Dynatrace vs New Relic vs Sematext Synthetics comparison

Dynatrace is an AI-powered software intelligence monitoring platform that accelerates digital transformation and simplifies cloud complexities. Dynatrace is an entirely automated full-stack solution that provides data and answers about the performance of your applications and deep insight into every transaction throughout every application, including the end-user experience. By modernizing and automating enterprise cloud operations, users can deliver an optimal digital experience with higher quality software to customers faster.

Dynatrace offers an all-in-one automated artificial intelligence solution that brings together application performance, cloud and infrastructure, and digital experience monitoring. Dynatrace accelerates performance-driven results through operations, development, and business teams with a shared metrics platform. In addition, users are provided a full-stack monitoring experience with three patented technologies:

• Smartscape - visualization mechanism that maps the totality of everything working in your environment and detects any casual dependencies between your applications, processes, websites, services, hosts, cloud infrastructure, and networks.
  
  
• OneAgent - a technology that analyzes, gathers ,and unifies all business performance metrics throughout every layer of your technology stack.
  
  
• PurePath Technology - code-level context and timings are captured from the mainframe to the cloud for all end-to-end transactions.

What does Dynatrace offer?

Dynatrace redefines how organizations monitor their digital ecosystems. The solution offers:

• Cloud Automation: With AI engine Davis®, users can see the exact reason for problems and facilitate quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.
  
  
• Application Security: With automated application vulnerability management, users can deliver applications faster and more securely.
  
  
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Convenient broad visibility across your environments is provided with streamlined, automated infrastructure monitoring.
  
  
• Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): Optimize your applications, provide better support, and improve user experience with a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM), Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring throughout your environment.
  
  
• Applications and Microservices: For complex cloud environments, Dynatrace can automatically provide visibility and root-cause answers. It can also monitor microservices.
  
  
• Digital Business Analytics: Get AI-powered, real-time answers to analytical business queries with KPIs and metrics that are already flowing through applications.

Reviews from Real Users

Dynatrace is the only solution that provides answers to organizations based on deep insight into each user, transaction, and organization's environment.

Barry P., a managing performance engineer at Medica Health Plans, writes, "With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place."

A consultant at a tech service company notes, "A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it."

New Relic offers real-time application monitoring and insight into performance bottlenecks. Its customizable dashboards and APM integration provide efficient operational support, while server performance alerts ensure quick issue detection.

New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring of application performance, tracking bottlenecks across databases and front-end components. Users employ it for server and infrastructure monitoring, as well as analyzing key metrics such as CPU and memory usage. The solution's ability to integrate with tools like PagerDuty enhances incident management capabilities. However, users have expressed a need for improvements in query language simplicity, more detailed historical insights, and better mobile app monitoring support.

• Real-Time Monitoring: Provides instant visibility into application performance.
• Detailed Transaction Tracing: Identifies specific transaction issues quickly.
• Error Rate Tracking: Monitors and reports on error occurrences efficiently.
• Customizable Dashboards: Tailors dashboard views for specific needs.
• APM Integration: Seamlessly integrates with application performance management tools.

• Operational Efficiency: Quick issue detection reduces downtime.
• Improved Debugging: Enhanced error analysis supports rapid problem resolution.
• Comprehensive Monitoring: Offers a holistic view of application performance and user behavior.
• Incident Management: Integration with incident tools helps streamline responses.
• Efficient Alerts: Rapid alert systems ensure timely notifications of issues.

In industries like e-commerce and financial services, New Relic supports application performance monitoring to enhance user experience and system reliability. Organizations leverage its insights for optimizing performance, particularly in server operations and infrastructure management. Its ability to monitor API failures through synthetic monitoring is crucial for maintaining high service levels.

Sematext Synthetics provides the ability to actively monitor APIs, Web URLs, websites, and user journeys/click flows from multiple locations around the globe. Synthetic monitoring helps you ensure the availability and performance of your APIs and websites. Synthetics will help you identify downtime and performance issues by simulating user requests and interactions with your web page.

No agent installation is required and there is no need to change your application code.

Sematext Synthetic Benefits

• Fix performance issues before they affect your end users
  Synthetic monitoring allows you to simulate user interactions at different locations worldwide. Synthetic performance monitoring monitors all your APIs, web applications, and mobile apps, no matter how many users they are. With Sematext, you can customize Dashboards and Alerts to monitor critical infrastructure aspects and trigger them when they malfunction. This will help you spot problems before they arise.
  

• Benchmark your website
  Synthetic monitoring solutions let you look at your APIs from different places during the day. Then you can use this data as a baseline for benchmarking since it helps you figure out what needs to be improved, and lets you compare your service to the competition.
  
• Test your scaling capabilities
  A website and application are built to respond quickly to users, but your server needs to be ready when traffic spikes unexpectedly. You can run artificial tests to determine how your server will behave under load with synthetic performance monitoring. Once you have this data, you can decide what steps to take to scale gracefully.
  
  
• Test new product features before launching
  If you're launching new features, synthetic monitoring lets you run a full test suite before releasing them during peak hours, which is a great tool to have. You'll be able to see how the application reacts under load and whether any of the recent changes will impact a 3rd party API you might use.
  
  
• Monitor third-party APIs and critical business processes
  If you don't use any third-party tools in your business, you run into a number of problems related to their availability. You need to keep an eye on them and get an alert the second things start to slow down. Monitoring API metrics is not enough to ensure your users get the best experience possible. Make sure your application works as expected, including logging in, searching, and checkout.
  
  
• Ensure SLA compliance
  Whatever side of the SLA you are on – the key is to make sure everyone in the contract adheres to the contract. To understand the performance limitations of your application and set realistic expectations, you should use synthetic monitoring tools if you're a service provider. Customers want to know that the vendor can fulfill his promises.
  
  
• Reduce MTTR
  With synthetic monitoring software like Sematext Synthetics, you can lower your MTTR by sending out alerts before the issue becomes a problem. In addition to being notified sooner, you'll also learn what's causing the problem and how to fix it.

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Just some of the things you can do with Sematext Synthetics

• Monitor & track the availability & performance of APIs
• Monitor SSL certificate expiration time
• Monitor websites and track various web performance metrics like page load time, paint metrics, etc.
• Monitor website uptime
• Monitor individual resource performance in a website by domain, type, and response code
• Create public status page showing the availability of your selected web services and share it with your customers
• Identify slow resources
• Monitor third-party resources performance
• Investigate slow pages & identify bottlenecks using a waterfall chart
• Create user journeys with custom assertions based on the content of the webpage
• Collect and track custom metrics from your sites
• Benchmark against competitors
• Create custom dashboards and alerts based on gathered performance metrics
• Debug downtime with end-to-end visibility of application performance
• Get alerted when things fail via multiple alert channels like email, Slack, Pagerduty, webhooks, etc.
• Monitor websites behind firewalls and on private networks with Private Locations
• Check out the full product update.

At Sematext, we’ve also had the need to monitor application availability. We use Synthetics actively to monitor our own applications and it has helped us uncover issues with our APIs on multiple occasions.

Where to go from here?

Sign up for a free trial and try it for yourself. Pricing starts at $2 per month for HTTP monitors and $7 per month for browser monitors. We have pay-as-you-go pricing if your usage changes or fixed plans if you can estimate your usage.