Dynatrace Reviews

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.

Monitoring of the hybrid solution, having application components spread over various datacenters. Having the insight from any channel, whether it is mobile apps or a website, we have everything covered. This gives us the capability to proactively monitor performance, but also give valuable insights to the user behaviour. 

The alerting mechanism where you get millions of dependencies analyzed, in one alert or "problem" as Dynatrace calls it. We are getting focused answers to issues in production, and moved away from the ops concept of "alert suppression", which historically has ignored seriously business impact due to over alerting. 

In short: The IT Ops game has been lifted, and silos have been broken down between traditional dev and ops.

The one agent technology and autodetection. 

That it made it possible to get the monitoring up and running fast. Therefore, we could focus on the value that Dynatrace provide. First, you harvest the low hanging fruits of failures and performance issues. Then, you have the foundation of implementing Dynatrace in your ITSM. 

In short: Time to realizing the value is short, maybe hours.

The thing with Dynatrace is the speed of releasing new capabilities and features. The one thing I am really missing is the final Azure dashboard. Further, I hope Dynatrace will release an on-prem API synthetic test soon, as that is really desired.

No issues.

No issues.

I used SCOM. I left due to moving to a cloud strategy.

I did not do the calculation.

Evaluate all the corners of the data Dynatrace provides, including outside dev and ops. The hole ITSM space can be ignited with Dynatrace integration, like CMDB synchronization.

I did not evaluate anything but Dynatrace.

Try it out. This is literally one tool to rule and distance any other.

My organization has leveraged Dynatrace for improving the quality of apps and streamlining in implementation.

Of the entire stack, DC RUM and DT SaaS are definitely the most asked for in our offering catalog.

Enterprise Synthetic of DC RUM can be made more robust.

Not much, but problem in stability of Enterprise Synthetic.

No.

Very good support.

No.

Yes, it is simple and straightforward.

Licensing is a bit complicated for Dynatrace, and pricing is dependent on how much your organization invests.

AppDynamics.

Before moving to production, go through the training on community sites/boards and try to build internal capabilities.

Dynatrace has significantly increased a lot of our troubleshooting capability. As IT support team spends less time, they can focus more on other things.

The most valuable feature is that we can see every database call executed from Java applications. Since most of the workload of applications are database-based, it is important to see and analyze SQL statements. Dynatrace provides the ability to drill down to different dashlets and see what is going clearly, which is extremely useful.

The second valuable feature is that we can catch every transaction in our applications. It is important to see all requests end-to-end and have the visibility into performance that we needed.

If you have many distributed servers, you will need to install or migrate every agent. This can be a problem if you have too many, and it takes time.

Customer service is good but I got answers late for some tickets opened recently.

PurePaths that start from method sensors (method entry points) cannot be grouped in any application and displayed under DefaultApplication.

The product runs perfectly with our application servers and collects data that we needed.

It is flexible enough to add desired measures and method level sensors into application code. We can see method-level details.

At the moment, we are focusing on internal IT processes covering the entire application lifecycle. Later, we would like to work on EUE.

• Deep insight to code
• Quick root cause analysis
• Quick bug fixing

Dynatrace provides a clear view to application code; it reviews code to decide where to place check points to collect information. Based on that, it is able to specifically identify where in the code it is experiencing either an error, issue or performance trap. This also provides third-level support with a clearly specified place for resolution without needing to re-create the error. It reduces the amount of time required for communication between all of the support layers, as they can share the same info - what has happened, what was result, where it happened - so in the end, it leads to quicker issue resolution.

Technical support is well-skilled and competitive.

Dynatrace was chosen as our first solution.

Initial setup was quite easy and straightforward. The solution by itself assigns a place for sensors. You just need to properly set ports and IPs.

We implemented it almost entirely in-house, with some remote vendor support.

Pricing is based on the number of servers monitored, so for big applications, it is a bit expensive.

First, make a detailed analysis of the purpose for such a tool, and then define detailed requirements they plan to achieve.

Dynatrace facilitates great live performance monitoring, allowing us to easily and visually detect problems before they become a large impact issue to the business. It is not uncommon to detect and quickly use various drill down options such as PurePath to quickly identify and provide initial analysis on problems.

• Creating different dashboards
• Sharing dashboards with edit permissions
• Simple classic but effective UI (unlike some modern UI's out there that have too much white-space)
• Wide variety of dashlets available to monitor various services/components

• Either use less system resources and be faster or use more resources to pre-compute the PurePath on recent X minutes of data
• More flexibility with refresh times
• More UI options

Overall, it's quite stable.

We haven't had a chance to change the scale much and will probably not scale up by any meaningful factor.

Customer Service:

It's great.

Technical Support:

I haven't had to use it a lot.

Overall, it's very easy to setup on the client side.

We currently use Dynatrace in conjunction with another APM tool as well as a synthetic monitoring tool.

I would highly recommend it.