Dynatrace Reviews

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.

The primary use case of Dynatrace is root cause analysis. Dynatrace is used for finding issues if an application is having trouble. 

I'm an integrator, so we have deployed it for customers both on-premise as well as on the cloud. 

A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it. 

Dynatrace could be improved by having a fully functional applications and infrastructure monitoring feature. Their existing stack, which is SNMP-based, does not have full infrastructure monitoring, whereas if we compare it with other solutions like New Relic or Datadog, they have moved into infrastructure monitoring. 

The second improvement I would suggest is in regards to the cost. So far, Dynatrace is the most expensive APM that we sell, even compared to New Relic. I think they can improve a little bit in terms of the license pricing. 

We have been running Dynatrace for three years now. 

This solution is stable. 

This solution is scalable. 

The tech support is great. Besides calls, they also have an online presence where we can chat directly to them. If I'm not mistaken, this may be for premier customers, since their support is layered. 

For the other support mechanism, which is for regular customers, they can submit questions into a portal. I think the response time is between four to six hours. They could improve the response time because the premier customers have a fifteen-minute to one-hour response time. 

Dynatrace is quite easy to install. For an SaaS deployment, the customer can practically use it within the same day. If it's on-premise, I think it takes around three days, depending on the complexity. 

We have five customers using Dynatrace and the team size for deployment depends on the complexity. We have one customer with a big project, which was big in scope as well, so we can have as many as six to seven people for deployment. It ranges, so if a customer has a hundred servers—in terms of the time and resources required for the deployment, from start to finish—I think it could be done within a month by two people. It depends on the complexity. 

We implement this solution for customers. 

Dynatrace is the most expensive APM that we sell, compared to competitors' products. The license pricing could be improved. My customers pay for licensing yearly. 

I rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten. I would definitely recommend Dynatrace, especially if the customer has a big budget. An enterprise company should purchase Dynatrace, even when compared to other APM solutions like New Relic. 

We use the solution in server monitoring, application monitoring, and roam and synthetic monitoring. We have 1,000 Dynatrace users in our organization.

The solution can be deployed quickly on-prem. Once it's deployed, you can use discovery and review the process and service on this application.

Dynatrace would be closer to a perfect tool if it could bring an interface similar to a standard for metrics like Prometheus and Grafana, New Relic, and Datadog, and the way they present these panels. It would help if Dynatrace allowed more features that work with metrics like Grafana or New Relic because the data is there in Dynatrace. Dynatrace collects all the information but some companies consider integrating, for instance, Dynatrace metrics with Grafana.

I've been using this solution for more than one year. It's a SaaS solution, and it's deployed on a private cloud.

Support is okay but could be better and faster. The documentation for the tool could be better. The documentation with Elastic and Datadog is more detailed.

Initial setup is simple but it depends. In the server monitoring, it's only install and discovery. That is very quick. To install with a cloud like OpenShift, it requires some Sandcastle configuration about tokens and operators, but with old data, it's fast.

Two people were required for deployment.

I have a little experience with Datadog, but it doesn't have the power to discover with some libraries like Dynatrace. With Dynatrace, you can discover all libraries and technologies that exist on the market today. With Datadog, that's not 100% the case. Datadog is a very good product but it works differently. Datadog has machine learning, too, but not in all discovery options of SQL and in all layers of our monitoring like infrastructure, service, process, and applications—like Dynatrace. With Dynatrace, 100% of all options are included in your machine learning, in your AI.

For development, Datadog is a little more friendly to your front end and development teams. There are some areas, particularly the Apdex of Datadog, that are more understandable for the development teams. Dynatrace is a little more difficult to understand for development teams. It requires some more learning.

The APM feature in Datadog is easier to understand. It works manually, like New Relic, Grafana, or Elastic. That's more understandable for software development teams.

I tested New Relic between 2019 and 2020. Like Datadog, I tested and did proof of concept for New Relic in about one month. New Relic is strong and the APM is easier for teams of dev to write. The scope of New Relic is like Datadog. It doesn't cover all technologies and all libraries and just works efficiently with all items of applications for work with QA and dev.

I have not tested the integration of New Relic. I know some colleagues that integrated between the tools for the infrastructure coverage in Datadog and the APM coverage in New Relic.

I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10. It's not a 10 because there are some little things that could be enhanced. Otherwise, the product is great.

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 use Dynatrace as an analytics and monitoring tool. It is on-premise at the moment. We're looking at using the cloud-based one in the next year or so. We're in the process of migrating over to the cloud-based one.

The Davis artificial intelligence built-in program is valuable. It keeps all the information about the systems, connections, service calls, and requests in its database. It looks at response times and keeps everything in check with baseline figures. If anything goes outside of that baseline, it reports based on that. If the performance starts degrading, it reports on that. Before something breaks, it tells you that it is going to break, and that's the most useful feature of Dynatrace.

It is useful for analytics, web performance, end-to-end coverage of a user experience, and database analytics. It is absolutely a monitoring tool that is worth having. The visibility that it provides is a unique feature of this product.

Its price, for sure, should be improved. Its price is quite high. Other than the price, there are always improvements to be made as technologies change. When we move into cloud-based technologies, Dynatrace will also have to adapt so that they can monitor those as well. It should have the adaptability to quickly transform to monitor those new technologies.

I have been using Dynatrace for the last six years.

Currently, we have around 2,000 to 3,000 users. It is very extensively used. We are covering all our production systems and major revenue systems with Dynatrace. It is our primary monitoring system.

Their technical support is brilliant. They are online 24/7. You go into a chat window, and you talk to their support people. They can connect directly with your system and monitor it. They even tell you if something is wrong. It is the best support that I've ever had on any monitoring system. It is not just you monitoring it; it is them monitoring it as well at the same time.

Its installation is extremely easy. You just install an agent on the server. You can just follow the default installation. As long as you've got your system set up and your architecture set up to connect those agents into your Dynatrace cluster, everything is done within minutes.

I do it by myself. I'm a systems administrator. I take care of its deployment and maintenance. I build the system, and I connect the system to other systems. Any user who is trained on how to do it will also be able to do it.

Its price is quite high. Although it is worth it, it would be better if its price is reduced.

They base their prices around licensing. Their prices are based on agent licensing and consumption licensing. Both of these can be a bit cheaper, but if they are the best in the market, as I consider them to be, I assume that their prices will be higher. They are delivering the product for that price.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. There is no better product on the market. 

I love Dynatrace. I might be biased, but I would give it a nine out of ten.

We have some states that use the solution for the whole monitoring of their infrastructure. It's used largely in the main court, state courts, and federal courts.

The dashboard is the most useful aspect of the solution. 

The deployment itself is very easy and straightforward. You can do the deployment in a transparent mode for the applications and containers and it's a very simple operation.

The solution's interface is good.

We haven't had any issues with support.

The solution offers capable configuration options. 

The solution offers integration with other solutions.

The pricing of the product could be improved. It's still very expensive compared to other solutions, although it is the best one. Even being the best, it could improve the price or the business model. There should be more flexible ways of charging the customer. They could have more price models and more options.

I've been working with the product for about three years already.

Up until now, the stability of the product has been okay. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable in terms of performance.

The solution scales well. It's one of the most scalable options. If a company requires a solution that can expand, this is a good option.

We use it for organizations with 6,000-7,000 employees.

These are pretty new implementations. Therefore, up until now, there is no demand for my customers to scale or expand. However, I do believe that in two or three years they will definitely need to.

The technical support is quite good. There is also very good documentation on the solution if you need it. Overall, we've been quite satisfied with the level of service we've been provided.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's nice and easy. A company shouldn't have any issues with the implementation process.

While it depends on the use case, in four to six hours we can typically do a deployment.

Typically, staff or three or four resources is enough in order to handle the deployment and maintenance of Dynatrace.

As implementors, we can handle the installation for clients if they require it.

The pricing could be less expensive, although I do see the value of the solution and its feature sets. However, with more flexibility in terms of licensing, the solution could be more attractive to more customers.

Our clients also evaluated AppDynamics from Cisco.

The main difference was the implementation and the end-to-end management for the monitoring, including the simple way to find and do the correlation of some issues, such as identifying calls and making correlations through their monitoring system. This is the biggest advantage nowadays that customers can see from Dynatrace as opposed to AppDynamics.

We are partners and implementors.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

I'd advise others to plan the requirements well and be aware of integrations that could be more complex. Training the operational team well is also important. With a good operation team, you can take advantage of the tool in many ways.

In general, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate the solution at a nine.

In the six months that we were using Dynatrace, it was a proof of concept.

It's used for full-stack monitoring, automated instrumentation, APM, and byte code injections, as well as infrastructure performance monitoring and the virtualization layer.

We really liked the OneAgent technology automated instrumentation. It is impressive, better than the competitors, AppDynamics.

We like the on-premises platform and the horizontal scalability.

In the next release, other than the price being reduced, I would like to see some improvements in open telemetry support, the open standards support.

They could also develop an observability platform where you could have the ability to inject events, locks, and traces.

We have been using Dynatrace for six months.

We used the Dynatrace managed service. It was the latest version when we used it.

The stability was fine. We did not encounter any issues. It was working as designed and expected.

It's a scalable solution with a true cluster platform that can be expanded. It works very well.

We have 200 users in our organization who are using it.

We are satisfied with the technical support.

We were using AppDynamics and CA APM in the past.

It was a straightforward installation.

It took two to three days to configure and do the proof of concept.

We had a team of two or three to deploy this solution.

We completed the installation ourselves.

Financially, Dynatrace was a lot more expensive than AppDynamics.

Our business case wouldn't resolve, which is why we decided to renew the licenses with AppDynamics.

Dynatrace should reduce their pricing. It should be cheaper.

We are no longer using Dynatrace because it was too expensive.

If the price were reduced then we would use this solution again.

For those who are interested in using this product, we would recommend it.

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

When we started with Dynatrace we were an on-prem organization. We used it in the early days as an APM, the way most people used it.

Our usage of Dynatrace has grown over the years, not as much in terms of capacity as in usability. It is now used by three departments within our organization. It originally started with just my group, which is IT, and then we rolled it out to development because they saw the advantages of being able to identify code bottlenecks in existing code. We've rolled it out to operations and they use Session Replay to troubleshoot customer-specific issues. And the sales department also uses it to gauge productivity and how many visits we get to a particular page, how many times people watch a particular video, how many take a certain practice exam, etc. 

Those use cases are all in addition to its core use, which is to help us keep our infrastructure running. 

We're currently using the Dynatrace SaaS, the Dynatrace ONE product. We're not using anything in the old, modular product. It fits very well for us. We are a cloud organization. We're all Azure now. We migrated from on-prem to cloud about three years ago.

The automated discovery and analysis definitely help us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint underlying root cause, both from a code perspective as well as an infrastructure perspective. When we get an alert, or we're seeing a degradation in performance, Dynatrace will lead us down the path: Where do we need to look first? It will tell us that it has analyzed so many trillions of dependencies and that it thinks that the problem is "here," and it will point to a query or a line of code or perhaps to a system or to a container that is not functioning properly. Depending on what the problem is, it saves us an enormous amount of time in troubleshooting and identifying problems.

I estimate it has cut our mean time to identification at least in half, if not more. Before, we were relegated to combing through logs. We would take Splunk, look for the error, find out where it was occurring, how many times it was occurring — do all that type of investigation that you normally need to do. We don't have to do that anymore because it's all automated. 

And as far as decreasing our mean time to repair goes, it's closer to 60 to 70 percent. The reason is that we don't need to take such drastic troubleshooting time. We take its recommendation, and the time that we spend is checking that Dynatrace was right. We'll test out a quick fix in dev and then take it to QA and then push it to production. In some instances, it does reduce our MTTR by anywhere from 60 to 70 percent, although it really depends on the problem.

I operate an entire stack on four people, and the only way I'm able to do that is by automating as much as I can and having tools that I can rely on to reduce time-dependent tasks. Dynatrace has allowed me to function and keep my people productive without working them 24/7. Dynatrace works 24/7 for me.

Another thing that Dynatrace gives us is very deep visibility, not only into user actions but systems interactions. How are the systems relating to each other? Are the right systems talking to the right systems? When we first deployed Dynatrace five years ago, it showed us, through its Smartscape tool, that we had servers talking to servers they shouldn't be talking to. That was quite an eye-opener. I've noticed that a lot of companies are trying to copy what Dynatrace came out with in its Smartscape, but to me, it is the best visualization tool of your app stack and network that you'll ever put together, and you don't have to do anything. The system puts all that together. You deploy your one agent, it maps out the system, and you can see everything from application to network to infrastructure connectivity. It depends what you want to see, but it's all Smartscape'd out. You can tell what traffic is going in which direction and where it's going.

In addition, when I first started using Dynatrace, I had a routine. I would come into the office early and go through all of the night's activities. I would check for any problems we had: Was anything broken, were there any active alerts? With Dynatrace Davis, I started getting those reports automatically, through Amazon Alexa, and I do that on my drive to work. Instead of having to go in early and spend time in the office, I'm able to stay at home a little later, have breakfast with the family. Then, when I'm in the car, I invoke Alexa to give me my Dynatrace morning report, which will include my Apdex rating, any open problems, and a summary of closed problems. It's probably one of the least advertised aspects of Dynatrace, and one which I think is among the most highly efficient tools that they offer.

The amount of time we have to devote to maintaining Dynatrace is next to nothing. The time that we spend in Dynatrace is actually using it. We're using it to look at what's happening, what's going on, is something broken, or do we have an alert? We go in to find out what's wrong. Maintaining it is really almost nonexistent.

Another advantage is that it is much more of a proactive tool than it is one for putting out fires. Of course, it helps us tremendously if we have to put out a fire, but our goal is to never have a fire. We want to make sure that any deployments that we put out are fully tested in all aspects of use, so that when things are fully deployed, there isn't any need for a rollback. In the last three years, we've had to roll back a production deployment once. I don't attribute that all to Dynatrace, but I attribute a large part of it to it.

It has increased our uptime because we find out about problems before they're problems. The one goal that my team has, above anything else, is to know about problems before the customer does. If the customer is telling us there's a problem, we have failed. We are so redundant and so HA-built, that there is absolutely no reason for us not to be able to circumvent an issue that is under our control, and to prevent any type of a work stoppage or outage. We can't help it if the internet goes down or if Microsoft has a core problem, but we can certainly help by making sure that it's not our application stack or our infrastructure. I would estimate our uptime is better by at least 20 percent.

In the end, it has decreased our time to market with new innovations and capabilities, because anything that reduces time-to-produce decreases time to market. Once the code has actually been developed, it's in testing and deployment and that's where my window of efficiency is. I can't control how long it takes to build something, but I can control how long it takes to fully test it and deploy it. And there, it has saved us time.

Before we had Dynatrace, and a lot of the processes that Dynatrace has helped us put into place, everything was manual. And the more manual work you have, the more margin for human error you have.

The most valuable features really depend on what I'm doing. The most unique feature that Dynatrace offers, in my opinion, is Davis. It's an AI engine and it's heavily integrated into the core product.

The Session Replay not only allows us to watch the user in 4K video, but to see the individual steps happening behind the scenes, from a developer perspective. It gives us every single step that a user takes in a session, along with the ability to watch it as a video playback. We can see each call to every server as the user goes through the site. If something is broken or not running optimally, it's going to come up in the Session Replay. 

We also use the solution for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. We are in the process of converting from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, but that is in its infancy for us and will grow as our Kubernetes deployments grow. Dynatrace's functionality in this is really good. 

We use JIRA as well as Jenkins. We have a big DevOps push right now and Dynatrace is an integral part of that push. We're using Azure DevOps, and tying in Dynatrace, Jenkins, and JIRA and trying to automate that whole process. So Dynatrace plays a role in that as well.

In terms of the self-healing, we use the recommendations that it provides. I'd say the Davis engine runs at about 90 percent accuracy in its recommendations. We have yet to allow automated remediation, which is our ultimate goal. It's going to be a bit before we get comfortable with anything doing that type of automated work in production. But I feel that we're as close as we've ever been and we're getting closer.

User management is extremely — and I hate to use the word "easy" — but it really is. And it's a lot easier today than it was when we first started with Dynatrace. We create a lot of customized dashboards both for the executive teams and management teams. These dashboards are central to their areas of oversight. It used to take quite a bit of time to create dashboards. Now it even has an automated tool that takes care of that. You just tell it what you want it to present and everything falls together. It has templated dashboards that you can customize.

The single agent does all of it. Once you deploy the one agent to your environment, it's going to propagate itself throughout the environment, unless you specifically tell it not to. It is the easiest thing that we've ever owned, because we don't have to do anything to it. It self-maintains. Every once in a while we'll have to reinstall the agent on something or a new version will come out and we'll want to deploy it, but for the most part, it's set-it-and-forget-it.

I would love to see Dynatrace get more involved in the security realm. I get badgered by so many endpoint protection companies. It seems like a natural fit to me, that Dynatrace should be playing in that space.

I'd also like to see some deeper metrics in network troubleshooting. That's another area that it's not really into.

We're in our fifth year of using Dynatrace. We were the very first paying customer for the new platform, Dynatrace ONE. We used it right at launch.

The stability has been phenomenal. I'm not going to say that Dynatrace has never had an outage, but I've never had an outage where Dynatrace wasn't available for me. It's always been there. It's always there when I need it. It's always on. Our uptime is five-nines, and we do attribute a large portion of our ability to maintain that figure to Dynatrace.

In terms of scalability, we don't have anything that it can't do. As we add to our infrastructure, it scales. Yes, every time we add a node, we're going to spend more. But it's up to me to decide if I want to monitor everything or a set of everything. My philosophy is to monitor all of production. Anything that is deployed to production is being monitored by Dynatrace. 

From a dev and test perspective we don't monitor like that. We keep a secondary Dynatrace instance that we use in the event that we need to troubleshoot something in development, but for the most part, our Dynatrace usage is relegated to production. And that's for cost reasons.

We have four environments in our builds. We have production, where we cover everything. We have a development environment, which is a subset of production, with different copies. We have QA, which is where everything goes from development for final testing. And then we have staging, which is the final step before it's pushed to the production clusters.

As we add to production, we add to Dynatrace. That is always going to be the plan. We will not deploy anything to production that doesn't have Dynatrace on it.

I don't get involved in the minutiae, but from what the guys tell me, with Linux servers you don't even blink. They have to watch Windows servers a little bit more because it's more intensive. Windows itself doesn't tend to perform very well when you first build. You've got to massage it and get it to where you want it to be. Dynatrace helps us with that, but Windows is more finicky.

We have about 50 users of Dynatrace between infrastructure, development, operations, and sales.

Their technical support is the best ever. I know I sound like a broken record, but we get chat support on the Dynatrace site, not from some guy in India, but from a high-level tech in the US who has all the answers to the questions. That person is not like some first-level guy who's going to ask you if your machine's booted up. The techs can answer our questions and, if they can't, they open the ticket and get back to us later. It's the best support model I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

We were using New Relic at the time. We were having a lot of frustrations with that in terms of its dashboarding capabilities, and the amount of time that my people had to spend keeping it updated and running correctly. We started looking at other products and we ended up settling on Dynatrace. Aside from its major capabilities, what Dynatrace ended up doing for us was to assist us in our migration to the cloud, because it gave us the sizing recommendations and the baselines that we needed to formulate what we were going to start with in Azure.

New Relic was the primary APM at the time and we were just very frustrated with it. We started looking at other products and really didn't see much of a difference in the competition, differences that would warrant going through the change, until we came upon what was then called Ruxit and is now called Dynatrace.

The biggest difference was that the other solutions required overhead. My biggest complaint was the amount of time we had to spend with these tools, because they're supposed to save you time, not take up more of your time. Dynatrace was the first one to actually complete that promise.

We ran hybrid for a year, collecting data on both ends, using Dynatrace both on-prem and in the cloud, and now it's all cloud.

The setup is really not much different, whether you're an on-prem organization or a cloud or even a hybrid. It's still the one agent. I have no experience with their AppMon product, so I can't tell you how much easier the new product is versus the old. But I can tell you that this product that we have been using is the easiest thing we've ever had. The only comment I got from my systems team is, "Why didn't we get this sooner?"

I am not the norm when it comes to policy and procedure. I tend to buck the trends a little bit. If I have a new product that I feel is going to be advantageous to the company and my team as a whole, then once we've done our due diligence, we will just deploy it. I know that larger companies with different criteria and regulations have to follow different channels and paths, through security and infrastructure and storage, etc. But ultimately, as long as you have "air-cover," and by that I mean an executive sponsor who believes in what you're doing, then you really should be able to get it done with minimal effort.

We were fully up and running in a week. It took me longer to remove New Relic than it did to deploy Dynatrace. We only needed one person to deploy Dynatrace. One of my systems people took care of it. I took care of the administrative stuff, creating the initial dashboards and getting the payments set up and so forth, but my systems people took care of the actual deployment of the one agent.

I didn't hire any contractors or deployment services. I signed up for Dynatrace's free trial and we went to town.

From a monitoring-tool perspective, Dynatrace has saved us money through consolidation of tools. We used to use a number of tools: PRTG, Pingdom, and we used to pay for an additional Azure service that we don't pay for anymore. And we used to use Splunk for log mining and now we don't. Just in the tools that we eliminated it has saved us $30,000, but there are more soft dollars that I could add to that.

I'm not sure how you come up with an ROI because it's pretty much all soft dollars. It's a line item in my budget that doesn't have to grow unless we grow. We have not experienced a base-price increase from Dynatrace.

Dynatrace is not the cheapest product out there and it's not the most expensive product out there. In our business, you get what you pay for. 

Dynatrace has a place for everybody. How you use it and what your budgetary limitations are will dictate what you do with it. But it's within everybody's reach. If you're a small organization and you have a large infrastructure, you may not be able to monitor the whole thing. You may have to pick and choose what you want to monitor, and you have the ability to do so. Your available funds are going to dictate that.

The only additional costs that I incur are for additional log storage space, which is like $100 a year.

My advice would be to compare and compare again. Everybody's offering free trials, and I know that they're a pain to do, but compare the products, apples for apples. Everybody's going to compare costs, but be sure to compare the functionality. Are you getting what you pay for? Are you getting the bang for your buck out of what the product is returning to you? If all you need to know is "my server's down," you can probably get by with the cheapest thing out there. But if you want to know why the server is down, or that the server is about to go down and you need to do something, then you want a product like Dynatrace.

I go to their Perform conference every year, and it's amazing to me to see the loyalty and dedication from the customer side. It's like a family reunion every year when we go to Perform. I hope we have it next year.

From a core-product perspective, Dynatrace is doing everything that we ever asked for. Everything that we've ever wanted to monitor, it has always been there first.

My use cases are typically working in conjunction with our business partners. For the most part, I get questions from the business as to what our conversion rates are on the eCommerce website. E.g., what the typical user journey looks like, especially when they're doing AB testing. They like to sort of double verify that in Dynatrace with a user session tracking to see which users are taking which path. 

I often get diagnostic questions about things like latency. Somebody on the business side will perceive some latency on one of our pages, then give me a call to use Dynatrace to go in and do a waterfall analysis of the page load to see if it is in fact loading more slowly than it has been in the past.

Since we are a 24/7 support shop, our primary job is to make sure that revenue keeps going in through the site and the site itself works. We have categorized issues into three tiers: Priority 1, 2, and 3. Depending on where a given issue falls, the Dynatrace alert is generated and sent to my team, then prioritized into one of those three categories. The response then to that issue will fall into a bucket for that type of priority. 

My primary use of the tool is to keep revenue coming into the business and to use it to help our business team in running their site analytics and web performance tools. They have things like Adobe Analytics that provide them with one layer of data. We use Dynatrace as another railroad metric to both confirm the Adobe Analytics data and enhance it in certain places where Adobe won't give us the answers that we need. In terms of metrics, we've had roughly about 120,000 unique sessions per hour on our website. So, we're capturing a lot of session data and real user data, and all of that data is kept in user sessions. We can look this information up by user ID to tag any given session that we want to find by date/client. E.g., if the user said that they had an issue last Thursday at 11:00 PM, then we can just do a search on their email address, go through all their sessions, and find the one that they mentioned, then dig directly into that one.

It has completely transformed the way that we do eCommerce from a couple of different perspectives. The first one is that we are really tied in with our business users to a much greater extent than we were in the past. A lot of the Dynatrace data is data which not just the technical team wants to see and to work with, but it is data that the business team wants to see as well. It has sort of facilitated a better communication stream between my business partners and my team to allow us to go back and forth on different aspects of the website. We didn't have that in the past. 

It has also built more solid relationships between the application development team and my support team because they will often have questions after new releases as to how those new releases affect different areas of the site. So, we have constant sessions with those guys in standing meetings on a biweekly basis to go through different aspects of what a release has done to the website, how we can use Dynatrace to track differences from one release to the next, and see if there is any latency as a result.

There are about 24 dashboards built, not only for my eCommerce support team, but I've also built dashboards for our development, business, analytics, and senior management teams that allow them to log into the product. Without having to know much about Dynatrace, they can just click widgets on the dashboard that I've customized for them to get to the information that they need. This saves me a lot of time because I don't have to go in and investigate every single issue that crops up. I can go in and just ensure that there's a dashboard available for diagnosing that type of issue and point the user who is interested in it to that dashboard.

After the dashboards, the Davis AI engine is fantastic. We're able to set thresholds within the Dynatrace application for what acceptable load times are for our web pages or API callback times. Davis actually monitors what those thresholds are and notifies me, not only when the thresholds are violated, but when they are either over or under the threshold. Then, it makes suggestions for tuning those thresholds based on what it sees in real user actions. Therefore, I'm never dealing with outdated data. Every day Dynatrace is updating what the user experience looks like and letting me have that compared to my benchmarks, which is super useful.

It's super easy to manage, especially the SaaS solution. We deploy the JavaScript through Tealium, which is one of the tools that we use to deploy tags to our website. Whenever we get a new version, or if we/Dynatrace create it off the Dynatrace JS, then we just deploy it through Tealium and that goes out to every page on our website automatically. Our users' browsers then start getting that new payload dropped into their browsers the next time they visit the website.

We use both Session Replay and synthetic monitors:

• A Session Replay is primarily for our customer support operation. We sometimes have customers call in to complain of issues with the website, and it's really useful to be able to look a customer session up and replay it in its entirely so you can see exactly what happened during that user journey. You can even find the point that the user is calling in to raise an issue, so you can dig down and resolve it. We record every single user session on the site. We don't have a limit on the number of sessions we capture because it's just so useful for our customer service folks to be able to do this. It's worth the trade off for us.
• Synthetic monitoring is set up on a couple of different levels. My primary synthetic runs every five minutes, every day, 365 days of the year. It is a simple, single page pane that tells me whether the website is up or down. If it is down, then an email distribution gets emailed and a pager text goes out to whoever is on call at that time to let them know that the site is down. We also use synthetics for the user journey testing. When new features go in from development, as part of our QA process, we'll often set up Dynatrace synthetic that simulates what that user journey should look like. We will then allow the synthetic to run every given set of minutes (whether it's 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or half an hour), to collect data on what that user journey looks like. This allows us to go in and run our reports against that synthetic module rather than against real user search.

Some of the analytics that you get in, e.g., a waterfall analysis of a web page could be clearer. A lot of that is not directly attributable to Dynatrace. Sometimes a vendor will implement a tag or JavaScript plugin that's named something entirely different than what it does. This makes it difficult to track that from the waterfall list, figure out where exactly that component is, and dig more into what it's doing. Dynatrace could probably improve a bit on that waterfall layout to make it clearer as to what exactly is there. It does a wonderful job of telling you what loads and when, but it could be improved in terms of telling me what exactly it is loading.

We have been using it for about 18 months. We first installed it last year in January. 

It is remarkably stable. They push out new releases of the SaaS application every two to three weeks. Dynatrace has a super active development schedule on their side. When they push out the release to us, all we have to do is push our JavaScript component back out to the website to allow it to go out to our users' browsers. Dynatrace has never gone down a single time in the 18 months that we've been using it. It's never been down when we needed it, and it's always collected the data that we need to analyze when we go into it.

Dynatrace itself doesn't really break, but the website does on occasion lose connectivity with a given API vendor, whether it's a payment processor or one of our other API pieces. Dynatrace is very good at alerting us when that happens, but we're not using any sort of self- healing capacity for that. What we do is we get alerted when those APIs aren't available or when a web page has an issue. My team gets alerts on a 24/7 pager basis, then we go in and investigate to resolve them.

The solution has given me a better view into uptime, in terms of how much downtime our website has. However, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud solution is remarkably solid. We rarely have downtime. Even during the holiday season for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we've had zero percent downtime for the last two years. From one perspective, it does let us know when the site is down using the synthetic monitor. The good news is that it has not had to give us much data because the site just doesn't go down.

We have 96 users logging into Dynatrace right now.

Our primary eCommerce environment is Salesforce Commerce Cloud. That is where we have the agent list SaaS solution implemented. We also have internal API servers within Azure, where we've implemented user agents to track them. We have not encountered any limitations in scaling to cloud-native environments with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We've had remarkably smooth deployments.

We have not scaled up to any other environments at this point.

It is fantastic. You don't even have to pick up the phone. You can submit a Jira ticket from directly within Dynatrace to the support team. Those Jira tickets are categories based on the component of Dynatrace that you're looking at. You actually get a live agent chat within the tool, so you're not only submitting a ticket and getting a case number, but you have the support rep right there in the chat session to walk you through it. It's the only product I use that has a similar interactive of an online health system.

We had AppMon, which is the previous version of their tool, before upgrading to Dynatrace. The first thing that we did was upgrade our on-prem AppMon solution to a solution that our Dynatrace agent setup in our DMZ on the network, then we added user agents on each of our API servers. This has morphed, as of last October, into a SaaS agentless solution that we run through a JavaScript snippet on our website. Every page on our website has a bit of JavaScript with a tiny JavaScript module that deploys out to the browser. For every user who visits our website, Dynatrace then collects metrics on what those user's actions are during the session and gives us reporting tools so we can check performance on the website.

We have used other monitoring applications, like SolarWinds and Gomez, in the past. However, they have all been replaced by Dynatrace at this point.

From the infrastructure perspective, what we have installed is the user agent on our API servers. So, we have six API servers set up in an Azure load balancing pool. There are three active at any given time. It was super neat when we installed the agent, because we actually went out and had lunch after the installation. When we came back, Dynatrace had generated the Smartscape view of not just the API and the different services they connect to, but it had crawled our entire network and found everything that it recognized from SQL Server databases to .NET Servers and API services. All of that stuff showed up in a sidenav automatically without our having hands on anything whatsoever. It provides a good quick view in the morning when you come in and just flip to that view right away, because it will flash in "red" for any given service or platform that is having a problem, then you can zoom to that problem and look into it right away.

Being able to capture every single user session on the site and work with our customer support team has been a huge return on investment for me. Of course, the additional support on top of Adobe Analytics to be able to try things, like website conversion, is also a huge return on investment.

The time to diagnose has decreased on average by 34 percent in its implementation. That is primarily because Dynatrace not only alerts you when something goes wrong, but the Davis AI also gives you suggestions as to why it may have gone wrong. This gives you a head start on triage and resolution.

Because the Davis AI gives us such a head start on problem identification, this leads into triage and diagnosis. Our diagnosis time has gone down significantly. We can find, identify, and get problems triaged more quickly than we could in the past by approximately 25 percent.

The only limitation with scaling to cloud-native environments is licensing. It all depends on how many DEM units you're willing to license. The more of DEM units that you purchase, the more user data you can collect.

We did compare it with several other products in the market when we did our due diligence before purchasing an APM and SaaS solution. Dynatrace came out just leaps and bounds beyond the pack. We're very happy with the results we're getting with it today.

We compared Dynatrace with AppDynamics, Opsgenie, and New Relic.

We do not use the solution for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. It was on our development roadmap for this year, but I think COVID-19 has probably pushed it to next year. While it is something we will be doing, we're not doing it now.

We have not yet integrated the solution with our CI/CD and/or ITSM tools, as it was on our roadmap for this year. We are a GitHub and Jenkins shop, and Dynatrace has plugins for both of those tools. One of the very next things we want to do with the tool is plug it into our CI/CD process so we can have sort of a hands-free built. We want to allow our builds to run through the entire pipeline and be managed by these three tools, then allow Dynatrace to do the reporting on the deployment and the resulting difference in the web application based on that new format.

My advice would probably be to start with the SaaS implementation to get a feel for Dynatrace, what it does, and what it can deliver. Then, based on results with the SaaS platform, evaluate installing the onsite on-prem solution. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. They obviously work best when you use them together, but there are some instances where our firm does not need an on-prem solution and may need just the SaaS application. Vice versa, there may be some firms that just need the on-prem solution and don't need the SaaS cloud based solution. In my opinion, it is best to start with SaaS, then based on what you discover with SaaS, decide whether you need on-prem.

I would give Dynatrace a solid eight (out of 10). It's beyond the expectations that I had when we purchased and installed it. As I went along and learned more about Dynatrace after the implementation, I was impressed with how much the tool does. Another aspect is not just how much it does, but how easy it is to do it. The AI engine runs 24/7/365, providing input. The dashboards make it super easy for my users to use as well as myself. 

The analytics that it provides are very easy to read. You can present them in pie charts, bar charts, or single table data. There's just a myriad of ways you can display the data that you get from Dynatrace to make it more consumable for users. 

We are using the solution in the operations space.

Our primary use case is production monitoring of complex business critical systems. Another use case would be performance testing of critical releases.

The solution uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery, which helps our operations. It reduces the cost of ownership of managing Dynatrace as a tool set, ensuring that we're able to maximize the value from Dynatrace and monitoring is available. That's a big plus.

An example of how it helps is we are more proactive than we were previously, though we're not quite where we want to be. Engineers are talking more with the operations people, which is closing the loop. Our teams are becoming more customer centric.

The platform is very good at identifying potential issues, but each problem that surfaces in most cases still needs to be qualified and quantified by somebody who understands the system. Complex application problems, not infrastructure, surfaced by Dynatrace still need to be reviewed by somebody who understands the application logic or system architecture. For somebody who understands the platform though, issues can resolved in minutes as opposed to hours.

We have the ability to detect user action response time slow downs and their consequences, along with the back-end calls to third-parties. We are heavily dependent, for a number of products, on back-end service calls to other suppliers. Using Dynatrace, we are able to measure the performance of those third-parties. 

We are also using Dynatrace to right-size the infrastructure, especially on private cloud where we have to provision the resources upfront to save costs. Dynatrace helps us by finding how many resource we are utilizing and identifies how many resources we need to maintain for the level of performance and scalability that's required. This has helped us right-size in about 50 percent of our cases, leading to a reduction in cloud resources by 50 percent.

The solution helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. This helps with performance testing because our performance test teams are more aware of how product features are performing, which helps to prioritize our testing. It creates test cases so we're able to do more testing. Because Dynatrace helps us define the cause more quickly, this speeds up the time between test cycles.

The end-to-end trace is valuable for us to be able to assign responsibility to the right resolver group very quickly.

The user experience allows us to be able to gauge customer experience and understand the performance impact of our platform.

It has a very nice interface with an easy way to visualize the data that we need, making it quickly accessible. It is very easy to use.

As a platform consolidating tool, it covers 90 percent of the needs for most applications. In that respect, it presents a very high value for us.

We have used synthetic monitoring functionalities to poll. Mostly, it's around service availability and key functionality of a website from different geographic locations. 

The real-user monitoring is mostly used to gauge the difference in performance for multitenant applications, This is so we can discern if there are any local network or client-facing issues when we do a comparison between each customer. It is quite important for us to be able to identify a client-side issue, as opposed to a feature managed problem, because we're essentially providing managed services of business applications.

Dashboarding and having different templates available for more business reporting, or even other metrics, would be useful.

With Dynatrace, we use one tool where we would have used many, but we still have had gaps.

Three years.

It has very high availability.

When we started, we were measuring uptime in a different way, and then Dynatrace started measuring uptime based on services, as opposed to infrastructure. Initially, because we started using different metrics for availability, it showed us that we weren't available as much as we thought we were. This helped us to have better conversations with customers and improved availability from the customer perspective over time. 

We have 115 users, which includes Level 2 and 3 supports, service design, product management, cloud infrastructure management, software developers, software testers, and product architects.

We are only in an early phase at the moment regarding the use of Dynatrace. Currently, we are only using it on two critical platforms. Going forward, we're looking to expand to nine critical platforms.

Our adoption rate across the portfolio is low because we're still in a pilot phase trying to build out our business cases.

The technical support is excellent and very fast. Not only do I get a quick response, but they're also able to close the request off very quickly and satisfactorily with a fix.

Some of the feedback I get from our team, who are familiar with other tools: "Compared with other tools, Dynatrace support is excellent." 

The feedback that I get from people is that the initial setup was very straightforward and easy. It was amazing what information we got in such little time after deploying the agent.

In most cases, the deployment is quick. It takes a couple of hours.

For high-risk applications, which are business critical or high complexity, we would deploy Dynatrace. For medium-risk applications, we would consider using Dynatrace. It comes down to cost qualification for medium-risk applications.

The solution has decreased our mean time to identification. It has saved us from 10 minutes to a couple of hours.

Consider volume because that is where you will get the most benefit. Doing a point solution is not cost-effective.

There are additional Professional Services costs which ensure the solution is configured with meaningful names so you're getting the most money for your investment.

It is the easiest platform to manage in comparison to the competition, like Elastic Stack, New Relic, AppDynamic, Nagios, or Prometheus.

Without a doubt, I'd recommend Dynatrace for business critical applications and anything that's driving revenue.

Biggest lesson learnt: To recognize the most value from the information that Dynatrace provides, you need to make it available to everybody in the DevOps group. There is a wealth of data which can be exposed, manipulated, and consumed by other systems, not just what's visible in Dynatrace. This can also be used for inputs into other upstream platforms.  

Understand the demands within your environment and plan a pipeline, then discuss with Dynatrace. 

We're aware that there are use cases for notifications that can be used for triggering self-healing or autoscaling, but we are not using those yet.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).