Dynatrace Reviews

We primarily use Dynatrace to monitor our job applications for our eCommerce platform. Generally, we are using it to diagnose user performance and our systems performance, especially for back-end functions. 

From a diagnosing standpoint, it has been a game changer. Before, we did not have monitoring, so anytime there was an issue, it was just guess and check. You would try something, and hope it fixed it. If it did not, then we tried something else, and did it fix it? No. Then, we would be up on phone calls at eight o'clock in the morning on a Sunday trying to figure out what went wrong with our last appointment. Now, within fifteen minutes (most of the time), we can diagnose or at least know where to look, after a problem has surfaced. 

It is nice to be able to deep dive and pull historical data. Sometimes, especially with our databases and stuff, we could not look at historical information for applications or issues that we have had in the middle of the night, for instance. Since putting Dynatrace in, we have been able to diagnose some of those issues in aftertime, not so much in real-time because we did not catch them. Therefore, it has been a big help to us being able to go back and check on things that happened in the past, so they do not happen again. 

Some of the complexities, especially with dashboarding, could be improved. While I know what I am doing, I am trying to get the developers to create dashboards and they just will not do it. They will just ask me, "Hey, can you make this for me?" It is like, "I can show you guys how to do it," and they respond, "Nah, I don't want to learn that."

With the newer products, they have improved them. However, the dashboarding process and creating measures and metrics, it needs to be made a little bit easier and more simplified. 

I do not know that I had any issues with stability. Generally, if there have been any issues with stability, it has been something on the server side, not really with the application itself. I do not think we have ever had Dynatrace crash. 

We are still pretty small in this. It is largely just our eCommerce platform that we are using it on right now. We have always been constrained by licensing on that anyway. Hybris does not let you scale too much unless you want to pay a lot of money, so we have not had too much issue with scaling at all, largely because we have not been scaling it. 

We have not really branched out too much into the cloud. We are just getting our toes wet, so I do not know that I have a really strong opinion on the role of AI when it comes to the IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. I expect that it will, as we grow, and it will continue to become more important. However, at this time, we are just not there. 

I have opened a couple tickets with technical support. I can't recall any of them off the top of my head, but I do not recall there being issues with them. They got back to me pretty promptly, and I was able to get a solution for them. Then, not for frontline things, but we purchased some coaching sessions and utilized those, which were very useful. 

We were not really using anything beforehand.

I was the sole person who set it up. There was complexity to AppMon and getting everything set, but more specifically getting the dashboard setup. It was reasonably complex. Some of the stuff was not super intuitive to me. Maybe I was approaching it from the wrong way, but I definitely had trouble. I especially struggled in the first couple of months trying to get everything set up the way we wanted it. 

We attempted to use New Relic, but the biggest issue was implementation. People before us tried to implement it, and it was never fully setup properly. Therefore, when I took over, we just decided to move to Dynatrace and canned the whole New Relic project.

Go with the new Dynatrace solution with it stats solution. Just the way it is implemented, they have made it a lot more user-friendly. Sometimes with AppMon, it is not so user-friendly. Otherwise, if you are choose AppMon, be prepared to sink a fair amount of time into it, because it is not something you learn overnight. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We were looking for something that could really help us deep-dive. That was the principal criteria. There were a lot of solutions, such as New Relic that we kind of looked at, but a lot of that was just surface-level. It was not giving us the full methods and full path of exactly what is going on, and that was what we were really looking for. 

Primary use case would be RUM for real-time monitoring. 

It has performed really well. Earlier, we were documenting how long each transaction was taking, because we had a service which was pinging different sources. Therefore, we had to go into the logs and see what the response time was for each step. Now that Dynatrace is instrumented, we are getting alerts any time the service time is not the baseline. Then, you look at the PurePath, and it really helps you drill down to where. You can work with other managed groups and tell them this is the timeframe when we saw the issue, "Did you see your CPU load go higher?" That is where I am finding it really useful. 

When our service response time was not matching the baseline, we realized that our Oracle TNS was getting too many pings, so Oracle recommended to us to utilize more persistent connections, so this is where Dynatrace really helped us narrow it down. Therefore, we are changing our call to use more data sourcing and connection calling. That is the real business benefit that we have received.

The real-time monitoring, which we are getting, is amazing. 

PurePath: It is really good. You can drill down and see what the baseline is. If it is five seconds and I am not happy with it, I can go into the PurePath and look at each step, then see where I can improve my performance.

I do not like the performance of the UI. It is really slow. I get a problem, but by the time I can drill down and figure it out, it is getting late because the performance is slow. When it is performing well, I know right away and I know how to react. 

Basically, our database list is running out. They have a maximum connection counts per second, and that is where we are running out of count. We were exceeding that count, so Oracle increased it to 200, and that is what Dynatrace gave us. In some situations, I have seen the UI is slow on our end.

Also, we were getting alerts, like the CPU was pinging, and it came in the middle of the night, and it was a development server. So, the next day I wanted to look at it, which process caused it, and sure enough Dynatrace gave me the details, but it does not give the user running the process. Most of the processes are very obvious what is running, like JVM is running, Java, or what websphere is running. But for this process, I had no clue. I involved a Dynatrace consultant, and he had no clue. Then, as a team, we did not know what to do. It was not happening often, so one night I was lucky enough, the monitoring alert came when I was online, and I quickly logged into the server to the top, and sure enough the process was running, and the process was running as route, so I know the groups which can run processes. 

That is how I figured out the process, and they looked into it. They figured out what the issue was, but just looking at Dynatrace I couldn't have figured it out. Therefore, I asked them if when they give these results that when they have CPU consumption in the processes, if they could also have the user. That would help.

Once screen replay comes in, that will be even more useful.

It is stable, but slow. We have a managed solution. We do not have a set solution. 

Scalability is pretty good.

I am more from the development team. We have a monitoring team, which is actually supporting Dynatrace with the help of Dynatrace's guidance.

Feedback about the technical support from our monitoring team has been pretty good. Our monitoring team is totally taking it in well. They are learning on their own. 

We have a lot of siloed monitoring tools; as in, we still have them. They are good alerting tools, but they cannot really measure response time levels and do the PurePath analysis, which Dynatrace is able to give us. This was the real challenge we had. They would say, "Why don't you record the response time for each step in the log file and we can monitor that," but I did not like that way of doing it. Dynatrace has very graphical interface, therefore it beats those tools. 

We used and are still using Nimsoft. The alerting is pretty good, and it integrates well with our issue management tools. Now though, Dynatrace integrate well with ServiceNow, and we are in the process of moving to ServiceNow. 

I am in the development. We just instrumented it on my servers. 

We had major issues, and it was not Dynatrace. It was how Dynatrace and Voz garbage collection were interacting, so IBM got involved and had to upgrade us. Now, it is doing a real good job, but that is how I got pulled into Dynatrace. 

There is a license issue where if we increase the memory we have to up the licenses. I was unaware of that going in. I thought it was scalable without all the paperwork behind the scenes.

I would recommend Dynatrace because I have seen Nimsoft. They do not have this graphical interface, and a graphical interface helps. Otherwise, with CP utilization and memory utilization, you would have to go to capacity planning to have them share their graphics. With Dynatrace, we can just bypass all that and just use it to see all the details. 

I would really recommend this product. 

We are not yet using cloud.

We use it for synthetic monitoring, as well as app monitoring.

It is performing well. It gives us all the things that we are looking for from application monitoring. From an operations point of view, we do not have visibility from the core level, therefore it helps get to the correct root cause of problems fairly quickly.

It provides the whole perspective in a single place when trying to guide the right people to go to the right solution at any given point in time. That is the biggest benefit.

The core level view, but also it all depends upon the instrumentation. The more instrumentation, the better the view gets. 

At the same time, a feature that I am really looking forward to is the OneAgent and the benefits that it will offer. Otherwise, it is pretty solid.

Definitely something to be improved is that OneAgent runs as a route, and not all applications want to run as route. Part of the problem is different technology companies will have various rules, regulations, and policies around what can run as a route. Thus, OneAgent running as a route is a security threat as far as some companies go. Especially in the payment industry, nobody wants to run as a route. Therefore, if they can avoid that and provide something as a non-route solution, that would be excellent.

There are still a lot of unknowns and a lot ahead. We also have a lot of competitors trying to actually sell in many different ways, and every company has a unique pitch when they are trying to sell their product. Good and healthy competition is the way to go, because I would still like to see more benefits from Dynatrace.

Stability is pretty good. I would definitely rate it around an eight or nine out of 10 stability-wise. It is the accuracy of the platform that really matters.

The scalability is good. I work in an environment in a complex ecosystem. It is a big piece of environment, and our hosts were able to handle it without any sort of issues that I know of. However, there could be some other unknown issues that go beyond me.

My technical team probably might have contacted the technical support for installations, setups, and so on. Personally, I have not ever contacted them.

We did use quite a bit of monitoring tools. It goes back to some other products, external products, offering their own way of monitoring. However, it is changing everywhere, the digital transformation, and not all companies are able to cope with the change. The important key thing is how well you will perform in the microservices framework.

We did use plenty of tools, a combination of many different things, not just one thing. You trust so many different products, and you cannot have good integration of all them, because none of them work together. 

Dynatrace solves the integration problem, because it is developed by one single company with a good framework behind the scenes. It is laid out with all the products that it supports in a nice, tightly integrated manner. That is why we went with them.

In the digital transformation that we are having right now, AI plays a key role. It is hard for a human being to think about all the aspects. When you have a proper AI, that is built by good engineers and a lot of resource go behind it, so I trust the AI will help. At the same time, I am also equally worried that it will make people dumb, where people who used to do things the hard way, now they get use this AI product, then slowly stop using their brains. So, we are also thinking about this.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be quality and getting right into the problem. Time savings is important as there is the brand reputation on operations. So, the quicker you solve problems, the happier customers will be. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Our focus is quality and speed of delivery, going through the microservice and that sort of framework. We are looking for a solution that can give insights into both the dev and the ops side. We are looking for features for changing the environment. An APM solution that can provide good balance between dev and ops is what we are looking for.

Our primary use case for the Dynatrace OneAgent solution would be OpenShift migration or OpenShift transformation, as part of our business is thinking about going the microservices route. The challenge that we have of course with the OpenShift world is, we lose the visibility that we had in the standard virtual machine with Dynatrace AppMon. That's where we are looking to potentially use Dynatrace as a solution.

We are trying to maintain parity between what we were able to see earlier with AppMon, and that's what we are trying to see in the new world. It should give us at least the same level of experience, if not better. That's what we are looking for.

The most valuable feature of that solution would be the level of visibility that you get. I haven't seen anything that gives us that level of visibility yet. I've been speaking with Red Hat as well, they also recommended Dynatrace as a solution, so that's what we are looking at right now.

One piece that we think that's missing is, there were thread names that were missing in analytical information in the Dynatrace solution, versus the AppMon solution. The AppMon solution gives you that information, and it is very helpful for connecting dots and bringing all the pieces together.

There is another challenge, which is in case of the Managed solution. In our old solution we could simply export the data as session data, and that would be imported and seen. Now, if we are using the Managed solution, then giving someone access to that solution is a challenge. We can handle it, but it's different than taking screenshots and saving that information the way we used to. The copy/paste features that were there in old application - because it was a fat app - were nice, compared to browser-based app, because you cannot really use those features anymore. There are pluses and minuses that we see.

We have done PoCs. I don't know whether I can speak in an educated fashion about the stability of this solution. But when we did a PoC for over a month, we did not see any issues with stability. The PoC was more of a SaaS, but we are potentially looking at the Managed solution.

We haven't encountered any scalability issues so far, but we were operating on a very small scale, so scale was not a test. Rather, feature, functionality, and parity, that's what I was trying to pull up. But we are having those discussions on a regular basis from feature/functionality perspective that we would like to see in Dynatrace.

I'm working directly with sales and engineers from Dynatrace. They have been very supportive. They are very knowledgeable. They are always available. We have a very good relationship with them. Last Saturday, seriously, someone was with me on the phone at noon trying to help on one of the issues. So they're very helpful.

With the Dynatrace solution, as this is still in PoC, I'm the first person involved in this. For AppMon, somebody else was doing that earlier, and I took that on on.

Setup with Dynatrace is much more simplistic. We've made a comparison matrix of other products, older products, and this one. That was one of the first items we were comparing. Ease of setup, of course, is great.

We did have other vendors on our short list before eventually going with Dynatrace. What made Dynatrace stand out from the crowd was feature functionality. That and the level of information that we are getting.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is one of the areas that we are looking into in 2018. We are definitely thinking about that, it's something that's on our radar. I believe that it is definitely important. I have seen some features presented by Dynatrace AI. But we are trying to do little more. I'm still exploring the AI option, to understand it much better from the Dynatrace perspective. But we are probably going to supplement that with some of our own analysis as well, at this point in time.

We have used siloed monitoring tools. Of course, the challenge is, when you're trying to put one single story together, it becomes extremely difficult. Importing and exporting data from one tool to the other, bringing everything together, trying to tell a story, the amount of time spent on that is humongous. You generally don't have that time. That's the main challenge.

If you had just one solution that provided real answers, and not just data it would definitely a great benefit - to have a solution rather than having data. Because then you're not relying on your best analyst, but you're going to present that to anybody who can read that information essentially and say, "Hey, here is the problem. This is how I go and fix it." Or, I would know which team to call, or which developer to call, because I could clearly see it on the screen. That visualization is very important. I think that would definitely help.

When it comes to selecting a vendor we have a lot of criteria. Vendor management within our company typically goes through those criteria. What I would say is, ability to understand our industry and resolve our problems, and understand what's critical to us and respond to that. Those are definitely important features that we are looking for from vendors.

I would rate Dynatrace, right now, about eight out of 10. There are a few features that we are really looking to get, and I'm having discussion with sales about that on a regular basis. Once we see those - those are our minimal set of requirements - I would be really happy.

It is part of our performance testing, where the team can run our workloads and can see the insights, where the bottlenecks are.

We had a very quick turnaround, and it solved our problems. We get more insights into what our code is doing, where the bottlenecks are. The tool helps us to find the root cause much faster than other tools in the market.

Our team can find bottlenecks quickly, and work with the engineering team to fix the problems at a much faster rate. So this is the quick turnaround, and they can go to production with better quality, and make the user experience much better than what previously they were experiencing.

The PurePaths can give us more insights, where the time is spent with the whole HTTP call. And we can clearly see where the bottlenecks are.

The business use case is that most people want to see how many orders came in. I'd like to be able to get data out of JavaScript tags, and capture more data. I think that would make it much more useful, rather than using Google Analytics. Instead, have one tool to capture all the stack, that would make it easy.

It's pretty good. It gives us what we need. We use the on-premise, with limited licenses, and we have never had any issues so far.

We've never seen any issue with the scalability.

We have never had an issue. We're pretty technical, so we can resolve things ourselves. I think, initially, we worked with them to help set up the on-premise, but afterwards, we didn't have any issues.

My previous client, the big pain points were, we had a lot of memory issues, upgrades not responding properly, and meeting SLAs, so that's why we were evaluating different APM tools. Finally, we picked Dynatrace for our own needs, for the use case.

We were using an IBM product which was not useful. Then we evaluated the APM space in the market and chose Dynatrace.

When we compared other APM tools, Dynatrace was the only one which could give us 100% visibility into the whole codebase. That's a key for us, because we can find the problem much faster.

Regarding the role of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, I haven't used the new Dynatrace tool, but as far as I know it can pinpoint the problem with AI. Based on the basin of data which they're collecting, it makes it much more that the developers can see where the problems are faster, rather than waiting for perf testing to be completed. I think it makes developers much more productive. They can see the problems right away, rather than waiting until they happen in production.

In terms of siloed monitoring tools, we used ITCAM before. We had a lot of pain points. It captured only 2% of the data, and we had to run a lot of workloads, change the config, and run the workloads. We spent a lot of time, wasting our human resources time. When we picked Dynatrace, it was a much faster turnaround.

If we had just one solution that would provide real answers, and not just data, the benefit would be - in most products, the tools are fragmented. If there were a tool which could give the full picture on the screen, the full stack, and give away the pain points, that would make it easier for any perf-engineer or developer to see easily. That's where I think Dynatrace is farther ahead in the game, in the APM space. There are other tools in the space, but I think Dynatrace is the only one that captures 100% of the data.

Also, I think they have good integration. Yesterday, here at the Perfrom 2018 conference, I saw xMatters integration where, when there's a problem, it can kick out a message to the whomever it is, with xMatters.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• product
• ease of use
• pricing
• features.

I give it a nine out of 10 because, as I said previously, I'm looking for more features, like getting data out of the JavaScript tags. That would make it much more usable.

But I would recommend the product.

We are using it essentially for health check monitoring on the application that I work on.

It saves your reputation once you have a product out there in the market and what you are doing to keep it up and running. You have to make sure it is out there and the key benefit would be to keep your reputation.

It gives you a great level of detail into whatever the issue is: Using troubleshooting and getting to the root cause.

We do not have any web monitoring with Dynatrace, so this is something we are looking at. At the moment, we are using another vendor products for most of our web solutions. We are looking at how well Dynatrace works with web solutions as we use Akamai for most of our web monitoring/solutions.

It has been a pretty stable product. 

It is pretty scalable. We are using it on most of our platforms, which are on a big scale and across the globe. The company that I work for is a global company, and the products that we use it on scale.

I have not used Dynatrace technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I was not there at the time.

If I had one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be to save time while troubleshooting.

The siloed monitoring compared to Dynatrace: Dynatrace is more widespread, so you get to have diversity in every aspect of what you are monitoring. Whereas, siloed is more of being concentrated in a particular area, then you have to put the puzzle back in versus a non-siloed approach where you can get to the root cause directly.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Scalability
• How accurate the troubleshooting and monitoring are.

The primary use case is infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring. It's performing really well, the OneAgent aspect of Dynatrace; we love it.

We spend less time in root-cause analysis. That way we are saving man-hours, and focusing more on fixing issues rather than trying to find the real cause of the issue.

Interrelating the logs and infrastructure issues, application issues, DC RUM, everything in one dashboard, saves us time in troubleshooting.

This is the constant evolution of the tools. The next release I would like to see is especially with external API monitoring. Right now, everything goes into one bucket, but if it were split into which API is failing, that way we wouldn't have to drill down to find out where the failures are. It would be quite evident on the dashboard, where the failures are. It would be easy for troubleshooting, and even on the executive dashboards, we could relay the message appropriately.

It's much nicer, it's lightweight compared to the previous versions. OneAgent is much nicer compared to Dynatrace AppMon.

We have not used it in a big environment yet, so I'm not quite sure how well it will perform. I hope it will perform well.

We used tech support just on the implementation side of it, initially, for a day. They were knowledgeable and helpful.

We had Dynatrace, the previous version. That's how we started. Now we have migrated from Dynatrace AppMon to Dynatrace Managed.

It was straightforward.

I think AI is the future when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, especially with the complexity of the systems and containerization of all the environments. Troubleshooting means increasing headcount or implementing AI solutions and being very smart with what we are doing. 

AI is learning things at this point. I don't know if it's the best. It took a while for AI to understand our applications. The first few weeks there were false positives, and now we are getting into the real issues, troubleshooting, etc.

I have used siloed monitoring tools in the past The challenges involved in them are interrelating outcomes of each tool with other tools; especially log monitoring with infrastructure analysis. That took a bit of time, double effort.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, we could focus on our strategy initiatives rather than our ops-type of activities, day-to-day. That would be the immediate benefit.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor, or working with a vendor,  are 

• stability
• technical knowledge
• industry expertise.

I would say Dynatrace is a nine out of 10. It's, again, the concept of evolution of the tool. What we have right now: fairly decent. There are always new things coming out.

You should at least consider this as a strong contender. The ease of implementing - we were up and running in less than a day, which is pretty impressive.

The primary use case is to monitor all our applications. We are doing an eMPOWER application, which is a new project including customer engagement across eCommerce, CRM, etc. We want a single place where we can monitor all our applications that we are building. Therefore, if something goes wrong, we immediately can find out what went wrong. 

We have not gone live yet. We just configured our environment and just started using it. So far, it is pretty good. 

We have not gone live yet. From a technical perspective, the expectation will be it is going to provide quick turnaround on issues and provide more stability. Based on how we observe Dynatrace, it will provide us some insight on what we can expect. 

From the business perspective, I think it is going to be a big deal. The conversion rate of people searching for a product and buying a product, these do not exist in our company right now. 

We expect there will be big business impact once we properly go live. 

• PurePath: Right now, we are using it for all our applications.
• Web monitoring: What we have is currently good. 

Cloud monitoring is insufficient. There is something that they are introducing for Salesforce, which is called agentless monitoring that I like. However, it is not going to cover the server side of Salesforce, it is going to cover the UI side of it. So, we would prefer Dynatrace to make more partnerships with major cloud applications like Salesforce, C4C, etc. That way they have an agent in their cloud services, and we can capture the code level analysis of what is going on in the Salesforce side. Right now, we do not, so that would be good. 

Given our scenarios so far, it is pretty good. The expectation is to remain the same.

The number of failures and the number of collectors servers, those look good right now and I do not see a need for increase for at least the next two years. Maybe after once we go live, once we will see the traffic, we may decide to if we want increase the scale. However, it may just be the extendability, and not a drastic change in the architecture of how we deploy the interface. 

We used the Dynatrace three month package, where I worked with a technical support person for three months and she helped in building the dashboards and exposing more features of Dynatrace. So, it was very helpful.

In our company, we had Microsoft SCOM, but I do not think it did the job well. Once we figured out there is a monitoring system that can show us code level details, nothing came closer. 

The initial setup was challenging for us. Initially, when we heard about Dynatrace, we knew why it was so good. However, it was complex until you grasped the nuances of the product and the building blocks: what makes what,  from where you can derive what, thresholds, goals, measures, etc. It took time for my team and me to get a grasp of what things are, so now we know what at least we have and have a good handle on it. Therefore, it is easier for us, so whenever there is a challenge, we have an idea of how to handle it. 

New Relic is one company that we had in mind, but our company preferred Dynatrace. New Relic was on the shortlist. As the technical team, we sat with Dynatrace for the PoC and we were able to do the PoC for Dynatrace. We loved it, and we explained the same to the executive team. Another team did the PoC for New Relic and our executive team decided on Dynatrace.

I would recommend the Dynatrace solution. I know firsthand that it is the most proven solution.

In today's sessions, I heard more about Dynatrace monitoring. We are using app monitoring. Dynatrace monitoring seems to be much more helpful.

Once the engine of AI is properly trained with sufficient amounts of data, it is going to be very critical for IT and it will be helpful and suggestive for the users. The only fear is that stage where it is trained, but not sufficiently, it will be very annoying. This is because it might pull up error messages, often times irrelevant. However, the concept of AI is going to be the future. 

If I had one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be that it would solve our problems much sooner.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The baseline is when a user comes in, we want to know everything he does in our landscape. It does not matter whether it is two applications or 10 applications in our landscape. We want to be able to follow exactly they do. 

That was the baseline we needed and Dynatrace fitted it pretty good, except there are some legacy applications, which Dynatrace doesn't support. Still, those are made as black box code. The bottom line is the traceability of any user. If something goes wrong, we should be able to pinpoint where exactly things go wrong.