Dynatrace Reviews

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. 

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.

Dynatrace is a strategic application performance monitoring tool. We use it for every use case related to monitoring applications. We use the SaaS solution to monitor on-premises.

We also use Dynatrace for monitoring third-party applications and our own applications.

Dynatrace has the most features compared to other products we looked at. However, the best thing, in my opinion, is the support from the Dynatrace team. They provide a success manager and a team of engineers who are quick to answer questions and provide help. They even assign architects and engineers to ensure our productivity with the tool.

Dynatrace is a complicated tool that requires time and investment to fully understand. It's not something you can simply turn on and use. You need a dedicated team to use it.

So, the only challenge is that it's an extensive tool that requires a significant amount of time to learn.

Moreover, Dynatrace delivers new functionality every month. They have a space on their website where you can request new features, and they actively monitor it. They provide feedback and ask questions about the requested features. Suddenly, those features appear in the product. Dynatrace is really good at incorporating user suggestions. So, there's nothing that I want to add that they haven't already considered.

I've been using Dynatrace for about three to four years. We are using the latest version since it's a SaaS solution. It's always up to date.

Dynatrace has been very stable without any issues. I would rate the stability a solid ten. 

Dynatrace is massively scalable. I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

We have around 200 users using this solution in our organization.

The support has been exceptional.

Positive

The initial setup is actually really easy to install. It's a quick process. You can turn it on and load the SaaS Dynatrace solution in just five minutes. 

However, there is additional configuration and tweaking that may take years to optimize fully. The interface configuration is not easy; given the tool's complexity, it requires time to become familiar with it.

There is maintenance involved. Dynatrace releases patches every two to four weeks. The only painful part there is the agents we run on-prem and on our servers, it needs the agent the application needs to restart.

So, sometimes you delay the update to minimize disruption but the patches are sent to us every month.

Dynatrace is expensive, but it offers good value for the money. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with one being cheap, and ten being expensive. It is not cheap; it could always be cheaper. 

The license has recently changed to a yearly subscription model. So, it's an annual subscription. We pay even more to have an engineer as part of our team for two days a week. It incurs an additional cost.

I would say to go for it. You won't regret it. Dynatrace has been an awesome product. The complexity of Dynatrace arises from its vast array of features and settings. It takes a considerable amount of time to learn and understand all the options it offers. 

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

My use case for Dynatrace is monitoring, including server monitoring. I use the tool to analyze what's wrong with the server, detect high memory utilization and any IO network problem, and monitor network traffic.

I use Dynatrace to find errors and the root causes of the errors, including information on which carrier is giving slow response times.

Dynatrace has multiple features that I need, but I love that you can analyze traffic, including any bottlenecks. I also find the tool user-friendly and has an easy-to-navigate interface.

Dynatrace is also easy to integrate with other tools.

For a new user of Dynatrace, the tool is not easy to understand, so this is an area for improvement. Initially, you'll need an expert to advise you on monitoring and analyzing data. Before using Dynatrace, you need to learn from an expert.

I've been using Dynatrace for three years.

Dynatrace is a stable tool.

Dynatrace is a scalable tool. In terms of scalability, it's an eight out of ten.

I consulted the Dynatrace technical support team one year ago and had a pleasant experience with the team. I'm rating the support a ten out of ten. It was excellent.

Positive

My company went with Dynatrace because it's a very popular tool in the market for server monitoring. Most of the companies where I'm based use it.

The initial setup for Dynatrace was easy, though it was the client who installed it, and I only accessed the URL. Deploying the tool took two to three hours.

I have no information on the cost of Dynatrace.

At the moment, I'm using Dynatrace.

More than fifty people use the tool within the company.

I'd tell anyone planning to use Dynatrace for the first time to review the tutorials and check how to analyze data on the tool.

I'm giving Dynatrace a score of eight out of ten because it's not easy to understand the tool entirely if you're a first-time user.

I'm a Dynatrace customer.

We use Dynatrace for a number of internal applications that we track in addition to API calls associated with the API engine. We have a partnership with Dynatrace and I'm a project manager.

We monitor critical internal applications including some public-facing applications. Internal transactions are being tracked and we get immediate feedback from the solution's monitoring which makes a big difference to us.

The value of this solution is in terms of the functionality, and every aspect of the hardware and connection-oriented signals that we get. We use most of the features on a daily basis.

Network monitoring doesn't seem to be a key focus of the company and if that were improved this could be a one-stop solution that would monitor the application. It would be quite useful in the data center environment as well.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, we have around 50 users. 

I am unaware of licensing costs. 

It's a wonderful product and I would definitely recommend it. I rate this solution eight out of 10.