Dynatrace Reviews

My primary use case is troubleshooting production issues to see which endpoints are mostly calling and get some logs about them.

It's performing well. We use AppMon, and whenever any production issues occurs, we get a time window from the customer explaining, "This time it is a software failure."

We actually did some training on the AppMon UI, then it almost never failed on us. We could trace back exactly where the issue occurred. We came to the Dynatrace event to understand more about it, and see how we could learn more to perform our troubleshooting better.

It used to take a lot of time to troubleshoot. Now, with Dynatrace, we can actually see the logs anytime we want. I can just find the problem. It has improved performance from a time perspective.

The most valuable feature the solution offers right now is the PurePath. When we see a web request, and something failing, we can drill down using PurePath. Then, on PurePath, we can get to the database SQL statement. So, it is a very cool thing. We have our logs and all the stuff, but this is an area that stands out.

The AI thing is a boost, but it is not in AppMon. It is in Dynatrace. If AppMon could also incorporate it, that would be great.

The main thing is more about the dashboard. Currently, it does not keep the snapshot data. It only keeps it for a very short duration. Because of that reason, we cannot get more reports. If we can somehow option a way to preserve the data and keep it for a longer time, or have that feature, that would be good.

It is always requiring us to update the Dynatrace client. There are some issues with Dynatrace. Many times I thought there was a production night deployment and we would do a smoke test. Therefore, I started Dynatrace, and suddenly it says your client needs to be updated. Then I had to go do that two or three times. So, there are some glitches in it.

In the future, Dynatrace should actually try to resolve those issues with AppMon. The new Dynatrace version, I think will not have these issues, because it will be only browser based. So, there will be no need to install anything on our machines.

I sometimes see issues with the loading of the data. If we give you criteria, like you want to see the last 15 days of data, it has a lot of requests in it. To refresh, it will take a lot of time. Therefore, we actually narrow it down to a particular instance or event.

My main purpose is to troubleshooting issues, so this way I know exactly what time it happened, then I can just narrow it down to that. However, if you want to see a month's data, it keeps on spinning. Here is an improvement which needs to happen, which is the case with all applications or tools. There is a lot of data, and either we have to change the way we are logging or the application needs to be enhanced.

For some reason, we wanted to create a report about what is the maximum used end point or the maximum called end point. Also, we wanted to create a certain dashboard at that time. Myself, with a DevOps engineer, we called the technical support team, and they helped us create that graph. We got it, actually.

We have used production logging. We have our own custom logging system, where we read the logs and transfer to the database. We have a nice UI for it too, but it does not scale well. It can read the log, but it can read only those logs which we added.

Most of the time it works, but it is very slow. If we want to trace back, for example, to find out what happened in the previous week, we cannot get that data.

The DevOps engineer worked extensively on it. I do the troubleshooting.

It saves a lot of time.

It is the best solution that I have seen so far.

AI is like a new feature or benefits, and it is a cool thing. We have not tried it, but I really like to see it working. It is a great program, and it automatically makes a trendline baseline. Whenever something goes wrong, it can send an alert. There is also a web check feature.

Currently, we do not have a baseline. If AI is there, it can see the trend. Based on the trend, it can send notifications. It is also integrated with various platforms, like social platforms, so we can also get alerts from there.

Most important criteria when selecting an APM solution: 

We look mainly for how it will scale and what are the features currently available. 

I provide this information to the decision-makers.

We primarily use it for performance monitoring and to track down solutions to ongoing issues.

Its performance is great. We previously had AppMon, and AppMon is a little bit difficult. But we're PoC-ing Dynatrace, and we love it so far.

We spend less time tracking down what's truly a problem and looking for problems, and more time actually solving the problems.

• The ease of use
• The ease of installation
• The simplicity of actually getting data out of it
• The artificial intelligence

It's more than just dashboarding. It actually tells you when you have problems, so you don't have to go set up anything. It automatically figures it out. The artificial intelligence is by far the most useful thing I've seen.

Without the AI, I don't think we would be able to grow at all. As we continue to grow, our environment gets more complicated and there are "segmented people" who know little pieces of it. The AI allows one item, the software, to be able to understand everything and provide all the data.

To me, dashboarding is still a little bit sketchy. I'm definitely of the mindset that the problem cards are just more than enough. But when you're making that transition from AppMon, which is very dashboard-oriented, over to Dynatrace, which is no dashboards, there needs to be something in between so that business buys in a little bit. To me, setting up the dashboards is not that easy to do.

There should be something that would help transition, especially customers like us who already are heavily into AppMon. I would transition my dashboards over so that we don't have to recreate them, because recreating them is very difficult in Dynatrace. I get that they're two different systems, but any legitimate company that is doing that... 

If you're starting in one or the other, you're totally fine. But if you're porting over... My boss has to do a whole business case on why she wants to do it, and it's really hard to say, "Oh, the dashboards that you had on the team that you were using, you're not going to get over here." Or, "You have to re-create them all over again." People are going to ask questions about cost, who is going to do that. Although the tool automatically does that, business hasn't seen it yet. So it's a really hard sale. I would love to see some kind of integration so that we can say, "Okay, we transferred at least 80% of your dashboards over."

I haven't had it long enough to truthfully rate stability. We've had AppMon long enough, about two years, and that's been rock solid, minus any upgrades. Every time we do an upgrade there's some instability. When it's not being upgraded, it's perfect.

Scalability is great. My biggest concern when we first put it in was the resources that it would take up, network traffic that it might create. But it seems perfectly scalable to any environment. Even on some of our heaviest use servers, it doesn't seem to affect anything. So to me, it can be put on any environment and keep growing.

We have a guardian. We don't actually call technical support. We have somebody on-prem. He's knowledgeable and almost always available. Whenever he's in the office, he's available. Even outside the office, he's pretty available.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I took this over from my boss, and she was involved in the initial setup. I was kind of thrown into it, so I was a little worried about that. But it's been pretty easy.

I'm involved in the switch from AppMon to Dynatrace. To me, that's the biggest upgrade we've got. For AppMon, I did training courses. We did one-on-ones with our guardian from Dynatrace. Even with those, it was still a very complicated tool to learn. With Dynatrace, we picked it up in minutes. It was very intuitive. That's what I can't believe. I almost wish we didn't waste the time doing the training for AppMon. I would have just gone straight to Dynatrace.

As for a tool that would not only give data, but real answers, it would make things even quicker. I actually think that's what Dynatrace does for us right now. It tells us the answer to what the root cause is. It doesn't actually fix it, which I'm hoping it will eventually do, but it actually gives us the right answers right now. That is better than what we had before, which was somebody would go in there and try to find the problem. They may not have gotten to the root cause, so they would put a temporary patch on it, and then it would come back again. Now, we seem to be getting to the root cause every time.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are knowledgeability and the future vision, which, to me, is the most important part of Dynatrace. They're not thinking about, "Here's a tool for today, and we're just going to keep improving it slightly." They already have a master plan for where they want to go, and the tool reflects it. It shows that they're just thinking way ahead.

I'd give it a nine out of 10. I think it's virtually perfect. There are some bugs in it. Sometimes things get hung just for second, and you have to refresh something. Also, they aren't necessarily intuitive, but to me, they're just going to get better over time.

My advice is, start directly with Dynatrace Saas. Don't start with AppMon. Don't do the other older solutions. Just go straight in. Even if you have on-premise, SaaS is much better to start with.

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.

Application Performance Monitoring. Our main use is to monitor our applications for any issues that might arise and use the data to assure that our performance trending is headed in the right direction.

• Monitoring of application performance 
• Monitoring of infrastructure components 
• Monitoring of user experience
• Code level performance metrics

We find the majority of the features very usable and valuable. Our focus would be on the ability to drill into our custom code and validate that it is performing as expected. The ability to monitor performance and create custom dashboards. 

With new versions coming out, staying up to speed and training needs. Dynatrace provides this via many outlets, so finding resources to keep yourself relevant within the tool is not that challenging. 

We use it to monitor customer user experience, performance issues, and unexpected errors. Dynatrace Appmon provides us with the ability to proactively identify issues within our systems which could be impacting our customers.

We have done several improvements to our single-page apps to improve initial load and response times. We have improved performance in areas that Dynatrace APM identifies as "Hot Spots". One of the big wins for us is that we were able to find root cause of a long known memory leak in our thick client applications. 

UEM is extremely valuable is it gives you performance measurements as close to the user as possible. The geographical view provides a nice visualization of performance on a map.

The web version of the client interface needs more features that are in the Java-based thick client. I barely use the web interface because I cannot get the level of detail that the thick client provides nor can I perform the bulk of the administration tasks I do on a regular basis.

• Troubleshoot application slowdowns
• Ability to track down what is happening "under the hood" when a user complains about a bottleneck
• Pinpoint areas of code that are vulnerable to bottlenecks

It has reduced customer complaints. We spend less time on troubleshooting issues since Dynatrace proactively informs us of an impending bottleneck.

Ability to drill down to code level to identify user bottlenecks. This enables the programmers to quickly revamp the code to resolve the issue.

• More Integration with cloud services
• Simplified licensing
• Single pane of glass view
• Simplified reporting
• Integration with ServiceNow and PagerDuty

• Production application and environment health monitoring tool
• Dashboard to help present the statistics to management

Real time monitoring helps reduce downtime. It also helps to get a detailed trace of each transaction. It saves a lot of time in determining what is the likely cause of an issue that an end user may be experiencing.

Log files for JVM transactions help to debug most of the failures. It helps to detect application dependencies, and provides one consolidated view of application performance.

• Requires application knowledge
• Hard to use for beginners, to setup and explore
• DevOps plugin monitoring tools need improvement

We monitor our business's essential websites and also our newest mobile application. Monitoring the application with Appmon has proven essential for our testing department.

We can see which step in a transaction is causing latency, right down to the particular Java class. The granularity is amazing.

Monitoring the PurePath is awesome. You can see every step a transaction goes through, which servers it hits, and what technology it uses (windows, Linux, etc.).

I do not know about how our contract is structured. From what I have heard in the company, Dynatrace is expensive. 

You get a really well-planned out monitoring suite for the money spent.