Dynatrace Reviews

We are mainly using Dynatrace right now to monitor what we call our customer-facing applications and our middle layer applications. We have Hybris Commerce and Sitecore, and our middle layer is made up of BizTalk. Therefore, we are using Dynatrace to monitor Hybris, as Dynatrace is a gold partner for Hybris. That is how we picked Dynatrace.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what the benefits are yet because we are not live with our Dynatrace monitored software applications yet. Our go-live date is in October. 

Right now, even before the go-live, I see the value because our ecosystem is pretty complex. We have applications above our middleware layer and then applications that are below the middleware layer, which are all 30 to 40 year old ERP applications, which are not Oracle nor SAP. Then, we have other custom applications that we have built which we need to connect. When there is a performance problem that comes up visibly to the customer above the middleware layer, most often the reason is not in these applications. It is in what we call the enterprise applications. Judging that, knowing that, and where to go to fix what has been very valuable even without going live. I am waiting to go live and see where the value is. 

I love how Dynatrace can hook on at the code level, then tell me all the details that I need. For example:

• Which query to the HANA database is executing, and how many times?
• Where exactly is the bottleneck when it comes to Hybris Commerce?

They need better infrastructure monitoring. New Relic is beating them for infrastructure monitoring. Come on! They have to pick up the pace for infrastructure. I do not need to have Microsoft SCOM, Dynatrace, and Splunk. Now, I have Microsoft SCOM for infrastructure, Dynatrace for application monitoring and performance monitoring, and Splunk for log monitoring.

Why? Why do I need Splunk? Why can't Dynatrace get into machine data? 

They can either go buy Splunk, or at least get into the log monitoring side of things as effective as Splunk does it. 

The siloed monitoring tools that we use and we have still in place for monitoring basic infrastructure. They do not monitor an application at the code level for the software side of it. Therefore, it is more, "My server is out," or "My virtual memory is running out or not," or "Is my call to my DNS working?" or "Is my load balancer up and running?" 

For basic infrastructure, we have been using Microsoft SCOM to monitor infrastructure. 

Our customer-facing ecosystem has been moved to SAP Hybris Commerce-based solutions and Dynatrace was a natural partner for SAP Hybris Commerce. I love how detailed Dynatrace agents can hook into the code level and tell me exactly where the problem is, if there is a problem in the customer application side of things. What we were using before was just a infrastructure monitoring tool, not a software code level monitoring tool. So, it was not existing before.

The vendor team who did the setup was very good. They sent a very skillful resource for the setup. However, with the BizTalk side of it, they were less effective as they were with Hybris Commerce.

We have had problems with our implementation. 

The SAP Hybris Commerce side of things has been very smooth, but not the BizTalk side. Microsoft BizTalk is our enterprise middleware and the implementation has not been smooth with it. We purchased a professional services package from Dynatrace, but then the customer rep who was assigned to it was not very skilled in helping us overcome the challenges. She was a very nice person, and she was very resourceful when it came to Hybris Commerce, but not the other applications. Therefore, the engagement was not effective and I don't believe that I got the entire value that I thought I would from the professional service package, or from using Dynatrace with BizTalk. As a result, my BizTalk team has a huge resistance to implementing Dynatrace completely, and I have to convince them. 

As of now, we no longer have the professional services package.

I evaluated New Relics application performance monitoring tool as well. They were good in certain aspects that Dynatrace is not good in yet, but they were not able to do it at the code level for Hybris Commerce. Therefore, they are not as detailed as Dynatrace can be. 

The role of AI is very important, but it is the future. Thus, I am counting on more innovations in the AI space to monitor, not just applications, but an ecosystem from hardware to software. 

If I had one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be more valuable customer engagement. Especially since I am on the customer-facing side of the organization, it would be like if Facebook was down for five minutes, the perception created is exactly the same as the perception created when websites are down, or not performing. It is quite frustrating for customers who do not plan to be there for such a long time but would like their work done faster. Therefore, the solution's immediate benefit should be about customer engagement. 

I actually support Dynatrace a lot. I am a champion inside the organization. 

For Dynatrace, there are other ERP systems other than SAP and Oracle that many companies are struggling to get out of (like mine) but Dynatrace treats them as a black box. Some more details than we usually get with Hybris Commerce, but though maybe not at my level, but a little higher up we need something. Right now, it is just a black box. So, I have been pushing for people whenever I see a Java application or a Darknet application by saying, "Guys, use this."

However, if it is not a Java or Darknet application than there is a huge resistance. They all just default to an infrastructure monitoring application. That is about it, not a software side. That space seems to be unconquered. 

We often find the same pattern: Large enterprise business process management (BPM) platforms, when deployed successful, quickly become a critical piece of software which is used by the entire organization and supports 100s of different business processes. This results in unusual opportunities for improvement (tweaking a single screen may have a huge impact) and in an extraordinary pressure on operations. Dynatrace gives us and our clients information about all layers and components of their platform, including the most important starting point for us: real-time and historical end user experience.

As a consulting practice, we invested significantly in our own monitoring assets to use in tandem with our core offer, IBM BPM. We felt the need for this as we were unable to find suitable tools for our needs. Either they were too technical, without any view of the end user perspective, or they were extremely hard to implement. With Dynatrace, we have different options that we are including as part of our projects. We are not investing valuable resources in developing custom tools, but rather focusing on our core activity and leveraging Dynatrace to offer the needed visibility and monitoring capability.

1. Ease of use, with a streamlined and automated installation process. 
2. Functional coverage, from an end user business sensible view to a very detailed drill down of technical transactions. All of them, not sampling. 
3. PurePath: The automatic correlation of transactions between multiple layers and dependency identification is brilliant. Drilling down from a slow user facing transaction to a database or service call used to be one key APM promise. PurePath delivers in a way that can sometimes feel like magic. 
4. Artificial Intelligence: It is early days, but the results are already visible. Rather than keeping an eye on dashboards or emails, the AI can now tell us when something is wrong, including the impacts (e.g., affected users) and the root cause. It is a new paradigm for incident and problem management.

The initial transition from Dynatrace APP monitor to Dynatrace created some confusion. It is much better now with a clear focus in Dynatrace and an increase in functional coverage.

No.

No. The overhead to capture 100% of transactions is negligible (under 2%, measured in real life scenarios in two of our largest clients).

We have used previous incarnations of APM products with disappointing results as they were too complicated or too technical for our needs. For this reason, we built a set of custom tools which addressed our needs but resulted in a maintenance overhead. When we went back to check how the APM market was and if the old insufficiencies had been addressed, Dynatrace surprised us with a strong and future-looking product that we could start using as a real life project in a couple of hours.

The initial setup was straightforward. The OneAgent technology does a brilliant job of simplifying what was earlier one of the pain points in enterprise monitoring.

We are a business partner, so we help our clients implementing Dynatrace.

As with a BPM project, Dynatrace fits really well a start small, scale fast environment. Getting the first agents installed, getting information, and coverage in a initial set of systems can be done in hours and with a low cost entry point. Rather than investing months building an enterprise-wide business case, our recommendation to our clients is that resources are better invested in proving the value with a small pilot.

We compared Dynatrace with the other main players in the APM space. It is in a mature domain so coming up with our short list was a bit easy. After engaging with Dynatrace, we felt the product offered what we and our clients needed, plus the vision for the product and the company matches ours.

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.

We are in IT services. We implement and provide support to our clients.

They have a feature that allows you to monitor the user, and we are able to create a VIP customer.

Normally when you are doing application monitoring, you are only trying to look for the high priority applications. The reality is if you are a CIO or have a CEO or another C executive who is trying to use an application, even though it's not a high priority from the perspective of the overall organization, being a VIP user, whatever we are trying to do with the non-critical application also becomes a critical activity.

It needs to be more user-friendly.

They could have a better user interface, better automation, better support for cloud-based, and SaaS applications.

Nowadays, everybody is going to SaaS or the Cloud. 

Historically these products started on-premises, but now obviously they start with a data center.

Dynatrace is evolving but it has a bit of catching up to do.

We have been familiar with Dynatrace for approximately a year. One of our clients is using this solution.

Technical support is fine. We have not had any issues.

We have also worked with AppDynamics.

I think that the price is reasonable.

As IT service providers, we are always looking to explore other solutions that may be suitable for our clients, that might be better than Dynatrace.

I would rate Dynatrace a seven out of ten.

We currently use AppMon. It has been performing great compared to what we replaced.

The main use case is application performance monitoring and availability.

The main benefits will be more proactive, high-quality performance monitoring and availability with more insight into the application. It is very impressive.

It has helped my business move forward probably just by taking the next step that everybody needs to think about, which is AI and the possibility of cloud. I do not know what direction the company will go with that yet.

• PurePath
• Being able to drill down and detect what the problems are.
• More insight into detecting what the problem is with some of our applications. 

We are still struggling a bit with finding an answer quickly. It is all there, but there is so much that it is still really hard to figure out exactly which way you want to go:

• What do I right click? 
• Where do I go? 

It is a little overwhelming with the amount of data that we have. I think it is more of an issue on our end. We just need to get more familiar with it. We just started implementing it last June, are still relatively new, and are currently struggling with some performance issues.

We have already seen the next release. It is doing so much more than what we ever expected. 

Right now, we are struggling a bit with stability. 

We have outages. We have not pinpointed what the problem is. We have data loss. We have had to restart and have not narrowed down exactly what the problem is yet. So, that is in the works.

Scalability is good. 

Because we are having stability issues right now, it depends on what we need to do:

• Do we need to add more memory? 
• Do we need to add more collectors? 
• Do we need to bump up something? 

So, this is a little uncertain at the moment.

Technical support is good. 

There was only one time that I had to contact someone at two o'clock in the morning and the response was not as quick as I thought it was going to be. However, we addressed that with meetings. I think they have done a lot better job of their support.

We have used siloed monitoring tools, specifically CA APM. The challenges were probably the end-to-end and getting the full picture of what the problem was. There always seemed to be some major piece missing and Dynatrace has allowed us to get as close to that big picture as we possibly can. Then, with OneAgent, it has to provide the problem to you. It does not really get any better than that.

We picked Dynatrace because of the value that it provides.

Our environment is very complicated anyway, so the initial setup was a bit of a struggle, but only because we have so many applications and JVMs that we have been working on for long time. We had to move everything from CA APM to Dynatrace, so it was a big conversion process.

We found a tool that can be utilized by testing, DevOps, marketing, software engineering, and monitoring. Before, we always had everybody doing their own thing. Now, everybody's utilizing one tool, which is huge. That is a huge savings.

Definitely look at Dynatrace if you are looking to purchase an APM solution.

We did evaluate other solutions, but I was not a part of that process.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers as opposed to just data, the benefit to my team would be time savings. We are scrambling all the time to try to figure out when there is a problem. If we could have something else telling us what the problem is, we could spend more time fixing it, providing valuable dashboards. and other valuable monitoring, then have a better proactive monitoring environment. So, it is huge.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the Cloud and manage performance problems is huge and really important, especially after seeing OneAgent. We will probably be moving to that, then probably be upgrading to version 7. I think that is the direction that the company will be going. They do not say that they are not supporting it, but it is highly encouraged that you jump onboard the OneAgent train.

Most important criteria when selecting an APM solution: Something that was less overhead for us. We were finding with our old tool, which we still support because we are still not off of it, to get the same thing that we get with Dynatrace required more servers and effort on our part to address everything that we wanted to from the performance side. So, there is less infrastructure to support and it is a little more consolidated.

We use AppMon to monitor our production system today. We're also looking at ways to get our development teams looking into things as they commit, and identifying performance problems, as soon as we can.

Our team is one of the few development spaces in our organization that actually uses Dynatrace to give us some feedback in terms of performance level, test regions, things like that. We're trying to find ways to get other people involved there.

When I first started, it was about five years ago, I don't really recall what was being done for application performance monitoring. But about three or four years ago they put Dynatrace into place, and I know it's provided a lot of insight, especially when we had production outages, to troubleshoot and quickly identify the problem.

For us, some of the troubleshooting features for development, the PurePath technology. The dashboarding gives us some good insight into some fluctuations in some of the application areas. But, seeing the new Dynatrace stuff makes me think, it could be a little easier.

If there was something that could be done at a local developer's station, something like, "Hey, here's a hint, this thing looks like it might not be optimized," or the like. More development features, to hedge that performance.

Some of the UEM capability interfered a little bit with one of our UIs. Aside from that, I don't think I know of any performance problem with the application.

I don't think we've had any problems with scalability.

I have not called tech support, but we do have a guardian. I know that one of our performance engineers actively works with him to work through any kinds of problems, configuration problems, things like that. We've had good support from them.

I don't know that we use too much in the way of AI to scale our production today. We do use Pivotal Cloud Foundry when we do have some auto scaling-up of some of our microservices. But those things, I definitely think are going to become more commonplace, and more part of everything that we do. 

I think the AI stuff is going to help us going forward, because we're breaking apart some of our bigger, monolithic applications, and building our microservices, so there are going to be things that need to scale up, scale down, based on what someone is doing. So I think that AI stuff is really going to drive a lot of that.

Regarding one tool that could provide not only data but real answers, even with PurePath and things like this, it still takes time, a day or whatever - or expert knowledge of some person - to be able to identify a problem quickly. From what I've seen so far, the AI stuff actually gives you at least five, six, different possibilities at worst case. So, just that insight alone would be a big time-saver for everybody.

When working with a vendor, I think it's really important that they're - I don't want to say available - but responsive. And I think with the guardian service we've been using so far from Dynatrace, it's worked pretty well.

I would rate AppMon a seven out of 10. I think at times it has given some folks some headaches from a configuration standpoint, and a maintenance standpoint, but aside from that I don't think they've really had many headaches with it.

Definitely weigh your options. I know there's some availability for proof of concept with Dynatrace, where they actually work with you, whether it's a guardian service or sales. They will work with you to identify the proper solution and setup for you, so I think that's really a good thing, instead of just dropping some software product on your platform.

We do release testing. Every month, we have a release where these are the two factors in which we usually use Dynatrace:

1. Release testing purposes.
2. Measure the product for any production-related issues. 

Our organization basically runs on demand in production, but it is always enabled in pre-production environment. When we do release testing, we do at least one round of testing using the product.

Dynatrace provide us the in-depth details to know what is wrong in the application and what are performance issues, then really quickly we are able to debug any performance issues or any other performance-related issues. It has helped the developers to find the root cause and a faster deployment process with a quicker release process.

Right now, the whole analysis part that we are doing is manually. Therefore, if we can implement the analysis part in an AI, it would definitely help to find the root cause quickly and retrieve customers' problem within minutes.

What I would like to see is an AI implemented sensor. Because all analysis that we are doing is basically manual, I want an AI to do it for me. Already some of them features are there, but we need more AI in the product, so if instantly something happens in production, it can alert me by saying, "Hey, this is the problem. You should involve this particular module level." Then, alert the developers to fix the problem, so we can stage it immediately. We want that quick solution with expertise and we want in Dynatrace.

AppDynamics and Dynatrace do not always well together. We have noticed if we run both APM tools in the same server, it gives us sometimes the wrong information, and sometimes it gives us problems. Therefore, we are neither AppDynamics nor Dynatrace in products, server, or pre-prod servers.

Stability is good. It is stable and that can definitely help.

I would rate scalability at a seven out of 10. With any particular problem, it is hard to detect in any of the other APM tools. However, in Dynatrace, we can very quickly find the root cause. It physically gives us the in-depth solution and in-depth view of the root cause. None of the other products gives us that in-depth analysis of the problem.

Customer support is pretty helpful. Two or three days back, we had some issues.  We logged a p zero defect and they resolved the problem within half a day. 

We are also using AppDynamics, before we used to use another solution, but recently we changed to AppDynamics. 

AppDynamics is deployed for all products and services. We use Dynatrace predominantly for deep dive analysis purposes.

The initial setup went smoothly and it was straightforward. Though, my colleagues did the setup.

• AppD: It is lightweight and high level. You can see all the problems.
• Dynatrace: People need to learn a lot to do the analysis. Developers need some knowledge to identify the root cause using the Dynatrace product.

I would definitely recommend Dynatrace. Based on my experience, you can do deep dive analysis and find root cause quickly. That is our primary reason for using Dynatrace.

If I had one solution that could provide real answers opposed to just providing data, the immediate benefit would be to find any root cause quickly, such as any application-related issues.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• We do not have many licenses, so whenever there is a problem, then only we can enable those agents.
• User-related issues. We want to be able to see, like users, how they are impacted, if there are any problems or issues.

I'm using it for our websites. We're a company that owns numerous stores and numerous sites and I track the site performance, to see things like load time. That's the primary use. I have a lot of page loads of home pages, and then there's the check-out process, so it's been great for that.

It's working well.

Customers are looking at our site, every second, constantly. They're able to do that because, if for some reason it goes down, I can instantly get it back up, because I know what needs to be fixed.

In the past, before having the tool, we were being notified by the brand, or the brand manager, "Hey, customers are complaining that our site is down." And then there was me, as a developer, trying to track down what was causing this issue. With Dynatrace, it's right there in front of me, it's a JavaScript error, or something I can narrow down.

I get valuable information like, for example, if a site is down. That's the key. I'm instantly getting a message, or even on the app, I can see if something overnight went down a few times, or it's not performing at 100%. Those are the key things.

I'm excited about the big announcement: session replay. That's going to be pretty awesome. I don't think the solution was lacking without this, but I do think now, that we're going to be able to get that view of an actual user, with the actual problem... The example that I saw was, a person is tapping through, and then all of a sudden it's not working, right there. Now, as a developer, I'm saying that's fabulous for me because I know there's a problem with that field. That's perfect. Otherwise, I'd be spending a couple of hours, at least, trying to figure it out, and also do my own testing. So I'm happy that it's here. I'm glad they introduced it and bought the company.

Honestly, I've heard this asked of others, and for me, I'm thinking, "Can there be anything else?" I just haven't even thought about it because I feel that Dynatrace thinks of everything before I can even think of the need for anything else. For me, we already have everything I need.

No stability issues at all, it's always been up.

We had to reduce our usage but then we were going over, so now we're back up again. But it definitely scales well.

I have not used technical support but I think my coworker has. He has recommended it to me. He's like, "If you have issues, totally call them."

We didn't have performance monitoring until we picked up this product. I wasn't involved in the process of tracking down a solution, but my thought is we had no idea how our sites were performing, except with our own internal testing. So we were visiting our own sites, and would say, "Yeah, it's fast enough." But that wasn't covering things. We have Adobe Analytics, but that was a different type of monitoring.

In terms of AI for monitoring the performance and management in the cloud, I don't know that piece because we're not really involved with AI, as far as I know.

As for one solution that can provide real answers, and not just data surrounding it, to tell you "this problem is right here," we already have that with Dynatrace. The immediate benefit, obviously, is getting the answers immediately.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include that the product has to be what we need it to be. But then, also, the support and training would be important, because you could get this fabulous product and then not know how to use it. And then you're throwing money away.