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CA App Synthetic Monitor vs Dynatrace comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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

CA App Synthetic Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
75th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
363
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (7th), Mobile APM (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), AI Observability (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of CA App Synthetic Monitor is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 4.9%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dynatrace4.9%
CA App Synthetic Monitor0.6%
Other94.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2286675 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
A reliable solution for SSL offloading and to encrypt outside traffic
If you are responsible for monitoring the logs in F5, it isn't very easy. The format is complicated compared to different vendors. For example, Fortinet and Cisco have feasible formats for sending and fetching logs. Suppose I'm monitoring the logs and everything, and when I am retrieving logs from F5, I want to know whether it is regular traffic or any abnormality is happening. The logs itself is not user-friendly. It may not give you a clear way of what's happening. You have to go through different websites and work on it. You have to waste so much time on 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

"From our experience, it really helps managers in measuring application SLAs and viewing historical performance data."
"Each had strengths in one area or another, but CA covered the majority of our needs end-to-end."
"Not only is it a great product now, but I can just see from their vision and what they're trying to achieve, I'm really excited about the direction it's going."
"The comprehensive application topology visualization in Dynatrace, called Smartscape, has benefited my understanding of system dependencies, and since we are using Dynatrace primarily for observability, we can get top-to-bottom visibility, from infrastructure to network to application front end."
"The way it shows a problem on the dashboard is pretty good."
"Using Dynatrace, we collected application metrics within three hours, in most cases, the majority of our triage were within three hours, then we were able to discover the root cause of issues."
"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."
"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."
"If we had one solution that could provide not only data, but real answers, if we deployed Dynatrace, and it got its own baselines, and then it told us, "We saw an anomaly, here's a problem ticket, somebody needs to look at that," that would be tremendous."
"PurePath is one of the best features."
 

Cons

"The RBMS component is limited as you can only record using Internet Explorer."
"Pricing makes little sense. We had examples where it would be cheaper to have two basic accounts than one intermediate."
"I think scalability is what we're struggling with. I would say it's okay, but there's a little bit of room for improvement."
"I would love to see Dynatrace get more involved in the security realm."
"For a new user of Dynatrace, the tool is not easy to understand, so this is an area for improvement. Before using it, you need to learn from an expert."
"The tool needs work on the performance monitoring part, as it is not providing specific details due to some issues in agent connectivity."
"Needs a clearer view for Smartscape."
"There was complexity to AppMon and getting everything set, but more specifically getting the dashboard setup."
"They're doing vulnerability assessments of the application stack by using OneAgent. It's a never-ending story if you are trying to be sure your application is also secure."
"Right now, we are struggling a bit with stability. We have outages, data loss, and have had to restart, but have not narrowed down exactly what the problem is yet."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The product is pricey, but it is feature-rich, which is why we probably haven't looked away from it."
"​I would recommend doing a PoC."
"Pricing is still too expensive."
"The price could be improved."
"From what I have heard in the company, Dynatrace is expensive."
"Price (of the product) is a major concern for all the clients I work with."
"Dynatrace is usually paid on a yearly basis."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
16%
Construction Company
12%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise303
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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

CA ASM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Lexmark
TD Bank, Zurich North America, Accenture, Macquarie, United Airlines, Raymond James, BT, Vodafone, Air France-KLM, TELUS, American Airlines, Air Canada, ADT, Virgin Money
Find out what your peers are saying about CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. Dynatrace and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
919,919 professionals have used our research since 2012.