No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.
reviewer1352679 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Technical Architect at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Jun 3, 2020
Provides traceability from tracing transactions of end users all the way through the back-end systems
Pros and Cons
  • "It has improved our critical incident response, exposing critical issues impacting the environment and our ability to respond to those events prior to client impact as well as resolving those events more quickly. We have use cases where we have studied a 70 percent improvement for response times in an occurring event as well as future reoccurrences being improved."
  • "We can see issues that occur, sometimes before the clients do. Before we have client (or end user) calls for issues, we are able to start troubleshooting and even resolve those issues. We can quickly identify the root cause and impact of the issues as they occur, and this is very helpful for providing the best client experience."
  • "Out-of-the-box, it's the best product that I've seen."
  • "There continues to be some opportunity to expose the infrastructure from a broader reporting standpoint. Overall, the opportunity is in the reporting capability and the ability to more flexibly expose or pivot the data for deeper analysis. Oftentimes, the solution is good at looking narrowly at information, but when you want to broaden that perspective, that's where the challenges come in. At this point, it requires the export of data to external systems to do this."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use cases are operational awareness, health of the systems, and impact on users. Other use cases include proactive performance management, system checkouts (as we investigate the ability to manage configuration and integration to the CMDB), some usage of it from a product perspective in terms of application usage, and I use it to manage and improve the user experience by understanding user behaviors.

We are in both Azure and AWS. We have both on-premise and cloud Kubernetes environments that we're running in. In fact, we have been using less efficient deployment methodologies. We haven't encountered any limitations in scaling to cloud-native environments. 

We have only used version 1.192 of the Dynatrace product. We have not used any previous versions.

How has it helped my organization?

It has improved our critical incident response, exposing critical issues impacting the environment and our ability to respond to those events prior to client impact as well as resolving those events more quickly. We have use cases where we have studied a 70 percent improvement for response times in an occurring event as well as future reoccurrences being improved.

The solution's use of a single agent for automated deployment and discovery helps our operations significantly. Oftentimes when you are looking at endpoint management, centralized monitoring teams need access to data across systems. They need to manage agents deployed throughout the organization. Remote polling of data can be helpful, but it's not deep enough, especially for APM capabilities. Having one agent significantly simplifies that functionality in such a way that it enables a very small team to manage a very large environment with very limited overhead. It provides the ability for external teams to manage it because they don't need any deeper knowledge of the application than installing the agent. They have the ability to integrate the agent into deployments and to do the work with very limited overhead.

The automated discovery and analysis helps us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint the underlying root cause. We have had scenarios where we can see end user impact. One of the use cases was where we had an individual system and a cluster of nine for a content management system that was having an issue. Through Dynatrace, we were able to quickly identify the one host that was having a problem, take that out of the active cluster, recycle that application instance, bring it back, and reintroduce it to the cluster in a very efficient manner. Historically, these processes take multiple hours in order to diagnose and identify the instance, then do the work. With Dynatrace, we are able to do the work in less than 20 minutes from when it first occurred to issue resolution. Thus, there have been scenarios where you can quickly identify infrastructure issues and back-end services. 

Out-of-the-box, it's the best product that I've seen. Its ability to associate application impact, as well as root cause from an infrastructure standpoint, is by far ahead of anything that I have seen due to its ability to associate infrastructure anomalies to applications. We are still on our journey of identifying the right business KPIs to see how we can associate this data.

Dynatrace is doing an excellent job of giving us 360-degree visibility of the user experience across channels in most technologies. We are working with Dynatrace to expose the full transparency to the mainframe, as we have transactions that call from the cloud onto the mainframe and back out to other services. This is a critical visibility that isn't there yet. Otherwise, with a lot of the cloud and historical systems, we do see a lot of transparency of transaction trace across the environment.

What is most valuable?

  1. Automated discovery
  2. Automated deployments
  3. The AI

These are probably the most key, because it gets into the traceability from tracing transactions of the end user all the way through the back-end systems. We are still working through the mainframe integration, but the scenarios where we can integrate through the mainframe are very useful.

We can see issues that occur, sometimes before the clients do. Before we have client (or end user) calls for issues, we are able to start troubleshooting and even resolve those issues. We can quickly identify the root cause and impact of the issues as they occur, and this is very helpful for providing the best client experience.

We have found the self-management of the management cluster and Dynatrace processes to be highly reliable. There have been minimal issues with managing the infrastructure.

We've targeted deployment of the real-user monitoring to the most critical applications in the company to understand if there's something that's happening in the environment and the user impact. This is to be able to understand the blast radius of issues, helping us understand if an issue is impacting one app or multiple applications. We can then quickly diagnose where the common event is (the root cause), resolve it, and then leverage the product to validate healthy user traffic after completion by seeing transactions be processed again. 

From a synthetic standpoint, we use the synthetics in two ways: 

  1. We do lower-level infrastructure pings (HP pings) primarily in order to validate individual, technology services on the back-end, i.e., the API endpoints. 
  2. We use the front-end synthetics to validate user experience 24/7. When you have low usage periods, you are still able to validate the availability and performance of services to the organization. Oftentimes, changes may be implemented to reduce risk during lower usage times and the synthetics can be valuable to validate during that time.

It has been very easy to deploy and obtain basic information. 

It's very good from a problem troubleshooting perspective.

What needs improvement?

I find the value from the out-of-the-box features to be extremely valuable. However, there will be gaps and challenges as you go into a much broader set of infrastructure technologies to consume that necessary information. This will be a challenge for the company. The things that they need to focus on is the ease of integrating external data sources, which can then also contribute to the AI. There is a ton of value gotten out-of-the-box, but moving to the next steps will be an interesting journey. I know this is something they are focused on now. When bringing in other telemetry, whether it be network devices, databases, or other third-party products that all integrate into a larger ecosystem, there will also be a lot of successes, but there will also be some challenges on this journey.

There is some complexity in the alarm processing logic within the product between the alert policies and problem notifications.

Expand the user session query data to be inclusive and enable that for the application or other telemetry within the system. Currently, in order to analyze the data outside of dashboards, it requires exporting to other reporting systems. If you want to do higher level reporting, then this may make sense. However, there is a desire to be able to do some of that analysis within the product.

There continues to be some opportunity to expose the infrastructure from a broader reporting standpoint. Overall, the opportunity is in the reporting capability and the ability to more flexibly expose or pivot the data for deeper analysis. Oftentimes, the solution is good at looking narrowly at information, but when you want to broaden that perspective, that's where the challenges come in. At this point, it requires the export of data to external systems to do this.

Adoption lagged primarily due to:

  1. The prioritization of monitoring as a functionality when teams do their work, as our teams are more focused on business functionality than nonfunctional requirements.
  2. Getting familiar with the navigation of the product. With our implementation, we have a single node where people get access to all the data within the enterprise. They're able to see everything. It takes time working through the process and getting the correct set of tags and everything else in place to allow them to filter and limit data to what they need to see and can consume. It takes some time for them to understand the data, what's there, and how to consume it as we learn how to limit the data sets to what they really want to see.
Buyer's Guide
Dynatrace
September 2026
Learn what your peers think about Dynatrace. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2026.
913,654 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

About two years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

At this point, we have about 1700 host units. We're monitoring 2000 to 3000 systems. We have 300 to 500 users a month using the systems with approximately 700 users overall. 

How are customer service and support?

Their Tier 0 is better than most companies that I have ever worked with. Normally, I'll get useful information even at that initial level/Tier 0. 

The in-app chat is extremely helpful. It helps not only with the ability for me to troubleshoot, but the ability for the rest of the organization to ask how-to questions. We have hundreds of those chats across the organization per month which are leveraged by end users.

Everything else is as expected when working through engineering and our product specialists, who have been helpful.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup and implementation are almost too easy. With real-user monitoring and all the application monitoring, you are introducing change into the environment. It is so easy to set up, configure, and implement that you can get way ahead of your organization technically from where they are from a usability standpoint. We have run into virtually no technical limitations in implementing the product. It has purely been from the ability to get users to adapt, understand, and leverage the value of the product.

We implemented and installed the Dynatrace platform (and everything) within a couple of days. We deployed the product in certain environments within overnight of instrumentation. Onboarding of teams and the training required, that took months. Even though we were able to technically implement the product from non-production into production within a month of deploying everything, having it there, and instrumented. It took us another eight to nine months to onboard individual teams into adopting and leveraging the product. From there, the rolling out is really limited more by organizational change, communication, and facilitating training with teams and their technical capabilities. Key teams have adopted the product and used it very quickly. Therefore, we are seeing value within four weeks of deployment from our centralized critical incident teams, but the product adoption from application and development teams has lagged.

If you are implementing Dynatrace, the first thing is to not underestimate your users and their experience, providing them personal service to onboard and consume the information, then leverage the product on the front-end. Technically the product makes it so easy to implement and deploy, this makes it difficult to stay in front of the rest of the organization when adopting the product. You need to ensure the data starts presenting itself before they are ready and able to consume it. You need to focus that into your implementation.

What was our ROI?

The solution has decreased both our MTTI and MTTR.

In 2018, we were having on average one issue per day. It is one of the reasons that we purchased the product in 2018. Last year, we significantly drilled those numbers down in outage time by 70 to 80 percent, as an organization. While Dynatrace is part of driving that avoidance as well as reduced outage time, it's impossible for us to have a direct correlation of its direct impact because there are so many other factors at play in an organization. I had to change management processes and everything else that could also influence that. However, we know that it was part of that increased uptime to where we've decided to invest significantly more in the product.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's understandable to do a smaller scale initial evaluation. However, as you identify the product value, don't hesitant in your scope and scale to maximize the initial investment and your opportunity to do a bulk investment of the product.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We have other competitive products. The automation instrument will be extremely valuable as we look to consolidate our solution set. The insight to quickly gain information is interesting and good information that we can use. There will be a challenge internally with our teams since application teams were never exposed to infrastructure information and infrastructure teams have never been exposed to application nor end user information. Organizationally, we have to change where people are now going to see this insight and figure out how to leverage it for good, which will be helpful. It will be a game changer in terms of how we can identify and respond to events in the organization from the point of view of data and analysis, as opposed to tribal knowledge and fear.

Dynatrace was initially brought in to eliminate one competitive APM product. We are now on to eliminating the second, and we'll be consolidating all APM on the Dynatrace platform. We are also in the process of consolidating other infrastructure monitoring products on the platform. We expect there will be a small incremental investment from a purely licensing standpoint to consolidate the products, but we expect realization of a significant amount of benefit from the capabilities it provides from root cause analysis, impact analysis, transaction trace observability in the environment, the reduced administrative costs of disparate products, and the ability to integrate data. However, a lot of these were not measured previously because we had a lot of disparate tools across disparate teams managing things. Therefore, we can't measure the savings but we expect it will be significant.

We have CA APM Introscope, New Relic, and AppDynamics. We are users of all three of these products, though we are probably using AppDynamics the least. We have almost completely migrated away from Broadcom and are starting the replacement of New Relic.

Holistically, Dynatrace's traceability starts from the user endpoint, meaning the ability to trace a transaction from a user session all the way through other technologies. We've had more comprehensive traces than with other products. Other products do not offer an easy interface to see the trace of the user session in a comprehensive way. Dynatrace offers the ability to go from a mobile, microservices, or mainframe and be able to trace across all those platforms. It also has the ability to associate or automatically correlate user transactions to applications, then into the underlying infrastructure components. Another Dynatrace benefit is the whole function of the AI as well as bringing in other external data sources. E.g., we are looking at things like a DataPower and F5 data integrations, but also incorporating those into the trace. Finally, there is support of legacy technologies, because it really gets into traceability, AI, and the supportive legacy. Mainframe technologies are the big positive differentiators and kind of come to a conclusive root cause analysis.

CA APM Introscope and New Relic have simpler interfaces to consume data. With Dynatrace, you need to develop plugins to obtain easier API interfaces for pushing data into other products. This is a little easier with the other products. The New Relic Insights product is a stronger reporting feature than what Dynatrace provides.

There are also other products that we are looking at eliminating in other product suites, such as Broadcom UIM, Microsoft SCOM, and Zabbix. We have a lot open source solutions where we're looking to roll out infrastructure, then consolidate and centralized data. The primary function and capabilities gets into mobile to mainframe traceability in order to simplify or expedite impact and root cause analysis processes for the teams. The solution also has the ability to support our modern technologies running in AWS and Kubernetes cluster microservices as well as traceability all the way through the mainframe.

What other advice do I have?

We have integrated our notification systems through PagerDuty, Slack, and our auto ticketing app. This is to generate incident records. The integrations with PagerDuty and Slack are effective. We're in the process of migrating some tools to ServiceNow. Thus, we are in the process of doing synchronization of both the events while also evaluating the CMDB integration with ServiceNow. There are some recent capabilities that make this look more attractive to automate discovery and relationship building that we're looking forward to, but we have not yet implemented. The integration to ServiceNow will be good.

The desire is to have Dynatrace help DevOps focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. We are not there yet. The vision is there and it makes sense with the information that we see, but we have not had the opportunity. Even though we've been using the product now for two years, we're only now just starting an effort to roll the product out across the enterprise and replace competitive products for application infrastructure monitoring. We'll then have the opportunity for that full CI/CD integration or NoOps opportunity.

We will be rolling out to some highly dense environments in the near future. We haven't run into any performance issues yet. The only issue that we ran into previously is with the automated instrumentation of the product. We accidentally disabled the competitive products that teams were using as we were evaluating Dynatrace. You can get in front of yourself in rollout.

We don't have the solution’s self-healing functionality integrated into the automation product. Dynatrace doesn't have the self-healing capability of restarting services. Therefore, from a monitored application perspective, we haven't enjoyed that capability yet.

We are in the process of testing some parts of the session replay. We see value there and are working through understanding the auditory or compliance impacts to leverage this feature.

Based on my experience and history of the products, I would rate it at least a nine (out of 10). It's been far superior to other products in its capabilities and comprehensiveness, especially across both cloud and legacy technologies, such as older technologies (like mainframes and server-based monolithic applications).

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Director, Digital Projects and Practices at Rack Room Shoes
Real User
Jun 3, 2020
Allows our team to focus more on innovation, rather than on monitoring and bug-squashing
Pros and Cons
  • "The alerting systems are definitely the most valuable feature. The AI engine, "Davis," has proved to be a game-changer for us, as it helps to alert us when there are anomalies found in our applications or in their performance... letting the Davis engine find those anomalies and push them to the top, especially as they relate to business impact, is very valuable to us."
  • "What Dynatrace has really allowed our team to do is focus more on innovation, rather than on monitoring and bug-squashing."
  • "The one area that we get value out of now, where we would love to see additional features, is the Session Replay. The ability to see how one individual uses a particular feature is great. But what we'd really like to be able to see is how a large group of people uses a particular feature. I believe Dynatrace has some things on its roadmap to add to Session Replay that would allow us those kinds of insights as well."
  • "The one area that we get value out of now, where we would love to see additional features, is the Session Replay."

What is our primary use case?

We are using it to monitor our e-commerce applications and the full stack that our e-commerce applications run on. That includes both our Rack Room Shoes domain and our Off Broadway Shoes domain. We use it to monitor the overall health of the entire stack, from the hardware all the way to the user interface. And more specifically, we use it to monitor the real user's experience on the front-end.

How has it helped my organization?

What Dynatrace has really allowed our team to do is focus more on innovation, rather than on monitoring and bug-squashing. Now that we have a tool like Dynatrace, we can continue to do forward-thinking projects while Dynatrace is doing the monitoring and rooting out the root causes. We're spending a lot less time trying to find out what the problem is, versus letting Dynatrace pinpoint where the problem is. We can then validate and remediate much quicker. That's the impact it's had on our business.

The automated discovery and analysis helps us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint underlying root cause. We recently had some issues with database connections. Our database team was scratching their heads, not really knowing where to look. What we were able to do with Dynatrace, because we had some of the Oracle Insights tools built into the database, was to provide, down to the SQL statement, what queries were taking up the most resources on that machine. We provided that to the database team and that gave them a head-start in being able to refactor the data so it was quicker to query. That really helped us speed up the user experience for that specific issue.

Dynatrace helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and to shift quality issues to pre-production. We are just now starting to use it in that way. When we first launched Dynatrace, we only had monitoring in our production environment. At that point we were using it as an up-front, first-alert tool for any issues that were happening. Now what we're doing is instrumenting our lower environments with Dynatrace so that it will allow us to monitor our load-testing in those environments, to find out where our breaking points are. So it does allow us to push out products that are much more stable and much less buggy because we're able to find out where our breaking points are in the lower environments. What this is going to do is allow us to do is push out, at a faster rate, more solid, less buggy releases and customer features, and allow us to continue to innovate on the next idea. We're just starting that journey. We just got fully instrumented in our lower environments in the last couple of weeks.

In terms of 360-degree visibility into the user experience across channels, we're only monitoring our digital channels right now, specifically our e-commerce channels. But we do have ways, even within the channel, to dissect by the source they came from. Did a given customer come from a digital ad? Did they come from an email? Did they come to us direct? It does allow us to segment our customers and see how each segment of customer performs as well. This is important for us because we want to make sure that we're not driving specific segments of customers into a bad-performing experience or to a slow response time. It also allows us to adequately determine where to spend our marketing dollars.

Another benefit is that it has definitely decreased our mean time to identification, with the solution and the Davis AI engine bringing the most probable root cause to the top. And within that, it gives us the ability to drill down into the specific issue or query or line of code that is the issue. So it has saved us a lot of time — I would estimate it has saved us 10 hours a week — in remediating issues and trying to find the root cause.

It has also improved uptime, indirectly. Because it gives us alerts early, we're able to mitigate issues before they're actually bigger issues.

What is most valuable?

The alerting systems are definitely the most valuable feature. The AI engine, "Davis," has proved to be a game-changer for us, as it helps to alert us when there are anomalies found in our applications or in their performance. We find that very helpful. There's still a human element to the self-healing capabilities. I wish I could say, "Oh, it's magic. You just plug it in and it fixes all your problems." I wouldn't say that, but what I would say is that the Davis engine gives us that immediate insight and allows us to cater to our solution so that the next time that problem arises it can mitigate it without a lot of human involvement.

Dynatrace's ability to assess the severity of anomalies, based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs, is really good, out-of-the-box. But it does an even better job when, again, we as humans give more instruction and provide more custom metrics that we're trying to monitor that are key to our business. And then, letting the Davis engine find those anomalies and push them to the top, especially as they relate to business impact, is very valuable to us.

We find the solution's ability to provide the root cause of our major issues, down to the line of code that might be problematic, to be valuable.

And we get a lot of value out of the Session Replay feature that allows us to capture up to 100 percent of our customers' real user experiences. That's helped us a lot in being able to find obscure bugs or make fixes to our applications. 

We also use real-user monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring functionalities. We use real-user monitoring for load times, speed index, and overall application index. And we use Synthetic Monitors to make sure that even certain outside, third-party services are available to us at all times. In certain cases, we have been reliant on a third-party service, and our Dynatrace tool has let us know that that service isn't available. We were able to remove that service from our website and reach out to the service provider to find out why it wasn't available.

We also find it to be very easy to use, even for some of our business users. Most of the folks who use the Dynatrace tool do tend to be in the technical field, but use is spread across both the business side, what we call our omni-channel group, as well as our IT group. They all use it for different purposes. I'm beginning to use it on the business side to show the impact that performance has on revenue risk. I can then go back and show that when we have bad performance it affects revenue. And I can put a dollar amount on that. So the user interface is very easy to use, even for the business user.

What needs improvement?

Dynatrace continues to innovate, and that's especially true in the last couple of years. We have continued to provide our feedback, but the one area that we get value out of now, where we would love to see additional features, is the Session Replay. The ability to see how one individual uses a particular feature is great. But what we'd really like to be able to see is how a large group of people uses a particular feature. I believe Dynatrace has some things on its roadmap to add to Session Replay that would allow us those kinds of insights as well.

For how long have I used the solution?

We started using Dynatrace in September of 2017. At that time it was an older product called AppMon. But we quickly upgraded to the current Dynatrace platform the following year. We've been using the SaaS platform ever since.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's been very stable. We've had very little downtime. In the last four years there may have been one outage. Overall, it's been extremely stable. Many times, Dynatrace is our first alert that we have issues with other platforms.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's extremely scalable. We're one of the small players. We're running with about 70 agents right now. We've been at Dynatrace's conferences and have heard of customers who can deploy 5,000 agents over a weekend and have no issues at all. For our small spec-of-sand space, it's extremely scalable.

We are hosted on Google cloud. That's where all of our VMs are currently set up. Our database is there, our tax server is there. All of our application and web servers are there, and Dynatrace is monitoring all of that for us. We haven't encountered any limitations at all in scaling to our cloud-native environment. We can spin up new auxiliary servers in a matter of minutes and have Dynatrace agents running on them within 15 minutes. We're starting to play a little bit with migrating a version of our application into a Kubernetes deployment and using Dynatrace to monitor the Kubernetes containers as well.

We have plans to increase our usage of Dynatrace. We just recently updated our hosts. We needed to increase the number of host units so that we could put Dynatrace on more servers, and we've already just about used up all of those. So next year, we'll likely have to increase those host units again. And we're going to start using more pieces of Dynatrace that we haven't used before, like management zones and custom metrics.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support has been great. The first line of defense is their chat through the UI, which is really simple. They're super-responsive and usually get back to us within minutes. We have a solutions engineer that we can reach out to as well, and they have been very helpful, even with things like setting up training sessions and screen-sharing sessions to help enable our internal teams to be more productive using the tool.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were using a tool called New Relic and we were really just using it as a synthetic monitor to make sure the application was up and running, but we really weren't getting a lot of insights. When we decided that we wanted a tool that could give us more insights and that we needed a tool that could give us the ability to monitor more of our customers' behaviors, there just wasn't another tool like Dynatrace that we felt could do things as well as Dynatrace, through a "single pane of glass." We chose Dynatrace over New Relic at the time because New Relic just didn't have any solutions like it.

We haven't found another tool that can help us visualize and understand our infrastructure, and do triage, like Dynatrace. We haven't found one that can give us that full visibility into the entire stack from VM all the way to the UI. That was really the reason we picked Dynatrace. There just wasn't another tool that we felt could do it like Dynatrace.

The fact that the solution uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery was the second reason that we chose Dynatrace. The ease of deployment, the fact that we could use the one agent and deploy it on the host and suddenly light up all of these metrics, and suddenly light up all of these dashboards with insights that we didn't have before, made it extremely attractive. It required a lot less on our part to try to do instrumentation. Now, as we add more Dynatrace agents to more of our back-end servers, we think we'll gain even more value out of it.

How was the initial setup?

We started with AppMon, which was more of an on-premise version, where we were installing it, although it still was a one-agent. Then we moved to the SaaS solution, and it was very easy for us to migrate from AppMon to the SaaS solution, and it's been extremely easy to instrument new hosts with the agent.

We were up and running within 30 days when we were first engaged with AppMon. When we migrated to the SaaS solution, it maybe took another 30 days and might have even been less. I wasn't involved with that migration, but I worked closely with the guy who was. I don't remember it taking much longer than 30 days to migrate.

We had an implementation strategy. We knew specifically which application we wanted to monitor, and all of the hardware and services and APIs that that application was dependent on. We went in with a strategy to make sure that all of those things were monitored. And now we've progressed that strategy to start monitoring more of our internal back-end systems as well — the systems that support our stores, not just our e-commerce channel — to see if we can't get more value and maybe even realize more cost savings on our brick and mortar side using Dynatrace.

What was our ROI?

We have definitely seen return on our investment. It has come in the form of being able to produce more stable, less buggy applications and features, and in allowing our team to focus more on innovating new ideas that drive revenue and business, versus maintaining and troubleshooting the existing application.

It hasn't yet saved us money through consolidation of tools, but as we continue to find more value in Dynatrace, it does make us look at other tools and see if we are able to use Dynatrace to consolidate them. We have replaced other application monitoring tools with Dynatrace, but we've not yet consolidated tools.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Whatever your budget is, you can manage Dynatrace and get value out of it, but you need to manage it to what your needs are. That's the one thing we found. We did not budget the right amount to begin with. It has cost us more in the long run than if we would have been able to negotiate it upfront. But we didn't really know what we didn't know until we'd been using Dynatrace for awhile.

Your ability to catch your Session Replay is based on the number of what they call DEM units, digital experience monitoring units. That's where we were short to begin with. There is an additional expense to determining not just the platform subscription but also the number of hosts units that you want to run and the number of DEM units that you need to be able to capture all of the user experiences that you want. In our case, we wanted the ability to capture 100 percent. Maybe in another business someone would only be worried about capturing a sampling of the traffic.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated New Relic, AppDynamics, AppMon, which was the Dynatrace solution at the time, and we also looked at Rigor.

Dynatrace could do pretty much everything. It wasn't just the real-user monitoring piece of it. It was also the full stack health aspect. The Davis AI engine was probably the biggest differentiator among all of the tools. The Davis AI engine and its ability to surface the root cause was a game-changer.

What other advice do I have?

My advice would be to jump all-in. There doesn't seem to be another tool that can do it like Dynatrace, and from what we've seen the last two times we've gone to their Dynatrace Perform conferences, they are dedicated to innovating and adding features to the platform.

We are not yet using Dynatrace for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. We are beginning to play in that arena. We're looking at tools that will help us migrate from our current VM architecture to a Kubernetes deployment architecture, to enable us to get more into a no-DevOps type of environment. But today, we're still on a virtual machine deployment architecture.

Similarly, we have not integrated the solution with our CI/CD and/or ITSM tools. That is on our roadmap. As we migrate and transition into a no-DevOps and continuous improvement/continuous deployment operation, we'll begin to use Dynatrace as part of our deployment processes.

The solution hasn't yet decreased our time to market for new innovations or capabilities, but we believe that we will realize that benefit going forward, since we'll be leveraging Dynatrace in our lower environments to find out where breaking points are of new features that we release.

We have half-a-dozen regular users who range from our e-commerce architect to DevOps engineers to front-end software developers. My role as a user is more of a senior-level executive or sponsor role. We also have some IT folks, some database administrators and some CI people, but most of our users are in the IT/technical realm.

We don't have a team dedicated to maintaining the solution. We do have a team responsible for it, though. That is the team that just helped instrument our lower environment with Dynatrace. We've got some shared responsibilities and some deployment instructions that are shared across three different groups. They're from IT, our omnichannel group, which is really our business side, and we leverage a third-party for staff augmentation and they use Dynatrace to help us monitor during our off-hours.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Dynatrace
September 2026
Learn what your peers think about Dynatrace. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2026.
913,654 professionals have used our research since 2012.
FerencJordanics - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Feb 11, 2024
Comes with good integration capabilities and useful in application monitoring
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution offers a better overview of applications. It offers end-to-end monitoring, and the user experience is real."
  • "Dynatrace needs to improve its configuration."

What is our primary use case?

We use the product in application monitoring. 

What is most valuable?

The solution offers a better overview of applications. It offers end-to-end monitoring, and the user experience is real. 

What needs improvement?

Dynatrace needs to improve its configuration. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with the product for two years. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I rate the tool's scalability a ten out of ten. 

How are customer service and support?

The tool's support is hard to reach. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

I rate the product's deployment a ten out of ten. The installation and deployment process is brief, but configuring the entire environment, including the agent server and enterprise configuration, is more complex and time-consuming.

What other advice do I have?

Our clients are enterprise businesses. Dynatrace's integration capabilities are good. I rate it a ten out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Implementer
PeerSpot user
FerencJordanics - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Apr 2, 2022
Reliable and quick support
Pros and Cons
  • "Dynatrace is stable."
  • "The documentation of Dynatrace needs to be improved. There needs to be a more detailed description and additional examples for background understanding for beginners trying to use it."

What is our primary use case?

We are using Dynatrace for application monitoring, elastic search, and problem analytics. 

What needs improvement?

The documentation of Dynatrace needs to be improved. There needs to be a more detailed description and additional examples for background understanding for beginners trying to use it.

There needs to be a better understanding of deep monitoring and complex investigations. Having better documentation would help.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Dynatrace for approximately two weeks.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Dynatrace is stable.

How are customer service and support?

I have contacted the support from Dynatrace and they are very good. I had only one question from the support and I received a quick response.

I rate the support from Dynatrace a five out of five.

How was the initial setup?

 The initial setup was difficult.

What about the implementation team?

The company that implemented the solution did not finalize the configuration properly. The solution was not monitoring everything that we wanted it to.

The amount of people needed to maintain the solution depends on the size of the environment. However, at a minimum, I would suggest two people would be suited.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Dynatrace a ten out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1170870 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Monitoring | Information Services at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Feb 23, 2022
Does thorough scanning of services and applications, but SNMP monitoring is not very good
Pros and Cons
  • "It is a very good APM tool, with a lot of thorough scanning of services and applications, great monitoring features, and PurePath helps us to identify minor glitches in applications and services while collecting everything from user sessions."
  • "Its infra monitoring is not that good. They are mainly into the APM environment, such as network monitoring and other things. Strong end-to-end infrastructure monitoring is missing. SNMP monitoring is currently not very good in this solution."

What is our primary use case?

We are using it for user monitoring and service monitoring.

What is most valuable?

It is a very good APM tool. There is a lot of thorough scanning of services and applications. It has got great monitoring features.

PurePath helps us to identify minor glitches in applications and services. It collects everything from user sessions.

What needs improvement?

Its infra monitoring is not that good. They are mainly into the APM environment, such as network monitoring and other things. Strong end-to-end infrastructure monitoring is missing. SNMP monitoring is currently not very good in this solution.

It is a bit expensive. It could be cheaper.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for the last one and half years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Its stability is good. It does not break easily.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have not scaled it yet. It is good enough to handle the bulk load. We never faced any performance issues with the tool. We have more than 150 users, and we never saw any issues with it.

How are customer service and support?

Their support is very good.

How was the initial setup?

It was straightforward. The full deployment probably took a week.

What about the implementation team?

We have vendor support, and we collaborated with our vendor for its implementation.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Its license is a bit expensive. We renew it yearly.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Clifford Neilson - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Delivery Manager at choice sourcing
Real User
Feb 18, 2022
Great application monitoring for large enterprises with an amazing AI engine
Pros and Cons
  • "The move valuable feature is the AI engine, which is amazing."
  • "The reporting could be better."

What is our primary use case?

My primary use case is application performance monitoring.

What is most valuable?

The move valuable feature is the AI engine, which is amazing.

What needs improvement?

The reporting could be better.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Dynatrace for around three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Dynatrace is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This solution is definitely scalable.

How are customer service and support?

I've had no issues with technical support.

How was the initial setup?

It was very, very, very easy to set up.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is not bad, but it could be better.

What other advice do I have?

Dynatrace is best-suited for large enterprises. I would advise those looking into implementing this solution to do the training because it's not easy to understand without it. I would give Dynatrace a score of nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. partner
PeerSpot user
Gregor Liddell - PeerSpot reviewer
Dynatrace Technical Consultant at Mediro ICT
Real User
Sep 28, 2021
Straightforward to set up with good stability
Pros and Cons
  • "I find that the AI on offer is useful, as it's good at identifying problems. You do need a bit of customizing, however, even in its sort of vanilla form, it's pretty good at identifying problems and the root causes of those problems and whatnot."
  • "The solution has been very stable; there are no bugs or glitches, it doesn't crash or freeze, and it's reliable."
  • "We'd like it to be more user-friendly, which, in our case, might be a big ask as we have a fairly complex environment."
  • "The solution could be more seamless. The user interface could be better and they could offer more integration."

What is our primary use case?

The company uses it for a lot of things. Obviously, we're using it mostly for application monitoring, and that covers both application performance and availability. We're using it for checking how things are performing and making sure that they're running and running properly and there aren't errors or issues. That would be the main thing. 

We're also using it to monitor servers, do some infrastructure monitoring, make sure there're enough servers are running and that they've got available disc space for monitoring CPU and memory, et cetera. 

What is most valuable?

The solution is stable. 

I find that the AI on offer is useful, as it's good at identifying problems. You do need a bit of customizing, however, even in its sort of vanilla form, it's pretty good at identifying problems and the root causes of those problems and whatnot. 

The installation process is straightforward.

What needs improvement?

They're generally going in the right direction and they're quite responsive to feedback. You can vote on features and whatnot. If enough people vote for a feature, they'll get it put in. 

The solution could be more seamless. The user interface could be better and they could offer more integration. 

We'd like it to be more user-friendly, which, in our case, might be a big ask as we have a fairly complex environment. 

For how long have I used the solution?

How long I've used the product depends on which version you would classify as the product. The current one, under this name, has only been out maybe three or four years. However, I also used the older version before that, and that was something called AppMon. Therefore, I've used it for a while at this point. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution has been very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I can't really comment on the scalability as we're in a relatively small environment. We don't have a massive number of servers on-site. I am aware of people that run it in massive environments, however, I can't make a comment on what it's like as our site is fairly small.

We might have ten or so active users. 

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is very good and very responsive. We're quite satisfied with the level of service on offer.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Before Dynatrace there was another Dynatrace product called AppMon. Before that, we used to use the company's own solution.  

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is easy and pretty straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

The main issue is that, due to the fact that it covers so much space, the navigation can be long-winded. It can take a lot of clicks to get into where you want to go, however, it's covering a lot of information.

On the site that I'm on, on the Dynatrace site, there's really just me that's doing the technical side of Dynatrace. I'm the one that's keeping Dynatrace itself running and whatnot. That said, even in bigger environments, there's probably only one or two people that are looking after Dynatrace itself. It's really solid in that regard. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't really get involved in the commercial side of things and therefore cannot speak to the aspect of licensing, such as pricing. We might be on a three-year contract that gets renewed.

What other advice do I have?

While my organization is a reseller of Dynatrace, I actually also work on it myself. 

While the deployment model that we're using is on-premises, there is a cloud-based version of it as well.

We're always using the latest version of the solution. It gets updated automatically, and therefore it's pretty much the latest version.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall.

I would recommend Dynatrace to others who are looking into implementing it.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
PeerSpot user
IlkkaM - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Sep 19, 2021
Scalable, with good appliance monitoring and analysis features
Pros and Cons
  • "In my experience, Dynatrace is scalable."
  • "We use Dynatrace for application monitoring in production and we use it in Huawei testing sites for analyzing the performance."
  • "The usability is worse than it used to be."

What is our primary use case?

We use Dynatrace for application monitoring in production and we use it in Huawei testing sites for analyzing the performance.

What needs improvement?

The usability is worse than it used to be. They had a new Source Dynatrace and it didn't go as well as they had expected or hoped for in terms of usability. It would be beneficial to test some other features.

If the installation was improved, that would be helpful.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Dynatrace for three years.

We are always using the latest version.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There have been some issues with the stability of Dynatrace. It doesn't work in all cases. There are seven different applications being monitored and there was an issue with one of them.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

In my experience, Dynatrace is scalable.

We have 100 users in our organization.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have contacted technical support. Unfortunately, it took quite a while.

The technical support could be faster.

How was the initial setup?

I have only installed the basics. I know that it is easier than it was in the past, but it hasn't been that great.

What about the implementation team?

I completed the installation myself.

We have one dedicated person to deploy and maintain this solution.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's expensive. It could be cheaper.

I don't have all of the contract details, but I believe that it is a continuous license.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend it to large enterprise companies. It may be too expensive for smaller businesses.

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Sep 12, 2021
Requires minimal configuration, works impressively, and provides visibility straight away
Pros and Cons
  • "The agent deployment is the most valuable. You don't need to do any configuration. You just deploy the agents, and it can automatically detect your infrastructure. That was the greatest feature that we saw in Dynatrace. If there is any database, it can detect it automatically and present everything to you."
  • "It is the best solution in the market."
  • "When it comes to monitoring, we did the integration with VMware vCenter, and we were able to see some good stuff. The VMware vCenter integration was really great, but what we really missed was the integration with the network management stuff such as Cisco ACI. We wanted to see integration in that area, but it was not provided by Dynatrace. So, the main feature for us is integration with things like Cisco ACI. If they can bring that one in, with vCenter in there, it would be a total solution. It would be absolutely incomparable to anything else in the market."

How has it helped my organization?

We have quite a big application that is used by almost every single person living in this country. This application is quite mission-critical. So, it was very important to detect problems as soon as they appear anywhere in the application. Dynatrace was able to show us the problems immediately without even knowing the application, code, etc. It showed us all the problems, and we have been able to present reports and solve problems very quickly.

What is most valuable?

The agent deployment is the most valuable. You don't need to do any configuration. You just deploy the agents, and it can automatically detect your infrastructure. That was the greatest feature that we saw in Dynatrace. If there is any database, it can detect it automatically and present everything to you.

It required minimal setting, and after we deployed a couple of agents, the very next day, we had the full picture of the internals of the application, and all the problems were visible straight away to us. There was no need to go and search and do a couple of things. It was quite impressive.

What needs improvement?

When it comes to monitoring, we did the integration with VMware vCenter, and we were able to see some good stuff. The VMware vCenter integration was really great, but what we really missed was the integration with the network management stuff such as Cisco ACI. We wanted to see integration in that area, but it was not provided by Dynatrace. So, the main feature for us is integration with things like Cisco ACI. If they can bring that one in, with vCenter in there, it would be a total solution. It would be absolutely incomparable to anything else in the market.

For how long have I used the solution?

We used Dynatrace almost six months ago. It was the latest version at that time.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is extremely reliable.

How are customer service and technical support?

We didn't have to contact them because it was so great. The solution was taking care of itself. For example, if there was any problem, we would shut it down, and the next day, when you try to figure it out, it would have got resolved by itself. That was quite impressive. So, we didn't have to call technical support at all.

How was the initial setup?

There is absolutely no configuration that you need from any technical person. Our engineers are very junior, and they don't really know how to configure an agent or play with the configuration file. They're not familiar with that. We just deployed the agents, and these agents went and detected which is the application server, where are the logs, and what are the processes. 

What about the implementation team?

We approached them and told them we want to try it. They were very cooperative. They sent us a link to download the software and the license. We did everything ourselves. They just came to do a quick onsite demo of how things work, but we had already figured out ourselves how it works. So, it was quite interesting.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We have been a long-time user of Broadcom CA APM. In addition to Dynatrace, we tried Elastic and AppDynamic. 

Dynatrace gave us the license for around six months. We were quite impressed with it. It was very impressive, but unfortunately, due to financial reasons and the network management interface integration, the management decided to go with Cisco. We got a better deal with Cisco, and it was bundled with some of the other stuff that they were looking for, such as network monitoring, network management, etc. Our manager really wanted to see the network management interface integration, and it was available in AppDynamic, and that's why they went with it, but if it was for me, I would have gone with Dynatrace. So, we got a good deal with Cisco and went with AppDynamics. They've just bundled the whole solution and given it to us. We are standardizing on AppDynamic right now.

What other advice do I have?

It is the best solution in the market. I can't believe the people classify it at the same level as the other leaders on Gartner Quadrant. It is way advanced than anything else. You can't find anything that is exactly like this.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 because it is just missing the network management interface integration. I would rate all other solutions that I've seen a six out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Head Of Product Development at Stefanini SCALA
Real User
Jul 7, 2021
Easy to setup and manage with a very nice user interface
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution has a very good user interface."
  • "Overall, it's a good platform."
  • "For the user, for the customer, they expect a solution to be not so expensive."

What is most valuable?

Overall, it's a good platform.

The solution has a very good user interface.

The product can scale.

It's fairly easy to set up and manage.

What needs improvement?

It will be great IF we could show (automatically, from the dynatrace dashboard) to the customer how much they are reducing costs, doing more business and no environment's stopped. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using the solution since 2015. it's been about six years or so at this point.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No worries about that.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution can scale, however, if you have a large amount of infrastructure you will need to pay more. I find that if you start with just a small part (the critical part), you'll better understand why you need more of it and scaling will come naturally. It's not just about managing the servers and applications. It's about the user experience too.

How are customer service and technical support?

I haven't really dealt with technical support. However, our tech team is quite capable of handling any issues should they arise. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We are also familiar with IBM SOLUTIONS.

How was the initial setup?

The solution is very easy to implement and easy to administer. It's not overly complex.

What about the implementation team?

Our IT team is capable of handling any implementation our clients need.

What was our ROI?

What I try to say to my customer is that, okay, it's not so expensive, if you could see the return of investment you will get. However, in Brazil, we have some difficulties when it comes to showing these numbers to the customer (they don't have the actualized numbers). It might be better, in the current market to just try to sell it to IT instead of across departments. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is quite high and many customers do not want to pay for it.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Dynatrace it has been our best APM Solution.

What other advice do I have?

We are an IBM partner and are beginning to work with solutions such as Instana as well. We're also partners with Dynatrace.

In the last three years, we've started to grow our customers and have new use cases. I believe due to the movement towards digital transformation, we have more opportunities to show the benefits of a platform like Dynatrace.

We are using the private and public domain from Dynatrace, however, we have customers and major financial customers who prefer to use either private clouds or a private environment. We believe that it doesn't matter where they are. I'm happy with this model, as we could get faster results in two weeks when we are implementing Dynatrace to our customers. It's faster to implement on the cloud.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been quite happy with its capabilities overall.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Dynatrace Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: September 2026
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Dynatrace Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.