments. I don't think they're charging more than it's worth, by any means. It's just that good software costs money."
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Answers from the Community

JS
Pre-Sales at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees
Nov 13, 2017
Nov 13, 2017
i don't 100% agree what @Scott mention. 1st - Please refer to the latest Magic Quadrant NPM & APM Dynatrace is good in APM space but Riverbed is offering end to end monitoring in NPM & APM space and the latest acquisition Aternity expands Riverbed’s SteelCentral offerings up to the end users performance monitoring level wish i personally love it. Traditional solutions base in DC to a...
2 out of 7 answers
it_user758499 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer IT with 501-1,000 employees
Nov 9, 2017
Riverbed is more of an NPM probe-based offering and only has a moderate level of application awareness. It is more aligned with Dynatrace’s DCRUM offering competitively. https://www.dynatrace.com/topics/performance-test/data-center-monitoring/ At some point our DCRUM will be integrated into the Dynatrace product, so one great thing coming is you will truly have a single platform/pane of glass for everyone down to the full network detail. For now, it is still a separate entity. Although Riverbed offers strong NETWORK analytics, it is not going to provide the application layer detail and provide a holistic all in one offering like Dynatrace does with RUM, webchecks, cloud, containers, network, infrastructure. It also samples and doesn’t provide a high fidelity of data. Dynatrace looks at every transaction, so we offer gap-free visibility into performance, bottlenecks, and issues. This is also important if you want to understand user and performance trends and understand where to align resources and focus on areas of development. With Riverbed, you’ll be making a lot of assumptions based on their sampling/averages output. It’s going to take you a month plus to evaluate it…minimum. It takes weeks to set it up and configure. And the cost of services to get installed and trained is costly. So ease of use with what you evaluated is not comparable. Dynatrace installs in 3 mins or less and our ROI is typically within 2-3 months. Maintenance of Riverbed is huge. Dynatrace is automatic in providing releases and upgrades, zero maintenance. Riverbed is going to require taking things off line, doing the updates, and putting things back on line. Lots of manual effort. Riverbed strongly emphasizes packet capture capabilities so it’s appealing to the network team. It captures and records everything from the wire and applies very light weight analytics. It’s a very reactive approach. If you want to apply the application layer information into the networking piece, you will be purchasing and managing multiple components instead of just one with Dynatrace. Dynatrace is application centric however it does provide some network analytics in relation to the performance of the applications it’s monitoring; This is like comparing an apple to a banana. So, for me, the top areas in which Dynatrace is better: • Ease of use, zero maintenance • Higher fidelity of data with Dynatrace-no sampling, aggregates or averages like you’d get from Riverbed. • Quicker ROI and user adoption • We show you every user, every app, everywhere. We provide gap free data from end-user, code, infrastructure, network. No blind spots, no samples, no averages. So no matter what device you are operating on, we’ll provide gap free visibility into performance. • Zero manual configuration. Just install one agent per host, we monitor everything. • AI gives you auto-everything. Automates, discovery, modelling, analysis, troubleshooting and stops you from having to figure this all out manually. • Automated root cause analysis. Avoid alert storms, get one single notification. • Seamless integration for cloud and containers.
it_user381273 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Nov 9, 2017
I am not familiar with these two anymore. I'm sure you can Google around as well as I can for general impressions, pricing, etc. I'll offer a bit of process guidance, though: Read the Release Notes for the latest version of each product. That will indicate what each company finds significant, and you can judge how well that aligns with the needs of your platform and your mgmt.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise298
 

Questions from the Community

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Any advice about APM solutions?
The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...
What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?
While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
 

Also Known As

SteelCentral AppInternals, OPNET ACE, AppInternals Xpert
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Instruments, Allianz
Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
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