Dynatrace Reviews

Dynatrace is doing it very well. It offers the customer a holistic view of the application or website, starting from the front-end services to the back-end services. Mainly, they are focusing more on application performance. 

For sure, they have it for server monitoring and network performance monitoring, but mainly they are focusing on application and AI capabilities when it comes to application performance monitoring.

They are very good when it comes to APM. 

It has AI capabilities for anomaly detection. Also, they are a fully automated solution, so it's easy to use when it comes to deployment. In general, they have root cause analysis, monitoring the components, and monitoring the application. They use information to connect the issues, detecting problems, and finding LiveOps analysis.

It would be good to extend the visibility to cover more infrastructure monitoring capabilities and more network performance capabilities.

I have been using it for five years.

It is a stable product. 

Moreover, there is a support team. Honestly, they are doing very good when it comes to communications and documentation, so you can easily troubleshoot and diagnose issues.

You can also easily reach out to their support team. For the components themselves, it's quite stable. There aren't many parts when it comes to Dynatrace components or the platform itself. So, it's the best solution.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten because it is an agentless solution. It is scalable; you can deploy the agent wherever you want. 

We have Enterprise businesses as our clients. It can be offered to small businesses, but it would be pretty expensive. Technically, there is no problem with that. But, it's all about the cost or the price.

We can reach out to them directly through chat services within the platform itself, or we can contact their partners globally. Dynatrace would be able to help you directly, and also let you contact the enterprise support team. So, it's quite good when it comes to support.

Positive

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy. 

It is fully automated, so it was easy. 

The deployment model can be both on-premises and on the cloud. 

The deployment depends on the component. Overall, it can be done in less than one hour, or two hours maximum; you will be able to finish deployment when it comes to the main components, like the analysis server or admin server. But when it comes to agents, it depends on the customer's environment. It may take hours or weeks. So, it depends on the prerequisites and the customers themselves.

The cost savings can add because they are focusing on the end-user experience. Currently, all businesses are all about the user experience. So once you have such a tool, you just want to make sure that users are satisfied. 

When they are satisfied, you will gain benefits. So when it comes to return on investment, by keeping your customers satisfied, it's worth it to invest in such a tool. It gives you clear visibility of the user experience or user behavior so you can improve your business.

It's not cheap, for sure. Dynatrace targets enterprise customers, banking, government entities. So for sure, it's not cheap, and it's a little bit expensive. So, I would rate the  pricing a seven out of ten, with ten being expensive. 

Now, here comes the comparison to other APM competitors like AppDynamics and IBM; yhey are within the same range. They are all targeting top-end users.

Dynatrace has an AI engine. It collects numerous metrics from the customer's IT environment. The AI engine then correlates and analyzes all of these collected metrics and transactions to offer some capabilities to the customers.

However, my recommendation depends on the use cases or pain points for the customers. For application visibility or end-user experience, I would recommend Dynatrace.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

With Dynatrace, my company pretty much utilizes it to try and catch performance issues before certain issues get created on our online banking platforms, as well as for technical performance issues in our internal systems and to make sure that our users get the best experience. The aforementioned details consist of three use cases. Obviously, my company stopped using some of Dynatrace's features since we started getting a few issues as certain services have gone down or been degraded. With Dynatrace, my company receives pop-ups on our site in terms of an alert to which we can react if needed, and it helps us minimize any negative impact on our clients or business stakeholders.

With Dynatrace, I think I like its ability to dive deep down into each service and application at the code level. You can see Dynatrace interacting with other applications, so it gives you a good understanding of where things go wrong. I think it is just that Dynatrace gives you great observability on your platform.

With Dynatrace, there is nothing that I would like to see improved in the product right now. Dynatrace pretty much fits in and meets all the checkboxes or requirements of my company. I know that a new product from Dynatrace will be launched soon, and my company may plan to move to it, so I think all the requests from my company's end related to Dynatrace may actually get covered in the new product.

From an enhancement perspective, I would like Dynatrace to focus on areas related to cognitive AI since it can help its users better understand their problems. With AI-related enhancements in Dynatrace, I can talk to the tool in English. Instead of getting some codes from the tool, Dynatrace can tell me the problem in a normal and understandable English language. If I am not mistaken, the aforementioned AI-related area may actually be released in the new version of Dynatrace.

I have been using Dynatrace since 2013, making it almost ten years.

It is a 100 percent stable solution.

Dynatrace is a highly scalable product since it is a SaaS-based application. As it is a SaaS-based application, you can deploy ActiveGate wherever you need it or closest to your environment.

Though I cannot check the list of the users who use the solution and don't have access to see the number of old users, many people use the solution. It would be close to around 300 users presently who use Dynatrace.

The solution's technical support is extremely good. If in our company, we are stuck with something, Dynatrace's technical support team is always quick to respond, and they always have answers to our questions.

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with SolarWinds and Applications Manager from ManageEngine. I predominantly use Dynatrace.

The pros of Dynatrace are that you are able to drill down to see in-depth how your application is performing, how your host is performing, and how your business services are performing, right from the cloud level down to the codes. The con of Dynatrace is that, at times, because it has so much information, it becomes difficult to see the root cause of your problem, and then you have to dig around to find the root cause.

The initial setup of the product is a relatively easy process since it is a SaaS-based platform. Previously, with Dynatrace, my company had it deployed on an on-premises model. Currently, when my company deals with the setup processes of the product, it is really easy since you just install the agents on your server or on your hosts, after which the product starts to do what it needs to do, and then you can just create your dashboards and alert systems. If you understand the application, the setup phase is a really simple process.

The solution's deployment and maintenance processes are handled by a team consisting of four members for both South Africa and the UK, and they also readily function as a support team. In terms of deployment and product administration, you can know how to utilize the tool from a much broader base.

Owing to the fact that Dynatrace is a SaaS-based product, there isn't much maintenance required. My company only subscribes to the services provided by the solution, and Dynatrace looks after the maintenance part, a major reason why only a small team is required to administer it.

I recommend Dynatrace to those who plan to use it since it is a Rolls Royce of monitoring tools with which you can't go wrong. Dynatrace gives you exactly what you want. There are no comparisons to Dynatrace with any other tool out there in the market.

Dynatrace is a brilliant product.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to identify performance issues. Our database is in Oracle and our user interface is Maps. The solution helps us to gather required information and manage systems. 

For example, we just had a big data center issue with cluster settings, voting, and updating. The solution captured the issue and showed us that shutting down the data center would not solve the problem because data was not flowing from the DR side. This is one of the best use cases because the solution captured the issue so well that we didn't need help from another application or database team. We were able to identify the issue, correlate it, and provide information immediately. 

It is very easy to create customized dashboards.

The solution is more user friendly than other application performance products.

Issues are identified more accurately than with other products. 

Though I have never used it, I hear that the container platform could include more value-added features. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable, includes good vendor support, and provides frequent updates. 

The solution is easy to scale through the active gate. 

We have more than 100 users across our infrastructure or enterprise applications and plan to increase usage in the future.

I have only interacted with support a few times but the team works closely with them and gives good feedback. 

I rate technical support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

We are currently migrating from AppDynamics to the solution. 

AppDynamics is moving toward a fast model and has a few issues with vendor support. It also requires multiple agents for each function. For example, a Java-related APM requires the installation of another agent. 

The solution is a bit higher priced than AppDynamics but is more user friendly and only requires one agent, so our application teams prefer it. 

The setup is very straightforward and it is easy to onboard. 

I rate setup an eight out of ten. 

We use Great Logics provisioning tool to install the solution's agent, package it, and distribute it to end users. Installing and provisioning takes about five minutes. 

There is no maintenance because upgrades happen from the centralized server. The process is much simpler than other products because many of them require another agent for upgrades.  

The pricing is a bit on the higher end and more expensive than AppDynamics. 

When we compared the solution with other APM tools, we found that its features and uniqueness balance out the price well. 

Pricing is rated a six out of ten. 

I recommend the solution, specifically if you want to find your root causes before issues become bottlenecks. 

The solution is a really good product and I rate it an eight out of ten. 

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 have been working with Dynatrace primarily for observability. We utilize the solution across various industries, including retail, financial services, insurance, and manufacturing. Our focus is to provide comprehensive monitoring and observability as part of our managed service provider (MSP) offerings. We offer extensive customization and value addition to the data provided by Dynatrace.

The solution enables us to deliver tailored services to our customers, including generating customized measurements, KPIs, and dashboards. This enhances our ability to provide detailed and valuable insights to our clients.

The observability provided by Dynatrace is extremely valuable. It allows us to achieve transparency and gain comprehensive insights into our operations.

The pricing model of Dynatrace is somewhat confusing. Currently, the industry is adapting to a consumption-based pricing model instead of a traditional licensing model, which might take some time to get used to.

We have three years of experience working with Dynatrace.

The scalability of Dynatrace is extremely easy.

I cannot provide specific details about their technical support as I am not in charge of that aspect.

Positive

Our company adds substantial value to the solution, making the pricing fair and providing significant value-added services to our clients.

The shift to a consumption-based pricing model from a licensing model is something new. Customers need to adapt to paying per consumption.

The value of Dynatrace is in its observability feature, but understanding the pricing model can be intricate. Ensure you have a good grasp of how the consumption-based model works.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is for checking site vulnerability to see if the applications are up or down and if they're running fine.

This solution has helped our organization by allowing us to check for site vulnerability and performance, which in the end helps us save money.

The most valuable features for me are the dashboard panels because they enable you to monitor multiple applications in one single site.

In the next release, I'd like to see more portables included regarding the screens.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

I would rate the stability of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. There are some 50 people using this solution in our organization.

I would rate the technical support of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Positive

The deployment process was easy as the vendor just had to give us access.

My impression is that their pricing plan is moderate.

Our deployment model is on-premises.

I would rate this solution as a whole a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

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.

My use cases are typically working in conjunction with our business partners. For the most part, I get questions from the business as to what our conversion rates are on the eCommerce website. E.g., what the typical user journey looks like, especially when they're doing AB testing. They like to sort of double verify that in Dynatrace with a user session tracking to see which users are taking which path. 

I often get diagnostic questions about things like latency. Somebody on the business side will perceive some latency on one of our pages, then give me a call to use Dynatrace to go in and do a waterfall analysis of the page load to see if it is in fact loading more slowly than it has been in the past.

Since we are a 24/7 support shop, our primary job is to make sure that revenue keeps going in through the site and the site itself works. We have categorized issues into three tiers: Priority 1, 2, and 3. Depending on where a given issue falls, the Dynatrace alert is generated and sent to my team, then prioritized into one of those three categories. The response then to that issue will fall into a bucket for that type of priority. 

My primary use of the tool is to keep revenue coming into the business and to use it to help our business team in running their site analytics and web performance tools. They have things like Adobe Analytics that provide them with one layer of data. We use Dynatrace as another railroad metric to both confirm the Adobe Analytics data and enhance it in certain places where Adobe won't give us the answers that we need. In terms of metrics, we've had roughly about 120,000 unique sessions per hour on our website. So, we're capturing a lot of session data and real user data, and all of that data is kept in user sessions. We can look this information up by user ID to tag any given session that we want to find by date/client. E.g., if the user said that they had an issue last Thursday at 11:00 PM, then we can just do a search on their email address, go through all their sessions, and find the one that they mentioned, then dig directly into that one.

It has completely transformed the way that we do eCommerce from a couple of different perspectives. The first one is that we are really tied in with our business users to a much greater extent than we were in the past. A lot of the Dynatrace data is data which not just the technical team wants to see and to work with, but it is data that the business team wants to see as well. It has sort of facilitated a better communication stream between my business partners and my team to allow us to go back and forth on different aspects of the website. We didn't have that in the past. 

It has also built more solid relationships between the application development team and my support team because they will often have questions after new releases as to how those new releases affect different areas of the site. So, we have constant sessions with those guys in standing meetings on a biweekly basis to go through different aspects of what a release has done to the website, how we can use Dynatrace to track differences from one release to the next, and see if there is any latency as a result.

There are about 24 dashboards built, not only for my eCommerce support team, but I've also built dashboards for our development, business, analytics, and senior management teams that allow them to log into the product. Without having to know much about Dynatrace, they can just click widgets on the dashboard that I've customized for them to get to the information that they need. This saves me a lot of time because I don't have to go in and investigate every single issue that crops up. I can go in and just ensure that there's a dashboard available for diagnosing that type of issue and point the user who is interested in it to that dashboard.

After the dashboards, the Davis AI engine is fantastic. We're able to set thresholds within the Dynatrace application for what acceptable load times are for our web pages or API callback times. Davis actually monitors what those thresholds are and notifies me, not only when the thresholds are violated, but when they are either over or under the threshold. Then, it makes suggestions for tuning those thresholds based on what it sees in real user actions. Therefore, I'm never dealing with outdated data. Every day Dynatrace is updating what the user experience looks like and letting me have that compared to my benchmarks, which is super useful.

It's super easy to manage, especially the SaaS solution. We deploy the JavaScript through Tealium, which is one of the tools that we use to deploy tags to our website. Whenever we get a new version, or if we/Dynatrace create it off the Dynatrace JS, then we just deploy it through Tealium and that goes out to every page on our website automatically. Our users' browsers then start getting that new payload dropped into their browsers the next time they visit the website.

We use both Session Replay and synthetic monitors:

• A Session Replay is primarily for our customer support operation. We sometimes have customers call in to complain of issues with the website, and it's really useful to be able to look a customer session up and replay it in its entirely so you can see exactly what happened during that user journey. You can even find the point that the user is calling in to raise an issue, so you can dig down and resolve it. We record every single user session on the site. We don't have a limit on the number of sessions we capture because it's just so useful for our customer service folks to be able to do this. It's worth the trade off for us.
• Synthetic monitoring is set up on a couple of different levels. My primary synthetic runs every five minutes, every day, 365 days of the year. It is a simple, single page pane that tells me whether the website is up or down. If it is down, then an email distribution gets emailed and a pager text goes out to whoever is on call at that time to let them know that the site is down. We also use synthetics for the user journey testing. When new features go in from development, as part of our QA process, we'll often set up Dynatrace synthetic that simulates what that user journey should look like. We will then allow the synthetic to run every given set of minutes (whether it's 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or half an hour), to collect data on what that user journey looks like. This allows us to go in and run our reports against that synthetic module rather than against real user search.

Some of the analytics that you get in, e.g., a waterfall analysis of a web page could be clearer. A lot of that is not directly attributable to Dynatrace. Sometimes a vendor will implement a tag or JavaScript plugin that's named something entirely different than what it does. This makes it difficult to track that from the waterfall list, figure out where exactly that component is, and dig more into what it's doing. Dynatrace could probably improve a bit on that waterfall layout to make it clearer as to what exactly is there. It does a wonderful job of telling you what loads and when, but it could be improved in terms of telling me what exactly it is loading.

We have been using it for about 18 months. We first installed it last year in January. 

It is remarkably stable. They push out new releases of the SaaS application every two to three weeks. Dynatrace has a super active development schedule on their side. When they push out the release to us, all we have to do is push our JavaScript component back out to the website to allow it to go out to our users' browsers. Dynatrace has never gone down a single time in the 18 months that we've been using it. It's never been down when we needed it, and it's always collected the data that we need to analyze when we go into it.

Dynatrace itself doesn't really break, but the website does on occasion lose connectivity with a given API vendor, whether it's a payment processor or one of our other API pieces. Dynatrace is very good at alerting us when that happens, but we're not using any sort of self- healing capacity for that. What we do is we get alerted when those APIs aren't available or when a web page has an issue. My team gets alerts on a 24/7 pager basis, then we go in and investigate to resolve them.

The solution has given me a better view into uptime, in terms of how much downtime our website has. However, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud solution is remarkably solid. We rarely have downtime. Even during the holiday season for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we've had zero percent downtime for the last two years. From one perspective, it does let us know when the site is down using the synthetic monitor. The good news is that it has not had to give us much data because the site just doesn't go down.

We have 96 users logging into Dynatrace right now.

Our primary eCommerce environment is Salesforce Commerce Cloud. That is where we have the agent list SaaS solution implemented. We also have internal API servers within Azure, where we've implemented user agents to track them. We have not encountered any limitations in scaling to cloud-native environments with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We've had remarkably smooth deployments.

We have not scaled up to any other environments at this point.

It is fantastic. You don't even have to pick up the phone. You can submit a Jira ticket from directly within Dynatrace to the support team. Those Jira tickets are categories based on the component of Dynatrace that you're looking at. You actually get a live agent chat within the tool, so you're not only submitting a ticket and getting a case number, but you have the support rep right there in the chat session to walk you through it. It's the only product I use that has a similar interactive of an online health system.

We had AppMon, which is the previous version of their tool, before upgrading to Dynatrace. The first thing that we did was upgrade our on-prem AppMon solution to a solution that our Dynatrace agent setup in our DMZ on the network, then we added user agents on each of our API servers. This has morphed, as of last October, into a SaaS agentless solution that we run through a JavaScript snippet on our website. Every page on our website has a bit of JavaScript with a tiny JavaScript module that deploys out to the browser. For every user who visits our website, Dynatrace then collects metrics on what those user's actions are during the session and gives us reporting tools so we can check performance on the website.

We have used other monitoring applications, like SolarWinds and Gomez, in the past. However, they have all been replaced by Dynatrace at this point.

From the infrastructure perspective, what we have installed is the user agent on our API servers. So, we have six API servers set up in an Azure load balancing pool. There are three active at any given time. It was super neat when we installed the agent, because we actually went out and had lunch after the installation. When we came back, Dynatrace had generated the Smartscape view of not just the API and the different services they connect to, but it had crawled our entire network and found everything that it recognized from SQL Server databases to .NET Servers and API services. All of that stuff showed up in a sidenav automatically without our having hands on anything whatsoever. It provides a good quick view in the morning when you come in and just flip to that view right away, because it will flash in "red" for any given service or platform that is having a problem, then you can zoom to that problem and look into it right away.

Being able to capture every single user session on the site and work with our customer support team has been a huge return on investment for me. Of course, the additional support on top of Adobe Analytics to be able to try things, like website conversion, is also a huge return on investment.

The time to diagnose has decreased on average by 34 percent in its implementation. That is primarily because Dynatrace not only alerts you when something goes wrong, but the Davis AI also gives you suggestions as to why it may have gone wrong. This gives you a head start on triage and resolution.

Because the Davis AI gives us such a head start on problem identification, this leads into triage and diagnosis. Our diagnosis time has gone down significantly. We can find, identify, and get problems triaged more quickly than we could in the past by approximately 25 percent.

The only limitation with scaling to cloud-native environments is licensing. It all depends on how many DEM units you're willing to license. The more of DEM units that you purchase, the more user data you can collect.

We did compare it with several other products in the market when we did our due diligence before purchasing an APM and SaaS solution. Dynatrace came out just leaps and bounds beyond the pack. We're very happy with the results we're getting with it today.

We compared Dynatrace with AppDynamics, Opsgenie, and New Relic.

We do not use the solution for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. It was on our development roadmap for this year, but I think COVID-19 has probably pushed it to next year. While it is something we will be doing, we're not doing it now.

We have not yet integrated the solution with our CI/CD and/or ITSM tools, as it was on our roadmap for this year. We are a GitHub and Jenkins shop, and Dynatrace has plugins for both of those tools. One of the very next things we want to do with the tool is plug it into our CI/CD process so we can have sort of a hands-free built. We want to allow our builds to run through the entire pipeline and be managed by these three tools, then allow Dynatrace to do the reporting on the deployment and the resulting difference in the web application based on that new format.

My advice would probably be to start with the SaaS implementation to get a feel for Dynatrace, what it does, and what it can deliver. Then, based on results with the SaaS platform, evaluate installing the onsite on-prem solution. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. They obviously work best when you use them together, but there are some instances where our firm does not need an on-prem solution and may need just the SaaS application. Vice versa, there may be some firms that just need the on-prem solution and don't need the SaaS cloud based solution. In my opinion, it is best to start with SaaS, then based on what you discover with SaaS, decide whether you need on-prem.

I would give Dynatrace a solid eight (out of 10). It's beyond the expectations that I had when we purchased and installed it. As I went along and learned more about Dynatrace after the implementation, I was impressed with how much the tool does. Another aspect is not just how much it does, but how easy it is to do it. The AI engine runs 24/7/365, providing input. The dashboards make it super easy for my users to use as well as myself. 

The analytics that it provides are very easy to read. You can present them in pie charts, bar charts, or single table data. There's just a myriad of ways you can display the data that you get from Dynatrace to make it more consumable for users.