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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
359
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), 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

reviewer1374792 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Support Specialist at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Great for visibility but lacks many features and difficult to update
We're customers. We don't have a special relationship with the company. I am the operation's application administrator. At the moment, the solution is monitoring the applications that we want it to monitor. We're not looking at it on a daily basis. We just use it here and there. The challenge we have is that we believe that Dynatrace can address some tasks we'd like done that are not possible to execute on this solution. Dynatrace includes monitoring of not just the logs, but the applications as well. Dynatrace also makes us include firewalls, etc. We could have it so there are end to end solutions or identifications within the process. What we have right now is only the app server as well as the database server and its connectivity. The solution does save time that's caused when creating SQL coding. However, there are some issues around AppInternals changing the code and giving us issues. From the point of view of the top management, we want a more permanent solution. We want to identify what causes issues and we are looking for a more end-to-end solution. That is why we are looking at Dynatrace. I don't know if I have any advice for other organizations. The experience I have is only based on my own limited experience. However, I believe that the application has the potential to be really good if it identifies what is really important to an organization. It's still sort of half-baked without AppResponse. Without the other key features in infrastructure, like the network, firewalls, and proxies, it's lacking. It's not fully complete. I'd rate the solution six out of ten. It addresses some of our needs, but there's a lot lacking that could be added to make it a fuller, more interesting product.
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

"The product is very useful to find problems in middleware for the application servers, especially agent instrumentation and management is user friendly."
"From the experience I had with these three tools, I realized that Riverbed was superior in all aspects (performance, user experience, and features)."
"Clicks to root cause - fast & easy to diagnose and deep-dive"
"By going to v10 it made our lives a whole lot easier because prior to v10, we had to put all of these assets, these Riverbed arguments, basically JVM start up itself."
"We just control on the backend of AppInternals what we want to instrument and what we don't want to instrument."
"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."
"Synthetic transactions, WMI and SNMP query capability."
"The capability of analysing each individual transaction captured to a very low level detail (method call/line of code)."
"​Data analytics help us to find us issues in the short-term or long-term."
"We started monitoring our VMware hypervisors and that gave us valuable system specific metrics into our virtual environments."
"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."
"Email alert and mobile app alert are very useful for informing the team that something is going wrong."
"It is the best solution in the market."
"The best part of Dynatrace is that the tool is very lightweight and very easy to install."
"Dynatrace is heavily automated which is a big advantage. You don't have to configure a lot, it installs and it runs straight away. There's direct return on investment and you can focus on more interesting stuff than always have to configure and change the configurations. Issues or problems in detection is also fully automated, which is great."
"PurePath view of methods and the call stack are extremely valuable for troubleshooting and performance review."
 

Cons

"The recording mechanism for synthetic transactions could be improved as well."
"The admin dashboard could be easier as it takes a little bit of time to get used to it."
"It wasn't a critical issue, but it was hot enough to where it would have been nice to get some guidance from Riverbed, but they went ahead and let us down, but that was only one occasion."
"It's still sort of half-baked without AppResponse. Without the other key features in infrastructure, like the network, firewalls, and proxies, it's lacking."
"Deployment and agent patch management is not managed centrally, resulting in a large level of effort to update."
"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."
"We have put in a request as an enhancement that we would like to search for items. If we're searching for a URL and we want to know was it a get or was it a post."
"It would be great if the solution could offer fixed bundles and more features."
"We would like to see more external tool integration, which is critical for us."
"It needs more dashboards like AppMon."
"One thing I'm missing and that is the JMX from the MBeans, it's missing completely."
"​I would like to see single pane monitoring."
"Generally their support is pretty good, but on occasion you can tell you get someone "new", in which you know more than they do."
"The one thing that I do not like about Dynatrace is their Web UI dashboards are very slow."
"It would be good to extend the visibility to cover more infrastructure monitoring capabilities and more network performance capabilities."
"One thing we'd like to see is mobile native replay. They don't have a timeline on it yet, but that's one of the key things we're looking at, to get rid of one of our incumbent products that does replay."
 

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."
"From what I have heard in the company, Dynatrace is expensive."
"The limitations I see 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."
"Always gives good ROI and total cost of ownership."
"We found a tool that can be utilized by testing, DevOps, marketing, software engineering, and monitoring. Before, we always had everybody doing their own thing. Now, everybody's utilizing one tool, which is huge. That is a huge savings."
"Surprisingly, it is quite expensive. That is something that we could always see: Improved pricing and the overall construct on how do we use each license in regards to usage of the tool."
"The product is really fast to implement and gives customers instant value. This is important, because it reduces costs on the implementation."
"Price (of the product) is a major concern for all the clients I work with."
"The cost is somewhat high."
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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
19%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

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 Business80
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise299
 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: August 2026.
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