Dynatrace Reviews

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.

We’re primarily using Dynatrace for user-experience monitoring, for our Autodesk e-store as well as our Autodesk subscription management. 

The performance is really good. It’s really helping us to catch problems and find out where the root cause is.

The main time to resolve issues is coming down with Dynatrace. 

Previously, it used to take time to find out what was the exact reason, why this user is failing, what is the user's complaints. Now we can see proactively, this is the component that is failing, and we are going to fix it. The time to the solution has improved.

Regarding AI and managing performance problem in the cloud, it’s very important. We have a lot of monitoring tools. We believe that with the new Dynatrace AI, the alerts will be reduced. It’s only binding to one alert where the exact, root cause of the issue is, instead of giving a thousand alerts, spamming them with all the email alerts and services. Just one alert that says: this is the problem, this is the root cause of all these things.

The real user-experience monitoring is very helpful. We can see what real users are seeing, what JavaScript errors, what pages are very slow for them. As well, it helps to correlate the front-end users to the back-end application components, and the corresponding Method which is failing, as well. We are able to go to the correct spot and fix the issue.

The real-user replay that they demoed here at the Performance 2018 conference, it would be really good if we can get that. And the other is the self-healing; it’s currently not there. We have to forward the events to some outsourced remediation solution and then they work on the event. If they also provided the self-healing option, that would be really good.

So far we haven’t had any issues with the Dynatrace infrastructure itself. We have been using Dynatrace AppMon for the last two and a half years. We’re migrating to Dynatrace now, we have started a PoC, with the new AI etc., to experiment with it.

We haven’t touched scalability for the new Dynatrace yet.

We have called the technical support and most of the calls are returned quickly. Some of them will be a real technical problem and then they have to reach their engineering side; the support is not able to help. Those were the cases where support got delayed.

We had both experiences, unreasonably long for most of the cases, and some were reasonably long delays.

Previously we were using a third party e-store. When Autodesk wanted us to have a custom e-store, built and managed by our Autodesk development team, we wanted to have real user-experience monitoring on all the applications, performance and everything.

It took a lot of time with the initial deployment, of the old solution, the AppMon. With this one we have to check it out. We are doing a PoC. The deployment is going to be smooth and it’s going to be quick, that’s what I hear, here at the Performance 2018 conference. I have yet to implement the install to see that.

We did a PoC with New Relic. New Relic did not capture any events because of the front-end framework that we used at that time was Angular, and New Relic did not support it. We tried AppDynamics and that also did not support it. Then, finally, we went with Dynatrace.

We have used siloed monitoring solutions in the past and there were a lot of events, it was not good. We’re trying to consolidate everything into one. We’re working on tool consolidation. That’s one of the primary plans for our roadmap, for IT.

If we have a solution that provides not just data but real answers about where the problems are, how to fix them, the immediate benefit for our team would be time. We would have time to work on other development efforts, innovation things. It would save a lot of resources as well. That would be the main benefit of it. We’re spending a lot of time to get the answers. With one solution like that, it would be giving us the answers.

What we appreciate most in a vendor is their being more responsive and attending to customer problems; more customer-focused.

I would rate Dynatrace a seven out of 10, because of the issues I mentioned before with technical support.

I would definitely recommend Dynatrace, the new one, with all the new features that are being launched. I think these are not available in other monitoring tools. This is the best one. I would definitely recommend Dynatrace.

I am from a monitoring team, and we had a PCF environment that we were building. We needed a tool to monitor a PCF environment. We were looking at a couple of tools, and we found Dynatrace is a robust tool which provides pretty good monitoring for a PCF environment. That is when we chose Dynatrace.

It will definitely be a benefit. We are using other tools to monitor other environments, and we have to switch between different tools when we have to do RUM, do synthetic monitoring, or do competent monitoring. It is really painful.

This is where I find Dynatrace pretty good, because it has everything in one tool, and you can monitor from infrastructure to synthetic monitoring, RUM, then performance data, etc.

That is the way to go, when you do not have to waste time between setting up the tools and seeing the metrics. That is what all matters. We can save time and still get the work done.

We are just setting up the environment, so I have not done so much with Dynatrace. The thing that I like with Dynatrace is it goes to every part of the containers, and it brings up all the data and all the problems. The way it shows a problem on the dashboard is pretty good.

We finished our PoC. We have deployed our dev environment, test environment, and now we are still setting up our production environment. The reviews that we got from the PCF team, they are pretty much happy with it.

I need more experience, because I have not used the tool. As far as I know about the tool, it covers so much. Once I am more familiar with the tool, then I will have more understanding of what I am missing here. Right now, I need more experience.

We are still setting up the environment. While I was deploying it, it was pretty quick. Therefore, I did not have any complaints. I am pretty good with what I have worked with of the tools, and how much time it takes for the deployment. So, I am pretty happy with it

We had some proxy-related issues in the beginning, but it looks like it was a mix up between our environment and their environment. Maybe it was a lack of knowledge. However, so far, it has been good. 

Technical support was pretty good. They jumped on the call, and we spent some time with them in India, and issues were resolved pretty quickly. 

We did not use any tools before this product.

It was pretty straightforward and quick. I was amazed by it. I deployed it in six servers in 40 minutes, and that is pretty good.

We needed some monitoring for PCF. Therefore, we did a PoC with a couple of other tools along with Dynatrace. That is when we found that Dynatrace was the tool that we should be using for PCF.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. The capability that tool is providing. That is the most important thing, because if the tool is not providing what we need, we do not need the tool. 
2. The pricing. It should fit into our budget, because if the tool is providing everything and we don't have money to spend on it, that won't work.
3. The support. If we are not getting the support from the vendor, then it is useless. We spend the money, and they advertise that that tool provides everything. However, if I am not getting support, then I won't be able to use the tool properly. 

These three things are the most important criteria that help us decide which vendors to pursue.

The primary reason for choosing any APM solution, it comes through the interface, is to find out the gaps between the application life cycle when someone makes a transaction. Then, we will not know what is causing it to come back so late, delayed, or with latency. We just want to know the pain points of it. That is why we have chosen this APM solution. So far, it is doing a good job, except for some flaws, but that is fine. 

When Dynatrace shows us an entire lifecycle. I can go back to my document and see A points to B, then B points to C, and so on. I can then back and see that I plugged it in every box to see how it is behaving and how the product is dynamically showing the AI behaving in a single place, like on a single webpage. This helps us to see the troubleshooting points or what is hiccuping. This is where we go. We reboot, fix it, or do whatever it takes for it to be taken care of.

The PurePath is one feature, which I actually like. When I have a problem that is being detected by the alerting profiles, I just go in and see what the part is talking to, then what its dependencies are. For example, if a middleware application is behaving weird, then has to be sampled by different databases back-ends, or mainframes, we just keep looking at those PurePath to see what it is talking to rather than going back to my library or my documents to see what exactly the architecture design was. The PurePath helps me a lot.

1. To improve in Dynatrace the log analytics, this is the first thing that has to be enabled. 
2. We are using Splunk or Sumo Logic as an enterprise logging tool. We have been there for a long time, since even before the Dynatrace was. There were Splunk APIs that have been exposed, and we can grab the data from there. Dynatrace also has APIs, but they are unfriendly APIs. If they were friendly like Splunk or Sumo Logic had, we might integrate that same data on a single webpage, then start showing these internally. That would be a great help of a feature; friendly APIs.

Artificial intelligence depends upon business to business. If you take a travel industry, like airlines, not every month will remain the same as in the next 12 months. Our busy seasons would be around summer, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year (two bottleneck seasons). If you come back and are replicating that scenario of traffic of those issues, or those latency of responses being triggered, it will not be the same as in the rest of the months. When we are plugging in the AI, we need it to have in mind this for each and every business, that the AI implementation should be different.

What happened was when there was an AI sneak peek to our portfolios for our company took an average of the last three months, which would not work for us. If it is taking an average of the first three months, say Jan, Feb and March. Our systems would be quiet because we are not handling our bottleneck capacity of traffic. Then, when it comes to April or May, that is where our busy business season starts. The AI takes the alerting profiles of the first three months, then tries to implement on those next three months, or the next coming 24 hours, and then it just screams a lot.

The AI should be tweaked for the last full year, like smart scheduling. That would help us.

Dynatrace solution is pretty much stable. 

Last time, when there were upgrades being made, the alerting profiles had been wiped off, then we had a gap. When Dynatrace made the latest upgrades, newest patch upgrade, or firmwares, the existing alerting profile, which says, "Call me when you see this," or "Call me when you see 10% of these," had been wiped off. Someone has to redo it again. Except that, it has been fixed in the next release. 

The scalability of the solution is good. We initially started with the first three major critical applications, which is where I was introduced to this tool. Right now, they are moving on to the top 21 applications, which is going to be good scalability. They did well.

I have not contacted any customer solution or support.

Since we are still on the warranty period, we have still Dynatrace guardians on-site. I can go in and say, "Hey, this is what is happening," and he will get me a solution, or he will say, "Hey, you are doing this wrong. You have to do this." If not, he would say this feature is not yet released, and we are going to have it in next Q release, or whatever. Dynatrace guardian is the first point of contact if I have to ask any questions, he would be the guy.

We never had a centralized application for performance monitoring tool before Dynatrace. 

Everyone has Sumo Logic. Someone has Splunk. Someone has Tealeaf. Someone has Riverbed. No one had a consistent idea of what another team was doing for monitoring solutions. When enterprise monitoring took place, that was where a centralized solution needed to come in. 

For example, if I was sending a transaction to a different team, and I called it as a transaction, but someone else named it with a Tealeaf ID. There was a disconnect in naming conventions. 

When the APM solution came into place, I now know what to call it and they know what to expect from me, so we are on the same page. This helps us in shortening down the time for triaging an issue.

The capacity planning was complex. Everything else was easy.

Our infrastructure setup has been there for quite a long time, then we already had JVMs who monitor our process. We needed to evaluate what options and what benefits were coming down on our plate, then what was a repetitive task which was already being done by other JVMs. We had to evaluate those on different boxes, different portfolios, etc. Then evaluating options were a little tough because we were already using some things and we had to do something new basically from scratch again. This took some time. After we had experience with the first three major applications, we knew what to do with the next 21. 

If I had a colleague interested in purchasing Dynatrace, I would ask these questions:

• What are you using these days?
• What are you missing? 
• If you have that missing point as well as what you already have, why not go for Dynatrace?

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be fixing the issues first. It takes a lot of time for us to dig back where the actual issues on the code base are, especially if it is a network or infrastructure-related. To get answers for most of it, we can fix our issues faster on a priority basis.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: Show me what I am not seeing. If you ask me, I am an engineer. I do not want to see the eyes on glass all the time. I want a solution which does it for me. I know how to set my thresholds and throttles. For example, if there is an issue, an exception, or a false exception which is coming in, I know my application:

• If it comes 100 times a day, don't worry about it.
• If it comes five times a minute, don't worry about it. That is the business clients calling improperly.
• If it happens 500 times in a five minute timeframe, then send me an alert.

That is the something which I like a lot regarding the synthetics of application performance monitoring. When I am not seeing and I am being called when there is an issue, which I set my own rules, that is a good idea. That is the great thing and a driving factor for having an APM solution.