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Dynatrace vs Wireshark 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

Dynatrace
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
347
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (10th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (3rd)
Wireshark
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Dynatrace is designed for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability and holds a mindshare of 10.2%, down 13.0% compared to last year.
Wireshark, on the other hand, focuses on Network Troubleshooting, holds 13.4% mindshare, up 11.7% since last year.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Network Troubleshooting
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a comprehensive view by integrating with other monitoring systems
There may be an issue since there are many tools like Splunk involved in network monitoring. From an IP perspective, Dynatrace is performing well. If they want to develop in network monitoring, they can, as it's part of their product line. It's not rocketry, so they can accomplish it. If I, as an SI, look at it from an enterprise perspective, considering the cost from the client, I prefer not to go with multiple systems, as they don't provide a complete 360-degree view. They need to improve on claims about being an enterprise system. The definition of enterprise is loosely used, however, from a holistic security perspective, including infrastructure, network, ports, software, applications, transactions, and databases, there are areas lacking, especially in network monitoring tools.
Vijay Duggal - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides detailed traffic analysis and helps troubleshoot issues
There is a disadvantage when it comes to sampling intervals. While the solution supports sampling as fine as one millisecond, it requires a copy at that interval. My Python script allows me to achieve a granularity of up to ten microseconds, but I can't go beyond that. When dealing with provisioning on both issues, it would be beneficial if I could go down to the microsecond level, if not the nanosecond. Additionally, I've heard from a colleague that Wireshark might be less effective in the voice domain.

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 features are ease of deployment, UI, and collected data. Its deployment is really easy. In just a few hours, you can have a very good outcome, and you can see everything, which is very valuable. It collects a good amount of data."
"Service engineers save a lot of time because they can just go in look at the data and share it with the customer, who has the same view, and say, "Here's an improvement which can be immediately implemented." It's not like a collection of big, multiple findings that are consolidated into one results presentation, then the customer needs to do something. It's more like a continuous performance analysis and improvement process, which is more efficient than those workshops approaches. That's one of the biggest of the advantages that our services team sees because it helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production."
"The geographical view provides a nice visualization of performance on a map."
"We can go back to when a specific user had an issue and trace the entire transaction from the client to the database."
"Ease of problem detection and alerting, visual timeline, and user-sessions are some of the best features of Dynatrace."
"Dynatrace can look into application transactions at the packet level, which pretty much relieves us of the work of manually collecting, analyzing, summarizing, and presenting the data, as we had done in the past."
"Quick availability of multiple aspects of performance from infrastructure to application layers."
"We have not had any stability issues with it at all. This has been the most stable solution that I have worked with."
"It's easy to troubleshoot issues because there's a large online community."
"Wireshark saves a lot of time, especially with network troubleshooting."
"If you're dealing with troubleshooting network, voice issues, or network operations, having a tool like Wireshark to dive into packet details is important. The initial setup is straightforward. Anyone starting out or looking to deploy it on your personal PC or machine can do it easily."
"The filter option provided by Wireshark is its most valuable feature...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The initial setup is simple."
"It gives us the ability to pinpoint problems and to communicate network problems with software and hardware vendors."
"I like the filtering feature as we can filter data easily. This feature is also available in tcpdump, but it's a simple piece of software. Wireshark is more advanced and has many features. It allows you to filter a lot of things. The output can be filtered easily. The most important feature is colorization. If I say, "Okay, this particular SMB protocol in red, it will show me red." It's easy to identify that protocol or capture data."
"Wireshark has a lot of features. It's a powerful tool if you're familiar with it. You can see everything on the network with it."
 

Cons

"Session export for offline analysis, like it was in AppMon, would be also nice."
"As we move into using more AWS native architectures, it should support everything that we want to do. We don't want to adopt another tool."
"What needs improvement in Dynatrace is its dashboard. Creating dashboards in Dynatrace is good, but compared to Grafana, which is integrated with Broadcom DX APM, the resulting dashboard in Dynatrace isn't as clear. The Dynatrace dashboard needs to be more graphic."
"The initial setup was challenging for us. However, it was complex until you grasped the nuances of the product and the building blocks."
"It would be great to have Synthetic automatically ​retrieve what the customer sees on his side."
"It requires manual intervention to uninstall the cloud agent from servers you want it removed from."
"The product could be faster and lighter, especially the rich client which uses many resources."
"More visibility into Python processes."
"A room for improvement in Wireshark is its ease of use for beginners. It could be better. Another room for improvement in the tool is for it to provide more details about the traffic load. At the moment, Wireshark is adequate for me, so there isn't anything I'd like added to it in its next version."
"It is difficult to scale this solution."
"Wireshark's UI isn't easy to handle and doesn't have as nice a view as Omnipeek."
"Wireshark is similar to an OS defense tool, meaning that it runs on an OS such as Ubuntu and Fedora, but I'm unsure if it's compatible with Windows or if it's a straightforward process to run it on Windows. Right now, my team needs to run Wireshark from a dongle to use it, so it's an OS-dependable tool, and that's an area for improvement. I was unable to use Wireshark on Windows, and I couldn't capture it, as I'm unsure how to configure the wireless card into monitoring mode on Windows. The process was straightforward on Linux, but it wasn't the case on Windows OS. It seems Wireshark isn't compatible with all OS. For example, you can analyze the log, and you can analyze it on the Windows server, but you can't do a capture in Windows. Configuring Wireshark for Windows isn't as easy as configuring it for Linux."
"The initial setup depends upon the basics. You need to have a clear understanding of the basics."
"In the future, it would be nice to see color coding. It is just black and white."
"Sometimes I need to use tcpdump when I need to check the packets on CLI."
"It would be better if they offered a hybrid version like My Cloud Control."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The setup costs for Dynatrace are low, however licensing costs are high."
"I think the pricing is at a fair value for what it is."
"The solution is not cheap."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"I feel the price is good for what the product does."
"The cost is somewhat high."
"Always gives good ROI and total cost of ownership."
"Its price is quite high. Although it is worth it, it would be better if its price is reduced. They base their prices around licensing. Their prices are based on agent licensing and consumption licensing. Both of these can be a bit cheaper, but if they are the best in the market, as I consider them to be, I assume that their prices will be higher. They are delivering the product for that price."
"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."
"Wireshark is free software, so you can download it and use it for free with no licensing fees."
"The tool is free."
"Wireshark is free software, so you don't have to pay any licensing fee. Individual people can use it and then donate to Wireshark."
"It's a stand-alone tool. If there is a commercial license for it I am unaware of it."
"It is an open-source solution."
"Wireshark is an open-source product, so it's free to use."
"I am using the free version of this solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Educational Organization
19%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Wireshark?
Wireshark is priced at a medium range, not too high, not too low. The pricing could be more flexible, and they might make it more expensive. That said, compared to other products, it is competitive.
What needs improvement with Wireshark?
The speed of the Internet could be improved, especially its performance. Performance can sometimes be a challenge due to numerous factors.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Comversion, ADP, Talbots
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: June 2025.
861,034 professionals have used our research since 2012.