Dynatrace Reviews

The primary use case of the Dynatrace is to monitor our application and its performance.

It helps in many ways in our organization:

• managing capacity planning
• managing services performance
• tuning database performance and optimizing queries.

There are so many features which we find very useful. One of them is to use PurePath to pick out frustrated users, see where the issue is, and analyze why it is happening. Dynatrace helps a lot in find the issue and fixing it.

We are still exploring features. But one feature which would be great in the next release would be that it provide a summary of the main fail point for frustrated users, instead of our having to go to PurePath and look for it. It should provide the list of pain point areas in report format.

APM.

Real-time information allows us to proactively tackle an issue before it affects our clients.

The dashboard gives us a great overview.

The cost is somewhat high.

External monitoring of customer-facing web presence. We also use Appmon and DC RUM to monitor the physical and database status within the company as a whole.

Improves the ability to isolate issues and determine root cause with the same tool. This has helped us determine the scope of an outage event and better determine an ETR.

Knowing when systems performance is affected. This has helped to isolate infrastructure pain points.

Addition of support for security tokens for login automated testing. At the moment, I am unable to use Synthetic to automate user login. I believe the addition of local agents will address this need, but I have not had that verified.

We use Dynatrace for application health monitoring and investigation into any reported problem.

Dynatrace has helped us reduce the investigation time and troubleshooting time for any application issue.

Dynatrace PurePath and exception lists are used most of the time, but it is also a very good tool for application reporting.

It's a great tool for building dashboards related to application performance.

Improvements in Synthetic monitoring would be great. Certain features of thick client, if available in the web interface, would also be a great improvement.

Monitoring our production systems and diagnosing the critical and difficult to find issues. Great tool for deep diving into performance data and tracking issues through all the connected systems to better diagnose and pinpoint the real issues. 

This tool has been essential for monitoring our systems, gathering all performance data, and helping to quickly resolve difficult problems affecting our customers ability to process their work through our systems. 

With Dynatrace PurePath information and performance data, we can trace through all our systems end-to-end. It is one of the critical features that we primarily use. This feature has helped us diagnose and resolve quite a few difficult problems affecting our customers over the years. 

Dynatrace has been difficult to set up and use to diagnose problems in the past due to the complex nature of the tool. However, I have seen great improvements over the years to make this easier to do as well as the latest versions incorporating smart technology to more quickly help diagnose issues and pinpoint the problem. Looking forward to seeing continued improvements in this area. 

Synthetic monitoring. Also, to be able to pinpoint issues on the web and mobile interfaces before they trigger a negative experience for the customer.

We're using Synthetic along with AppMon, and this has been very helpful in pinpointing errors and new trends to help with investigation.

Interactive charts and waterfalls in Synthetic, because they tell the story.

I also love the support we get through the forum and ticketing system.

It would be great to have Synthetic automatically retrieve what the customer sees on his side.

Our primary use case is to combine and transform a lot of metrics from our production environment and utilize Dynatrace to turn that data into knowledge which we can act on to prevent outages, increase application performance, and improve end user experience. This tool enables us to make intelligent, fact-based decisions faster.

With Dynatrace, we have identified and solved "mystery" issues that we have experienced for a long time, including sporadic latency issues on storage volumes and SQL databases not scaling properly when under certain loads. 

We are also monitoring web services and using synthetic web checks to actively monitor specific parts of our production website and production web applications. With the SaaS version of Dynatrace, we started monitoring our VMware hypervisors and that gave us valuable system specific metrics into our virtual environments. Therefore, we have built smart alerts to notify our team of potential problems before they manifest themselves to end users.

I really like how easy it is to deploy and use the SaaS version in our environment. We have a lot of other tools that have plenty of capability but they do not get a whole lot of use because they require a dedicated resource who is an expert to use them. With the SaaS version of Dynatrace, all the admin functions are taken care of by the Dynatrace team (updates, patches, new features, bugs, etc.), and our small shop can focus on getting valuable metrics, alerts, and issue resolution from the product. That is very important because despite how many features and how powerful a product is, it will only return value to an organization if it is being integrated and used regularly for its intended purpose; Dynatrace SaaS makes that easy for us.

As far as more technical features go, we are a small shop and wear many hats in the IT department, so the automatic baselining and AI engine take a big chunk of work off our hands. It collects, analyzes, and summarizes the application and host level metrics (including host log files and hypervisor host details) from VMware virtual environments as well as physical stand-alone servers, then presents that data to us in an easy enough format to help us make better decisions and tune accordingly before our end users inform us of problems. 

In addition, we use the synthetic web checks to emulate the end user experience and availability of our public website and internal web applications, which is a wonderful feature to have access to. 

If I had to pick something to improve, it would be the fact that it requires manual intervention to uninstall the cloud agent from servers you want it removed from. The installation part is the easiest of any Linux tool that I have ever installed, so I do not have a problem with that at all. What I have a problem with, is that in order to 100% remove the product, you will need to manually go to each machine and uninstall the cloud agent. I wish there was a feature that would allow a Dynatrace administrator to remotely uninstall/remove the cloud agent from the Dynatrace management console without having to physically logon to each server to achieve the task.

We use it for identifying issues in production.

We had an issue with Web Services going down in production, and we used Dynatrace to monitor the exceptions and alert the vendor to correct the service. This, in turn, helped minimize end-user impact.

• CPU utilization
• PurePath analysis
• Alerting mechanism
• Finding exceptions and errors
• Dashboards to generate the transactions count

Every time I want to see the PurePath, I have to launch the client. It would be helpful if they introduced this in the browser application. 

Also, configuring alerts is bit confusing.