Dynatrace Reviews

We use Dynatrace to monitor our webservers. 

Dynatrace has given us one simple dashboard to monitor all of our servers and web applications. If we have an application error, it is really easy to find the specific web request in Dynatrace and debug what went wrong.

I find the "PUREtrace" functionality the most valuable. It lets me drill down into the specific web request and see exactly what processes were called, what database calls were made, and if the application made an error. It also shows me the error message. 

It gives me an overview over how long each process call took, enabling me to find bottlenecks in the application.

I would like to see Redis calls being included in the "PUREtrace" functionality. It would be great to see the different Redis calls and find bottlenecks.

We replaced New Relic with Dynatrace. We were quite happy with the easy installation process and how quickly we received a good overview over all of our web applications.

To monitor and mimic the external customer experience for our external customer-facing websites. This tool does the exact same thing. It monitors the customer experience at over 10 US locations and informs us if there are any issues through email alerting and text alerting in the mobile. This has made our life so much better.

This is the first gate where we come to know if our external customers are facing any slowness in response times for critical page navigation irrespective of if there is any background issue or not. Once there is any slowness, an alert is triggered to the corresponding team and they immediately start looking into the background to find out any issue. This way, when a customer reports any issue, we can always assure them that we are already working on the issue and it will be resolved soon.

There are lot of features, but I found data analytics and triggering are the two most valuable feature of this tool. 

• Data analytics help us to find us issues in the short-term or long-term. 
• Triggering gives us warning that system is getting slow and we need to nail down the issue soon, so it does not impact our business.

This tool had a feature of doing load test in production or lower environment, which was shut down earlier this year. We are missing that feature badly and we definitely want to see that feature back. 

Our development group has started using Dynatrace extensively. It helps them find bottlenecks caused by code.

The topology map is extremely useful. The dashboarding capabilities are unmatched. From a management perspective, I have a single pane of glass view to my entire environment.

Possibly include some network monitoring capabilities. I honestly feel the product already has everything we would need.

We were using New Relic, but we never got the full picture of our production environment. Their pricing model was an issue, too. We were unable to put all our servers on their tool due to the high cost. So, we were limited in what we could do. Their dashboard was almost non-existent. It would require us to build our own which we did not want to do. Installation complexity and maintenance were also an issue. 

Dynatrace claimed to be super simple, and we thought let us try it. Honestly, we were amazed by how simple it really is. The other motivation was the design of the product itself. Everybody can show charts and metrics, but Dynatrace’s infographics are amazing. The dashboarding is simply best in class.

I use DT for identifying performance bottlenecks on the DB, mid-tier and front-end, which is built on .Net platform.

The performance testing is executed using the LR tool, where the DT headers are added. Once the test is completed with the filter criteria in dashboard, we are able to segregate the transactions having slow response time and root cause.

For one of the trading applications, we were able to identify the slow performance query which was resulting in overall performance degradation of the GUI. The Query involved multiple joins and clause which when executed by multiple users slowed the overall DB response time. From the DB Chart in DT and DB Dashboard, we were able to arrange the Query within the SP against slow response time/execution time. Analysis resulted in optimizing the query resulting in improved performance.

The dashboard customization based on the performance metric requirement is one of the most exciting features in DT. I am able to customize my dashboard based on the test requirement and it helps me to focus on the area that really needs close monitoring.

I would suggest to have more rich client features on Appmon as soon as possible. I agree most of the things can be done using Appmon, but users (like us) are bit hesitant to use Appmon compared to the Client.

Appmon:

• Drill downs to root causes.
• Easy to find the performance bottlenecks.
• Full insight into all classes.
• UEM helps to identify user experience and detailed steps performed by the user.

I have identified and fixed the following performance issues in non-production before we release the app:

• Identified memory leaks that caused heap utilization maxed out.
• Identified thread bottlenecks at JVM.
• Identified JDBC connection pool limits.

There are so many!

• Transaction flow: Helps to identify server health at every layer.
• Threads on JVM: Helps to identify active, hung, and count.
• GC: Helps to identify GC collection time and number of times GC kicks in.
• UEM: Helps to identify user experience.

DT Saas: Does not have all the features that Appmon has. Maybe in the future releases it may have all features.

Application performance monitoring for testing our pre-production environments. Along with that, we use AppMon to create B/T's for alerting and graphing trends.

Prior to the use of Appmon, our team was in the dark. We had zero visibility into our production application, and it would take up to days to find out why our clients were being impacted and how.

Since Appmon has been leveraged, we are now down to just hours (sometimes minutes) in resolution times.

PurePath analytics, I can't imagine not having this feature in your application. Not only have we been able to improve troubleshooting, but we have also used PurePath data (response times) to improve and tune application performance.

Ease of Use. I find it is very difficult to train someone in using this application. As amazing as it can be, the learning curve is extensive.

Java-based microservices (couple of dozen) monitoring and their dependencies (Oracle, MySQL, RabbitMQ, and Elasticsearch). Apart from monitoring (with alerts), I use the Dynatrace solution to investigate reported issues by clients.

It eases the investigation process (faster feedback loop with clients), better pro-activity on possible outages (in order to avoid outages), and eases the process of fine tuning allocation of resources to processes.

• Dashboards: Most critical information on a single view and in a very-customizable way.
• Alerts: Stays on top of probable issues.
• Services monitoring: Helps fine tune resource allocation (CPU and memory).

I would like to have more visibility into Python processes. Meanwhile, we are thinking about "fronting" our Python processes with a fully supported web server, such as Nginx.

1. Application performance monitoring root cause analysis 
2. User experience analysis 
3. Proactive monitoring (application, third-party API, and availability and host)

It helps to identify the problem in a minute and user experience metrics provide valuable data to the business team to understand how the application performs at the end user level. Overall, it is an amazing tool for application root cause analysis and business function analytics.

• The microservices container topology view
• It supports Kubernetes and cloud monitoring platforms.

Its needs to focus more on open source areas, like Apache umbrella products and availability motioning areas.

SaaS infrastructure monitoring and alerting. We use it to monitor over a 1000 servers in AWS.

It is our main SaaS monitoring and alerting solution, and it allows us to identify many problems that we would miss if we did not have a comprehensive monitoring solution.

• Automatic alerting on system problems
• Failure rate increases
• Latency increases, etc. 

This stuff all works out-of-the-box, and is essential for a DevOps team to be aware of to identify production issues.

• The Web UI can be slow and hard to understand. 
• The integration with PagerDuty is currently broken on mobile. 
• It often produces "false alarms" and cannot identify failure patterns over days/weeks that do not indicate concern.

Application performance diagnostics of our enterprise critical applications. Proactive monitoring of response times and trends. Performance and load testing of new versions.

• Helps us to quickly find performance issues with new applications or new feature introductions.
• Allows us to see response time, failure rate, user experience, and visualize trends.
• Root cause analysis of problems with live systems.
• Performance and load testing evaluations.

The ability to go from a high level performance view to a specific transaction. Dynatrace covers the important tiers and allows us to quickly find trends and root causes in all our critical application lifecycle steps (Ops, Dev, and Performance).

It is not clear which path the product will follow with Dynatrace in the cloud (or on-premise) and Appmon. As an existing customer who has invested heavily in training and using the Appmon version, it is not clear what are our long-term strategy should be to upgrade (Appmon vs Dynatrace).