Dynatrace Reviews

Application monitoring: We use the application monitoring of the core Dynatrace products. We mainly use it the demarking, troubleshooting, and monitoring to the PurePath for analyzing where our performance is not up to snuff.

Performance has improved substantially since we started using Dynatrace. We are able to really keep the performance solid with daily monitoring and daily dashboarding. It is a one page view of exactly where we need to focus our attention each day.

The PurePath is the real silver bullet for Dynatrace, but also the ability to create any dashboard that you want for different levels of reporting for technical people, managers, or even executive level. They can get a one page view of what the system health and performance looks like.

They need a capability similar to Tealeaf where you can actually view what the consumer is doing and record the sessions. That is the biggest missing element. Tealeaf has done it before with the Dynatrace product and exploited it, but from what I understand is Dynatrace is now incorporating this feature into a future release.

It is lacking in another area. However, I do not know if it is the way we configured it or not, but it is historical data. I do not like after 60 days or 90 days it gets aggregated to summary data. I would like to be able to analyze specific PurePaths after 30 days or 60 days with real numbers. I believe that is a limitation that we have put in place in our storage. I can't say it is a Dynatrace product problem or not, so I do not have an answer to this.

I do not recall us having any instability problems, so I would say it is stable.

I am aware that we have some limitations, but I could not specifically talk to that.

We have used and still do use some siloed monitoring tools. Looking at one part of the equation, whether it be server health or system health, it does not necessarily impact positively or negatively on performance. Without understanding of what system performance is, you can't necessarily look at what the system health is at the same time.

We used Compuware for many years, but that is part of the Dynatrace family. So, ServerVantage and Compuware were our only products prior to the implementation of Dynatrace, and Compuware was the company that purchased Dynatrace several years ago.

We are more of the user community than the architecture or infrastructure, so I have people that are architects, experts, and guardians who have had to deal with this (not me).

I would recommend implementing Dynatrace. It gives us all the data on all the calls, which is something that is very different from any other APM solution that I have seen or used in the past. 

We have lived without AI for a long time. There is minor AI and there is machine learning, so I would not say it is that important.

We wanted to buy a tool which would take care of monitoring our application performance. That's the primary reason we went for this product. 

We've been using it for the past two months and so far we've been very good with using the tool. It's been very helpful for us.

We have moved up to the next level, and once we move on to the cloud I think it's going to be more complex to monitor. That's where Dynatrace is going to help us, with identifying problems.

The benefit is that it keeps track of the application. The better the application is going to perform, the better the users are going to do their jobs. When we work with the customers it's going to be really helpful.

Overall it's helped our business in time savings. When everything happens on time you move on to the next job or activity, where you focus on things you really need to focus on.

I like the drill-down feature, that it can drill down to the code level to point to where the problems are. It's also helpful for the developers to identify what exactly happens, rather than the operation team having to do so. It works well for the developers to fix issues, so that way it's very good.

There are certain features which were introduced today here at the Perform 2018 conference, like the playback. I was very much impressed with that. It's going to help us a lot. That was something I was looking for and that's what they did. The new features that were launched today were the ones that we were expecting, and we're quite happy with that.

I can't think of any limitations at the moment. It's too early for me to comment, it's only been two months.

It's too early to comment on stability. It's been only two months so I'll have to wait on this.

I think scaling is going to be pretty easy. We're not up to that, so once we are in a position to think about the scalability we will take a look at it.

The technical support team is really good. We do have guardian services, the dedicated resource who works with us. We always reach out to him. The online chats have been effective. The webpages, the university where we can go and have a look at solutions and the like, have been very helpful so far. The technical team has been very good with support.

We have not used any tools before this one, not siloed or otherwise.

We went to a consultant to tell us which is the best product on the market. We read some reviews and we came up with Dynatrace, that it would be the apt product, based on feedback and information from the other resources. That's why we zeroed in on Dynatrace.

I was not involved from the first phase. I got involved only in the middle of the project, so I really can't comment on this. But from when I got involved, I think it has been pretty good. I would have to ask colleagues who did the other parts to check how they were.

AppDynamics. I think it's easier to work with Dynatrace, right from the installation, and I thought Dynatrace was better than AppDynamics working with SAP.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity I think the role of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to stay natural and manage performance, is very important. The AI of Dynatrace is really excellent. It would be very difficult without Dynatrace AI, so I think it's very important.

I would definitely say go with Dynatrace. I also like Dynatrace because of their integration with other products like ServiceNow. It's very good. And again, working with SAP HANA it's very good so. So, overall I recommend Dynatrace.

The primary use case is we have customer-impacting production issues, so we have to get in there and quickly find out the root cause. It used to take days because we did not have an APM tool. With Dynatrace, we are now able to identify the root cause in 15 minutes. It has helped the entire operations of our company. It is working really well.

PurePath is the best. I have never seen it before and the way it is helping is really cool. It is eliminating lots of hops we go through to find the cause and reach out to the person. Now, we know exactly which line, which method, and which program needs fixing, so we directly go to the right developer and the guy comes in fixes it. Then, in the next week at least, it is done. 

I am looking forward to new Dynatrace features coming out. However, I am still hoping for more.

It is 99.9% stable. For the 0.1%, there were too many users who were using the client. This was the problem. So, we had to move to the business rich client, then the issue was gone. 

We scaled from 300 agents to 800 agents in six months. There were no issues at the server level, which is pretty good.

We have used the problem management, which is available on the management support community site. We have used that. 

Dynatrace is my first APM tool. We were previously using CA Wiley. With Wiley, we did not have the ability to get inside the process. We were outside. Now, with the Dynatrace, we are getting inside the PurePath, which is a great help. 

I helped my administration to do the initial setup. It was very easy.

If you are looking to implement it, go straight ahead. Don't even think about it, just use it. 

When it comes to IT's ability to scale to in a cloud and manage performance problems, now that we are activating more agents of Dynatrace, AI is going to be tremendously helpful to us. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be the ability to add up more applications into the performance support, then help more applications with the fewer number of resources in our app.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. The sales rep with their technical team coming to see us and giving us a demo is the key. We need to understand exactly what level of depth they have.
2. We need security in place.

Considering the application and what we are using at the client site. We have a user interaction related application where users fill in their information, and they are processing the formality and completing the business transaction. The business transaction generates a policy or a report out of all the services. This is from the user interface point of things. 

Other than that, they are that second aspect of us in elite services called back-end services. There is no actual user interface with these services for the end user. There are some other applications, which will be calling the services. At the client side, we are monitoring Layer 2. One service that we use it for: What are the issues, what are the problems, and what are we facing for services.

Similarly, when the user interaction is there, what are the challenges users are facing and how we can proactively use Dynatrace and get the problem resolved. That is what the current setup of Dynatrace offers our client base.

1. The deployment configuration and everything is simple. It is not that complicated. That is critical, because that saves time. Whenever something goes wrong, since in deployment everything is easy, you are saving time solving the issues. 
2. The user interface. The user interface is like a type of dashboard. You can use the tool as an end user into the tool interface, which is good. This is simple, not complex as where to find something. Any layman, if you give them the tool, who has knowledge of how to use an internet browser will be able to use the tool if you just explain it in a few words. It is intuitive.

Mainly, if the user rarely utilizes user monitoring, this is the biggest feature. Because when the user has an issue, we have configured the alerting so the error or the incident will go to the respective team. Then, the team can contact the user once they see that they have an issue and ask if they can them resolve the issue. That is the key thing, because that helps with revenue loss. This is the key feature that we see.

There is a limitation on timeframe. Now, if you look at the dashboard, it will state five minutes, then 15 minutes, then one hour, then six hours, and finally 24 hours. I would like them to provide a set of options defining the business hour.

In the morning from 5AM to 6AM is my business hour. If you could give me that option, it would be easier for me instead of just lasting one business hour to finish. This would be a cool feature. 

A lot of organizations are 24/7, but they will be mainly looking for limited data for their business hours. My business hours are about 12 hours, which is when all my analysis is done.

We had only two or three major downtimes. We were able to resolve those in less than eight hours. These were not big, major downtimes that we experienced for the solution.

We have used technical support many times, because there are some issues which we were not able to figure out based on the information provided. There are some things, which we need the technical support team's help in making the changes, and also before changes are made. There should not be a case where we make a change and certain features get disabled, or certain featured get enabled.

We have used technical support in the past, but the support is limited. Though, I have never had an issue that the technical team has not been able to solve. I show them the problem, then they see the problem, and solve it. That is what is very successful for me: no back-and-forth with support.

Support can ask in a list what information they want from me and what problem I am facing, then I will explain it. This will help us to solve problem more quickly than just chatting.

Before, I came to that account, they had a network monitoring tool. They also had some JV monitoring tools, so two different things. There are some network-related issue you can take from the network monitoring tool, some with a JVM and some you need to take from Java.

For the end user, application, or web tier, the monitoring was not there.

I have used, as a part of my team back home in India, CA Wiley. We did a PoC implementation with it. I did a PoC of Wily in 2005.

The deployment was simple, as well as the upgrade.

The first upgrade was little bit complex because you have a data you need to maintain. With an initial deployment, you are starting from scratch and have nothing to worry about. When you upgrade, you need to plan well in advance what you want see.

We needed to do see what was intact, because when we moved from 6.1 to 6.3, the migration tool that they had, it was not quite solid or sound. Now, they have a good migration tool whatever they developed.

The challenges that we face were not that big just minor challenges, since we did a PoC with the tool. Therefore, we could migrate easily with minimal impact on the end user.

When I came in the picture for this particular engagement, the client had already done a PoC with Dynatrace. However, if I say Dynatrace right now, it is a total different flavor, as I am currently using AppMon.

When I came here and I was working another engagement, I attended some training for DC RUM which was a Compuware APM to Dynatrace. Now, it has totally changed since when I started using it for deployment. Everything is fine. As compared to the Wiley, it is not an apple to apple comparison. 

Make sure your application team or the development team is going to use the tool. If your application or development team is not going to get any benefit in the sense of not being involved in this particular APM monitoring, then the benefit will be less. For example, if you implemented a solution and your monitoring team is using it, then to achieve the full-fledge benefit, your application development team should use it, because during the development itself they will see that these are the challenges we are facing. They will fix the problems during the development instead of in testing.

This will save time for any application for release, because the development team will fix the problems before the release of anything. This is the foremost thing that they need to consider whenever they are going for the solution.

The other thing is an organizational point of view. You need to have some center of excellence, which will be dedicated for the APM. It is not okay for some part-time people to just be looking on. There has to be a dedicated team if you have this tool in your organization.

Only then you will get whatever you are expecting out of this tool.

AI's playing the key role in the way all the monitoring solutions are going now. They are computing all this information which is available and providing information it for human beings to try to solve problems.

The AI is playing a key role otherwise just imagine. Previously, you would need to analyze all the logs for an error and coming out with the solution would take hours. Nowadays, because of the AI, the log analysis and everything has been done in backing. You can use your experience logic, take that information, and solve the problem.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be time to resolve issues that would be useful for the team. To solve the problem for the end user, because from his point of view, the problem should be resolved quickly. So, this is definitely an advantage for the end user as it is for the team.

Support team could use the information and will be able to pinpoint the issue, who the user is, and where their location is. When we have these issues with this technology, the issues will be resolved more quickly because you have the information regarding what went wrong, what is the error, and what stage the problem is at.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: What is their market share? Where are they standing? Are they a leader or they just initially starting? Because based on the customer's budget, if they want to sell out or work with a type of market leader's solution, then we will definitely look at that particular area.

However, there are some company that might not want to sell out. We see this in some companies, which are in their startup faze. The investment will be minimal, but the challenge is that you won't be able to get the features that other companies at the top are offering.

We have been using Dynatrace for almost two years now. Our primary focus is to understand where the critical bottlenecks are. We have a wide range of applications running on technologies right from mainframe: the client server, cloud, Node.js, etc. 

In order to accommodate all these things, we were looking at one simple product which would help us with all these issues that we were facing. Before choosing Dynatrace, we did a survey of the market to understand what other products there were. 

We ended up choosing Dynatrace because of fantastic capabilities, which it provides. Our business is critical to our customers. With a variety of technologies and different groups, we are experiencing more diverse issues.

The issues are identified well ahead of time because there are a series of operations that form the upstream and downstream applications. The earlier we catch an issue in one of the upstream applications, we can handle it and put a mechanism in place to effectively handle the downstream applications. Without that in place, if something breaks in upstream, then we are definitely sure that some application in downstream will be affected. This is really critical.

PurePath. In addition to routing mechanisms, they have set up the latest profiles and the latest threshold for alerts that go to several teams, including development, support, and infrastructure teams. This helps us be ahead of the game before something happens.

A couple of things that we have actually pointed out in the past:

1. The log analytics, which OneAgent should be carrying forward.
2. Getting the data out of Dynatrace and consuming it in development for other analytical purposes. The analytics feature provides us some information, but is limited for now. We want to see how we can consume the data further down and have analytics guys look at the datacenter information.

We have been running it for more than two years now. We have never had issues with the platform. One hiccup was the front-end server being low in memory because many users logging and running a wide range of reports. So, we limited that to some information by moving some of our users to the platform. In terms of stability, we have never had any issues.

It is scalable. We initially started with fewer agents because we just wanted to have the development team working with this new product. Therefore, we started small and have not had any issues scaling up to what we have. We never had any incidents because of it neither in VM or physical boxes.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is definitely very important. The sheer volume of data we are creating from across all these systems is one of the critical pieces of the enterprise window that happens from 4:00 to 7:00 PM EST, where we send out all the NAV updates to various clients including NASDAQ. There are a variety of products which have their own limitations and quality of information. It is necessary to focus all the important technologies into a single source so we can follow the timelines and know exactly who is going to call us.

With the new managed OneAgent, that is what we're looking at. Currently, we are on AppMon, so we need the AI metrics in place at least until the process of OneAgent to manage the elements that is there. Then, we will see the critical elements and information.

We had to use technical support before, primarily in the areas of adding additional features to the product. For example, we have some applications in Python. We do not have support for Python, which is not really the product, but more adding features on top of the product.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past and some of them are already part of the infrastructure vertex system. Then, some are home grown, so we have a good system which is homegrown and looks at various metrics. It is a challenge because we have to write one solution which can handle everything, and our timeframe and resource constraints are a long process in writing. 

I was not involved right at the beginning. It was not complex at all. We had the Dynatrace agent helping us in person with the issues.

Look at Dynatrace. It has helped us by reducing the number of incidents that we have had in the past. It is a robust solution that would help anyone get to the solution and resolution pretty fast.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It came down to a critical component because we have numerous applications with different problems from apps or databases. Before the APM platform for narrowing down the problem became a critical issue, so at this point it was narrowing down and pointing to the exact core component. That was very critical.

We wanted to replace the previous APM, which was a first generation product, so that was our use case for purchasing Dynatrace.

Its performance has been wonderful.

One of the benefits - and I think it's because of one of the features that Dynatrace has, which is PurePaths - is that we have been able to diagnose, a lot faster, some of the issues that we have encountered in the past, when it comes to performance. We've even encountered two issues where we had to go back to software companies and tell them "You've got a problem with your software, and this is where it lies." Dynatrace was the one that helped us with that. We haven't completely removed the war room but we're expediting some of those war room diagnoses.

The customers just bought into it and just love it. They love the ease of use and the dashboarding that we have been able to set up for them. Everything that we have done so far has been a success.

What I like about it, is how it auto-discovers everything rapidly; within a matter of seconds you get to see the business transaction and how it's mapped within the product itself. That surprised the customer, but when we were starting to give them some of the dashboards in matters of minutes, after that, they were even more impressed with that feature.

We're not quite there yet, but the thing I would like to see is to really have that view of how issues relate to the business. Often enough, the tools that IT have for IT stop at the IT level. They cannot go into the business level part. They can't understand, because they don't have the information that the business needs to provide them with - for example how much an hour of downtime costs the business. For us, in IT, it's an hour of downtime, but it equates to money and equates to hours lost and equates to a lot of things, and often enough we don't have that information. This is where I would like to see us going. I think having a tool that can do that, and help us out with that information, I think would be helpful.

I don't play with the tool itself, I could ask some of the guys that do, they would be able to tell you more about it, but at this point I haven't heard anything that was a showstopper.

Stability has been great. I can't say enough about being able to upgrade and not even worry too much about the fact that it's going to be stable. I'd like to maybe see a little bit more about HA and disaster recovery. I feel that's a part that, at this point, we haven't been able to focus on - maybe because we didn't need to - but it's something that I would like to see more of.

I haven't hit that one yet, and I have to eventually, so I'm hoping scalability is going to be good.

I've never had to use technical support.

The only time that we really needed support, we actually engaged with, not a guardian, but the next level, which was a consultant. He came to work with us and help us out, deploying some of the stuff that we needed to do.

I wasn't involved directly in the setup. I oversaw the project that did. It didn't seem complicated, but honestly I can't say for sure.

I don't think the limitations are technical at this point, honestly. My limitations are more to do - and maybe it's because of the nature of the job I have - but they have to do with pricing. It's a little bit pricey. It's a very good tool. It's worth the price, to a certain degree. But it's hard to justify when it's that costly.

CA and AppDynamics.

It was a close race between AppDynamics and Dynatrace, but the views, the dashboarding, the clarity of the views, was a lot better. When you looked at it, it was easy to actually see what you needed to see.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, I'm not there yet. I wouldn't be able to answer you honestly on that one.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. The challenge associated with them is mainly integrations. We still have plenty of these tools, but the reality of it now is that they all have to talk to each other in order to get more information out of the monitoring. It's not enough to just see an alert, you need to correlate that to an application, you need to correlate that to a business model. And all of that is done only if you can have the tools talking to each other. Unfortunately, most of the time they don't talk well together.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, the benefit, from a manageability perspective, would be that I could concentrate my workload and my workforce on working with one product, therefore having one expertise. Now, I need to have several people understanding several products and, unfortunately, because they can't be hands-on most of the time, they don't have the expertise, or when they do have the expertise on one product, they can't develop it on the other products. For sure, from a workforce perspective, right there you've got a big advantage.

The main criterion we had for an APM was that we wanted to see an end-to-end view of our business transactions, which is something that we've never had and that the business has been asking for for years. That is the main criterion that pushed us to actually go this route. The first tool that we purchased was really hard to manage, didn't fit the bill that well, and that's when we moved to Dynatrace.

I would definitely say look into Dynatrace. One of the things that really dazzled me was that the minute you installed it you started seeing something coming out of it. and just that makes it so much easier. You don't have to wait. When you have to wait to see the results, it's not good.

Our primary use case for the solution is in our development environment where we look at how new applications rewrite or transaction flows work, and to see what the performance is. Then, we also monitor the same performance in production.

Some of the main benefits are being able to quickly identify when transactions start to slow or run into issues, or hiccups if you will, then we are able pinpoint them. Some of the other benefits are when we are trying to push large loads through in our test environment and everything comes crashing to a halt, then it will pinpoint where the bottleneck is.

Probably what everyone else loves: PurePath. Being able to get down to the individual code level to see where transactions are taking time. It has helped troubleshoot issues immensely and other tools can't provide this.

The messaging layer is not really capturable and measurable right now. We have had this this ask for years. Examples would be like IBM DataPower devices, literally just translates message types. It would be nice to see what the weight is on there to put some sort of measure on them. 

EMS or JMS: Really with JMS base transports, there is not much there. I know a product or two ago, they added a visualization piece, but it does not actually measure anything.

The stability for the solution is pretty solid overall. 

We did have some issues in an earlier version, probably 6.0 or 6.1. We have not had issues in the more recent ones. Thus, stability seems to have improved over the past few years.

The new Dynatrace product looks like it is more scalable. We are currently using AppMon. The tool definitely allows for scalability, but you do need to have decent hardware on one side, then you also have to have the knowledge. You have to be able to implement this type of application and go into its environment. There are different ways to do that with each AppMon agent. It will be interesting to see if the new Dynatrace product resolves these issues. 

We use technical support several times a year. They are always quick to respond. They have been able to handle the majority of our issues. We lay out all of our issues, and the few times they have not been able to help us was just because the product was still in development. 

They are one of the better customer supports that we have worked with in the technology world.

We have used some siloed monitoring tools. Some of the challenges that we faced are integrating with systems external to it, such as ticketing systems.

I do not believe they were using an APM solution before. The need to invest in a new solution was because the development was moving quicker and we had more tight resources. We had to sit there and be able identify if it was quicker than spending the little resources we did have, mainly trying to figure out where the bottlenecks were.

It was selected a while back, and I was not the primary on the project. I know they were looking for something that could get code level information and could measure response times inside the application. They wanted it to break down each step of the way, not just have a large bucket of data, e.g., have the whole thing take four seconds and know each step taken.

At the time of the initial setup, I was a programmer analyst and our team was bringing in several tools. So initially, I assisted a little in the testing and rolling out.

This was probably more than five years ago. It was relatively complex because we were trying to implement into environments that they did not yet support. We wanted to try pushing the boundaries in making it compatible. Therefore, it was not as simple as some of their other setups would be.

First identify which issues, or information, you are trying to get. After doing that, get advice on the solutions out there, including Dynatrace, since Dynatrace is by far one of the leading APMs. Depending on every company's needs, you should definitely always evaluate a few competitors. 

The role of AI is important probably for most organizations regarding IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. However, AI is loose term ranging from pretty basic to pretty complex. The more human interaction is reduced and just the issues are shown and reported on, it helps. Everyone is moving to the cloud and having central transformation along with all those other buzzwords of the year. Obviously, our company is doing the same.

We purchased Dynatrace to give us an end-to-end picture of transactions from the end-user, all the way back through all the infrastructure, and tag it all together - and it's worked out great.

The main benefits are that, obviously, we can see the transaction throughout the entire infrastructure.

One of the things that we're embarking on is, we're trying to measure the impact to the business of infrastructure events and incidents, rather than using gut feeling or emotions of whether we feel there was an impact, or asking our customers, how were you impacted. We have data now to prove it. So it's just taking the emotions out of it and just providing the facts of the impact, of the incidents or events.

The most valuable component of it is taking that guessing out of troubleshooting problems. We no longer have to rely on an architect, or an application person, or someone's memory of how the transaction moves throughout the infrastructure and the different dependencies that it has on it. We can see it right there and we find out more that we ever imagined.

We like the user's experience piece: being able to see, from the browser perspective, the user's behavior; being able to answer questions from our customers about why such and such happened, why the performance was slow, why we had an error. Many of our customers are business partners. They're not a customer online that couldn't shop or something. They're customer service representatives, maybe, or a customer service team, that is experiencing slowness, so they're reporting it very quickly and letting us know. We're able to see those transactions and it's helped with our mean time to repair.

I'd really like to see more dashboarding abilities. The ability to do workflows within dashboards, being able to start at a high level and click into it with custom dashboards. I think most of the time, we are creating our own custom dashboards, and I'd just like to see more ability with that.

I would also like to see it baselining more metrics out-of-the-box. We have a lot of rich data, but if someone says, "Well how did that look last week?" If you're looking at a problem and you see, for example, a long SQL statement, is that the root cause, or is it always slow; that kind of thing. It's difficult to take that and say, "Oh the SQL statement was fine last week and it's now slow and it started slow at this specific time." So, it's difficult to get historical data, unless you know in advance what your problems are going to be.

I feel, overall, it is very stable. We have some response-time issues from the product or from the UI, and getting all that massive data back. But overall, the stability, the availability of it, is good.

I think scalability is what we're struggling with. I would say it's okay, but there's a little bit of room for improvement.

We've spoken with tech support several times. We've used them to answer questions and to help us get more value out of Dynatrace. We've also uncovered bugs and they've been able to help us identify those and support has come out with fixes for them. It's been good overall.

We didn't really have a short list. We had another solution that we were using and it just really wasn't fitting the bill anymore and Dynatrace just slipped in. We just started evaluating it and we liked it, so we just went forward.

I think with anything that's of a massive scale, there are complexities - even just trying to understand the product. Obviously it's a new product and you're trying to architect something you don't know. There are definitely challenges and hiccups that occur with that.

I think, overall, the implementation of actually installing was fairly easy. Most of the problems, really, were organizational problems on our end. You know, change-windows being very small, and the testing requirements that we've put in place, caused the implementation to take a while. But the tool itself was pretty easy to implement.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, we're not really using the cloud very much, so I can't really say for the cloud piece. But I do think that these transactions are more and more complex, and there's so much data. That's one of the great things about Dynatrace is there's so much data, and it's also one of the most difficult parts about Dynatrace, is there's so much data. So having that AI to bubble things up for you, so that you're not searching for a pin in a haystack is definitely the future, I think, for Dynatrace.

We have used many, many siloed solutions and still do. It's hard to give  those up. The problem is, obviously, everybody is looking at their own silo and looking at their own monitors and, of course, it never looks like it's that silo's problem.

One solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, is really what we're looking for. It takes the guessing out of monitoring and everybody is seeing through the same window. That's what our team is designed to do, come up with answers, not just provide a lot of data. Obviously, we can send out data to folks, but they're not looking for that. They want your opinion of what the problem is, or what the answer is, not just charts and data. So it's very valuable for our team.

The criteria we were looking for when choosing an APM solution were the ability to gather metrics on a lot of different technologies and solutions. I was on more of the technical side. The financial side was kind of smoke and mirrors for me. I just evaluated the technical aspects and was looking for a solution that would give us an entire picture of the transaction.

I would recommend Dynatrace, of course, but I would just mention again, that you have to kind of think about the story that you want to tell. Determine, in advance, the metrics that you're going to want to show over time, for that historical view of data.