Dynatrace Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Ease of use
• Ease of integration

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

The integration between the web monitoring of Dynatrace and OneAgent. 

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

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

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

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

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

The initial setup was straightforward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The installation and configuration were very straightforward and nice.

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

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

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

This is not offered at the moment.

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

It scales well. 

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

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

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

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

The initial setup was straightforward, very easy and nice. 

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

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

Most important criteria when looking for an APM solution: 

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

We have a platform that is like an automation of DevOps. The company is getting into the DevOps environment and the primary hurdle for them is to choose the right tools. Our customers do not know if they get stuck with one tool if they could not easily move to another one. 

Our platform, what it does, is we give them all the tools that connect to what they want. In that process, initially we integrated the options, like ELK and Nagios into our platform. Then, some of our clients also wanted Dynatrace in it. That is how we got Dynatrace also on our platform. So, we integrated their APIs into our application, so now all our clients can use Dynatrace too. 

The most valuable feature is that I am getting business. My clients ask me something, I go to my technical team and tell them, "They want this and this." From my clients' perspective, Dynatrace below the dashboard is very good compared to other monitoring tools. The dashboards are a really cool feature when I get to talking to clients. I ask them, "Why Dynatrace?" Because I need to push the tools that I have in my application. Then, they explain the monitoring of Dynatrace, saying the rate of the updates and features. They want to go with Dynatrace.

Introduce a cool feature called "all monitoring", or something like that. It briefs an entire session for you, monitoring and replaying that entire session, so it becomes very easy. A cool feature which I can sell to my customers, which can drive more customers to Dynatrace.

For stability, our customers have no complaints. 

We increased our Client to experiment with the tools, so we could find the right tools. Some of my previous customers whom we encourage them to switch to Dynatrace, they had no complaints.

I do not talk to technical support. Our clients talk to Dynatrace. All our clients inquiries are directed to Dynatrace.

My job is not to rest because my whole platform's aim is to move on to next to the tools, like finding out what is right for their environment. Initially, if I would ask them to go for Dynatrace. Then, after using it for approximately one month, I can tell them to find out what they like and what they do not like. They can go on from there.

AI is very important. The world is moving toward an automation. In the future, it is going to be a new Ops world. There is no resource for sitting on the operations side, so there will be an AI which will be doing all the work.

When we implement the solution, the developers just supply the code and all the automation that happens behind them. That is what they expect. For example, it needs to do its work in a formulation, then determine what kind of resources you need for that and what kind of servers we need for all that. Thus, AI is going to be a big thing.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers and not just the data,  the immediate benefit for the team is they do not have to spend time. So, the first thing is I don't have to bang my head about what is happening and where to find the solution. If I have something to use, which solves my problem. My life becomes easier.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They should be very stable. Like most of the products in market, when they do updates, they break down. This will usually cause a slow down briefly to customers. This is where we will see if the product is stable or not. 

The vendor should avoid rapidly giving updates every month without doing testing, because if you see in the past with AWS (for example) when they released the patches for the Spectre and the Meltdown problem, it affected almost every company around 20 to 30 percent of the parts went down. The companies did not know that the patch was up like that. Transparency is important, and also, test the solution before you actually implement it.

My primary use case, as a partner, is to help my clients find out what's happening in their environments, what the problems are, where the need is for help, for investment in people, in technology; and how can they reduce the gap between the problems and fixing the solution on time.

I think it's doing a really good job.

Because it is a good product, our customers are happy. We can help them faster than before. We can do more business with them, and we can have them develop better businesses for themselves.

AI, driving problem identification.

I would like to have something more along the lines of the old DC RUM, because we have lot of clients with old technologies, legacy technology, and we really want to integrate it with Dynatrace so that they can use just one single product. So, better integration with legacy products.

Stability is really good. I have never experienced any downtime.

Scalability is excellent.

I have used technical support many times, but it's more an issue of the learning path, it's more being acquainted with the product, features, new features.

It's always the right person, always the right answer, and they always want to help, even connecting in GoToMeeting sessions, even phone calls. Always.

Our clients use lots of solutions, Solar Winds, DMC.

Before, with AppMon, it was so complex, but you got used to it. Now, with Dynatrace, it's a breeze.

When it comes to the role of AI and IT's ability to scale into the cloud and manage performance problems, I think AI is really important. Before, you needed some really expert people to do this job. Some customers have that kind of personnel, but some customers don't and they worry about hiring somebody, training them and then, maybe, that person will leave later and they will lose all that knowledge. Now, as it is automatic, as it is driven by AI, it's easier, it's better.

While I have not personally used siloed monitoring tools, our clients do a lot. They have a lot of trouble as a result, blind spots are common. Also, lack of knowledge, and integrating all those tools into a single one. Sometimes, they are mad, or not very happy, with investment of so much money into so many tools, and very high maintenance.

If you had just one solution that could provide real answers telling you what you need to do and not just the data surrounding it, the immediate benefits of that would be simple implementation, simple management, low cost maintenance, and faster adoption.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, a lot of people use the industry reviews as a reference. But, in practice, customers want a product that is proven, that is easy to manage, that has low cost maintenance, and that they can use in as many scenarios as possible. One solution to rule them all.

I never give anything a 10 out of 10 rating, but I would easily give this an eight given its integration, the stability. Dynatrace is always on the edge of new technologies. You are never left behind. Everything that is new is almost instantly covered in Dynatrace so, we like that.

Just try it. If you try it for one day, it's enough to understand the scope, the really big scope of Dynatrace.

We're using it for monitoring our infrastructure, product reservation, so we're making sure that it's up 99% of the time.

We've been using it less than six months. As of now, it's working well.

Because we have a 15-minute SLA, we have to see the root cause of the problem or the alert, what's the issue. It helps us to determine, quickly, as much as possible, to know what the issue is, what the problem is, and where it is. Also, it's helpful when there is a correlation on all, on the whole service and applications.

• RCA (Root Cause Analysis)
• PurePaths, where you can see the stack trace and everything; that helps.

I haven't used it long enough to know what additional features might help. But I am looking forward to the Davis AI feature. That's exciting.

Right now, stability is okay. We haven't had any downtime.

Scalability is good.

We were using some old tools but we're decomissioning them and transferring to Dynatrace. We're also using currently using SCOM. So Dynatrace is an additional tool.

We brought on Dynatrace because it's an in-depth monitoring tool; we needed that. SCOM is not enough for our products, so we took another one for the troubleshooting.

Regarding a single solution that could provide real answers, Dynatrace will help because it will give you a lot of data, based on what I've heard at this Performance 2018 conference. Because we have not yet been using Dynatrace for a very long time, at this conference I have seen that it will be very helpful because of all the data and information that it will give you. It's an end-to-end solution.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are, of course, the cost, the usability, and if it's successful in the market. Also, if it will give us what we need.

I rate this solution eight out of 10 because I'm seeing you don't have to update everything. Once you've applied the one agent, it will be automatically updated if you turn on the automatic update.

I would advise that you check it out and try it.

We do a lot development in our company. We work with multiple servers, especially AWS and Azure. When we do these deployments and when we do these pipeline, we need to know what exactly is going on with the service and if there is an error. We need to know the root cause and where exactly the error is coming from. 

We have been using different kinds of monitoring tools in the past, such as, ELK and Nagios. This did not make much sense in a few of our uses cases. For example, there is an error in a deployment scenario, it does not show. It would remain difficult for us, as sometimes we could not find the root cause. When we switched it to Dynatrac, we could clearly see where the error is coming from and we could see the service performing well. We can also see the amount of usage, like the status. Particularly, the thing which we like about Dynatrace is its clarity.

It is clear. You can easily know where the error is coming from and the performance of Dynatrace is something which we have been really surprised with. Most of the other monitoring tools that we have used in the past have not been user-friendly, and most of the their user interfaces are terrible. With Dynatrace, this is not the case. It is very advanced when compared to other monitoring tools.

There are some cool features which they are trying to include like the tracing and the client side errors with the view. We could see the number of the problems where it is coming from, but we couldn't get in too deep to what exactly the problem is and what exactly the user is doing to see the error.

This a cool feature that they are trying to implement with video, which I appreciate a lot. It is not only that you are seeing that there is an error, you are also seeing where it is and what exactly the flow that caused the error. This feature has been announced it, and I was surprised by that, as it was exactly what I was looking for.

Compared to other tools, this solution is perfectly stable. The main feature with this solution is that you do not need to do a lot stuff. Everything is being done by the tool itself. Everything is in there for you. There is nothing much needed from your resources; it is all in there. That is the beauty with this solution.

Scalability is an important factor. At the same time, this is the Dynatrace solution we are talking about, it is really scalable when compared to other tools. We need to do a lot of stuff to make it work with multiple instances and multiple servers. So the scalability is there, but it is a headache when you do a lot of stuff and when you need to compare a lot of servers and do a lot of things. The scalability is very difficult to maintain. 

When things get reduced and the things from our side get reduced, as a developer, it gets much easier in order to scale. In this way, the solution is really scalable, and it is not difficult to get scalability with this solution. 

Regarding the customer support, they were very few instances that I have used them, but I would not say I use them regularly. I have only used them a couple times. They were really cool. They were really helpful. I got an immediate response, something not seen with other solutions. 

With this solution, you can always get in touch with support representatives and the developers if you want to, and you can get the solution directly from them. They are good about giving customer service, which I really like.

We have used different monitoring tools before when we had multiple problems. We would need to configure a lot. There are many tools needing an expert developer who had expertise in that particular tool. Therefore, we needed to have the proper resources for it where a lot of configurations were going on in, then one of the configurations failed. It is meaningless once your configuration fails and you can't find the error, or where it is exactly coming from. 

I was using ELK Stack. The thing with it is you need to do a lot of configurations where you need to maintain separate servers for each stack. You need to maintain three servers, which was a headache for us and it is also costly. You need to install agents in each server, which is the same for Dynatrace too. However, for the ELK agent installation, you need to configure a lot. You cannot just go execute a few commands and make the things work. You need to install, then configure it. It was pretty hard work as a developer, which was how we started to switch to Dynatrace, which is really cool.

Dynatrace is something which does not need many configurations. It is a just a simple way for you to install an agent in just three or four steps. Go in there in with just a few commands, and it is all set for you. In that way, Dynatrace is perfectly good for every cloud deliverer. 

I am happy with the Dynatrace solution. Dynatrace is a perfect tool when compared to other tools. 

AI is important when it comes to cloud. Every time you see a complex problem, you can't go in the server and find it yourself. You need expertise in order to do it. With the resources of a non-cloud person who has just been introduced to  the cloud, he cannot do everything that an expert does. 

With the evolution of cloud and an unattainable number of resources, such as everyone in your software company cannot be an expert with the cloud. This is where the AI comes in. It helps you a lot. It shows the correct path of what is happening.

AI is a huge, important factor, and it will be the dominating role in the coming future.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers as opposed to just data, the immediate benefit it would provide would be to decrease the resources that you may need and not necessarily need to provide staffing for your resources to know the technology perfectly. You can reduce the cost of the training or for the things that would make a developer be an expert in the technology. So, it would reduce the cost while automating things, and it will make things work smoothly and perfectly for you.

Primary use case would be problem solving and remediation, and it's working very well.

It has dramatically reduced the time it takes to problem solve webpages and coding problems.

Being able to drill down into the PurePaths, to get to a solution.

We have a couple of one page apps that it has a problem with because it doesn't call to the server all the time. I believe part of that is taken care of in the next version. That was the biggest thing for me. That's one of the reasons we haven't really siloed up too, because of that.

I can't think of any issues we've had with stability.

I love it, I've always been a big fan of the scalability. We haven't scaled up yet but we hope to.

We used a guardian to begin with. He trained us and helped us quite a bit. I think we had him for about six months. He was wonderful.

As for siloed monitoring tools, I don't believe we used any. We did use an alert site, but nothing other than that.

We actually had a production issue on our catalog website. Dynatrace came in and helped us install and problem solve that issue right off the bat. That was our initial outing.

During the initial implementation I was just there as a bystander. We had our infrastructure guys taking care of the implementation. I was just there afterwards to learn how to run it. And if there are upgrades, we hand that off to infrastructure.

When it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud in order to monitor performance management, I can't really comment on the role of AI in that. I'm not involved in that as yet. We are just starting to have a cloud footprint now.

If we had just one solution that would not only provide data, but real answers, the immediate benefit for our team would, of course, be helping the code to be error free, but also speeding it up a bit.

What I appreciate most in a vendor, personally, would be performance in the product, and knowledge; product knowledge.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10, because it's easy to use. I use it everyday now.

Implement it and put it on every server. You have to have it all the way across with the network.