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Dynatrace vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability 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

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)
ServiceNow Cloud Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
69th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 4.9%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is 0.7%, up from 0.5% 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%
ServiceNow Cloud Observability0.7%
Other94.4%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Vinothkumar Sugumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Unified dashboards have provided end-to-end visibility and now streamline API latency troubleshooting
I think Dynatrace can be improved in dashboard creation, as this is the face of a product. Although Dynatrace may have many things, new users typically do not know the whole power of the product. To onboard new people, it would be beneficial to provide template dashboards or suggested dashboards. Organizations working with microservice architecture will follow some templates, so suggesting simple, hand-picked features that are really helpful could make a difference. Quick configurable and customizable templates would be very useful. Whenever they come into the product, they can use this template and feel that their product is applied to it. Immediately, they will think everything is online and can improve easily. This base can be provided in template form. Since Dynatrace has a lot of features now, the AI integration makes it simple, but the product itself is very huge. To understand and utilize it, maybe it would be good to index the essential features.
Uday-Thentu - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Automation has reduced incident impact and is driving proactive self‑healing across hybrid services
ServiceNow Cloud Observability's valuable features include AI agents that can be integrated and triggered with workflows for evaluating and taking the right action in both process and technical aspects. On the process side, it ensures the right approvals are triggered. From the technical aspect, it allows integration for taking relevant action without human intervention, moving towards self-healing. The main benefit of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is real-time data, which helps us move from being reactive to more proactive. By defining and fine-tuning workflows, we were able to implement timely notification and auto-action or auto-remediations. At the same time, if anything involves additional cost or requires intervention, it helps trigger approval notifications, and once approval is received, it timely takes the action. The AI agents help define and fine-tune those workflows further.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Nowadays, we are working with a lot of different customers and our preference is to implement Dynatrace over the other solutions."
"Having the metrics easily understood and easily articulating the information."
"The full stack - Everything from the browser, all the way back to the database, and being able to see everything, and really narrow in very quickly on what is the root cause."
"In terms of one tool, right now I’m seeing Dynatrace can do a lot of things: the entire DevOps, infrastructure, application performance monitoring, all that can be done using just one tool."
"I would give Dynatrace's technical support a 100% rating. I feel like whenever I call or send an email that I get the right person automatically. For the most difficult answers, the most I have to wait is about three days and the answers have been relevant."
"The major improvement was the ability to find errors immediately and predict future failures, or when resources reach the maximum capacity."
"Logs files for JVM transactions help to debug most of the failures."
"We use PurePath to see exactly what the user observed from the web browser to the end of the request to the dialog box. Every step of what they do is very useful for us to diagnose a problem"
"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."
"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."
"The main benefit of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is real-time data, which helps us move from being reactive to more proactive."
"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."
"The UI is very intuitive."
 

Cons

"With Dynatrace we need to upgrade and restart often. New Relic is more stable than Dynatrace."
"I am unable to use Synthetic to automate user login."
"I do not like the performance of the UI. It is really slow."
"We had one issue when we tried to enter one agent and it just does not work. We got to work with the highest level of support, but it took a while to get there."
"I did like the old dashboards, the legacy 6.3 for example; the way we were able to do the dashboarding in the client. I would like to be able to see that in the new version of Dynatrace."
"​Definitely something to be improved is that OneAgent runs as a route, and not all applications want to run as route. Part of the problem is different technology companies will have various rules, regulations, and policies around what can run as a route."
"There is a limitation on timeframe. Now, if you look at the dashboard, it will state five minutes, then 15 minutes, then one hour, then six hours, and finally 24 hours. I would like them to provide a set of options defining the business hour."
"It could be more affordable and therefore, more widely used by including more features like DEM as part of licensing cost rather than an additional expense."
"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."
"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."
"The cost could be reduced or lightweight agents and lightweight modules could be introduced, which would make it much easier to implement."
"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."
"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license issue where if we increase the memory we have to up the licenses. I was unaware of that going in. I thought it was scalable without all the paperwork behind the scenes. ​​"
"The setup costs for Dynatrace are low, however licensing costs are high."
"We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good."
"Financially Dynatrace was a lot more expensive than AppDynamics."
"Dynatrace is very good and it's provided a lot of information, it plays a positive role in making your application up to date in the market. If you want to monitor some applications only, it would be cheaper if you did cloud monitoring, but the price benefit depends on the use case."
"Pricing is still too expensive."
"Time to value was surprisingly fast."
"Our annual costs were about the same for both AppDynamics and Dynatrace."
"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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...
What needs improvement with LightStep?
The cost could be reduced or lightweight agents and lightweight modules could be introduced, which would make it much easier to implement.
What is your primary use case for LightStep?
ServiceNow Cloud Observability's main use case is end-to-end automation starting from the trigger in the cloud. Currently, it focuses more on self-healing and understanding the complete uptime ...
What advice do you have for others considering LightStep?
Regarding security, I unfortunately do not have much hands-on experience. My focus has been majorly on self-healing activities, but given what I have observed, it does provide a good opportunity in...
 

Also Known As

No data available
LightStep
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TD Bank, Zurich North America, Accenture, Macquarie, United Airlines, Raymond James, BT, Vodafone, Air France-KLM, TELUS, American Airlines, Air Canada, ADT, Virgin Money
InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,
Find out what your peers are saying about Dynatrace vs. ServiceNow Cloud Observability and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.