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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
7.4
Number of Reviews
346
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (5th), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd)
Wireshark
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (3rd)
 

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 10.5%, down 13.4% compared to last year.
Wireshark, on the other hand, focuses on Network Troubleshooting, holds 13.9% mindshare, up 11.9% 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

"Being able to drill down into the PurePaths to get to a solution is key for us."
"This solution has helped us to improve application performance and reduce issue-impact with faster resolutions."
"The overall application monitoring ability to do alerts."
"We have configured the alerting so the error or the incident will go to the respective team. Then, the team can contact the user once they see that they have an issue and ask if they can them resolve the issue."
"Being able to get down to the individual code level to see where transactions are taking time. It has helped troubleshoot issues immensely and other tools can't provide this."
"Before we had the tool we had no visibility into the user experience and capturing what was going on inside the browser. We utilized tags so we knew how many times people were doing certain things, but we did not know how the performance was, if users were satisfied with what they were doing, and if we were serving up errors."
"PurePath view of methods and the call stack are extremely valuable for troubleshooting and performance review."
"The most valuable things that we have seen are the user experience and capturing what the users are doing inside the browser."
"It has a good syntax to put the commands in and get information out of."
"It's easy to troubleshoot issues because there's a large online community."
"You can use Wireshark to see the traffic packet format, the IP layers, the fields, and the enabled flags."
"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."
"Wireshark's best feature is that it's adaptive, which means it's the go-to tool for network-related developers."
"The most valuable feature of Wireshark is the ability to choose a destination of flow that has not been working as expected."
"The best part about Wireshark, in my opinion, is its ability to analyze packet capture files."
"Setup is very easy. It's also possible to change source code and compile if you want to change something in the code, because it's free."
 

Cons

"Whenever there is a new version the UI changes, it makes it hard to use, because we are accustomed to the old one."
"This solution would be improved with the addition of annotations for automated custom metrics creation."
"It definitely needs HA, because we have so many applications that are dependent on AppMon that it has been deemed critical. Any downtime, it just affects so many users. So that's one of our key asks for the future."
"They seriously have to improve their Web UI dashboard configuration and SSL timeouts. Their Web UI dashboards are very slow."
"Its needs to focus more on open source areas, like Apache umbrella products and availability motioning areas."
"The only challenge is that it's an extensive tool that requires a significant amount of time to learn."
"The next release I would like to see is especially with external API monitoring. Right now, everything goes into one bucket, but if it were split into which API is failing, that way we wouldn't have to drill down to find out where the failures are."
"There are lots of features to share information, but we need to learn to leverage that, both on the web browser and on the mobile app."
"Sometimes I need to use tcpdump when I need to check the packets on CLI."
"It is difficult to scale this solution."
"The speed of the Internet could be improved, especially its performance."
"The product is great but I wish there were more of an emphasis on the command line tools."
"You need some basic knowledge to work with Wireshark. Maybe it could be more user-friendly just for new users. Just for the new generation."
"In the future, it would be nice to see color coding. It is just black and white."
"The Wireshark search function shows green for a correct search and red for an incorrect search. If there were a way to provide a description about what a search - and the similar ones which are available - can do, while a person is typing it, it would make the product easier to use and simultaneously decrease the learning curve."
"It needs the ability to follow multiple interfaces for specific traffic from different network zones/virtual networks. It would help to understand how any packet is going through the network."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I feel the price is good for what the product does."
"The product is definitely worth taking a look at. Be aware that it is probably more pricey than other options on the market, but there are a lot of capabilities. Dynatrace has an eye toward the future and the computing and monitoring needs that we are gonna need for the cloud. ​"
"We are buying more licenses, because we are seeing more value."
"The product is pricey, but it is feature-rich, which is why we probably haven't looked away from it."
"There is time savings. People's times have been cut in half using this solution because we were previously doing a lot of that manual work. Now, it's a lot more automated, and the data is just there."
"The licensing model is confusing in solutioning clients for the number of hosts needed to deploy."
"Time to value was surprisingly fast."
"If there are no corporate requirements to run Dynatrace Managed (operating it yourself), I would definitely go for the size option. For small and medium-sized companies, the size option is probably the cheapest one. You don't need to look into operating it. You don't need to run hardware. It is pay as you go."
"It's free."
"We are using a freeware version of this solution, so there are no licence costs involved."
"Wireshark is an open-source product, so it's free to use."
"The tool is free."
"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."
"It's a stand-alone tool. If there is a commercial license for it I am unaware of it."
"Wireshark is open source and gives great value and functionality to the network investigation."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
36%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
University
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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: April 2025.
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