Dynatrace Reviews

We are using Appmon and Gomez tools to monitor performance metrics in production systems. Appmon is used to monitor performance of production and test environments. We even use it to debug the results of performance tests using Appmon.

We have used Dynatrace for various projects. Everytime it has been really handy in identifying the root of the cause. We have used this tool to help in cases such as production performance outages and functional level issues.

PurePath is the most useful feature in the Appmon tool. It gives a lot of flexibility in identifying issues and finding the flow of execution. PurePath is also used to create many complex measures and business transactions as per our needs.

Addition of more statistical features, plus different time series modeling techniques, would really help for future versions.

• 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

Our first use case for Dynatrace was application analysis to find the source of a performance problem on a critical management application.

Through analysis of transactions and transaction flow, we clearly saw the path taken by our transactions, and identified through drill down and PurePaths the time consumed by each class and method. The bottleneck was identified and the problem corrected.

Dynatrace's power lies in its ability to inspect and chart transactions, and draw the PurePath tree. The parameters of the requests and methods can be selected to access the necessary information for efficient analysis.

Some technical architectures are based on an event mechanism operating via a publish/subscribe system. APM technology sometimes reaches its limits to go upstream. 

It should also be remembered that APM is often useful in production where problems are difficult to reproduce. You must be careful in using Dynatrace so that the overhead is limited.

• Alerts
• Monitors
• Reporting and troubleshooting
• Proactive monitoring
• System health and business process monitoring

The web-based UI needs to be improved. The client seems to be heavy on laptops and desktops. Some reports are only on the client versus the Web UI.

Analysis of user behavior, application errors, performance of hosts, services, processes, and user sessions.

Understanding how the user was being targeted by the application as well as knowing their behavior using those applications.

• Easy installation
• Fast support
• Extensive documentation
• Quick distribution of new features
• Active community
• Market leading product

• Customization
• Support for more technologies
• Plugins
• More types of tiles (dashboard)
• Replay of user sessions
• User actions heatmap (native)

We need to have accurate, reliable real-time alerts when issues arise in our production environments.

Thanks to Dynatrace, we now spend less time figuring out what went wrong and where. Instead, we can focus more on why it happened and work towards resolving the issue sooner.

Real-time alerts are the best feature. Often, we are busy working on other tasks when something goes wrong with the site. Getting timely alerts is very important to our needs as a business.

• Configuration could be simpler. 
• Alert triggers could be easier to setup and more granular. 
• We sometimes receive alerts for things we would rather not get alerts about.

Monitoring our web server uptime and the performance of our web applications. We also use it to monitor our database performance.

Real-time alerts allow us to address issues as they happen. Tracing issues down to the specific application and the specific method reduces troubleshooting time.

Real-time alerts and being able to trace issues down the call stack. This has helped us to react quickly to issues and reduced our debug time due to knowing where to start looking for the issue.

It could be organized better in the dashboard. Ease of use could be improved because it can be hard to determine how you made it to the screen you are on and how to get back to it later.

Dynatrace not only tells you that your users are having issues with your application, but also where you should look to fix the issues. In modern complex applications, it is no longer enough to just hope for the best. The latest product utilizes AI and massive automation make it really easy to deploy. 

Finds issues that previously occupied people for months. Just pointing the finger at a problematic piece of code is magical. Business and IT come together to understand how apps work, no more unproductive discussions and blame game. 

• Code-level detail for all transactions
• AI, automation, and ease of deployment

The products or company go through a rebrand/renaming about once a year, which creates some confusion with our customers.