Dynatrace Reviews

• Server monitoring
• Performance monitoring
• Logging
• Profiling
• Alert triggering
• Network monitoring
• Database monitoring

We setup triggers for certain critical events. When these events happen, alert notifications are sent to the support team to take immediate action.

The alert trigger. This frees up our IT team. Also, they will be the first one to notice any interruption in the services and take action to recover the services. 

I hope going forward it can provide more functionalities for application profiling. I also hope it can provide more logging view, collecting, and search functions.

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.

I am a Dynatrace consultant, and I work with a partner in South Africa.

Once you have it running, Dynatrace will show you a picture of your environment that nobody else would have, except perhaps for the architect. IT environments are inherently complex, and this will help figure out what you've got in the environment.  

The most valuable feature is the AI. In the older version, it would highlight errors but you still had to figure out the root cause. With the latest version, the AI engine highlights the root causes automatically. 

It would be nice if there were a way that it could be made simpler, given the complexity of the things that we're monitoring. It can get a bit overwhelming. The AI has helped in this regard.

This solution has been very stable.

I am in a small shop so I do not have direct experience with scalability, but I do know that it is one of their design goals. In our company, we have a couple of guys working on huge sites and scaling farms, so my impression is that the scalability is good, or even excellent.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The agent installs and configures everything automatically. In the older one, you had to manually configure everything. Now, you install the agent and you may have to restart some processes, but then it just starts giving data.

In this solution, they try to take a whole lot of complexity and make it look simple. It is not an easy thing to do.

There is a release every month of new features. They are pretty good at implementing things when you log a feature request or enhancement. The vendor is running DevOps and has a high frequency of releases, so you don't normally have to wait for the next major release, provided that there is enough requirement for it.

Quite a lot of the new design in the new version has been influenced by the new privacy rules in Europe. They've had to restrict a lot of what can be seen, in terms of the user's personal data, which can be seen as a good thing. Generally speaking, they've gone from a very open design where you can see all of the database queries and the data, to a more closed system. You can still find that stuff, but you have to turn on a lot of things and implement them. They are not there by default.

I find this a source of frustration because some of the time, the problems are because of the data. For example, someone put in their name wrong or put in an apostrophe. Without seeing the data, you don't know and can't figure out what is wrong. You have to figure it out by looking at it. This is a GDPR thing, however, and it is necessary for compliance. Companies have to decide while consulting with their customers, how much people are allowed to see. Then it can be configured.

My advice for someone who is implementing this solution is to take some time to plan out your operational environment in advance. Try to maintain consistency in naming, because I think that you can get additional value through this planning. You can roll out ad-hoc and it will be fine, but if you take some time to name things then you can get a better picture of your environment.

This is a very good solution, but nothing is perfect.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

I installed the demo application on an internal server and looked at the functionality of Dynatrace.

Through the demo server, we were able to see the functionality of Dynatrace and plan to apply it to our internal systems.

Through end-user monitoring, we were able to measure the user's perceived performance and build an SLA based on that information.

We hope the next version will have more powerful database monitoring capabilities.

SaaS infrastructure monitoring and alerting. We use it to monitor over a 1000 servers in AWS.

It is our main SaaS monitoring and alerting solution, and it allows us to identify many problems that we would miss if we did not have a comprehensive monitoring solution.

• Automatic alerting on system problems
• Failure rate increases
• Latency increases, etc. 

This stuff all works out-of-the-box, and is essential for a DevOps team to be aware of to identify production issues.

• The Web UI can be slow and hard to understand. 
• The integration with PagerDuty is currently broken on mobile. 
• It often produces "false alarms" and cannot identify failure patterns over days/weeks that do not indicate concern.

We use the product on our applications for monitoring and troubleshooting errors through customized dashboards.

The major impact of improvement is from AppMon in our development area. Now we are enable to find applications problems more quickly.

The best feature of the product for me is the real troubleshooting capability through the PurePath analysis. 

I also like the Transaction Flow dashlet where I can see the real path of our web request through the application's layers.

I don't much like the Java Management Extension. I would rather do administration tasks in a web GUI.

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.