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CA Application Delivery Analysis [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

CA Application Delivery Ana...
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Dynatrace
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
356
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1237194 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Director, DevOps at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Good monitoring functionality, but technical support and integration with other products need to be improved
My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances. For CA Spectrum, the integration of this product is something that needs to be improved. Even some of their point products to not integrate very well, and ADA is one of them. The user interface needs to be improved. Technical support needs to be improved.
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 most valuable feature is the fault management monitoring."
"The pricing is relatively low compared to other solutions in this area. I'd go so far as to say it's even significantly less than the competition."
"We use it for monitoring all the applications in our bank, and it works fantastically."
"It has helped us deliver better solutions to our end customers, and helps them in their digital transformation journey."
"The most valuable feature the solution offers right now is the PurePath. When we see a web request, and something failing, we can drill down using PurePath."
"Dynatrace provides probable root cause for any issues which assists our support team to quickly address issues identified by Dynatrace."
"Mean time to root cause analysis decreased drastically."
"We can see each session, end-to-end, and discover issues."
"We are able to drill down and detect what the problems are; providing high-quality performance monitoring."
"Dynatrace has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to see very quick action whenever there is an issue with production."
 

Cons

"My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances."
"The user interface needs improvement."
"Better root cause detection and improve root cause categories. In some cases, the root cause points out only a clue of what has happened."
"Ability to better identify SDQ script errors would be helpful."
"The UX/UI needs improvement. It is not easy to learn."
"The dashboarding in Dynatrace is not very good. We have used other monitoring tools like AppDynamics. We are also using AppDynamics for some of our products. If I compare Dynatrace with those monitoring tools, the dashboarding is not as good. If I have to create a dashboard it takes me time, the experience is not that good."
"Nginx monitoring service did not work out-of-the-box, so we had to tinker with it for quite some time."
"For an easy view of global and entity-specific configurations, a separate tile or pane aggregating these configurations should be implemented."
"If the user interface were made more intuitive then it would really benefit the product."
"I haven't had a chance to go through all of it, but I would like to see the ability, from an administrative standpoint, for it to collect statistics. I want to be able to see the servers that the agents are installed on. I want it to be able to start doing collections for me by platform: How many Linux servers do I have? How many Windows servers do I have? Statistically give me the information of how things are performing, but I want that in a dashboard, where I can look at a dashboard and I can look at a section. So the ability for me to drill down will make it easier for me."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an expensive solution and there is a single price to pay for licensing, with no options."
"Its license is a bit expensive. We renew it yearly."
"Decodes on less used/popular protocols are available, but they should be included. Additional investment should not be required."
"I have not been able to observe more than 1% overhead, despite Dynatrace saying that it can be slightly higher in some situations."
"This is an expensive solution, but it is also worth the money."
"We purchased a subscription for one year and it is an expensive solution for a large enterprise like ours."
"I feel the price is good for what the product does."
"You get a really well-planned out monitoring suite for the money spent."
"The solution has saved us money through the consolidation of tools. With a hybrid landscape, we had multiple tools. When we consolidated, we removed four or five other monitoring tools with one. For the last ROI calculation that I did, Dynatrace was saving us up to $500,000 per year."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise297
 

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

CA ADA, Application Delivery Analysis, NetQoS SuperAgent
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ERGO
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: November 2025.
879,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.