Dynatrace Reviews

Our primary use case is the consolidation of observability platforms.

Looking at Dynatrace's automation and AI capabilities, automation is generally a great place to start. In products where there has been no observability or a very limited amount, the automation can give a great deal of insight, telling people things that they didn't know that they needed to know.

Davis will do its best to provide root cause analysis, but you, as a human, are still responsible for joining as many of the dots together as possible in order to provide as big a picture as possible. As long as you accept that you still have to do some work, you'll get a good result.

I have not used Dynatrace for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment in this company, but I have had an AWS microservice cluster in the past. Its ability to cope with ephemeral incidences, as Kubernetes usually are, was very good. The fact that we didn't have to manually scale out to match any autoscaling rules on the Kubernetes clusters was very useful. Its representation of them at the time wasn't the best. Other products, Datadog, for example, had a better representation in the actual portal of the SaaS platform. That was about three years ago, and Dynatrace has changed, but I haven't yet reused the Kubernetes monitoring to see if it has improved in that regard.

Given that Dynatrace is a single platform, as opposed to needing multiple tools, the ease of management is good because there is only one place to go in order to manage things. You deal with all of the management in one place.

The unified platform has allowed our teams to better collaborate. In particular, because of the platform consolidation, using Dynatrace has made the way we work generally more efficient. We don't have to hop between seven different monitoring tools. Instead, there's just one place to go. It's increased the level of observability throughout the business, where we now have development looking at their own metrics through APM, rather than waiting until there's a problem or an issue and then getting a bug report and then trying to recreate it.

It's increased visibility for the executive and the senior management, where they're getting to see dashboards about what's happening right now across the business or across their products, which didn't used to exist. There's the rate at which we can monitor new infrastructure, or applications, or custom devices. We had a rollout this week, which started two days ago, and by yesterday afternoon, I was able to provide dashboards giving feedback on the very infrastructure and applications that they had set the monitoring up on the day before.

As we've only been using Dynatrace in production for the past month in this company, the estimate as to the measurement of impact isn't ready yet. We need more time, more data, and more real use cases as opposed to the synthetic outages we've been creating. In my experience, Dynatrace is generally quite accurate for assessing the level of severity. Even in scenarios where you simply rely on the automation without any custom thresholds or anything like that, it does a good job of providing business awareness as to what is happening in your product.

Dynatrace has a single agent that we need to install for automated deployment and discovery. It uses up to four processes and we found it especially useful in dealing with things like old Linux distros. For example, Gentoo Linux couldn't handle TLS 1.2 for transport and thus, could not download the agent directly. We only had to move the one agent over SSH to the Gentoo server and install it, which was much easier than if we'd had to repeat that two or three times.

The automated discovery and analysis features have helped us to proactively troubleshoot products and pinpoint the underlying root cause. There was one particular product that benefited during the proof of concept period, where a product owner convened a war room and it took about nine hours of group time to try and reason out what might be the problem by looking at the codebase and other components. Then, when we did the same exercise for a different issue but with Dynatrace and the war room was convened, we had a likely root cause to work from in about 30 minutes.

In previous companies where the deployment has been more mature, it was definitely allowing DevOps to concentrate on shipping quality rather than where I am now, which is deploying Dynatrace. The biggest change in that organization was the use of APM and the insights it gave developers.

Current to the deployment of Dynatrace, we adopted a different methodology using Scrum and Agile for development. By following the Scrum pattern of meetings, we were able to observe the estimated time in the planning sessions for various tasks. It started to come down once the output of the APM had been considered. Ultimately, Dynatrace APM provided the insight that allowed the developers to complete the task faster.

The most valuable features for us right now are the auto-instrumentation, the automatic threshold creation, and the Davis AI-based root cause analysis, along with the dashboarding for executives and product owners.

These features are important because of the improved time it takes for deployment. There is a relatively small team deploying to a relatively large number of products, and therefore infrastructure types and technology stacks. If I had to manually instrument this, like how it is accomplished using Nagios or Zabbix, for example, it would take an extremely long time, perhaps years, to complete on my own. But with Dynatrace, I can install the agent, and as long as there is a properly formed connection between the agent and the SaaS platform, then I know that there is something to begin working with immediately and I can move on to the next and then review it so that the time to deployment is much shorter. It can be completed in months or less.

We employ real user monitoring, session replay, and synthetic monitoring functionalities. We have quite a few web applications and they generally have little to no observability beyond the infrastructure on which the applications run. The real user monitoring has been quite valuable in demonstrating to product owners and managers how the round-trips, or the key user actions, or expensive queries, for example, have been impacting the user experience.

By combining that with session replay and actually watching through a problematic session for a user, they get to experience the context as well as the raw data. For a developer, for example, it's helpful that you can tell them that a particular action is slow, or it has a low Apdex score, for example, but if you can show them what the customer is experiencing and they can see state changes in the page coupled with the slowness, then that gives a much richer diagnostic experience.

We use the synthetics in conjunction either with the real user monitoring or as standalone events for sites that either aren't public-facing, such as internal administration sites, or for APIs where we want to measure things in a timely manner. Rather than waiting for seasonal activity from a user as they go to work, go home, et cetera, we want it at a constant rate. Synthetics are very useful for that.

The benefit of Dynatrace's visualization capabilities has been more apparent for those that haven't used Dynatrace before or not for very long. When I show a product owner a dashboard highlighting the infrastructure health and any problems, or the general state of the infrastructure with Data Explorer graphs on it, that's normally a very exciting moment for them because they're getting to see things that they could only imagine before.

In terms of triaging, it has been useful for the sysadmins and the platform engineering team, as they normally had to rely on multiple tools up until now. We have had a consolidation of observability tools, originally starting with seven different monitoring platforms. It was very difficult for our sysadmins as they watched a data center running VMware with so many tools. Consolidating that into Dynatrace has been the biggest help, especially with Davis backing you up with RCAs.

The Smartscape topology has also been useful, although it is more for systems administrators than for product owners. Sysadmins have reveled in being able to see the interconnectedness of various infrastructures, even in the way that Dynatrace can discover things to which it isn't directly instrumented. When you have an agent on a server surrounded by other servers, but they do not have an agent installed, it will still allow a degree of discovery which can be represented in the Smartscape topology and help you plan where you need to move next or just highlight things that you hadn't even realized were connected.

The user interface for the management functions is not particularly intuitive for even the most common features. For example, you can't share dashboards en masse. You have to open each dashboard, go into settings, change the sharing options, go back to dashboards, et cetera. It's quite laborious. Whereas, Datadog does a better job in the same scenario of being a single platform of making these options accessible.

User and group management in the account settings for user permissions could be improved.

The way that Dynatrace deals with time zones across multiple geographies is quite a bone of contention because Dynatrace only displays the browser's local time. This is a problem because when I'm talking with people in Canada, which I do every day, they either have to run, on the fly, time recalculations in their heads to work out the time zone we're actually talking about as relevant to them, or I have to spin up a VM in order to open the browser with the time zone set to their local one in order to make it obvious to them without them having to do any mental arithmetic.

Personally, I have been using Dynatrace since November of 2018. At the company I am at, we have been using it for approximately four months. It was used as a PoC for the first three months, and it has been in production for the past month.

The SaaS product hasn't had any downtime while I've been at my current company. I've experienced downtime in the past, but it's minimal.

To this point, I've not had any problems with the scalability, aside from ensuring that you have provisioned enough units. However, that is another point that is related to pricing.

Essentially, its ability to scale and continue to work is fine. On the other hand, its ability to predict the required scalability in order to purchase the correct number of various units is much harder.

Talking about Dynatrace as a company, the people I've spoken to have always been responsive. The support is always available, partly because of our support package. As a whole, Dynatrace has always been a very responsive entity, whether I've been dealing with them in North America or in the UK.

We have used several other solutions including Grafana, Prometheus, Nagios, Zabbix, New Relic, AWS CloudWatch, Azure App Insights, and AppDynamics. We switched to Dynatrace in order to consolidate all of our observability platforms.

Aside from differences that I discuss in response to other questions, other differences would come from the product support rather than the product itself. Examples of this are Dynatrace University, the DT One support team, the post-sales goal-setting sessions, and training.

We're yet to have our main body of training, but we're currently scheduled to train on about 35 modules. Whereas, last year, when I rolled out Datadog, the training wasn't handled in the same way. It was far more on request for specific features. Whereas, this is an actual curriculum in order to familiarize end users with the product.

In my experience, the initial setup has been straightforward, but I've done it a few times. When I compare it to tools like Nagios, Zabbix, Grafana, and Prometheus, it is very straightforward. This is largely for two reasons.

First, they're not SaaS applications, whereas Dynatrace is, and second, the amount of backend configuration you have to do in preparation for those tools is much higher. That said, if we were to switch to Dynatrace Managed rather than Dynatrace SaaS, I imagine that the level of complexity for Dynatrace would rise significantly. As such, my answer is biased towards Dynatrace SaaS.

In my previous company, it allowed a very small team to manage what was a very fast-moving tech stack. In my current company, it is still very early.

The consolidation of tools due to implementing Dynatrace has saved us money, although it's tricky to measure the impact. The list price of Dynatrace was more than the previous list price spend on monitoring tools because the various platforms had been provided as open-source tools, were provided through hosting companies, or had been acquired as part of acquisitions of other companies.

The open-source applications that we used included Grafana, Prometheus, Nagios, and Zabbix. New Relic through Carbon60 in Canada, as an example, was provided through a hosting company. Also, we acquired a Canadian company or had been acquired as part of acquisitions of other companies, AppDynamics, in a Canadian company, for example, with us in the budget of the previous company rather than our own company.

The hope was that Dynatrace through consolidation would release the material cost of the administrative overheads of tools like Prometheus and Grafana and the cost of hosting infrastructure for solutions like Nagios, Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana, et cetera. This means that it is more of an upstream cost-saving, where we would be saving human effort and hosting costs by consolidating into a SaaS platform, which is pretty much all-in-one.

Dynatrace's pricing for their consumption units is rather arcane compared to some of the other tools, thus making forward-looking calculations based on capacity planning quite hard. This is because you have to do your capacity planning, work out what that would mean in real terms, then translate that into Dynatrace terms and try to ensure you have enough Davis units, synthetics units, DEM units, and host units.

Catching those and making sure you've got them all right for anything up to a year in advance is quite hard. This means that its ability to scale and continue to work is fine but predicting the correct number of various units to purchase is much harder.

The premium support package is available for an additional charge.

At this point, we have not yet integrated Dynatrace with our CICD tool, which is Azure DevOps. However, in the future, our plan is to provide post-release measurements and automated rollbacks when necessary. Even further down the road, there's ServiceNow on the roadmap, which we're currently bringing in from an Australian acquisition in order to try and promote the ITSM side of the business.

There is nothing specific that has been implemented so far, although there have been general degrees of automation. When we get Agile, DevOps, and ServiceNow in place, the degree of automation will increase dramatically. For example, automated rollbacks in the case of deployment failure or change management automation through the current state of the target system are being included in the ServiceNow automation.

The automation that has been done to alleviate the effort spent on manual tasks is still very light because I'm the only person doing the work. I generally don't have time to do the ancillary tasks at the moment, such as creating automations. It's mostly a case of deploying instruments, observing, and moving on. When we come back to revisit it, then we'll look at the automations.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Dynatrace is to make sure you talk constantly with your Dynatrace representatives during the PoC, or trial phase because there is invariably far more that Dynatrace can do than you realize. We only know what we know. I'm not suggesting that you let Dynatrace drive but instead, constantly provide the best practices. You will achieve faster returns afterward, whether that's labor savings, or recovery time, or costs from downtime. Basically, you want to make sure that you leverage the expertise of the company.

In summary, this is a very good product but they need to sort out their user interface issues and provide a more logical experience.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for user happiness monitoring. Basically, we look at how well we'll use it to run some arbitrary metrics over the website's behavior. I'm trying to understand how the user experience is going. Therefore, we're doing user experience monitoring. We're also using it for monitoring and listening, where we fire off specific test cases against that site with it. 

Typically, it does quite a lot. We can also do health monitoring of the actual service hosts, and servers, and dependencies.

Dynatrace provides us with the ability to actually map out the whole ecosystem and our websites and services that exist within it. You have that whole picture even though it's now a distributed network of products and things. We use Dynatrace to just monitor the health of that ecosystem and manage, and identify where the dependencies are. In doing that, we can also look at hotspot monitoring, so that we can determine bottlenecks within our system. We can use it to follow metrics to help us figure out how fast things should occur, to identify slowdowns of speed - or potential slowdowns - which can cause us to have those little mysterious bugs where suddenly the user experience drops out because something three or four levels down is not behaving itself.

Basically, it's a lot of use cases based on the user experience. There's lots of user monitoring. Lots of looking at where they're entering the sites from, where they're exiting the sites from. The behaviors can sometimes help us detect failures in our overall user experience. It's a lot of user experience management that's assisted via AI. We can use AI to develop, identify, establish, buy, and build trends so that we can look forward to purchasing requirements. Ideally, the AI will make it that we can identify where the system is going to fail in the future. We're still working on that side of things, but we're getting there.

The ability to play back individual user sessions is very helpful. I can look at what people actually do when they interact with our product when I use that website.

The solution has a lot of use cases based around the user experience that helps us make a better product.

The AI is great. In the future, we hope it will help us predict problems before they arise.

They provide a lot of quite useful training equipment for training materials for it. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The solution is very easy to manage.

You can set access fairly easily so users can see only parts that are relevant to their roles.

The solution is quite stable.

The product scales well.

Technical support has always been quick to respond. 

It does do nice dashboards.

Due to the fact that you doing a lot, you have a problem with the learning curve. We're really looking for ways to make this product more accessible. That comes back to training and also having the information within the system presented well. Right now, quite a lot of time is spent learning the idioms of the system.

That said, they work very hard on taking the edge off it. However, the reality is that it will take time to learn. It does take time to come up to speed with this product. Most of the problems I've had are just a lack of familiarity with the product so far.

I haven't pushed it far enough to discover that my answers are not met by the product fully. I still need time to explore it before giving it a full review. 

I've personally been using the solution for about seven months or so. It's been less than a year so far.

The stability of the product is very good. It's rock-solid. there are no bugs or glitches. We haven't had any issues at all. 

The solution can scale quite well.

Basically, the way it works is you put in it, you put an agent into each of the deployments you're using it to monitor, and then it just gathers data. It doesn't really impact the operations of things. The majority of its work is actually done by the parent in the cloud.

We have one or two administrators and various people in the company have various levels of access. We have quite a fine-grained control over what people can see, however, at the same time, we can provide some useful information to them to know what they need so that they can know what they actually do need to know to do their jobs.

We haven't been in touch with technical support lately. However, when we have contacted them in the past, they have been helpful and responsive. We're quite pleased with their capabilities so far. 

I wasn't actually involved in the deployment itself. It was a case of just coming in and seeing it was available for various use cases.

However, looking back, it's a relatively straightforward process. It's often as simple as installing an agent with your deployment, and it takes off from there. My understanding is the deployment was very seamless and quite quick.

There's definitely a maintenance contract with it. It's a case where you subscribe to it, and they provide regular updates. You've actually subscribed to a service and there's regular maintenance happening organically.

We got a lot of support from the vendor. There was a lot of ongoing support from the vendor at that time.

The solution is a SaaS. If we were to stop paying the subscription entirely, the service would end shortly afterward, based on the contractual arrangements we have with them. Assuming we were not to renew our contract, the facility would just go away.

I was not a party to the actual license negotiations or costings. I can't fully answer to the exact cost, to any degree of certainty, other than to say it's not a free product. It's a business. I believe that we have been getting value for money. We do have to watch how we use it. We have to watch that the costs are not substantial. We do restrict where it's actually deployed and how it's deployed. That's part of our management strategy and that's kind of informed by a budget. That said, I'm not aware of the actual budget numbers.

App Dynamics is a product in a similar space. 

It compares well to other instrumentation tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.

We're a customer.

We tend to use the most up-to-date or stable version of the solution. 

I would recommend Dynatrace as an application performance management tool. It does its job quite well. I am able to see a wide range of the application I'm looking at, and what other applications it is interacting with. We do get quite a lot of information, which allows us to better understand what's going on. I would recommend exploring an IPM tool. I haven't used one of the IPM tools yet. 

I'd be interested to see how it handles a security event or security incident and event management. That is a bit of a gap for me at the moment. I'd love to know if it does that. There are other tools available, however, it is kind of nice to be able to sort of stop in one spot.  

I need to learn more about the tool. I was kind of running up against my limitations with the tool, rather than the limitations of the tool itself.

I'd rate it seven out of ten, simply due to the fact that I still need to explore it more. 

We use it for infrastructure monitoring and real user monitoring on our website, i.e., monitoring how users interact with our website and digital experience. We use it to track if our website is up using synthetic monitoring, which we use for our website and mobile app. We use Dynatrace to track complete observability through our infrastructure to our digital apps. 

We are able to share information easier and improve user experience.

When a ticket is logged in Dynatrace, it automatically goes to the correct support team. There is no manual intervention, which saves time. We are saving probably $30,000 to $40,000 annually because we are not employing several people to do this work.

Dynatrace’s ability to help us visualize and understand our infrastructure, and to do triage, is very good. It provides a Smartscape view, which gives us an overall view of the topology. When a problem is raised, it draws out where the issue lies and also suggests the solution. This brings down mean time to restore very quickly, helping the resolution.

The fact that the solution is a unified platform has very much changed the way our teams work and collaborate. It brings teams together, because they are able to screen share, especially during COVID. Then, we are able to talk about the exact same thing.

The automated discovery and analysis help us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint the underlying root cause. If we are seeing error messages in our website for users who are seeing an error page, then we are able to go into the user's session, look at PurePath and the code, and see the reason why this is occurring in the back-end code.

If a user experiences an issue on their mobile, e.g., where they can't generate a ticket nor generate a benefit from our application, then it will automatically log a ticket. That will then feed into a database where the customer is contacted proactively.

Dynatrace uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery. This helps our operations because we can bake that into an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and roll it out.

The solution gives us 360-degree visibility of the user experience across channels. This is important in our environment. This helps us meet business goals because we are able to interact and serve as many teams. So, product managers and project managers are able to give metrics or data feedback to any team suitable from a developer to the C-level.

The key feature that stands out is being able to track real users within our website. We can feed this back to the developers and project teams, shaping what we develop next. This allows us to be proactive.

The AI capabilities are very good. This allows us to automate what we call AIOps. Any incident or alert raised from Dynatrace automatically goes into our ITSM tool. This saves a lot of money, probably $30,000 to $40,000 a year.

We have the Kubernetes module enabled. We can track pods, namespaces, and the performance of them. Dynatrace's functionality in this area is very impressive. It allows us to see the pure topology of our infrastructure and how the microservices interact. It also gives us a one-stop shop for checking the health of Kubernetes.

We offer Dynatrace as a service. Anyone in the business can use it. So, management is pretty easy.

We use the Dynatrace AI to assess impact. Because it links to real users, it is generally pretty correct in terms of when it raises an incident. We determine the severity by how many users it is affecting, then we use it as business justification to put a priority on that alert.

We use the solution’s real user monitoring, Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring functionalities. We use synthetic monitoring for reporting to get a definitive answer if anything is up or down. We will use sessions to check the health of our website and measure user experience. We also use it for feedback on a release and how it is affecting our end users. We use Session Replay to investigate issues that our users are experiencing.

I would like a testing module focused on quality gates.

I have been using Dynatrace for two years.

The stability is very impressive. We haven't had any downtime.

No maintenance is required because it is a SaaS solution.

Because it is an automated deployment, you can scale it up quite easily.

We have scaled the solution to AWS. We have not encountered any limitations in scaling to this cloud-native environment.

There are maybe more than 100 people working on Dynatrace: product managers, project managers, architects, developers, C-level, IT operations, service delivery managers, service managers, and testing.

The technical support is very good. They are always there and able to answer any query.

We previously used AppMon.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just install it, then automatically put it on. We did this in one big bang overnight, taking probably five hours.

We deployed it data center by data center. We grouped the application service together, then we had an offshore team sign off the health of the service before we went live. We also did a thorough testing strategy two weeks beforehand. So, we installed it on all test services and made sure there weren't any negative impacts by installing the agent.

We have seen ROI through the cost savings of manual work. Automation saves a lot of time.

As a result of the automated discovery and analysis, 60% to 70% of our manual work has been automated.

Dynatrace helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. This frees up time for developers and also provides constant feedback for continuous improvement.

The solution has decreased both our mean time to identification and mean time to repair by about 70%.

We have used Dynatrace to identify problems and trends. Identifying problems and trends has allowed us to fix underlying problems, which then leads to more uptime.

Dynatrace has decreased our time to market with new innovations/capabilities by about 50%.

It has saved us money through the consolidation of tools.

The pricing and licensing are fairly competitive.

We also briefly looked at AppDynamics. We decided on Dynatrace because of PurePaths, which provides the code that goes between applications and the service. This has provided overall observability.

You need to plan how it will be consumed within the company and assign a product owner to make sure uptake is there.

We have 100% adoption. Everyone who needs to use it, uses it.

I would rate Dynatrace as a nine out of 10. 

Dynatrace is a very good solution to monitor both application performance and the underlying infrastructure. It's good to analyze all the relationships with Smartscape technology. It's very useful to understand all the dynamic relationships of the application stack, including all the hardware and dependent components. We always use the latest version. 

We deploy it on-prem and on cloud. The SaaS solution is deployed on AWS.

The infrastructure manager or application or database manager will be using this solution. You can also have a CIO or CFO type of dashboard since there's business value and you can monitor the components. You can decide what is the total output provided by those applications.

Smartscape is a valuable feature. They also have a technology named PurePath. PurePath is the distributed tracing data. Previously, we called it distributed tracing. Including all the stacks, you have the full visibility of your solution, the impact of the hardware, and all the operating system dependencies. You can analyze if you have any software change which has impacted your performance.

They're doing vulnerability assessments of the application stack by using OneAgent. It's a never-ending story if you are trying to be sure your application is also secure. So, they could improve in that area, but they have started doing that.

They could definitely add additional components since the technology is driving from different perspectives. So, they should follow up with all the new components and new versions of the suite.

The price could be lower.

I've been using Dynatrace for two years.

I haven't seen any instability. Even their SaaS platform is always up and running. We haven't seen any issues on-prem since their components are already clustered. You can implement multiple servers to have the solution.

It's very scalable for tens or hundreds of servers. We didn't see any scalability issue. Some customers have over 10,000 applications monitored by Dynatrace.

We had several calls to their support organization, but we have had a very good response from them. Even the Mission Control functionality within the solution is handling most of the log collection. They can reach your server to understand the situation, and they can do a dynamic upgrade of the solution. So, it's very good and very powerful.

I would rate them 5 out of 5.

I'm using alternatives in several customer cases. Dynatrace is the best solution in the market, but because of the price restrictions and also the relationship of vendors, we use other selections in certain environments.

Setup is very easy, and it's easy to implement. I would rate setup 5 out of 5.

Since I'm representing different use cases and different customers, we see different needs. For all of them, including having a SaaS-based approach or having on-prem deployment, it's always a matter of minutes to get some results. The amount of servers is always changing. But we are mostly targeting SaaS customers who have hundreds or thousands of servers for their application stack.

I'm the business development manager and also the pre-sales of the solution in our company. I'm mostly doing the POCs and also leading the implementation since it's very easy. Mostly, I'm in front of our sales and also including the implementation timeframe as the customer success manager for the customers. 

The amount of people needed for deployment and maintenance depends on the size of your environment. If your environment is not up-to-date, your environment is not handled by the operations team. This is not the case for Dynatrace.

Our customers have seen ROI. It's very high. I would rate it 5 out of 5.

Dynatrace is usually paid on a yearly basis. You can also have an upfront three-year contract and pay each year, and you will have better pricing. Pricing is always dependent on the industry and the region. Since we are in Turkey, we have a very big push from customers for the discount levels. It always depends on the customer and their project situation.

There are additional costs to the standard licensing fees. If it's a SaaS-based approach, then all the platform cost is included. But if it's on-prem, you have some additional costs. Their pricing structure is a little different if you are using it on-prem without Mission Control.

I would rate them 4 out of 5 for pricing.

Our customers evaluate other solutions like New Relic APM. If they need to have it on-prem, they are mostly including Instana and sometimes Cisco AppDynamics.

Dynatrace has great output and very successful implementation in most cases, including the microservices, the new technology components, and the monolithic architectures of classic Java and .NET applications. They are very good technically but usually very expensive. That's why customers are always evaluating other alternatives to understand what is the final cost of the project.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

My advice to those looking to implement this solution is to include Dynatrace in their evaluation and try to understand if the other solutions can have similar results with their footprint. It depends on the environment. If it's mostly a newer environment like microservices and just Kubernetes or that type of environment, they can also have some outputs with Instana. But if it's monolithic and there's old stuff in their environment, they can have some outputs with AppDynamics. 

Dynatrace includes all of the technologies from old to new. They are very powerful. So, I strongly suggest having them in the evaluation period.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We use Dynatrace both on-premises and in the cloud. Our use cases involve monitoring application performance. We are also able to see how the underlying infrastructure is performing.

This monitoring capability gives us the ability to measure the end-user experience.

We have other use cases, as well, but this is a summary of what we do with it.

There are several features that we find very valuable.

The setup is automated, so you don't have to do any configuration. There is very little manual intervention required.

Once it captures the data, it is able to dynamically analyze the packets and determine a probable route. This is a feature that we use very heavily.

Support for cloud-based environments needs to be improved. There is a challenge when it comes to monitoring cloud-native applications. This means that we have to use other tools that we integrate with Dynatrace. If there were another approach to monitoring things automatically then it would be a fantastic feature to add.

Some of the results that we were being given by the AI engine were not a proper output based on what the data input was.

These days, we are seeing that AIOps is becoming more predominant. As such, I would like to see more of the features in Dynatrace, expanding it from a purely monitoring solution into a full-fledged AIOps solution.

I have been working with Dynatrace for approximately nine years.

With respect to stability, this is not a system that gives users access to the low level. Rather, they interact with the agents. That said, we have had some stability issues with a number of our agent deployments for our customers. One example is that the AI engine was not giving the proper output, based on what the input was.

This is a scalable product but you ought to have multiple instances to scale it.

We have worked with their technical support team on a couple of specific areas, and I would rate them a four out of five.

We have not had to contact support for applications that use simple technology, like Java. However, when it is a complex system such as an ERP or a cloud-based application, sometimes the integration requires that we create specific plugins to capture the data. These are the types of things that we have worked with technical support to resolve.

We have worked with various competitors' tools. Some of these are AppDynamics, New Relic, Datadog, Splunk, and others. There are a lot of other tools on the market.

Nowadays, we are working with a lot of different customers and our preference is to implement Dynatrace over the other solutions. The three main reasons for this are the features in general, the ease of implementation, and specifically for the AI capabilities.

The initial setup is straightforward, although it depends on whether the application enrollment is heterogeneous or complex. The initial planning can take some time but the actual installation and setup is not a big process.

The number of staff required for deployment depends on how many applications we're going to configure. If it's only a few applications then you don't need many people. However, if a customer tells us they have a hundred applications that need to be installed in a month's time then obviously, we need more people to help with the deployment.

As product integrators, we deploy this product with our in-house team. We have a good set of people who are trained and certified in Dynatrace.

Over the time that I have used this product, I have worked with several versions. I am now working on the latest one.

The advice that I typically give to my clients is that you shouldn't think that it will do everything. In order to implement it properly, we need to clearly understand what are your specific use cases are, and then work on those.

Use cases can be related to an environment, a technology, or a platform. If it's a cloud-native service, for example, then you won't be able to use Dynatrace because it can't even be installed. You won't get anything out of that. This is an example of how it is not suitable for every situation. The feasibility depends on what you want to use cases are.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Regarding the use case for Dynatrace, currently, my company is working on a UK-based project in the telecom industry. I'm working as one of the leads on the Dynatrace side. The project has three vendors supporting it as it's a massive project.

My role in the project is installing new agents, giving support for any BAU issues that arise, and creating dashboards. My company works with different vendors, such as IBM and TCS. It's the vendors that support RUM (real user monitoring) and licensing. On the other hand, my company handles agent deployments and gives that over to the application team. Whenever there's an issue, I assist in finding out the root cause and fulfilling requests such as creating new dashboards, customizing dashboards, etc.

One of the most valuable features of Dynatrace is that it offers good visibility. It's better than other APM tools. You're not required to use a different technology when you have Dynatrace because it will work whether you're hosting it on Windows or Linux.

For example, Dynatrace can do full-stack monitoring for a particular server if you use it on the Windows platform. Whatever application is running, you can monitor it thoroughly, even the services, processes, and environment.

I also find the minimal configuration and one-time deployment of Dynatrace valuable and that you can do both infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring on Dynatrace. You can also restrict the feature. For example, if you don't want to do infrastructure monitoring, you can limit that feature.

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.

Since I'm not using the latest version of Dynatrace, I cannot share what additional feature I'd like to see from the solution. I would need to use the latest version first to see if there's anything I'd like added to it.

I've been working with Dynatrace for the last three years, and I'm still using it.

Dynatrace is a very stable solution.

Dynatrace is a scalable solution.

My team reaches out to the Dynatrace technical support team whenever there's a connectivity issue, an issue with dashboard creation, or a log that needs clarification. I used to contact the vendor via email and create a request for the Dynatrace support team.

Support is good, but it needs a faster response, so I'd give it an eight out of ten.

Positive

I prefer Dynatrace over other APM solutions because it's the best in the market, except when compared to the visualizations in the Grafana dashboard. Dynatrace has a host-based deployment, so unlike other solutions that require you to create supporting files and packages based on the application and server, in Dynatrace, as long as the application runs on Windows or Linux, that's it. You don't need to gather files or do anything else. Other APM tools require you to select the application type, and then you need to download the right package. You need compatibility when you use other APM solutions, which is a big headache, unlike Dynatrace, so I like Dynatrace better.

Dynatrace is easy to deploy. It won't take more than two minutes to deploy one agent, but getting approval, summarizing the changes, and the change request concerning the service ticket getting approved is what's taking longer.

I deployed Dynatrace, so it was an in-house deployment.

A different team handles the licensing for Dynatrace.

I evaluated Grafana and Broadcom DX APM.

I'm working with Dynatrace. I'm using an older version of the solution.

Within the company, eight people use Dynatrace.

The solution is straightforward to maintain.

Even if I have three and a half years of experience with Dynatrace and a total of eleven years of experience with other APM solutions, my only advice to new users or anyone looking into implementing Dynatrace is that it's a good tool. However, I still need to dig deeper into the solution to give more advice.

My rating for Dynatrace is ten out of ten.

We have quite a big application that is used by almost every single person living in this country. This application is quite mission-critical. So, it was very important to detect problems as soon as they appear anywhere in the application. Dynatrace was able to show us the problems immediately without even knowing the application, code, etc. It showed us all the problems, and we have been able to present reports and solve problems very quickly.

The agent deployment is the most valuable. You don't need to do any configuration. You just deploy the agents, and it can automatically detect your infrastructure. That was the greatest feature that we saw in Dynatrace. If there is any database, it can detect it automatically and present everything to you.

It required minimal setting, and after we deployed a couple of agents, the very next day, we had the full picture of the internals of the application, and all the problems were visible straight away to us. There was no need to go and search and do a couple of things. It was quite impressive.

When it comes to monitoring, we did the integration with VMware vCenter, and we were able to see some good stuff. The VMware vCenter integration was really great, but what we really missed was the integration with the network management stuff such as Cisco ACI. We wanted to see integration in that area, but it was not provided by Dynatrace. So, the main feature for us is integration with things like Cisco ACI. If they can bring that one in, with vCenter in there, it would be a total solution. It would be absolutely incomparable to anything else in the market.

We used Dynatrace almost six months ago. It was the latest version at that time.

It is extremely reliable.

We didn't have to contact them because it was so great. The solution was taking care of itself. For example, if there was any problem, we would shut it down, and the next day, when you try to figure it out, it would have got resolved by itself. That was quite impressive. So, we didn't have to call technical support at all.

There is absolutely no configuration that you need from any technical person. Our engineers are very junior, and they don't really know how to configure an agent or play with the configuration file. They're not familiar with that. We just deployed the agents, and these agents went and detected which is the application server, where are the logs, and what are the processes. 

We approached them and told them we want to try it. They were very cooperative. They sent us a link to download the software and the license. We did everything ourselves. They just came to do a quick onsite demo of how things work, but we had already figured out ourselves how it works. So, it was quite interesting.

We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good.

We have been a long-time user of Broadcom CA APM. In addition to Dynatrace, we tried Elastic and AppDynamic. 

Dynatrace gave us the license for around six months. We were quite impressed with it. It was very impressive, but unfortunately, due to financial reasons and the network management interface integration, the management decided to go with Cisco. We got a better deal with Cisco, and it was bundled with some of the other stuff that they were looking for, such as network monitoring, network management, etc. Our manager really wanted to see the network management interface integration, and it was available in AppDynamic, and that's why they went with it, but if it was for me, I would have gone with Dynatrace. So, we got a good deal with Cisco and went with AppDynamics. They've just bundled the whole solution and given it to us. We are standardizing on AppDynamic right now.

It is the best solution in the market. I can't believe the people classify it at the same level as the other leaders on Gartner Quadrant. It is way advanced than anything else. You can't find anything that is exactly like this.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 because it is just missing the network management interface integration. I would rate all other solutions that I've seen a six out of 10.

It tells me everything I need to know. It tells me what the transactions are. The AI provides you with advancements or degradations in what is happening. 

It gives me visibility into everything, from transactional logs to services and processes to the OneAgent installed on the box, which tells me it's talking to systems that are in development and it shouldn't be.

The most important takeaway is simply the compute. Simply understanding how much, or, the resource adoption across the board. Back in the day, for example, I would need 128 gigs of RAM to run SQL. You don't need that any longer. Having the performance and true metrics of what's going on, as well as scaling your environment to its optimal performance.

Dynatrace works perfectly.

Having OneAgent is the most valuable feature of Dyantrace, as well as the monitoring.

What is web interaction as it relates to Synergy, or when it comes to using web-based, phone-based, or apps published on end-user devices, it's fantastic in terms of performance, and code. Even if you run the release and discover that the update you just released is causing a degradation in performance, auto-release will restore the old code without missing a beat.

I believe that something related to IoT devices should be improved.

I have been using Dynatrace since 2018. It's been four and a half years.

We are using both a SaaS and an on-premises version.

It is both on-premises and hybrid.

They are hosted by Google, Microsoft Azure, as well as AWS.

Dynatrace is a stable solution. It's rock solid. We have never had an issue.

Dynatrace is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We have an application, management, and support teams looking into things. We have our help desk and service desk looking at various dashboards. Certain dashboards are being examined by our developers. It is frequently used by between 60 and 80 people.

I believe we are currently using all of the functions and features. It's operational, it's production, it's living and breathing.

I would rate the technical support a four out of five.

Positive

We were looking at Dynatrace at the time, and then there was AppDynamics or something like that, I believe, which Cisco eventually purchased. Dynatrace's maturity level at the time far outstripped that of anything else on the market.

In 2018 it was a superior product.

The initial setup is straightforward. I'll be up and monitoring in four hours. The on-premises installation was a little more difficult due to network firewalls and so on. Overall, it went well.

This solution can be deployed and maintained by four people.

For us, the most important thing was to get OneAgent out everywhere. Once we had the OneAgent in place, we began building out, and understanding what applications are present, and start developing the monitoring aspects. Not just from conventional RAM CPU calculations, but truly looking at the applications, and examining the Java functions, as well as the MongoDB functions.

Having all of that information and being able to create dashboards to communicate it not only to the higher-ups but also to the developers doing the development, who must understand that they must be very smart with their code.

We are a consulting company. Within our organization, we have a Dynatrace division. However, for this installation, in particular, we collaborated with Dynatrace on product implementation.

We saw a return on investment. The downtime has been reduced, which is significant in and of itself.

I would rate the return on investment a five out of five.

I am not aware of the licensing fees.

We evaluated AppDynamics.

I would recommend following the instructions. It's easy to understand.

Nothing is very perfect. I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.