Dynatrace Reviews

It's used in two major use cases:

1. Monitoring and our own internal IT operations. 
2. We provide our customers access to Dynatrace tenants so customers can also leverage developing their code running on our platform.

It does full stack monitoring for internal operations, problem diagnostics, APM use cases, and performance management for our customers.

We have multiple instances of Dynatrace running, where about half of them are running in our data centers and the other half are running in the public cloud. Therefore, it's a hybrid deployment. We use a mixture of cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure (running Kubernetes), and Google Cloud Platform.

We have traditional deployments on VMware virtual machines as well as running stuff in the cloud. We have a couple hundred Kubernetes clusters monitoring using Dynatrace. Dynatrace's functionality in this area is unmatched combined with its full stack visibility, ease of deployment, and completely dynamic changes. The container environments are also dynamic since you have microservices spinning up and down as you go. I have never seen another tool doing this with the same reliability. 

Dynatrace has improved our organization through operational support. We also have a large services organization which directly works with customers, and sometimes you run into situations where customers ask how they can improve their applications. Traditionally, these service teams would go for assessments. Eventually, they would even go onsite and through performance workshops with them to find some low hanging fruits that could address, and this was very tedious work. By introducing Dynatrace, you suddenly have real-time data. Then, the process of doing performance reviews switches from workshops or a defined time frame analysis (and then taking actions) to a more continuous approach where you constantly have Dynatrace performance data of the landscape. 

Service engineers save a lot of time because they can just go in look at the data and share it with the customer, who has the same view, and say, "Here's an improvement which can be immediately implemented." It's not like a collection of big, multiple findings that are consolidated into one results presentation, then the customer needs to do something. It's more like a continuous performance analysis and improvement process, which is more efficient than those workshops approaches. That's one of the biggest of the advantages that our services team sees because it helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production.

Dynatrace is tightly integrated with ITSM. It's integrated with ServiceNow, which our support team is using.

We provide a platform, then the customer ships the code and deploys it. Therefore, we rely on testing by the customer, and sometimes, they miss something and it breaks. Then, it doesn't work as expected so we have to step in, and say, "Yes, your site is down," or "It's not functioning properly." We do the analysis because typically the customer says, "Okay, it's not us. It must be you as the service provider." This is where we gain a lot of efficiency. The support team is the first line of defense there. They get the information to determine if they are able to quickly pinpoint the problem. E.g., the customer deployed, then two hours later, issues were occurring. This is when you don't want to waste time. Our support engineers need the visibility so they can immediately be able to communicate to the customer, saying, "Yes, it's on our side," or "It's on your side." If it's on the customer's side, they can let them know exactly where they need to go. This is where we gain most of the time.

It helps our operations that the solution uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery. If you think about all the work in the past where we had different agents, tools, or scripts deployed to monitor specific aspects of an environment and different tools, then having one agent definitely helps. For example, for our rollout, when we migrated all the different tools to Dynatrace, we did this over the weekend. We installed the agent, then just watched the data and findings coming in, which was a huge benefit. We installed one thing an it discovers everything.

I suppose the solution has decreased time to market for our individual customers with new innovations/capabilities. Dynatrace helps them gain better insights, allowing them to do another deployment faster.

It has auto detection of almost everything. The full stack capabilities to get one agent deployed allows you not to worry about anything else because the agent detects everything. This is in combination with the AI so you don't need to worry about any baselines or setting up any thresholds. This is all done automatically, which brings us the biggest benefit.

Configuration as code integrating through APIs is really important when automating at scale. If you think about the tens of thousands of hosts that you deploy to, then APIs are key when automating deployments, the management of those instances, and configuration as well as integrating with other systems without sophisticated or far reaching APIs. 

Dynatrace easily integrates with our infrastructure or applications, then reliably triggers self-healing actions or remediation actions. This is something that we really love to use because it definitely removes a lot of human interaction. You just let the machine to do the job and can trust it, and that's the most important. I have seen systems where the users were very reluctant to trust the system to take actions where typically a human would do the job manually. Dynatrace considers all the information that it gathers, then triggers self-healing actions which are quite reliable. It doesn't need a lot of human adjustment to make it work.

We use real-user monitoring a lot to get insight into end users and our customers, e.g., customer behavior. 

While the integrations are great, sometimes our customers are not as far as long in Dynatrace concepts from a technical perspective as they need to be, whether it's a cultural thing and educational thing. Thus, some of our customers are not as advanced as Dynatrace would like them to be. From a technical perspective, all the capabilities are there but the concepts are not yet spread out within the ecosystem to their fullest extent. Therefore, Dynatrace is ahead of its time.

Documentation could be improved. E.g., you don't know how to properly use Dynatrace because documentation is almost lacking behind the features being deployed.

On very large deployment scenarios, the APIs for configuration and configuration management came in slowly. This is something that is good already but could be better.

In the product, I am missing some configuration automation APIs.

The company has been using Dynatrace on different occasions for the past eight years. The current product of Dynatrace has only been out for four years.

We operate services for our customers with pretty high SLAs. We guarantee the systems we run are reliable. We also guarantee uptime. In the past three years, we have run up to 50 updates with Dynatrace and had only one or two issues where the system had to be brought down. There are almost no issues at all with stability. It is rock-solid.

They are improving constantly with every release and adding new stuff. We have updates about every two weeks.

We have about 2,500 people using it.

We currently manage seven Dynatrace clusters with several thousand Dynatrace tenants, then in total almost 30,000 hosts are monitored with Dynatrace. We're not reaching the limits of Dynatrace's scalability. This is probably one of the largest deployments, but we have not seen any limitations so far.

We want to leverage even more services:

• Real-user monitoring
• Possibly look into session replay.
• Expand the footprint of synthetic monitoring.
• Build more integrations by leveraging all the data Dynatrace captures for custom metrics into our BI reporting, billing systems, internal cross charging functionality, and scaling/optimizing our environments in terms of resource usage. 

There is a lot of data in Dynatrace at the moment that we do not fully utilize.

The technical support is great. We have a pretty good contract with Dynatrace for contacting support. They are pretty responsive and very knowledgeable. You get a DevOps engineer from Dynatrace jumping on immediately with very high expertise. You don't get the typical Level 1 automated standard reply: "Yes, we will take care of it," but then you have to ping back.

We came from a former product of Dynatrace, which was called AppMon, and not really sold anymore. Though, there are customers who still use it out there. We used it for the traditional APM scenario, then migrated to Dynatrace to extend the visibility for hybrid cloud deployment.

We had been using a mixture of Opsview, Splunk, SolarWinds, and other tools. We switched because of the complexity of managing all these tools. It became unmaintainable. E.g., historically, people would write scripts for Nagios Opsview, then maintain them. If we lost the people who had been maintaining those scripts, then nobody knew how the checks worked for those custom scripts. Also, the maintenance overhead was pretty high.

From the perspective of the end users using different monitoring solutions, you had different teams who had to go to different tools and contend with data in one tool not being exactly the same data as another tool. While the overlap between tools was there, the complexity in accessing those tools and knowing how to use those tools became a big organizational and maintenance overhead that we decided to pull them all into one tool to harmonize it. We wanted one tool where the interface and data are the same regardless of whatever you're monitoring.

The initial setup was straightforward. We looked into Dynatrace and were able to roll it out to 12,000 hosts within four weeks. 

From the Managed version, you can have it installed and up and running in less than an hour. This is on the condition that you have the hardware to install it on and access to the systems/services that you want to monitor.

Initially, some people were skeptical about the one agent really working, so we did test it. Now, we have had so many good experiences that when we deploy, build new services, or spin up new instances, Dynatrace is one of the first things that is always there. We don't even even test the agents anymore. We completely rely on this mature product that is solid and stable when we deploy staging, development, QA environments, or playgrounds. There is no deployment without Dynatrace agents.

We deployed Dynatrace ourselves as we have a lot experience working with it. Deploying Dynatrace depends on the environments that you run it on. Since that was all orchestrated with things like Puppet, Chef and Ansible for us, it just was a matter writing a bit of automation code that it wasn't already in place. One person was needed to do this properly, and it is not that hard of work because it applies to almost every environment that we deploy. For new services that we provide, it's done within the development teams writing those services. Therefore, there is no dedicated Dynatrace team responsible for integrating Dynatrace with services.

There is almost an API for everything. If you run it Managed, this means you have to administer Dynatrace's installation yourself. You run it and take care of some prerequisites, like sizing. Any system updates, back fixes, or upgrades to the whole cluster have almost zero maintenance. All you need to do is confirm it or let Dynatrace update itself. In the past three years, we had almost 50 updates or installations where we didn't even need to touch anything. We just had one or two occasions where an update broke functionality, and those were fixed with next update and within hours. It's almost self-maintaining.

We do have a dedicated staff for maintenance, but this team is not spending a lot of time on actually managing Dynatrace. They do the integrations of Dynatrace and other tools as well as development of custom integrations and configurations. This team is also responsible for the infrastructure and ensuring the machines Dynatrace runs on are scaled or adjusted properly. However, this is minor effort for them. We have a dedicated team of 20 to 30 SRE engineers and their responsibility is not only to Dynatrace. They are responsible for the whole infrastructure and surrounding tools.

As we use it internally, our internal operations have gained a lot more efficiency. The time to resolution and triage problems in different environments has been reduced by 50 percent, if not more. When Dynatrace raises a problem, the team does not need to bring together experts from other teams to look at the problem, log files, etc. You almost have Dynatrace training our support engineers because it's so easy to pinpoint the root cause of problems.

The solution has decreased our mean time to identification by approximately 50 percent.

There has been a positive impact on the instances run for our customers. Overall, uptime got better because we became faster at fixing the problems causing downtime.

The solution has saved us money through the consolidation of tools. With a hybrid landscape, we had multiple tools. When we consolidated, we removed four or five other monitoring tools with one. For the last ROI calculation that I did, Dynatrace was saving us up to $500,000 per year. 

In addition, our speed is up 40 to 50 percent. Therefore, our human cost and licensing savings together are one to two million.

We are a very big customer. We obviously have a special price point. 

If there are no corporate requirements to run Dynatrace Managed (operating it yourself), I would definitely go for the size option. For small and medium-sized companies, the size option is probably the cheapest one. You don't need to look into operating it. You don't need to run hardware. It is pay as you go. 

We looked into what can Dynatrace could actually replace. If the price point is high, think about the impact it would have to the entire organization to constantly replace monitoring tools. If implemented correctly, then it has a lot of saving potentials for the organization. That is something that should go into any ROI calculation.

We looked at the other big player in this space: New Relic and AppDynamics. Looking at the cloud, full stack capabilities, ease of deployment, and scalability that Dynatrace has, they definitely stood out in comparison. The full stack story was pretty compelling, where you have one agent deployed and it provides everything.

Trust what it's doing. Don't question what it's doing. If you don't understand it yet, take the time to try to understand it. Do not implement or force the old ways of monitoring onto a completely different approach, like Dynatrace. That's definitely that the biggest lesson a lot of people in our organization had to go through. 

Be curious and embrace the different approach. It is definitely worth it. The different approach that it does is a good one. It's different but it's something that actually works. Those guys know what they have built and what they are doing.

It is partly integrated with CI/CD. We are operating a platform with our applications, but our customers are responsible for testing and CI/CD deployed into our environments. Internally, some of our teams use it. The majority of our CI/CD deployment is our customers' responsibility, and while we do provide them Dynatrace for CI/CD, we do not control how they integrate it.

We are in the process of rolling out synthetic monitoring at scale to replace other tools. 

We are not yet using session replay, which is mostly due to data compliance restrictions. We have very hard data privacy protections. We do have customers who are highly interested in using the feature, but we are not using it at the moment.

Overall, I would give the solution a clear 10 (out of 10).

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.

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.

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.

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.

About two years.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We use the product in application monitoring. 

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. 

I have been working with the product for two years. 

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

The tool's support is hard to reach. 

Neutral

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.

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

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

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.

I have been using Dynatrace for approximately two weeks.

Dynatrace is stable.

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.

 The initial setup was difficult.

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.

I rate Dynatrace a ten out of ten.

We are using it for user monitoring and service monitoring.

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.

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.

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

Its stability is good. It does not break easily.

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.

Their support is very good.

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

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

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

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

My primary use case is application performance monitoring.

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

The reporting could be better.

I have been using Dynatrace for around three years.

Dynatrace is very stable.

This solution is definitely scalable.

I've had no issues with technical support.

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

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

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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

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. 

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

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

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. 

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.

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.

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. 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.

I have been using Dynatrace for three years.

We are always using the latest version.

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.

In my experience, Dynatrace is scalable.

We have 100 users in our organization.

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

The technical support could be faster.

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.

I completed the installation myself.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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

No worries about that.

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.

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

We are also familiar with IBM SOLUTIONS.

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

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

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. 

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

Dynatrace it has been our best APM Solution.

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.