Dynatrace Reviews

• Application monitoring
• End user experience
• Cloud Migration

It has helped us deliver better solutions to our end customers, and helps them in their digital transformation journey.

Monitoring: This helps us in making sure the end user gets an excellent experience with the applications that they use.

Nothing in particular. They could spend more time and effort in creating brand awareness.

I recommend Dynatrace to all of my clients for Server Monitoring/APM. It makes it so much easier to proactively solve problems before they become big headaches, and easily pinpoint the root cause of an issue.

Transparency and visibility into application performance, errors, incidents, etc. helps to foster a collaborative environment.

The ability to drill down from an alert into a problem and pinpoint the source of an issue saves my client teams hours of time.

The user interface is complicated, but recent web versions are getting better all the time. The improvements and new features in each release are great.

Application performance problem triage and root cause investigations. Specific areas of value include providing insight on 100% of network transactions, an end-to-end user experience view, and the opportunity to support migrations to the cloud.

Speed to resolve problems, improve digital customer experiences, and full clarity of root causes independent of functional or system boundaries. Whether it is the server, database, network, or application, Dynatrace provides a consistent unambiguous view of performance. This saves time and money

Comprehensive suite of solutions that can address all aspects of applications from dev to ops.

Richer, deeper partner channel: It needs to expand and deepen the business use cases, where their solutions can help.

Delivering application performance monitoring as a service out to clients for managing the health of critical apps and infrastructure out to end customers.

It is much easier to deploy, maintain, and delivery of high value insights, which almost immediately lowers the mean time to value and resolution of issues.

Auto alerting and reporting on the application and the infrastructure aid us in delivering our service with greater value.

The licensing model is confusing in solutioning clients for the number of hosts needed to deploy. It is difficult to determine without the assistance of Dynatrace employees. The product is superior to others, but it comes with a price tag that is often difficult to position back to clients.

We use it to do performance tuning and APM of production environments for clients. We have revamped our performance tuning practices to leverage Dynatrace instead of using OS-level tools, such as the sysstat package for Linux.

It simplifies a lot of the processes of performance tuning client systems before they go live. It severely reduces the time spent doing performance test cycles. We used to do three to four weeks of tests, and with clients using Dynatrace we can normally do it in one week.

• Drill downs all the way to the database calls.
• Adding sensors.
• Browsing PurePath.
• Saving sessions.

Make the Web UI more robust. Last time I used the web interface, it was still pretty crude. Price also is a major concern for all the clients I work with.

We often find the same pattern: Large enterprise business process management (BPM) platforms, when deployed successful, quickly become a critical piece of software which is used by the entire organization and supports 100s of different business processes. This results in unusual opportunities for improvement (tweaking a single screen may have a huge impact) and in an extraordinary pressure on operations. Dynatrace gives us and our clients information about all layers and components of their platform, including the most important starting point for us: real-time and historical end user experience.

As a consulting practice, we invested significantly in our own monitoring assets to use in tandem with our core offer, IBM BPM. We felt the need for this as we were unable to find suitable tools for our needs. Either they were too technical, without any view of the end user perspective, or they were extremely hard to implement. With Dynatrace, we have different options that we are including as part of our projects. We are not investing valuable resources in developing custom tools, but rather focusing on our core activity and leveraging Dynatrace to offer the needed visibility and monitoring capability.

1. Ease of use, with a streamlined and automated installation process. 
2. Functional coverage, from an end user business sensible view to a very detailed drill down of technical transactions. All of them, not sampling. 
3. PurePath: The automatic correlation of transactions between multiple layers and dependency identification is brilliant. Drilling down from a slow user facing transaction to a database or service call used to be one key APM promise. PurePath delivers in a way that can sometimes feel like magic. 
4. Artificial Intelligence: It is early days, but the results are already visible. Rather than keeping an eye on dashboards or emails, the AI can now tell us when something is wrong, including the impacts (e.g., affected users) and the root cause. It is a new paradigm for incident and problem management.

The initial transition from Dynatrace APP monitor to Dynatrace created some confusion. It is much better now with a clear focus in Dynatrace and an increase in functional coverage.

No.

No. The overhead to capture 100% of transactions is negligible (under 2%, measured in real life scenarios in two of our largest clients).

We have used previous incarnations of APM products with disappointing results as they were too complicated or too technical for our needs. For this reason, we built a set of custom tools which addressed our needs but resulted in a maintenance overhead. When we went back to check how the APM market was and if the old insufficiencies had been addressed, Dynatrace surprised us with a strong and future-looking product that we could start using as a real life project in a couple of hours.

The initial setup was straightforward. The OneAgent technology does a brilliant job of simplifying what was earlier one of the pain points in enterprise monitoring.

We are a business partner, so we help our clients implementing Dynatrace.

As with a BPM project, Dynatrace fits really well a start small, scale fast environment. Getting the first agents installed, getting information, and coverage in a initial set of systems can be done in hours and with a low cost entry point. Rather than investing months building an enterprise-wide business case, our recommendation to our clients is that resources are better invested in proving the value with a small pilot.

We compared Dynatrace with the other main players in the APM space. It is in a mature domain so coming up with our short list was a bit easy. After engaging with Dynatrace, we felt the product offered what we and our clients needed, plus the vision for the product and the company matches ours.

As a Managed Service Provider, deep understanding across client an application stack and their users' experience is critical. The ability for Dynatrace to identify the root cause of problems in a timely manner through its powerful AI capability and dependency mapping is a real value add for the service that we offer.

Prior to the use of Dynatrace, the dependency mapping was knowledge that was built over time. The autodiscovery of service intercommunication has saved countless man hours and is dynamically updated when new services are added.

The Smartscape view and service dependency are the most valuable services. Knowing what services are impacted by infrastructure host issues is critical to the service we offer.

A useful addition for known issues would be the ability to automatically perform certain activities as a first attempt to resolve issues which are creating a problem.

The main use of Dynatrace is development assistance through to live deployment, then proactive monitoring. Afterwards, monitoring of the infrastructure and live site.

Being able to track issues found in live back through environments is particularly useful. 

The obvious benefits are proactive monitoring, but there were the unexpected results we gained from it that brought additional value out of the product:

• Security analysis, i.e., being able to detect when there was malicious activity on the site. 
• DNS poisoning when incorrect traffic was hitting the site.
• Multiple hits to API calls when only one should happen.
• Helping to reduce license costs by reducing calls to specific services.
• Being able to ingest data from other sources and display them alongside, an example being in a third party system that does not allow monitoring, but does have an open API to pull monitoring stats from.

• Memory analysis: The ability to tune an application and stop memory leaks has been invaluable, especially in ATG where sizing is crucial. 
• Dynatrace allows real-time visualisation of what is happening instead of making changes, running a command to pull stats every hour or so. This enables us to make changes in an environment and instantly see the impact.
• Some systems can run low over a period of time. It allows us to predict when the server is going to struggle and proactively stop that from happening.

This is not a simple product. You cannot fire and forget. Maybe not a specific function issue that needs resolving, but certainly an area for consideration upon adoption of the product.

Training is required for all of the people who will be using it, and this should not be overlooked. I would even recommend nominating an SME in each of the three areas covered: user behaviour analysis, development, and infrastructure/operations support.

We have had some issues, mainly in the JS embedded in the page.

None.

We have used them extensively. They are very eager to help.

Reviewed other products, but never switched.

Fairly complicated, but it is an in-depth product.

In-house.

As a user, I can testify that we found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost.

Do not ignore the training!

Yes, AppDynamics, New Relic, and one other.