Dynatrace Reviews

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.

We are a retail market. We wanted to understand how our business is doing, how our website is doing. This solution is one of our key parameters for determining how we are behaving on a timely basis, because every second is currency. Every second is money, so it matters.

It's reducing our manual efforts. Once you get the application guys to install OneAgent and it's done, there's no need for them. You can do every task. And AI, Smartscape, we're really into them. These are the things that are helping our organization the most.

In my organization, where we are using Dynatrace, three years back we were using Dynatrace AppMon in order to instrument .NET applications. It used to take time, because you had to onboard your resources from the support team, get that guy, get that instrument. It was a little bit of a pain, because you had to plan things prior and get these things started.

With this, the new Dynatrace, what's happening is we don't need to do all those things. Get that OneAgent installed and it does everything and it takes care of all the applications. It's actually simplifying my job. That's why I feel Dynatrace is great at this point of time.

Smartscape is a wonderful feature. I'm really loving it because there's no need for you to go deep into an analysis and go in to see where we are going wrong. You go to Smartscape, pass all the connections, and it will tell you the root cause. 

One of the coolest features is AI. It's amazing. You don't need to create the process groups, you don't need to create any other groups. It will automatically take all of this, based on the technology, create groups. It does amazing things. My manual labor is almost reduced because of this.

With Linux or Windows, it automatically takes care of everything, so there's no need for you to do any manual config changes. But when it comes to AIX - because I implemented it two weeks back - you have to go back to kind of an AppMon approach, where you instrument agents for .NET applications. So if Dynatrace could make those changes and make it automated, that would be one of the biggest action items.

One of the features that we are lacking is on the reports side. We don't have much reporting available. And the dashboards. I checked on their blog and they said that they are working on the dashboard front where you can create the dashboards. We do have dashboards available. They said they are bringing in a lot of things there, so I'm looking forward to that, on reports.

And there's no download action for the reports, so if they could add something like that, it would add value for us. We cannot save data for more than seven to 10 days, so it would be better to add a feature for downloading. At least we could store the data and then we could compare for ourselves, where we are starting and where we are and where we are heading. I would have those metrics, that's something I'm looking for. 

They do have some APIs where you can feed the data into Splunk. 

I really cannot say or comment on this, because it is still evolving. They are bringing in a lot of changes. Also, I'm posting a lot of questions and queries and requesting they add some of the coolest features. So, stability-wise, probably next year, or middle of this year, I can comment on this. Right now, I don't want to.

Scalability-wise, on the data side, I'm really worried because they are giving only seven days data retention. They should plan something on that, to increase the data.

Whenever I reach out to technical support, they are helping us. There's no point at which I would say they're not helping. They are very good. 

The problem here is that they are evolving day to day. Some features they're saying they'll include the next week or coming up. They have planned features, and that's where we are lagging.

But whenever I reach out to the support guys, they are very good.

When it comes to support, it all matters. You have a problem with your application and you don't know how to solve it, you reach out to the support guys. And if they are responding on time, that solves your problem. If you have a problem in an important application and your support guy doesn't respond and you are losing business... that's where these guys are standing out. Their support is constant, so you can reach out to them at any time and they are there. They're just helping us in that.

I've used different monitoring tools. I don't want to name them, because it could cause a problem. We used siloed monitoring tools but we couldn't find most of the features that Dynatrace offers. That's the reason these guys are standing first in the market. Number one in the market.

We also switched because of the coolest features and support.

It's straightforward. Very simple. There is a lot of automation.

I rate them an eight out of 10. Although they have a lot of things already available, still, there's a long way to go.

I'm always recommending Dynatrace now. We had two vendors come to us and we proposed to one the Dynatrace solution; and the other is in the pipeline, so we have to start the discussion. I'm part of a the team that works on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions. We do RFPs for them, PoCs for them, so that's one of the engagements that I am involved into. So my first choice, obviously, would be Dynatrace.

We have used it for application performance management (APM). We have been using it for almost seven years now. 

We use it, in many instances, to find the root cause in production. It has definitely helped out in many important critical cases. 

Business use case: One typical user could take down an entire post. Therefore, we had to institute Dynatrace to find out what is exactly causing it to pull down a question. For example, when you do not know if it is going down, then it causes an outage for the customers. 

It can actually prorate anomaly prediction (the problem resolution), which was happening in the production. It is quite detailed and deeper in the insights that it provides. 

Stability is pretty good. Everything run smooth so far.

Scalability has improved quite a bit from the beginning. I have been using the product for so long, and it has transformed quite a bit and is now scalable. 

Initially, when we were onboarding the product, we had to use technical support, especially for contouring the system. We found the technical support to be effective and the resolution time to be good.

I have used other APM tools as well, such as CA Wiley and SiteScope.

We had support from the Dynatrace team. They actually flew to us and we were working with the developers. We spent about a week with them understanding the product.

We evaluated New Relic. We were already users of the software Wiley Introscope.

Go for it. Implement the solution.

They want everything in technology to be self-learning, so AI is the future. It is not just somebody who has to be enlisting for time to debug an issue, rather AI will help out at that critical point as to what the solution could be.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: An APM solution has to be simple. We were actually evaluating other products at that point of time. One thing was the deeper insights that it could give. I should be able to pinpoint the issue and see the details. Dynatrace provides that and no other solution was giving any comparable. On top of that, we can't move over to the cloud, so we did not go with any cloud-based solutions. We wanted to have total control, so that was a requirement of the solution, too. 

Our primary use case is our mobile applications, to make sure that we’re doing end-to-end transaction tracing for both of our mobile apps.

Its performance is fantastic. We have found so many issues with the code and with development; also, with our microservices on the back-end, that we’ve been able to alleviate and optimize. It’s been totally fantastic.

It increases productivity first of all, and it makes our troubleshooting efforts more efficient. We don’t do the war-room thing, I hate the war-room thing. A lot of the time, when there’s an issue, before they can even assemble the war room, I’m telling them, "Okay, the problem is here, you need to fix this and then we’re good to go."

For me the service workflow and the dashboards are the most valuable features, simply because I can know what’s going on in my infrastructure within five minutes, versus two hours.

Can it talk to me? 

But seriously, the additional feature I would like to see: I did like the old dashboards, the legacy 6.3 for example; the way we were able to do the dashboarding in the client. I would like to be able to see that in the new version of Dynatrace. Other than that everything else is far superior to what we had before.

I think stability is fantastic. I work very closely with our SE. He and I have developed a very good working relationship. We exchange ideas and he helps me as far as knowing what’s coming up. What’s available, or will be coming up in the future. Then I help him in terms of, this was a custom config that we had to implement, and we feed off of each other.

The only issue with scalability that we’ve had - and it’s not a Dynatrace issue, it’s more an internal issue - is the fact that the data going over the satellite costs a lot of money. What we’ve ended up having to do is to implement separate data centers on each one of the ships. So instead of having one place that everything goes to, we have 40. That’s the only thing as far as scalability is concerned.

I wanted to be able to have a separate managed node - because we have the on-prem SaaS solution - so have the managed node on each ship disburse that data to the shore without causing the data overhead.

Our tech support guy is amazing. What I try to do, because I know how I am and I get irritated when someone comes to me and I know that they haven’t even tried to look. They’re just saying to themselves, “Oh, she knows, let’s ask her.” That’s annoying to me because I have a lot that I have to do throughout the day. What I try to do is, I go to the Dynatrace support site, I’m on there every day watching the videos, looking at the articles, reading the white papers. It’s very extensive. The majority of the time I find what I am looking for. If I don’t, I know that I can call Jeff and say, “Hey, I’m looking for this I can’t find it, can you help me?” 

It’s a running joke between him and me because he’s our SE - I don’t want to get him in trouble. Technically, I know I’m supposed to call tech support, but if it’s something real quick that I know he’s going to know, I’ll just say, “Hey Jeff, how do I do this?" Or, "I have been looking on the tech support site and I’m getting annoyed, I can’t find it. I know you know. How can I find this?” Then he'll say, "Oh, just do this, and this, and this." He gives me step by step, and then within 15 minutes, the problem’s been resolved.

In terms of regular tech support, I haven’t had any issues. I have a really good working relationship with them, even the tech support guys, they know me. When I submit tickets, they say, “Oh, hey Danielle.” I’m always reading, learning, asking questions. I tell them, "I know I’m being a pain. I’m going to ask you anyway. How do I do this?" They know it’s me, and they respond right away.

AppDynamics, and I’ve also worked with New Relic and I’ve also worked with Wily, which was horrible.

I used to work for the government and we used use CA Wily at the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. We used Wily and I hated it, it was awful. Just basic monitoring functionality, we had to write custom code for it. 

Then I went to Office Depot and there we switched from AppDynamics to Dynatrace. I was part of that implementation as well. My reaction was, "Oh my God, what is this?" I was totally engaged and at the time I was a WebSphere admin. I wasn’t part of the set-it-up implementation but I was an actual user. Once we got the Dynatrace software on my particular environment I ran with it. I loved it. 

From there I came to Royal Caribbean and we were still using New Relic at the time, I was miserable. I talked to my boss, and he had already been looking at and scoping Dynatrace. I just told him, "Look dude, we’ve got to get Dynatrace. Office Depot is using Dynatrace. This is all the stuff that we can do with it." At the point he was sold and we brought it to RCCL. I’ve been using it ever since.

I was involved in the initial setup. The funny is that I worked at Royal in 2014. I implemented the initial - we call it the "legacy" - Dynatrace environment, which is version 6.3. I did that implementation and then I left and went to work at Carnival, hated it there, and then came back to Royal Caribbean and then implemented the new version of Dynatrace.

Setting up the new Dynatrace was different because I was used to the level of complexity. One thing I’ve noticed is that everybody complains about the level of complexity with Dynatrace. Even with the surveys, what I said is, you have to know your infrastructure. That’s one of the things that Dynatrace really forces you to learn and know. They’re a monitoring company. They don’t know how we’ve written our applications, they don’t know how we’ve implemented our microservices, they don’t know what connections we have going into our database. We have to know those things in order to be successful with the set up.

Once you know those things... We’ve automated the entire install practice and we’ve automated the entire implementation process. That’s simply a matter of us or me saying, "Okay, we need architecture diagrams, we need service workflows." I need to know how these calls are being made so that way I can correlate them, and I can write the scripts to do the implementation and then we can get it done.

I know they looked at AppDynamics, I know they looked at New Relic. There’s this new company called Datadog that they’ve been looking at. It’s nowhere near the functionality that Dynatrace offers.

In terms of AI, I love the base-lining Dynatrace provides us. It baselines the application over a seven-day period; we have it at the default of seven days. The artificial intelligence is so amazing because it can automatically track each transaction and their response times: how much CPU they use, how much memory, resources that they use. If there’s any deviation from that Dynatrace will tell me like right away. If there’s a deployment and the deployment has increased response time or is taking up CPU or has caused a memory leak, I can say, “Hey guys, you need to look at this, it’s this function on this page in this microservice, in this docker container. You need to go here, you need to fix it, it’s not going live.” It has just increased our productivity off the charts.

We were using siloed monitoring tools before this. The challenge with them is simply the silos themselves. We had separate database monitors, we had separate service monitors. We have a project called Apogee, it’s a routing-type technology. It had its own monitoring. And then we had separate monitoring for the front-end, separate monitoring for the mobile apps. Now, with Dynatrace we have consolidated all that monitoring into one central location.

Regarding one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, we’re already using it now. Like I said, we’re monitoring our SQL databases, we’re monitoring our microservices infrastructure, we’re monitoring our front-end we’re monitoring our mobile apps. It has increased our productivity, we’ve been able to optimize all of our applications. As a matter of fact, I just got a call from our VP because there’s a specific project for the mobile app that we’ve implemented this in. Now, he wants to put it in the rest of the enterprise. Based on what we’ve done for the mobile app project, he wants to roll it out to the entire enterprise.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is, are they going to answer my call, because I’m very engaged. If I call you it’s because I have a question. I’m not going to call you unless I absolutely need to, which means that when I call you, you had better either answer the phone or call me back. I am very big on that. Like I said, Jeff has been fantastic, Dave is our sales manager, Chuck Billups is our customer success manager. Between the three of them, if I have an issue, within 15 to 20 minutes I have an answer.

In terms of advice, make sure you know your infrastructure. Make sure you know your applications. So often in the IT industry we see people who say, "Yeah, I’m an architect, I’m a senior engineer. I’m a senior developer." Then, if you ask them, "Okay, what’s the service workflow of this service?" or "What’s the workflow of this application?" or "What’s the workflow from this server to that server?" They can’t tell you. You absolutely have to know those things in order to be able to implement Dynatrace successfully.