Dynatrace Reviews

From an operational perspective, monitoring systems. We've primarily deployed it in production to give better awareness to application support teams of how their apps have been doing. We do have it deployed in pre-production as well, and are actively pursuing these cases in that space as well. It's just easier to sell to executives from the operations side first.

Mean time to resolution is probably the biggest improvement. Also, operational awareness is probably one I haven't touched on too much. I think in the past a lot of teams really didn't have a comfortable feel for how well, or not well, their applications were performing. You would get log files, things like that, just a small amount of perspective. In a lot of cases, people complaining was their first indicator of a problem and, really, nobody wants to be in that situation.

We started using this product about five years ago, and with AppMon. That was one of our first big wins, getting these big TV dashboards up all over the place. It really gave executives confidence that we did have things under control. At least we knew what was going on. It wasn't always the green check-mark up there, but we knew when there was a problem, before people called in and told us there was one. So that was a huge benefit.

• End-to-end visibility of the applications, since we have them instrumented. Understanding where the hotspots are in the applications. 
• Quick Fault Domain Isolations: When people are having a problem, understanding where to look, and letting all the other people go back to their day jobs. 
• The UEM feature, User Experience Management: Understanding how users are perceiving the application and then connecting that back into back-end systems to understand why things have gotten slow and then dealing with things.

Over the last year, one of the things we've had a challenge with is, we've used AppMon for so long, people are quite comfortable with it. We had a pilot of Dynatrace SaaS up and running for about a year, trying to transition application teams over to it: "Try this new tool out," - especially at microservices-based applications. And a lot of the features at the time that were in AppMon were not yet available, or worked differently, so we had some challenges in internally selling it. Since then, a lot of those features have been added into the new platform, and I'd say in some cases have leapfrogged over where AppMon is.

The one thing people really liked that we can do in AppMon is executive dashboards and, until recently, you couldn't even create the business transactions you need for the data at the back-end of those dashboards. But if I had to ask for one thing it would be: In the new platform, give me the ability to do dashboarding in the way it's done in AppMon, and I think that would bridge a lot of the missing pieces. If I could do the same type of executive dashboards on the walls, they would be happy.

As far as the new tool goes, we haven't had any issues with stability at all. I'm really impressed with the way they've architected it and made it much more scalable than the AppMon solution. 

We've had some challenges with AppMon in the past, mostly due to the top-end Dynatrace server not having an HA solution, which they're addressing now with the new version. So that's a big win for us as well. 

These things, when they first started out, were kind of neat and cool but they were never considered mission critical early on. Fast forward a few years to now, and nobody can afford the Dynatrace solution not being online. People are using it to support their apps. It is considered mission critical. So having HA built in, making this stuff rock solid, is very important to us.

So as far as AppMon, we knew where there were ceilings in the product. We've got a pretty big company and we hit some of those scalability limitations early on, to the point we were running about eight AppMon servers just for production load alone. One would never handle it. 

The thing that impressed me about the new Dynatrace Managed offering is that people are seeing, here at the Perfrom 2018 conference already, about 100,000 host limitation, at this point. But that's more than enough for us to handle our entire production infrastructure, so I'm looking forward to actually collapsing all of the AppMon stuff into one big solution where I can see, end-to-end, any app offering. Even if it crosses lines of business, you get full visibility. So I'm very impressed.

I wouldn't say we need to call them that often, the solution does not require a lot of hand-holding from that perspective, but we've had it for five years so there are always a few bumps in the road. We've had to call in for a few things, and they're really very professional. If we've needed to escalate issues, we've never had a problem doing that. Always been able to get to root cause, and in every case, been satisfied with the outcomes.

Five years ago, Wily Introscope was in place for a lot of our WebSphere infrastructure. At the time, we were actually looking at it more as an infrastructure tool. The guys supporting WAS, whether it be in Windows, AIX, Linux, or z/OS, needed something to give them a lot more visibility into what was going on, and Wily at the time just wasn't doing it. 

Wily Introscope was only lightly used at the time, but it just wasn't giving them the depth they needed. Realistically, nobody was using it. We had a product that was sitting there, unused. At the time there really was no APM-type thinking at all. It's kind of by chance since we moved to Dynatrace to satisfy that first requirement.

Since then, we've flipped it on its head, and we use the tool that much more from the app perspective. And that's really the way to do it. And we had no problem making that shift at all. We could still satisfy what the WAS team needed to do with the tool but get a lot more value out of it by giving app teams a lot more perspective. We've been able to get 500 percent more value out of it just by putting it with app teams as well.

One of the challenges, when we were looking through all the different solutions out there was, which one supported all of those things to give you that big picture? And Dynatrace met the mark. 

I was only loosely involved in the initial setup. At the time we brought Dynatrace in, it was one of my peers in the same larger group that was doing the evaluation. I was in the background, watching it. I then ended up inheriting the whole thing about a year later, so it was kind of good that I did have some visibility into it.

Overall, the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We did a bake-off against some of the competitors at the time, and it was pretty clear Dynatrace was the best fit for our organization.

I know AppDynamics was one of the other ones we were evaluating, and IBM's offering, ITCAM. And given the different types of technologies we had to deal with, specifically mainframe, Dynatrace really stuck out as the one tool that could handle all the requirements we had at the time. And since then we've actually grown the use cases up quite significantly, and are even more happy with it.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, the role of AI - when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance properly - is huge. We saw it when moving to Dynatrace AppMon and started the Gen 2 platform and wondering how did we deal with problems just a few years ago without tools like this? Now we've gone into the Gen 3 platform space and really, with apps exploding from the perspective of complexity - as it's impossible to manually understand where all the moving parts are at any one time, where to look for a problem if it happens - AI really rolls all that up in a way that makes it useful, and we don't waste time trying to dig through things like we would have even with AppMon. So it's immensely important.

We still use siloed monitoring tools to some extent, and we've used quite a few of them. They have their place for what they do but, in reality, we've had to look at other aggregation-type tools and bringing feeds from each of those together. Let's say a Windows Server monitoring tool can tell you the CPU is higher, but it doesn't give you any perspective on what the actual impact is for the user of the app that's sitting on it. And that one server might only be a small cog in the wheel of the overall app. It's great at telling you what it does, but it doesn't go any further than that. You really need something that aggregates all those things together and has perspective. And that's really what app teams want. I think those tools are better served in the operations space, but then that's where they're stuck, they'll never go further than that.

If there was just one solution that could provide some real answers, as opposed to just data, the benefit would be that looking in multiple tools definitely slows you down. The fact that a tool like Dynatrace can bring all those things together and really help pop problems up right into your face is a huge time-saver. I don't know anyone that's got extra time on their hands at this point, so anything that helps us save time and get us to a resolution of a problem faster is of huge importance. Looking back, a few years back, trying to look at multiple tools to help us figure out problems, teams could spin for weeks because we'd have no idea where to look; classic war-room scenario, where everyone's pointing fingers at everyone else in the room, "It's not my problem." Dynatrace has really done a lot to help us get rid of those types of scenarios and be productive, really addressing actual issues.

I give it a nine out of 10. Compared to the other solutions out there, I'd still say it's top breed. It's great to see they're doing a lot more with the product on a big scale. But there are a few things they need to knock off the list to hit that 10; it's not perfect, but it's really, really good.

In terms of advice, the one thing that I've seen from other app teams internally: Do a PoC. It's much better to see your data in the tool than trying to demo it with easy travel or someone else's app. You just don't get the perspective of what they're looking at is some cases. Set it up, kick the tires, and give it a try, and that will win most people over.

Primary use case would be exposing application performance, and incidents and errors within the application. It has performed exceptionally well.

Understanding and visibility, and the ability to provide the same answers across the different archetypes of support personnel, maintenance personnel, business personnel, executives, middle managers like myself, where we're all telling the same story and we're all working off of that same story, to understand what's going on.

The main benefit has been time, definitely. Over my career I've spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in war rooms picking problems apart, over-analyzing issues, chasing red herrings, and this type of solution, or solution set, not just AppMon but Dynatrace, and even the Synthetic portion, really helps us narrow down what we're looking for.

Capture of 100% of the traffic. Exposure to downstream services, that might not necessarily be new, to everybody who's using applications. It triggers them and captures them and it gives visibility to some pieces that might be forgotten or even obscured.

If it is AppMon, I would really like ease of integration developed into Logstash. The business transaction data doesn't have a natural feed through the GUI, through the configuration. We have to do a little jiggering in between to get it to feed, so I'd like to have that out-of-the-box. That'd be great. We have now, out-of-the-box UEM integration, I'd like to have the rest out of the box as well.

And if it's Dynatrace we're talking about, I really think they're on the right track as it is, because of all the AI and all the session replay and all these fantastic things we've been shown.

And if it's the Dynatrace Synthetic which we also use, I would love to have higher-level analytics across the tests. Where today we get errors and generate them per test, but we have clusters of tests that are for the same application, I'd love to see a little bit more analysis done across series of tests, so that we can have higher roll-ups of actionable information.

This is an interesting question. We've had our challenges in the past because our primary tool over the five years has been AppMon, and AppMon has had a series of evolutions. We started with the 4.2 version and we've come all the way to version 7 at this point. It was never intended to be a high-availability solution or a clustered solution, and some of those improvements have been made more recently. But historically, it was fragile. 

Like I said, I have a very large implementation. Over six thousand agents with AppMon. Some of our servers are very highly loaded, over a thousand agents, and when we talk about our online banking, mobile banking platforms, we drive significant load and it can really impact the viability of the servers.

To be fair, we were pushing the product to its limits, and it even prompted some of the architectural changes within Dynatrace itself, and within the AppMon tool, to allow for larger footprints. But generally, and lately, it's been extremely stable.

The AppMon product hasn't been historically as scalable. That is one of the reasons we're really excited about Dynatrace product, because it was redesigned for scalable environments with scalability itself in mind.

The technical support has been fantastic, even getting right up to third-level support and getting changes overnight. 

A small anecdote: We needed some changes to the UE mobile agent and we needed them in a hurry. And support turned that ask around in two days, which was phenomenal.

And then, I started talking to some of the guys in Boston, Detroit about some of the exciting changes they're making for their support model where they can have off-site guardians. I actually employ two guardians myself at a time. I have them on a one year contract. Putting them in-house has been invaluable.

The idea of other organizations being able to use Dynatrace guardian hours, and doing it piece meal as they need it, is great because not everybody needs as much hand-holding, but everybody needs a little help some time. The response time and the knowledge has been tremendous.

We've used a number of tools. We've used SCOM and Wily Introscope and Groundworks. We've used Nagios, Zabbix. We've used HPE RUM which was terrible. It cost a lot of FT overhead. There have been a few others, I just can't remember them offhand.

A lot of them were siloed, very siloed approaches to monitoring. Some of them have similar approaches, DC RUM is the same as HPE RUM, but the manpower overhead is significant. The challenge there is they just don't talk to each other. And they're not providing the same information to the same people because people craft the output to what they want, and they're not trying to tell the same story. Dynatrace just attempts to tell the truth.

To be honest, I wasn't part of the board of smarty-pants that brought the solution in, but I can imagine the criteria they looked at included breadth of coverage of technologies, the cost, and ease of use. Either way, I thank that team because it changed our lives.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is absolutely crucial. Last year I spent a large portion of my time doing an investigation into AI capabilities for IT operations, and I evaluated several products in the market space. I found they're all very, very immature, but it's an absolute necessity for us going forward. 

We're a very large bank and we have hundreds of thousands of users, thousands and thousands of applications. When you start scaling up to the cloud with microservices, the sheer volume of data is so massive that human beings can't evaluate it anymore. It's not possible. AI is the only way that we're going to be able to move forward into the future with these types of architectures, and still get the value out of the data that we're recording.

I've definitely used so many siloed monitoring tools in the past. The challenge is when it comes to clustering and high-availability - that type of solutioning where we look at strict node-based siloing and then application based siloing. Even then you're limiting yourself to the purview of what's in that container or what's in that application, and if you're not looking outside of yourself then you're really just looking for a culture of "not me," instead of fostering a culture of this is what it is. Let's work together.

If we had just one solution that could provide real access and not just top line data, I think it would probably free us up in terms of manpower and work hours, to allow us to do more value-add things. If all we're doing is working with top level data, then you have to spend a lot more time digging deeper to find your cause or to find actionable insights into the applications, and that chews up manpower. In this day and age, IT overhead really has become "Let's look at the employee first and cut that first." So, if we need to move in that direction, having something that provides real answers helps us to make that adjustment.

I rate Dynatrace an eight out of 10. I never want to give a perfect score because there's always room for improvement. But it's been a great journey for me and I look forward to many more years with it.

I'd recommend you look at Dynatrace. It's really the only one worth looking at.

We use it for monitoring all the applications in our bank, and it works fantastically. 

We know it is a primary part of it and we use it for everything. It is starting to become a culture differential. People are starting to understand what it is and what it can give them. It is a slow process, but it is really changing and it is making people start to understand how their applications work.

• Root cause analysis
• Problem solving

Deeper dive on the Dynatrace web versions, so we can get down to the packets if it is available. The ability for business transactions in application automatic deciphering.

The integration of the tools is getting there. It is still not there yet, because we still have to get a lot of tools to put together.

It is sometimes good, sometimes bad, but most of the time it is getting better. Some of it is the installation and configuration, we screwed it up. The other side of it is that sometimes we have issues with the code on their side. We like to get it fixed.

Scalability is getting better. It has had its issues. We have scaled it very large, and it is getting better. The newest version will scale, but we have not tested it yet.

When it's something technical support can fix, it is very good. When it is something they can't fix, and it is either an environmental area or something they need to work on it sometimes can take time to get done.

They take a reasonable amount of time if it is on the roadmap, but if it is not on the roadmap, then it does take awhile. 

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. I have a big problem with silo. Silos never solve a problem. 

I am a trouble shooter. I used to have break silos. Silos are the not "ME" generation. Not me, not me, not me. We had to break that. Sometimes silos caused people anger and stepped on people's toes. It just made people say "Not me, it's not my job," but they found, when you break them, it opens up reality. 

There are the tools that are better, but overall, it is the best suite out there. 

Do tests. Do PoCs to make sure that it fits in your environment, because there are a lot of different ways of doing things, and if you find out that it fits your environment, do use it. It is a fantastic tool, but you have to learn how to use it.

The role of AI has become very important when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. The more complex digital gets, the more important AI is when it is done right, because it takes less time to do things. It filters through all the garbage, so you do not have to pay somebody to it, and it takes care to do a good job.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, it would affect our team and every team in the world if it was done properly very well. 

Most important criteria when evaluating products:

1. Does it work.
2. Don't listen to the FUD.
3. Make sure it does what you want to do under the load that you want to do it.

Our primary use is for DevOps. As far as that's concerned, it's been a great tool for finding where transactions are slow, at the development stage.

The main benefits have been getting to root cause on certain issues, being able to deploy applications faster because of the way that you can troubleshoot those issues. So delivering products to our business and driving revenue have improved.

The fact that you can drill down to the code level and get a breadth of information. We do use it for a little bit of troubleshooting in production so that's been a great feature.

I think they've already touched on it at this Performance 2018 conference: enterprise monitoring in a single solution for all of your monitoring needs, whether it's infrastructure, application; having that whole holistic view. Having something high level, in terms of dashboards implemented to provide executives with answers. I think that's the direction it seems that they're going and that's the direction that, hopefully, they'll continue in.

It's very stable. It's very powerful but it's extremely stable. We hardly have any issues from a stability standpoint. Our main problems have been that it has a high learning curve to it. I've used it for about three years now and I'm still learning it. But I feel it's pretty stable.

It's easy to scale. It's costly, but it's easy to scale up. I haven't seen any issues in terms of increasing our user base or the number of the agents that we have deployed, so I think it's pretty easy in that respect.

I submit a ticket once every week or every two weeks. They always have been pretty comprehensive in their responses. They're also quick when it comes to responding to our tickets.

I think they may have been using ManageEngine Applications Manager monitoring. It's not quite as in depth as the level of information that Dynatrace can provide. It provides some pretty basic application-health type monitoring but not to the code level that Dynatrace provides. So I think that was the solution. We still use application monitoring since it's relatively cheaper than Dynatrace. So we use it for application teams that may not want to spend the money on a Dynatrace license.

I was not involved in the initial setup. But I can imagine it was complex due to the high learning curve. There was also some complexity in the adoption rate of it because of how costly the licensing is. So getting application teams to spend the money to use it, I think was one of the biggest hurdles.

Given the nature of digital complexity, the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale it in the Cloud and manage performance problems is very important because our brain, humans, are only able to compute so many things. AI can take a whole bunch of data and turn that into something that we can create more data out of. We can have several million lines of code and AI can detect if there's anything wrong, without us having to look at it manually.

Regarding siloed monitoring tools, we use infrastructure monitoring tools and application-specific monitoring tools. Getting them in to a single dashboard has been a challenge, because our executives don't want to log in to different tools to view our enterprise, they want to see it in one page. So that's been a problem with those siloed tools.

If there was one solution that provided real answers as opposed to just data, it would help executives who just want one view and just a single page of answers for problems. So that would benefit us greatly.

I would rate it about an eight out of 10. For me, personally, I mentioned it before, it has a high learning curve. They probably did provide a comprehensive training when they first rolled it out, before my time with the tool, so I didn't get a chance to take advantage of that. There are some videos and there is some documentation out there, but it still requires you to delve into the tool to learn it. Because applications are very complex and very different, creating a training video to set up some basic monitoring would probably be a little hard. But a little bit more comprehensive self-paced training would help.

I would suggest you evaluate what you want out of it. It has a load of information and if that's what you want, if you're looking at it from a DevOps standpoint, then Dynatrace is a great tool for DevOps. But if you're looking at it from merely a monitoring standpoint, it might be too much of a tool for that purpose.

To detect performance issues and user experience, as well.

It performs very well.

It saves the company money.

The ability to detect the issue before it's a major cost.

I'd like to see self-healing and I'd also like to see more automation. It looks like is that's the direction Dynatrace is heading in, in their Dynatrace product.

We haven't had any downtime when using Dynatrace.

It is highly scalable.

Tech support is slow.

Going from the dev department back to the front-end customer service, then back to the dev. Then it just goes back and forth, back and forth, until they finally find a resolution. If you don't push through, then they won't resolve the issue right away. So you have to keep pushing, or they're going to just say, "You need to update."

Straightforward. We did it in-house.

I've tried other ones out, AppDynamics and others, as well. What made Dynatrace stand out was ease of use. It more intuitive.

Regarding the importance of the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, I believe that's the future, the correct direction that we're heading in. We're not in the cloud yet.

We've used siloed monitoring tools in the past. The challenge with that is that one person has all the knowledge, and then when they leave, you're left with nothing. Also, those tools are high-maintenance and there's a lot more manpower going into them.

If there was just one solution that could provide real answers and not just data, so it would tell you, "This is the problem. This is how you would solve it," the immediate benefit for our team would be helping diagnose issues quicker. Self-healing would be ideal.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that it has to be scalable, and I appreciate the forums.

Keep your options open, but Dynatrace is one of the major companies that can resolve your issues.

The use case is internal applications and vendor applications, mostly all that run on either .NET or Java.

All the prior monitoring tools were based mostly on infrastructure. Everybody was really good at keeping their boxes alive and networks running. However, there was a big exposure point on API failures and no mechanism for service response for those. 

So far, it has been app interoperability and identifying failure cases in call-outs, out of the app to outside resources. 

We still have future issues, because the integration is ServiceNow and that is only a reference. It would appear that actually to get further along you can't use just Dynatrace. You'd now have to contract for services to finish up your integrations.

We are changing our ITSM. If we had continued on our current path, they have no integration to a HEAT ITSM. That would have been a big problem for us. Fortunately for them, Dynatrace went through a review of that last year, and they have decided to go to ServiceNow. However, it does appear that the ServiceNow is a reference platform, not an actual solution. It would be better if some of these API implementations and things were not reference solutions. Looks like the partners were working on that, but the company as a whole is not. They are working on their product primarily. They are in some tough competition with New Relic and AppDynamics, so they have to keep on that. Thus, integrations is the weak point.

Dynatrace has been terribly stable. I have run Dynatrace Managed, which is internal, and I am able to take down individual boxes in the middle of the business day with no effect. The cluster is very stable. I have not had a update with an error at all. Then, through the Spectre Meltdown stuff, my Linux admin has been able to patch and unpatch with no issue at all. The cluster stayed alive the entire time. Basically, since October, we have met 100% uptime.

Scalability is outstanding. Right now, I am running it in a virtual environment. We are running what they call small sets. We are only running at about 20%, because you have to build a minimum set of three. However, it won't tax our environment at all. It will scale sideways. If I have three, I have seven more nodes to go, so I have quite a bit of headroom. So, it will scale great.

Depends on how tough the question is. If I ask them a question about stuff they have not done before, it takes a while. Then, we have uncovered a couple of bugs, and we used to wait for the solution. I have been a good QA for them in some cases. Generally, nothing show-stopping. 

Some of their sprints have had some inconsistent pieces. They generally fix them in two or three sprints after that.

We did not have an APM solution previously.

It was not straightforward. Documentation is slightly in error as far as directory set ups and guidance. We came to our own solution for distributing the disk loads. However, there were two or three different components that worked off the same pathings. A couple of the teams were not aware that when people went outside a stock installation that their assumptions were incorrect across components, and they had to resolve some documentation issues. 

The evaluation was between AppDynamics, New Relic, and Dynatrace. Dynatrace won out for a couple of things. 

1. The AppDynamics engineers never got the solution in place on our environment, and the New Relic product was not able to work sufficiently well with the security solutions through the firewall. The real killer that took it over the top was Dynatrace's promise to work with Asia natively. 
2. The security gateways. No one else works with security gateways. I am able to configure those perfectly well within the banking and FDIC infrastructure to pass audits. With the other two products, you have to allow all your hosts out, and the security gateway solves this for me. Then, of course, we put it on-premise anyway.

Of the three, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic, Dynatrace rates a 10 out of 10.

Look at Dynatrace for these very reasons: the security gateways, the ability to scale sideways, and the ability to identify more internal applications. Do not rely as New Relic did on third-party implementations of just plug-ins. Dynatrace does the plug-ins natively, usually. 

Never go with one solution. For the same reason that you do collaborative work, it is better to have different opinions.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• It has to cover the platforms that we run in the company.
• It has to be an established company that is not too flaky. It has to show an engineering pre-sale staff that is competent. Then, it has to work within our secure environment.

The primary use case is to monitor and make sure all the crown jewel applications are up and running. If there is an error, then I will pinpoint what the error is, take it to the application team and developers, and ask them to fix it.

It is performing well, so far. So well that we actually had a company program wherein we wanted to promote Dynatrace for as many applications as we can. We have our hands on all the tools of Dynatrace, and whichever is the best fit based on the application, we go ahead. 

I can get everything on a single page. 

That varies from product to product. Every product has its charms. I like AppMon a lot. The new solution that they have, the Dynatrace solution, which is integrated with the browser plugin and agentless monitoring. That is pretty exciting. 

I would like to see AppMon also integrated in the Dynatrace portal. There are certain features, which I am not saying are not there in Dynatrace, but I am used to in AppMon. I would like to see something a bit familiar in terms of UI. It could be five to six clicks away (I don't mind), but something familiar would be helpful. 

Stability is pretty good. Comparatively, I do not see too many downtimes, and the response time is good. The communications for any downtime is also pretty much on time.

No scalability issues.

I have used technical support a lot of times, mostly for technical stuff. For example, on challenges that I am facing for configurations based on technical tools. 

They have been pretty helpful and very responsive, Compared to other tools that I have used in the past, Dynatrace's support has always been responsive. 

They were all scattered, because we were getting a lot of information from different tools, but no integration. Also, there were a lot of redundancies, so that is why Dynatrace is good, but there is still a bit of redundancy in Dynatrace as well. A little bit of it across platforms, but overall, it has been better than the other tools that I have used in past. 

Dynatrace has so many different tools, so some of them are a bit complex, like AppMon. However, your OneAgent, your browser plugin, and so on are pretty simple setups. 

We get access to the early access programs. So, we evaluate. We do PoCs, and based on our customer feedback, then we proceed. 

We were working with Catchpoint, because for the synthetic device management, it is simpler for Catchpoint. However, the setup and the configuration were so much easier than Dynatrace that we are still in a bit of debate on what to do. 

If you are looking to implement it, just go for it.

For cloud, AI has been pretty useful so far when it comes to IT's ability to scale. To manage performance problems, we have not actually used it.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be continuous checks for a lot of hardware. There are a lot of applications, so if Dynatrace could provide this, that would be awesome. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:  

• Performance
• Availability
• Scalability.

The company that I work for is huge, growing every day. So, I think availability and scalability were the primary parameters.

We have a new product at Farm Bureau, called Guidewire. We have been using Dynatrace to diagnose as their moving code through the systems. It has been helpful in being able to guide our application staff. This part of the code has been having an issue where we need to look at it, or we have a database call that is malformed and it is causing issues on our database. That is what we have been using it for. 

We recently had a problem. When we went through a triage or a war room type of situation. We were able to use it help us nail down a specific call which was having a problem.

The main benefit definitely is being able to pinpoint problems. I have spent a lot of time in the past on tools that did not work very well. You spend a lot of hours, nights, and weekends with VPs over your shoulder going, "What's wrong?" And, you can't find it. 

What I see in today's tools coming out is that artificial intelligence is very important to help minimize that time and get very specific with where the problems are coming from.

The version that we are on now has the ability to get us in the area of where our problems are. What I see with the new product is that it is actually going to give us a pinpoint. 

Therefore, we will not be spending hours behind the scenes being the artificial intelligence. It will be built in. It will save us a tremendous amount of time this way. 

There are some features that get in-depth into the product and you are having to redo the data across several tiles. You have got cloning at one level, but it would be nice to have cloning at deeper levels. Or, as you are doing the cloning, it would be nice if you could select different options. Then, you are not having to sit there and build dashboards, and spending a lot of time in the cloning area.  

I do not even see this as being a problem. I have seen very little of it being a problem.

What I know about scalability is from the sales pitches, not from experience. From the sales pitches, it looks to be extremely scalable. I have worked with products that when it goes into practice that this is not always the case. I would be interested to see Dynatrace in a very scaled environment. 

In previous places that I have worked, like Ford or General Motors, which are very large environments. I could see where they would need a very large scaled solution.

Mike Ditmar is probably one of the best engineers that I have ever worked with. If he does not know the answer, he is back with you within an hour with the answer. 

General support is same thing. If they can't give you the answer, they are saying, "We will have someone call you back. We will have your S.E. call you back." They get someone for you. So, it is one of the best support structures.

Dynatrace's documentation is great. I love the university. 

I used siloed monitoring tools. My view is a little bit skewed because I used them on the mainframe. The mainframe was developed over 30 years, so they were very developed tools and easy to use. I was one of the first adapters of the Vantage product from Compuware that is Dynatrace's predecessor. I thought it was cool then and that it had all the bells and whistles. 

Now that I have come back into it, today's tools don't even compare. We did a lot of work back then to try and correlate the data. Even Dynatrace 7.0 is a hundred times easier than that Vantage product was and I see the new stuff making that same leap from the 7.0 version.

When I originally looked at Dynatrace, it was because it was something that we could spread across the company. You can set something up for the VP and upper levels to look at that is a summary dashboard. Yet, you can set up that same system for your application developer, so he/she can pinpoint those methods, and you can do the same thing for the database. Thus, you have many different sections of the company in which you can set up specific data output meaning something to them. It does not necessarily have to filter through one team, because you can really clog a team up fast making them the central point. 

I was not involved in the Dynatrace initial setup. For the upgrade, we put it in, and it was done. It was not complex.

I have heard it was great to have the consulting staff help you because you got it right the first time. 

Do a PoC of all of the competitors. Do not go off the sales pitch. Once you see Dynatrace in action, it really has some shining elements that the competitors are missing. They all have, to a certain point, the same functionality. Though, what I see in Dynatrace's new AI stuff really comes into play and it out shines its competitors. 

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is invaluable. The amount of data coming at us these days is overwhelming. I started in a network team with three people, one server, and 100 users. That was manageable. 

In today's world, we support 2500 users, WAN/LAN, and applications which are becoming increasingly cross-platform and integrated. Therefore, you need artificial intelligence to help with it. 

I do not think there is one solution for one company. You pick your top tools and have them work together. For instance, you have a tool that monitors your storage and your infrastructure. You have that same tool in Dynatrace that monitors your apps, but those two talk to one another. So, when we see that blip in storage, then we see the effect over in Dynatrace because it just ran out of space. I don't believe in one tool, you pick your top tools and have them talk.

Primary use case is for application performance management. So far, we have instrumented 19 of the 72 critical applications, and it is performing well.

We display it on a big dashboard, allowing the teams to look at performance for each app within a group. Thus, it has a little bit of competition, if you will, such as my app is green and yours is not. Not only that, it allows us to see issues sooner rather than later and see the correlated issues. This is very important, because where I work many of the systems are integrated, or using the same underlying infrastructure. The tool allows us to see if it is an infrastructural related issue and see what is affected right away.

• Ease of use
• Ease of integration

There were a number of marketing promises that were made, which we do not see it in the tool yet. 

The integration between the web monitoring of Dynatrace and OneAgent. 

On the technical side, it appears good. It does not always translate on the financial side. 

The technical support has been fair. We have Dynatrace folks still working on the implementation stage so we have not used the full tech support. It is in-house support right now. 

My complaint is the feature sets that they promised slips a lot. However, that is software development. 

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. We have had challenges with its integration. 

We did an interview of all the applications and figured out what our gaps are. We identified performance monitoring as a major gap, then we did a number of vendor evaluations and tool evaluations, and our leadership picked Dynatrace. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

Make sure your leadership buy-in is in place. Ensure leadership understands that an APM solution is a fairly expensive, so they know what they are getting into. Tools come and go, but it is the vendor relationship that is important. 

We compared Dynatrace to other vendors. It is cleaner and more compact with good UX/UI.

AI's role is very important when it comes to IT's ability to scale it in the cloud and manage performance problems. AI is the next step in our digital transformation initiative. However, we need to do some simplification of the environment before we can do it.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be people will be much happier. When you have a team that is looking at several hundred applications, if they have to visit eight different tools (or eight different dashboards) to get status, then it is cumbersome. Therefore, you want a centralized solution that allows you to integrate with same products, but not just the same products, any product that whether it is Dynatrace, CA, or BMC. If you are able to grab the data from the siloed solutions into a centralized repository or centralized GUI, it makes it simpler for everybody else.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: How the vendor works with us, and whether or not they are a partner or just a customer. Just trying to get more dollars out of the customer instead of working to be a partner, and both in helping to implement the tool and supporting it after the implementation.

Currently, we use Dynatrace to monitor the PCF Cloud Foundry. We just started using it. So far, so good.

We do not have an effective tool to monitor the PCF Cloud Foundry. Dynatrace closes that gap. We have tried using different tools to monitor Cloud Foundry, but they were all ineffective. 

It helps to show you the performance. It also shows you where the problem is, automatically trying to find the problem. It helps to show where the problem is and isolates the issue. 

The installation and configuration were very straightforward and nice.

There was one issue with the installation, but the we resolved the issue. It was some issue with the proxy, and we resolved it.

An additional feature that we could use is the rollover. If we could rollover to different datacenters, then it would satisfy our requirement. I.e., if one datacenter fails, then we could rollover to another datacenter.

Right now, they can rollover to a multi-node cluster. Generally, they require a multi-node in the same data center. Our requirement is because we want something in case of a catastrophe, like an earthquake, and the data is possibly wiped out. We need a way to automatically roll it over to another datacenter. 

This is not offered at the moment.

So far, stability has been very nice, and Dynatrace runs on the Linux system.

It scales well. 

The only thing is we do have requirements where if one datacenter fails, you need to switch to another datacenter. On this front, Dynatrace was not built. They have active to active standby, but from our talks with Dynatrace, they are not built between datacenters. They need to be logged in at the same datacenter, and if they are logged in at different datacenters, there might be some issues. That is one thing they need to improve on: Datacenters which are geographically located. So, when there is a issue in the datacenter, they can just automatically rollover to another datacenter. 

We used technical support. We just start configuring the system and the initial installation. We had one issue when we tried to enter one agent and it just does not work. We got to work with the highest level of support, but it took a while to get there. Initially, we did not get to that level. This is considering maybe it was just after the New Year, and it took a little bit longer than we expected to get to the highest level of support. 

We do use multiple monitoring tools in our organization, including size scope, BPM, and CA APM. We also have RUM and several different monitoring tools. 

We chose Dynatrace, because it is good at monitoring the PCF and also the performance platform is very nice. 

The initial setup was straightforward, very easy and nice. 

AI is very important with the increased complexity of the IT system. IT is very hard to pinpoint the root issues of a problem with AI. It would help you to analyze the issues and let you get to the root issue faster, because people with experience are rare, and with AI, it helps bridge this gap. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be using only one tool where you do not have the complexity of managing more tools.

Most important criteria when looking for an APM solution: 

1. I need it to monitor all the different applications. We have a diverse suite of applications, and it needs to support all the different applications. 
2. It has its own stability and is well supported.
3. It needs to be scalable.