Dynatrace Reviews

Our primary use case is the consolidation of observability platforms.

Looking at Dynatrace's automation and AI capabilities, automation is generally a great place to start. In products where there has been no observability or a very limited amount, the automation can give a great deal of insight, telling people things that they didn't know that they needed to know.

Davis will do its best to provide root cause analysis, but you, as a human, are still responsible for joining as many of the dots together as possible in order to provide as big a picture as possible. As long as you accept that you still have to do some work, you'll get a good result.

I have not used Dynatrace for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment in this company, but I have had an AWS microservice cluster in the past. Its ability to cope with ephemeral incidences, as Kubernetes usually are, was very good. The fact that we didn't have to manually scale out to match any autoscaling rules on the Kubernetes clusters was very useful. Its representation of them at the time wasn't the best. Other products, Datadog, for example, had a better representation in the actual portal of the SaaS platform. That was about three years ago, and Dynatrace has changed, but I haven't yet reused the Kubernetes monitoring to see if it has improved in that regard.

Given that Dynatrace is a single platform, as opposed to needing multiple tools, the ease of management is good because there is only one place to go in order to manage things. You deal with all of the management in one place.

The unified platform has allowed our teams to better collaborate. In particular, because of the platform consolidation, using Dynatrace has made the way we work generally more efficient. We don't have to hop between seven different monitoring tools. Instead, there's just one place to go. It's increased the level of observability throughout the business, where we now have development looking at their own metrics through APM, rather than waiting until there's a problem or an issue and then getting a bug report and then trying to recreate it.

It's increased visibility for the executive and the senior management, where they're getting to see dashboards about what's happening right now across the business or across their products, which didn't used to exist. There's the rate at which we can monitor new infrastructure, or applications, or custom devices. We had a rollout this week, which started two days ago, and by yesterday afternoon, I was able to provide dashboards giving feedback on the very infrastructure and applications that they had set the monitoring up on the day before.

As we've only been using Dynatrace in production for the past month in this company, the estimate as to the measurement of impact isn't ready yet. We need more time, more data, and more real use cases as opposed to the synthetic outages we've been creating. In my experience, Dynatrace is generally quite accurate for assessing the level of severity. Even in scenarios where you simply rely on the automation without any custom thresholds or anything like that, it does a good job of providing business awareness as to what is happening in your product.

Dynatrace has a single agent that we need to install for automated deployment and discovery. It uses up to four processes and we found it especially useful in dealing with things like old Linux distros. For example, Gentoo Linux couldn't handle TLS 1.2 for transport and thus, could not download the agent directly. We only had to move the one agent over SSH to the Gentoo server and install it, which was much easier than if we'd had to repeat that two or three times.

The automated discovery and analysis features have helped us to proactively troubleshoot products and pinpoint the underlying root cause. There was one particular product that benefited during the proof of concept period, where a product owner convened a war room and it took about nine hours of group time to try and reason out what might be the problem by looking at the codebase and other components. Then, when we did the same exercise for a different issue but with Dynatrace and the war room was convened, we had a likely root cause to work from in about 30 minutes.

In previous companies where the deployment has been more mature, it was definitely allowing DevOps to concentrate on shipping quality rather than where I am now, which is deploying Dynatrace. The biggest change in that organization was the use of APM and the insights it gave developers.

Current to the deployment of Dynatrace, we adopted a different methodology using Scrum and Agile for development. By following the Scrum pattern of meetings, we were able to observe the estimated time in the planning sessions for various tasks. It started to come down once the output of the APM had been considered. Ultimately, Dynatrace APM provided the insight that allowed the developers to complete the task faster.

The most valuable features for us right now are the auto-instrumentation, the automatic threshold creation, and the Davis AI-based root cause analysis, along with the dashboarding for executives and product owners.

These features are important because of the improved time it takes for deployment. There is a relatively small team deploying to a relatively large number of products, and therefore infrastructure types and technology stacks. If I had to manually instrument this, like how it is accomplished using Nagios or Zabbix, for example, it would take an extremely long time, perhaps years, to complete on my own. But with Dynatrace, I can install the agent, and as long as there is a properly formed connection between the agent and the SaaS platform, then I know that there is something to begin working with immediately and I can move on to the next and then review it so that the time to deployment is much shorter. It can be completed in months or less.

We employ real user monitoring, session replay, and synthetic monitoring functionalities. We have quite a few web applications and they generally have little to no observability beyond the infrastructure on which the applications run. The real user monitoring has been quite valuable in demonstrating to product owners and managers how the round-trips, or the key user actions, or expensive queries, for example, have been impacting the user experience.

By combining that with session replay and actually watching through a problematic session for a user, they get to experience the context as well as the raw data. For a developer, for example, it's helpful that you can tell them that a particular action is slow, or it has a low Apdex score, for example, but if you can show them what the customer is experiencing and they can see state changes in the page coupled with the slowness, then that gives a much richer diagnostic experience.

We use the synthetics in conjunction either with the real user monitoring or as standalone events for sites that either aren't public-facing, such as internal administration sites, or for APIs where we want to measure things in a timely manner. Rather than waiting for seasonal activity from a user as they go to work, go home, et cetera, we want it at a constant rate. Synthetics are very useful for that.

The benefit of Dynatrace's visualization capabilities has been more apparent for those that haven't used Dynatrace before or not for very long. When I show a product owner a dashboard highlighting the infrastructure health and any problems, or the general state of the infrastructure with Data Explorer graphs on it, that's normally a very exciting moment for them because they're getting to see things that they could only imagine before.

In terms of triaging, it has been useful for the sysadmins and the platform engineering team, as they normally had to rely on multiple tools up until now. We have had a consolidation of observability tools, originally starting with seven different monitoring platforms. It was very difficult for our sysadmins as they watched a data center running VMware with so many tools. Consolidating that into Dynatrace has been the biggest help, especially with Davis backing you up with RCAs.

The Smartscape topology has also been useful, although it is more for systems administrators than for product owners. Sysadmins have reveled in being able to see the interconnectedness of various infrastructures, even in the way that Dynatrace can discover things to which it isn't directly instrumented. When you have an agent on a server surrounded by other servers, but they do not have an agent installed, it will still allow a degree of discovery which can be represented in the Smartscape topology and help you plan where you need to move next or just highlight things that you hadn't even realized were connected.

The user interface for the management functions is not particularly intuitive for even the most common features. For example, you can't share dashboards en masse. You have to open each dashboard, go into settings, change the sharing options, go back to dashboards, et cetera. It's quite laborious. Whereas, Datadog does a better job in the same scenario of being a single platform of making these options accessible.

User and group management in the account settings for user permissions could be improved.

The way that Dynatrace deals with time zones across multiple geographies is quite a bone of contention because Dynatrace only displays the browser's local time. This is a problem because when I'm talking with people in Canada, which I do every day, they either have to run, on the fly, time recalculations in their heads to work out the time zone we're actually talking about as relevant to them, or I have to spin up a VM in order to open the browser with the time zone set to their local one in order to make it obvious to them without them having to do any mental arithmetic.

Personally, I have been using Dynatrace since November of 2018. At the company I am at, we have been using it for approximately four months. It was used as a PoC for the first three months, and it has been in production for the past month.

The SaaS product hasn't had any downtime while I've been at my current company. I've experienced downtime in the past, but it's minimal.

To this point, I've not had any problems with the scalability, aside from ensuring that you have provisioned enough units. However, that is another point that is related to pricing.

Essentially, its ability to scale and continue to work is fine. On the other hand, its ability to predict the required scalability in order to purchase the correct number of various units is much harder.

Talking about Dynatrace as a company, the people I've spoken to have always been responsive. The support is always available, partly because of our support package. As a whole, Dynatrace has always been a very responsive entity, whether I've been dealing with them in North America or in the UK.

We have used several other solutions including Grafana, Prometheus, Nagios, Zabbix, New Relic, AWS CloudWatch, Azure App Insights, and AppDynamics. We switched to Dynatrace in order to consolidate all of our observability platforms.

Aside from differences that I discuss in response to other questions, other differences would come from the product support rather than the product itself. Examples of this are Dynatrace University, the DT One support team, the post-sales goal-setting sessions, and training.

We're yet to have our main body of training, but we're currently scheduled to train on about 35 modules. Whereas, last year, when I rolled out Datadog, the training wasn't handled in the same way. It was far more on request for specific features. Whereas, this is an actual curriculum in order to familiarize end users with the product.

In my experience, the initial setup has been straightforward, but I've done it a few times. When I compare it to tools like Nagios, Zabbix, Grafana, and Prometheus, it is very straightforward. This is largely for two reasons.

First, they're not SaaS applications, whereas Dynatrace is, and second, the amount of backend configuration you have to do in preparation for those tools is much higher. That said, if we were to switch to Dynatrace Managed rather than Dynatrace SaaS, I imagine that the level of complexity for Dynatrace would rise significantly. As such, my answer is biased towards Dynatrace SaaS.

In my previous company, it allowed a very small team to manage what was a very fast-moving tech stack. In my current company, it is still very early.

The consolidation of tools due to implementing Dynatrace has saved us money, although it's tricky to measure the impact. The list price of Dynatrace was more than the previous list price spend on monitoring tools because the various platforms had been provided as open-source tools, were provided through hosting companies, or had been acquired as part of acquisitions of other companies.

The open-source applications that we used included Grafana, Prometheus, Nagios, and Zabbix. New Relic through Carbon60 in Canada, as an example, was provided through a hosting company. Also, we acquired a Canadian company or had been acquired as part of acquisitions of other companies, AppDynamics, in a Canadian company, for example, with us in the budget of the previous company rather than our own company.

The hope was that Dynatrace through consolidation would release the material cost of the administrative overheads of tools like Prometheus and Grafana and the cost of hosting infrastructure for solutions like Nagios, Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana, et cetera. This means that it is more of an upstream cost-saving, where we would be saving human effort and hosting costs by consolidating into a SaaS platform, which is pretty much all-in-one.

Dynatrace's pricing for their consumption units is rather arcane compared to some of the other tools, thus making forward-looking calculations based on capacity planning quite hard. This is because you have to do your capacity planning, work out what that would mean in real terms, then translate that into Dynatrace terms and try to ensure you have enough Davis units, synthetics units, DEM units, and host units.

Catching those and making sure you've got them all right for anything up to a year in advance is quite hard. This means that its ability to scale and continue to work is fine but predicting the correct number of various units to purchase is much harder.

The premium support package is available for an additional charge.

At this point, we have not yet integrated Dynatrace with our CICD tool, which is Azure DevOps. However, in the future, our plan is to provide post-release measurements and automated rollbacks when necessary. Even further down the road, there's ServiceNow on the roadmap, which we're currently bringing in from an Australian acquisition in order to try and promote the ITSM side of the business.

There is nothing specific that has been implemented so far, although there have been general degrees of automation. When we get Agile, DevOps, and ServiceNow in place, the degree of automation will increase dramatically. For example, automated rollbacks in the case of deployment failure or change management automation through the current state of the target system are being included in the ServiceNow automation.

The automation that has been done to alleviate the effort spent on manual tasks is still very light because I'm the only person doing the work. I generally don't have time to do the ancillary tasks at the moment, such as creating automations. It's mostly a case of deploying instruments, observing, and moving on. When we come back to revisit it, then we'll look at the automations.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing Dynatrace is to make sure you talk constantly with your Dynatrace representatives during the PoC, or trial phase because there is invariably far more that Dynatrace can do than you realize. We only know what we know. I'm not suggesting that you let Dynatrace drive but instead, constantly provide the best practices. You will achieve faster returns afterward, whether that's labor savings, or recovery time, or costs from downtime. Basically, you want to make sure that you leverage the expertise of the company.

In summary, this is a very good product but they need to sort out their user interface issues and provide a more logical experience.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We had Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring in place, and we had Gomez. The whole point of that was to really check for system availability, to make sure we knew if the site was going down, etc. Since then, we've put in the full Dynatrace solution to prevent customer impact, some kind of site outage. That's the whole point of having it, so we can identify problems sooner, fix them, and stop the site going down.

We have had a few instances where we found small problems. They may or may not have been a full site-outage, but they certainly would have had some kind of customer impact. We only put the tool in a year ago but we've already got quite a number of things. We've found the product has helped us to identify an issue and we fixed it before there was  any customer impact. So we're seeing the benefit already, which is great.

To use an example, the savings in terms of cost and time. We use it for live monitoring, but we also use it in our performance testing. So that alone, that issue I just talked about, was a performance testing issue, and we would have put that change live without Dynatrace.

Finding that problem in "live", that would have been three or four days of investigation, whereas we found the issue, fixed the issue, reran the tests, all same day. That was days and days and days of cost-savings, in terms of resources, and allowing them to actually do other things that they're there to do.

Being able to identify the blind spots. Before, we had lots of monitoring, but it was all very manual. It was literally taking server logs and dumping them somewhere and someone had to manually go through things. You only monitor what you know about. As soon as we put Dynatrace in, it sprung to life, and we identified problems instantly. The team's reaction was, "Wow, look at that." So finding different parts of the system.

Sometimes you focus on the area where you see the issue, but not necessarily where the root cause is coming from, so you have to go through the full stack and help to identify the problem areas. We've found problems and fixed them in half an hour when it would've taken days before.

I think the one that's coming soon, the customer playback and the session replay. Notwithstanding the challenge we might have around GDPR, and the collection of data - which worries me - what we have quite a lot is, a very specific customer situation or customer problem. Of course, we can see problems in Dynatrace, but we might have a customer call in trying to donate, or trying to create a fundraising page, and we can never recreate the issue.

You don't want to have to go to the customer, "What browser were you using, and what were you doing, what day was it, was it cold outside?" To be able to see exactly what has happened, for us to be able to understand that, gives us extra power really to understand the issue and to fix it. Nine times out of 10, it's probably a really simple thing, that we just need a bit of JavaScript or something to fix.

Also the thing that's really powerful is being able to recognize what the customer's trying to do and contact that customer. And for us again, customer is key. For our Help desk to actually be able to help that customer and say, "We see you were trying to donate," or "We can see this happened to you, we're really sorry, we fixed that issue, please come back, or let us help you on that journey." That's really powerful. In terms of NPS, that's really important to us.

I think that would help with those situations, stop the problem in the first place. But also, if there is a problem, being able to deal with it directly with the customer is fantastic.

It's been stable, I haven't had any problems with it at all.

It absolutely suits us. In terms of the wider bank, within Virgin Money, we can absolutely look to spread it across other applications, which we will be doing. But I think we've probably got the critical ones covered. We can obviously see the benefit, we just need to fight the right battles at the right time to get those things put in.

The team used tech support during the original implementation to make sure that it was going well. And it went very smoothly. 

I don't think we've had any problems with it from a Virgin Money Giving perspective. Having said that, we had experts using it who were already within Virgin Money. So we were able to use that internal expertise to help us to implement it into our solutions, which was helpful. So we haven't needed to call tech support.

This is our first APM tool. We haven't been around that long. I look after a system called Virgin Money Giving, and we haven't been around that long - seven or eight years. It's a really successful business, and as that business has grown and grown, you then see the value in these kind of tools. We managed successfully, we didn't really have many system outages and the like, but we saw the benefit as it has been rolling out across the rest of the bank. It's the first tool we've used.

I was only pointing at people to do the initial setup. I don't come from the technical side, I just run the teams that do the stuff, the proper work. So I was involved in terms of helping to make sure it happens, but not at the level of touching it.

We did look at other tooling, but Dynatrace suits us as a solution.

It was the simplicity. Obviously we had heard lots about AppMon, but we went straight into the full Dynatrace solution. The simplicity of the implementation. We literally switched it on and we could see benefit almost instantly. 

Also it's the full-stack, one solution that can allow you to track and monitor across the whole of our infrastructure. We haven't got a huge, complicated infrastructure, so its probably quite simple for us, versus people who've got huge amounts of different cloud hosting and all that kind of stuff.

Actually having had conversations with Dynatrace, as part of the proof of concept, it feels like they're constantly looking to innovate. Coming here, to the Performance 2018 conference, there are things about which I'm saying, "I can't wait for that to come." And that's really nice for us as a customer, to be waiting for the next thing to come to help our business.

We we haven't really gotten anywhere near the area of AI and IT's ability to scale up the cloud and monitor performance management issues. Having been through sessions here, at the Perform 2018 conference, that's definitely something we need to be focusing on. We're not using cloud in any way, as an organization, other than things like Dynatrace. AI is definitely on our roadmap, but we're not there yet. It's something that's coming up a lot, and you can actually see the benefit.

Regarding a solution that could provide real answers, and not just the data, the immediate benefit for our team would be time and cost. We're running a website that needs to be there 24/7, and because we're Virgin Money Giving, we deal with quite personal things. People are raising money for good causes, things that are personal to them. So if our website isn't available for any point in time, it can be really quite heartbreaking for people, people can't donate to their cause, or give money to the charity they want to. The whole customer experience is really important, so anything that allows us to prevent problems sooner, and prevent system problems, is right for the customer. And that's important to our brand.

In terms of selecting a vendor, for us, because Virgin Money as an organization has important values, we need to find a vendor that has the same kind of values. I think there needs to be a synergy around what we're wanting to do. 

Also the key thing is support. Sometimes you can have third-party relationships, or vendors that sell you a product and then you don't see them again, and you don't really get the best out of that product. So it needs to be an ongoing relationship, and a genuine partnership. It can't just be a "drop the product over the fence then run off with your money," it needs to be an ongoing relationship.

Also important for us is to help, perhaps, influence the future of the product as well, a genuine partnership.

At the moment I'd say Dynatrace is a 10 out of 10 because I can see the benefit. It's early on in the lifecycle of the product for us, but I can absolutely see the benefit already. I think the thing we do need to do is understand more about the potential. I think we've just scratched the surface. As soon as you switch it on, there is so much information that comes to you, that you're all excited about, all that data. But it's just making sure that you're looking in the right places and doing the right things. At the moment, it's a 10 for me, I absolutely love the product, a year in.

My advice is try it. I think we put it onto an application and, within hours, we had really good powerful data, and we could see problems in the data that needed to be fixed. Trial it on an application and see what happens.

I primarily use the solution for mobile monitoring and service management. 

The monitoring is very good.

We like that the solution has the ability to drill down so that you can see your payload. 

The solution is ideal for large companies. 

I'm not sure if there are improvements needed. I don't work actively with it. I sit at the management level.

The solution is a bit pricey. As a result, you can't shift quite so easily, and you always are testing in production.

It's not the best solution for small-scale companies. 

I've been using the solution for five years.

The cost model for developers, et cetera, is too expensive. It's not very affordable for small companies. 

I am just a customer and an end-user.

I'm using the latest version of the solution. It updates regularly.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd advise users to try it out. However, it's more for large-scale companies and not really the best for smaller organizations. 

We use Dynatrace for monitoring. It does have AI capabilities but the system needs more time to learn before we receive any benefit. 

When integrating this solution with any third party applications, there is an additional cost to pay. This can make the solution very costly to use. 

I have been using this solution for six months. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

We really need assistance directly from Dynatrace. We don't have a technically strong person internally to support the solution and we haven't had support from Dynatrace in the past six months. 

Before Dynatrace, we were using Cisco AppDynamic.We changed to Dynatrace because Dynatrace is more popular and they have a good reputation in the market. 

The deployment process is better than with AppDynamic. It requires one, knowledgable agent to handle the set up.

We purchased a subscription for one year and it is an expensive solution for a large enterprise like ours. 

I would advise others to fully explore Dynatrace because it is more expensive than other tools. It is important to educate yourself on the solution to fully understand if it is suitable for your business. Not understanding this upfront, could cost you more money in the long term. 

I would rate this solution a five out of ten. 

We use it to follow up user experience data. It's all banking applications. For example, when you're viewing your account, you open up your mobile app and the click you do to view your account is measured in Dynatrace. It's stored and we are checking the timing at each moment. 

We are also following up the timing differences between our different releases. When we have a new version release, we are already checking within our test environment to see what the impact of each change is before it goes to production. And we follow that up in production as well.

In addition, we are following up the availability of all our different systems. 

And root cause analysis is also one of the main business cases.

So we have three main use cases:

1. To follow up what's going on in production
2. Proactively reacting to possible problems which could happen
3. Getting insights into all our systems and seeing the correlation between these different systems and improving, in that way, our services to our end users.

We use the on-prem solution, but it's the same as the SaaS solution that they are offering. They have Dynatrace SaaS and Dynatrace Managed, and our is the Managed. Currently we're on version 181, but that changes every month.

The dynamic microservices for Kubernetes is really value-added because there is a lot of monitoring functionality already built into Kubernetes Docker. There are also free things like Prometheus which can display that. That's very good for technical people. For the owner of the pod itself, that's enough. But those things don't provide any business value. If you want business value from it, you need to extract it to a higher level, and that's where you need the correlations. You need to correlate what is between all these different services. What is the flow like between the services? How are they interconnected? And that's where Dynatrace gives added value. And the fact is that you can combine these data, which are coming from Kubernetes, and include them in Dynatrace, meaning you have a single pane of glass where you can see everything. You can see the technical things, but you have the bigger business value on top of it, as well.

Before Dynatrace, we were testing just by trying out the application ourselves and getting a feeling for the performance. That's how it very often would go. You would start up an application and it was judged by the feeling of the person who was using it at that moment in time. That, of course, is not representative of what the actual end-user feeling would be. We were totally blind. We actually need this to be able to be closer to the customer. To really care about the customer, you need to know what he is doing. 

Also, incidents are resolved much faster by using Dynatrace. And that's for front-end, because we actually know what is going on. But it's also for server-side incidents where we can see the correlation. Using this solution our MTTR has been lowered by 25 percent. It's pinpointing the actual errors or the actual database calls, so it goes faster. But, of course, you still have to do it. It still needs to be implemented. It doesn't do the implementation work for you.

Root cause detection, how the infrastructure components interact with each other, helps. We know what is going wrong and where to pinpoint it. Before, we needed to fill a room with all the experts. The back-end expert would say, "I'm not seeing anything on the back-end." And the network expert would say, "I'm not seeing anything on the network." When you see the interaction between the different aspects, it's immediately clear you have to search in your Java development, or you have to search in your database, because all the other ones don't have any impact on the performance. You see it in Dynatrace because all the numbers are there. It really helps with that. It also helps to pinpoint which teams should work on the solution. In addition to the fact that it's speeding up the process of finding your root cause, it's also lowering the number of people who need to pay attention to the problem. It's just a single team that we need to work on it. All the rest can go home.

It has decreased our mean time to identification by 90 percent, meaning it only takes us one-tenth of the time it used to, because it immediately pinpoints where the problem is.

Dynatrace also helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and to shift quality issues to pre-production because we are already seeing things in pre-production. We have Dynatrace in our test environment, so we have a lot of extra information there, and DevOps teams can actually work on that information.

Finally, in terms of uptime, it's signaling whenever something is down and you can react to the fact that it is down a lot faster. That improves the uptime. But the tool itself, of course, doesn't do anything for your uptime. It just signals the fact that it's down faster so you can react to it.

The most valuable aspect is the fact that Dynatrace is a correlation tool for all those different layers. It's the correlation from the front-end through to the database. You can see your individual tracks.

One of the aspects that follows from that is the root cause analysis. Because we have these correlations, we can say, "Hey it's going slow on the server side because a database is having connection issues," for example. So the root cause is important, but it's actually based on the correlation between the different layers in your system.

Dynatrace is a single platform. It has all these different tools but they are actually all baked into the OneAgent technology. Within that OneAgent — which is growing quite large, but that's something else — you have the different tool sets. You have threat analysis, memory dumps, Java analysis, the database statements, and so on. It's all included in this OneAgent. So the management is actually quite easy. You have this one tool, and you have server-side and agent-side which are ways of semi-automatically updating it. We don't have to do that much management on it. Even for the quite large environment that we have, the management, itself, is quite limited. It doesn't take a lot of time. It's quite easy.

The solution's ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is great. It's exactly what we need. The severity impact is based on the users, the availability, and the impact it has on your business.

We also use the real-user monitoring and we are using the synthetic monitoring in a limited way, for the moment. We are not using session replay. I would like that, but it's still being considered by councils within the company as to whether we are able to use it.

We are using synthetic monitoring to measure the availability of one of our services. It's a very important service and, if it is down, we want business to be notified about this immediately. So we have set up a synthetic monitor, which is measuring the availability of that single service each minute. Whenever there is a problem, an incident will be immediately created and forwarded to the correct person. This synthetic monitoring is just an availability check in HTTP. It's actually a browser which is calling up a page and we are doing some page checks on this page to be sure that it is available. Next to the availability, which the synthetic monitoring gives us, we also measure the performance of this single page, because it's very important for us that this page is fast enough. If the performance of this single page degrades, an incident is also created for the same person, and he can respond to it immediately.

Real-user monitoring is a big part of what we are doing because we are focusing on the actual user experience. I just came from a meeting, 15 minutes ago, where we discussed this issue: a slowdown reported by the users. We didn't see anything on the server side but users are still complaining. We need to see what the users are actually doing. You can do that in debug tools, like Chrome Debugger, to see what your network traffic is and what your page is doing. But you cannot do that in production with your end-users. You cannot request that your end-users open their debug tools and tell you what's going on. That's what Dynatrace offers: insight like the debug tools for your end-user. That's also exactly what we need.

Most of the problems that we can respond to immediately are server problems, but most of the problems that occur, are front-end problems, currently. More and more, performance issues are located on the machine of the end-user, and so you need to have insight into that. A company of our size is obliged to have insight into how its actual users are doing. Otherwise, we're just blind to our user experience.

Dynatrace also provides a really nice representation of your infrastructure. You have all your servers, you have all your services, and you know how they communicate with each other.

While it gives you a good view of all the services that are instrumented by Dynatrace — which is good, of course, and that's what it can do — in our case, our infrastructure is a lot bigger than the part that is instrumented by Dynatrace only. So we only see a small part of the infrastructure. There are a number of components which are not instrumentable, like the F5 firewalls, switches, etc. So it gives a good overview of your server infrastructure. That's great, we need that. But it's lacking a bit of network segmentation and switches. So it's not a representation of your entire infrastructure. Not every component is there.

The solution's ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is great. In my opinion, it could be extended even more. I would like it to be more configurable for the end-user. It would be nice to have more business rules applicable to the severity. It's already very good as it is now. It is based on the impact on your front-end users. But it would be nice if we could configure it a bit more.

Another area for improvement is that I would like the alerting to be set up a little bit more easily. Currently, it takes a lot of work to add alerting, especially if you have a large environment, and I consider our environment to be quite large. The alerting takes a lot of administration. It could be a lot easier. It would not be that complicated to build in, but it would take some time.

I would also like the visual representation of the graphs to be improved. We have control of the actual measures which are in the graphs, but we are not able to control how the axes are represented or the thresholds are represented. I do know that they are working on that.

I have been using the Dynatrace AppMon tool for six years and we changed to the new Dynatrace tool almost three years ago.

We haven't had any issues with the stability of Dynatrace, and it's been running for a long time. We use the Managed environment, so it's an on-prem service, but it's quite stable. We are doing the updates pretty regularly. They come in every month but we are doing them every two or three months. First we do them in the test phase and then in the production phase. But we have not experienced any downtime ever.

For us, Dynatrace is scalable and we haven't seen any issues with that. We did need to install a larger server, but that's because we have a managed environment. You don't have that problem if you go with the SaaS environment. We don't see any negative impact on the scale of our products, and we are already quite large. It's quite scalable.

In terms of the cloud-native environments we have scaled Dynatrace to, we are using Dynatrace on an OpenShift platform, which is a Docker Kubernetes implementation from Red Hat. We have Azure for our CRM system, which Dynatrace monitors, but we are not measuring the individual pods in there as it is not a PaaS; it's a SaaS solution of course.

As for the users of the solution, we make a distinction between the users who are deploying stuff and those who are managing the Dynatrace stuff. The latter would be my team, the APM team, and we are four people. The four people are installing the Dynatrace agents, making sure the servers are alright, and making sure the management of the Dynatrace system itself is okay.

The users of the tool are the users of the different business cases. That includes development and business. There are about 500 individual users making use of the different dashboards and abilities within Dynatrace. But we see that number of users, 500, as a bit small. We want to extend that to over 1,000 in near future. But that will take some advertising inside the company.

I use Dynatrace technical support on a daily basis. They have a live chat within the tool and that comes for free with the tool itself. All 500 of our users are able to use this chat functionality. I'm using it very frequently, especially when I need to find out where features or functionalities are located within the tool. They can immediately help you with first-line support for the easy questions and that saves you a lot of time. You just chat and say, "Hey, I want to see where this setting can be activated," and they say, "Just click this button and you will be there." 

For the more complex questions, you start with tickets and they will solve them. That takes a little bit longer, depending on how complex your question is. 

But that first-line support is really a very easy way to interact with these people, and you get more out of the tool, faster.

We purchased the Dynatrace product because we had some issues with our direct channels, our customer-facing applications. There were complaints from the customer side and we couldn't find the solution.

There were also a number of our most important applications that needed more monitoring. We had a lot of monitoring capabilities on the server side and on the database side, but the correlation between all these monitoring tools was not that easy. When they came up with a problem they would say, "Hey, it's not the mainframe, it's not the database, it's not the network." But what was it? That was still hard to find out. And we were missing some monitoring on the front-end. The user experience monitoring was lacking. We investigated a number of products and Dynatrace came out as the best.

We kind of grew into Dynatrace. Our initial scope was quite small, so it was not that complex. Currently, our scope is a lot broader, but it is not complex for us because we have been working with the tool for such a long time. Overall, it's quite straightforward. If you're starting with this product from scratch and you have to find out everything, it can take some time to learn the product. But it's quite straightforward.

We started with the AppMon tool, which was the predecessor to the current tool. Implementing that went quite fast because it was a very small scope. When we changed to the Dynatrace Managed it took us half a year. And that's not including the contract negotiations. That was for the actual implementation: Finding out all business cases and all the use cases that we had, transforming them into the new tool, and launching it live for a big part of our company. That took half a year.

We hired some external experts from a company in Belgium, which is called Realdolmen. They really helped us in the implementation. They had experience in implementing Dynatrace for other companies already, so that really helped. And I would advise that approach. If you're doing it all by yourself, you are focusing on what your problems are, while if you are adding an external person to it, who is also an expert in the product itself, he will give you insights into how the product can benefit you in ways you couldn't have imagined.

The issue of whether Dynatracec has saved us money through consolidation of tools is something we are working on. There are a number of things that we are replacing now by things that are already present in Dynatrace. If you currently have a lot of different tools, it will save you money. But Dynatrace is not the cheapest tool. Money-saving should not be your first concern if you buy Dynatrace.

It depends on your business case, but as soon as you are at a reasonable size and you have different channels to connect within your company — mobile and web and so on — you need to have a view into your infrastructure and that's where Dynatrace provides real benefits. It's not for a simple company. It's not for the bakery store around the corner. But as soon as you hit a reasonable size, it gives enough added value and it's hard to imagine not having it or something comparable.

"Reasonable size" depends a bit on your industry. But it is connected with the number of customers you have. We have about 25,000 concurrent customers, at a given moment in time. As soon as you have more than 1,000 concurrent customers, you need this tool to have enough analysis power. It gives you power for tracking the individual user and it gives you the power to aggregate all the data, to see an overview of how your users are doing. This combination really gives you a lot of benefits.

It is quite costly. Dynatrace was the most expensive, compared to the other products we looked at. But it was also a lot better. If you want value for your money, Dynatrace is the way to go. 

In my opinion, the product is extremely good and comparable. We did compare it to AppDynamics and New Relic and we saw that Dynatrace is actually the best product there is. If you are looking for the best, Dynatrace will be your product.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from Dynatrace is that application performance monitoring is very complex, but the easiest part of it is the technical aspect. The more complex thing is all the internal company politics around it. We see a lot of data and if you are targeting some people and say, "Hey, your data bridge is going slowly," they will respond to it very defensively. If they have their own monitoring tools, they can say, "Oh no, my database is going very fast. See my screen is green." But we have the insights. It's all data, and gathering the data is the technical aspect. That's easy. But then convincing people and getting people to agree on what is obvious data is far more complex than the technical aspects.

The way to overcome that is talking. Communication is key.

I'm a little bit skeptical about the self-healing. I have heard a lot about it. I have gone through some Dynatrace instances where they have this self-healing prophecy. I think it's difficult to do self-healing. We are not using it in our company. There is a limited range of problems that you can address with it. It's only if you definitely know that this solution will work for this problem. But problems are always different, every time. And if you have specific knowledge that something will work if a particular problem arises, most of the time you can just avoid having the problem. So I'm a little bit skeptical. We are also not using it because we have a lot of governance on our production environment. We cannot immediately change something in production.

We are using dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment, but the self-healing is a little bit baked into these microservices. It's a Docker Kubernetes thing, where you have control over how many containers or pods you want to spin up. So you don't need an extra self-healing tool on top of that.

In terms of integrating Dynatrace with our CI/CD and ITSM tools, we are working on both of those directions, but we are not there yet. We have an integration with our ITSM tool in the sense that we are registering incidents from Dynatrace in our ServiceNow. But we are not monitoring it as a component management system.

We are not doing as much as I would want to for these Quality Gates. That can be improved in our company. Dynatrace could help with that, but I would focus on something else like Keptn, or something else that integrates with Dynatrace, to provide that additional functionality. Keptn would be more suitable for that, than the Dynatrace tool itself, but they are closely linked together. For us, that aspect is a work-in-progress.

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of 10, because it has really added value to my daily business and what I have to do in performance analysis. It can be improved, and I hope it will be improved and updates will be coming. But it's still a very good tool and it's better than other tools that I have seen.

We’re using Dynatrace AppMon currently in our environment, and we’re using it for troubleshooting performance issues. We are mainly using it in the performance-testing environment, to try to reproduce a problem if we happen to see one in production, and find what the root cause is.

It's performing well, absolutely.

I’m not sure about the entire organization, but for my quality assurance, the mean time to resolution or to find a problem has been reduced dramatically now. I don’t have a percentage but, we used to take a week or more to troubleshoot an issue, now it can be done very quickly, probably in a day’s time.

PureStack, I just love it. It can give visibility from the end-user perspective right through to the code level. That's the most valuable feature.

Also the UI is amazing. We really like it.

I think Dynatrace is top-notch, it's well ahead of its competitors. I don’t see any features which another vendor or other products have which Dynatrace doesn't. I think Dynatrace is in pretty good shape right now. I don’t really have any features which I’m lacking right now, so it's all good.

In terms of new features, I’m excited about AWS monitoring, that Lambda function, and log analysis. We’re not yet on the cloud, but still it's a good feature. We are actually planning to move to the cloud, and my organization is actively looking for tools which can support monitoring. This will definitely be a value-added feature.

It's not a big concern for us at this moment.

We haven't used technical support.

For deep diagnostics we were using an HPE product or, then, a Microsoft product called Diagnostics. It was difficult to use that tool and connect the dots. It was per machine base, per JVM base, and was not really giving a holistic picture. But Dynatrace is doing that all for us. And PurePath, again, I just love that. That was missing.

I think one of the vendors helped us. We didn’t have any hands-on, but I think we did some Dynatrace University, we’ve been through some videos. And the vendor gave us some training, so we’re fine with that.

I’m a big advocate of AI. It seems that AI can join the dots sometimes for us, and that is helpful. Instead of spending the time to think and connect all the dots, AI can do that for us in the future, and can come up with a solution also. That will be nice.

In my previous company I did use siloed monitoring tools. We used HPE BSM, Business Service Management. There were two piece to that. One was infrastructure monitoring, host monitoring such as CPU, memory, using SiteScope. The other was end-user monitoring, synthetic user monitoring. Also, there was a piece called Diagnostics. The challenge was, although the two pieces, synthetic monitoring and the host monitoring, both were agentless, it didn’t give us the real root cause of issues. Diagnostics did but you had to go and install it, and it didn’t perform very well in production.

In terms of one tool, right now I’m seeing Dynatrace can do a lot of things: the entire DevOps, infrastructure, application performance monitoring, all that can be done using just one tool. Now they just released a new feature for log monitoring. I’m really excited to learn about that. If everything can be packaged in one, that would be nice. You wouldn't have to worry about different vendors and patches. And especially, they have a SaaS model. I’m a big advocate of SaaS. My company is not right there but eventually, I hope, when it gets there, I think you’ll see big use of it, and ease of use.

I think from the organization's perspective, probably the most important criteria when selecting a vendor would be the cost, and the tool, obviously. The tool is very important: quality of the tool, reliability, scalability, all those factors weigh in.

My advice would be, from the tool perspective, to look at this tool and its features: ease of use, scalability, and stability-wise this tool stands out. I understand organizations have a pricing factor, a cost factor. That is something you have to decide on. If you want a low-cost tool, there are different tools in the market, or do you want to settle with the best tool in the market but you'll spend a lot more money. Do your research, work with your peers, your leadership, understand which way they want to go. But definitely, as an engineer, I will always say you should go Dynatrace.

Java automation (application monitoring agent)

• System profiling
• Early warning alerts
• Memory and thread dump analysis
• CPU sampling
• PurePath technology for easy troubleshooting.

These save us a lot of time because we no longer have to guess and pour through millions of log lines to figure out what is hurting.

• UEM
• Dashboards

2 years.

No issues. Easy installation.

No issues, but there are a few problems with our Mobile App's Dynatrace Libraries.

No issues.

Great relationship. They respond quick and are readily available to help.

They have a fairly good support team. They are dedicated until the issue is resolved. In case of an emergency or product issue, they will find someone to get on the phone or WebEx.

Yes. The previous solution was very light and not helpful while troubleshooting.

There's always a learning curve in anything, thereafter things are fluid and you rely less and less on support.

In-house with help from a Dynatrace consultant.

We don’t share this number, but significant enough that we adopted the tool enterprise wide.

It was about $200,000. Given our small footprint back then, it was not a huge cost. On a day to day level, I can show that it is actually paying us back for multiple reasons. But for the sake of it I’d say about $500.

When I joined, the product was already in house, and I just had to switch it with the existing one but I heard there were other products evaluated.

Best APM tool I ever worked with. It has made our lives a lot easier and reduces our troubleshooting time. The QA and Performance team will usually just send a screenshot of the problem from Dynatrace to the developers. This way they don’t have to guess, and they know where to look to fix the problem.

Dynatrace does application and platform diagnostics and monitoring and user experience management. Typically, in our region, we are seeing a lack of deep application platform management tools because most of the customers in our region don't use those tools.

We are using Dynatrace Managed and Dynatrace SaaS. It is the new Dynatrace. They had a legacy product called AppMon, but nobody is using that now.

Our customers mostly have on-prem deployments. In terms of the version, I always use its latest version.

The most valuable features are ease of deployment, UI, and collected data. Its deployment is really easy. In just a few hours, you can have a very good outcome, and you can see everything, which is very valuable. It collects a good amount of data.

It is one of the most easily deployed monitoring products that I have seen in terms of scalability and installation. In 60 minutes, it is installed, and if you want to scale it, there are no issues. You just add another node, and in 15 minutes, it is done.

It is very stable. Our customers didn't have any issues with it in the last four to five years.

The licensing part is complicated or not transparent. It is very difficult to assess the number of licenses for a prospect. You have to do a PoC, and calculating the number of licenses for two years or three years is sometimes very difficult. It also depends on each case. There are multiple types of licenses. Sometimes, you need only one of them, and sometimes, you need all of them. This is an area for improvement.

I have been using this solution for five years.  I'm a certified professional for Dynatrace, and I work for a Dynatrace partner in Europe.

Its stability is awesome and perfect. It is much better than the competitors that we have evaluated.

Its scalability is awesome. It is really easy to scale in any direction. For SaaS, you don't have to think about scalability, and for on-prem, it is very easy.

It is mostly on-prem, and we have the largest US companies as our customers. The largest deployment has 200 to 300 users. They are not concurrent users.

Their support is awesome. I get valuable answers from their support for all my tickets.

I mainly have experience with IBM products. We stopped partnering with IBM because it was not suitable for this market. IBM is ten years behind Dynatrace. You can't compare them.

Its deployment is really easy. It is one of the most easily deployed monitoring products.

Its maintenance is minimal. I worked with competitive products for more than 15 years. So, I can compare them. With Dynatrace, one agent is required. From time to time, there are issues that are typically very specific to the monitored environment. We have customers who have been using all the updates of all the agents for five years, and they have had no issues. Typically, when we have an issue in one of our environments, it is tied to the monitored application platform. We had no issues with Dynatrace.

Its licensing is complicated or not transparent.

I would definitely give it a nine out of 10.