Dynatrace Reviews

We wanted to replace the previous APM, which was a first generation product, so that was our use case for purchasing Dynatrace.

Its performance has been wonderful.

One of the benefits - and I think it's because of one of the features that Dynatrace has, which is PurePaths - is that we have been able to diagnose, a lot faster, some of the issues that we have encountered in the past, when it comes to performance. We've even encountered two issues where we had to go back to software companies and tell them "You've got a problem with your software, and this is where it lies." Dynatrace was the one that helped us with that. We haven't completely removed the war room but we're expediting some of those war room diagnoses.

The customers just bought into it and just love it. They love the ease of use and the dashboarding that we have been able to set up for them. Everything that we have done so far has been a success.

What I like about it, is how it auto-discovers everything rapidly; within a matter of seconds you get to see the business transaction and how it's mapped within the product itself. That surprised the customer, but when we were starting to give them some of the dashboards in matters of minutes, after that, they were even more impressed with that feature.

We're not quite there yet, but the thing I would like to see is to really have that view of how issues relate to the business. Often enough, the tools that IT have for IT stop at the IT level. They cannot go into the business level part. They can't understand, because they don't have the information that the business needs to provide them with - for example how much an hour of downtime costs the business. For us, in IT, it's an hour of downtime, but it equates to money and equates to hours lost and equates to a lot of things, and often enough we don't have that information. This is where I would like to see us going. I think having a tool that can do that, and help us out with that information, I think would be helpful.

I don't play with the tool itself, I could ask some of the guys that do, they would be able to tell you more about it, but at this point I haven't heard anything that was a showstopper.

Stability has been great. I can't say enough about being able to upgrade and not even worry too much about the fact that it's going to be stable. I'd like to maybe see a little bit more about HA and disaster recovery. I feel that's a part that, at this point, we haven't been able to focus on - maybe because we didn't need to - but it's something that I would like to see more of.

I haven't hit that one yet, and I have to eventually, so I'm hoping scalability is going to be good.

I've never had to use technical support.

The only time that we really needed support, we actually engaged with, not a guardian, but the next level, which was a consultant. He came to work with us and help us out, deploying some of the stuff that we needed to do.

I wasn't involved directly in the setup. I oversaw the project that did. It didn't seem complicated, but honestly I can't say for sure.

I don't think the limitations are technical at this point, honestly. My limitations are more to do - and maybe it's because of the nature of the job I have - but they have to do with pricing. It's a little bit pricey. It's a very good tool. It's worth the price, to a certain degree. But it's hard to justify when it's that costly.

CA and AppDynamics.

It was a close race between AppDynamics and Dynatrace, but the views, the dashboarding, the clarity of the views, was a lot better. When you looked at it, it was easy to actually see what you needed to see.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, I'm not there yet. I wouldn't be able to answer you honestly on that one.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. The challenge associated with them is mainly integrations. We still have plenty of these tools, but the reality of it now is that they all have to talk to each other in order to get more information out of the monitoring. It's not enough to just see an alert, you need to correlate that to an application, you need to correlate that to a business model. And all of that is done only if you can have the tools talking to each other. Unfortunately, most of the time they don't talk well together.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, the benefit, from a manageability perspective, would be that I could concentrate my workload and my workforce on working with one product, therefore having one expertise. Now, I need to have several people understanding several products and, unfortunately, because they can't be hands-on most of the time, they don't have the expertise, or when they do have the expertise on one product, they can't develop it on the other products. For sure, from a workforce perspective, right there you've got a big advantage.

The main criterion we had for an APM was that we wanted to see an end-to-end view of our business transactions, which is something that we've never had and that the business has been asking for for years. That is the main criterion that pushed us to actually go this route. The first tool that we purchased was really hard to manage, didn't fit the bill that well, and that's when we moved to Dynatrace.

I would definitely say look into Dynatrace. One of the things that really dazzled me was that the minute you installed it you started seeing something coming out of it. and just that makes it so much easier. You don't have to wait. When you have to wait to see the results, it's not good.

We are using it in an operational mode, when we have trouble easily getting the root cause, getting the application back up and running. 

Based on that, the product has worked very well for us. We are happy with it.

It's really opened our eyes. We had point solutions where we could see different elements of the stack, and Dynatrace ties everything together. Before, we could never get that full-stack monitoring. It prevents that, "Oh, it's your problem. No, it's your problem," type of an issue, and it allows us to get to that problem.

It also helps us get us the context of the customer experience. What's the business impact of those problems? And we've never had that before. That has been good.

• Ease of use
• The full stack - Everything from the browser, all the way back to the database, and being able to see everything, and really narrow in very quickly on what is the root cause. That's the biggest bang for us.

Where we are struggling is being able to pull that information out and combine it with other contextual information that we have in other sources. Mining that data in a big-data environment, and joining it together and coming up with larger types of analysis on it. Big-data types of issues. We're still blazing a trail, trying to figure that out. But it's not as easy as some of the other things we've been able to do with the product.

Very stable. Very happy with it.

We have a lot of our infrastructure on it, so it's meeting our needs, for our enterprise. We have thousands of agents that are out there in over a thousand applications, and it's meeting our needs with that.

I think it's good. They are very responsive and get back to us. They try to give us workarounds and follow up with us. So, we're happy with that.

We have an infrastructure group and I'm more on the business-unit side, but I was part of our PoC as we brought it in, and stood it up. Generally, it was very easy to get it set up and get going very quickly. It was pretty easy. We used some of the Dynatrace sales team and the engineers to help us get it set up, but in short order, we had it going.

AppDynamics and New Relic were the other two.

We were never able to get AppDynamics working in our PoC. We couldn't get it working on our web servers. New Relic didn't meet some of our shortlist criterion.

Regarding the nature of digital complexity, I think the role of AI is becoming more critical when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. It's because of the complexity and the number of elements that are out there, and being able to completely understand what the problem is. There was a good quote from one of the last keynote presentations here at the Perform 2018 conference: "Let's not chase $500 issues. Using AI allows us to go for those bigger issues," and look for more value, rather than worrying about all the little things that happen. AI would give us the ability to handle that low-level work, very quickly - the auto remediation - get that back up and going. It would buy us time to do higher-level work.

We've used a lot tools at our company, including siloed monitoring tools. Some of the main things we're seeing with them are gaps in the ability to handle emerging technology; things like single-page applications, Angular applications, single sign-on applications, those types of things.

When looking at purchasing an APM solution, we wanted something that was a proven leader. We looked at industry review rankings. Did it support the technologies we develop our applications on? Can it give us that full-stack view into our architecture? Can it tell us what's going on with the customer experience? Those types of things.

If I had a friend looking to adopt an APM solution, I'd really have him take a look at Dynatrace. It's an industry leader. We've had a great experience with them. It meets our needs. They're future-looking. Even though we're not where they are in terms of the capabilities they have, we know we're going to need those capabilities in the future. Great product.

The main use of Dynatrace is development assistance through to live deployment, then proactive monitoring. Afterwards, monitoring of the infrastructure and live site.

Being able to track issues found in live back through environments is particularly useful. 

The obvious benefits are proactive monitoring, but there were the unexpected results we gained from it that brought additional value out of the product:

• Security analysis, i.e., being able to detect when there was malicious activity on the site. 
• DNS poisoning when incorrect traffic was hitting the site.
• Multiple hits to API calls when only one should happen.
• Helping to reduce license costs by reducing calls to specific services.
• Being able to ingest data from other sources and display them alongside, an example being in a third party system that does not allow monitoring, but does have an open API to pull monitoring stats from.

• Memory analysis: The ability to tune an application and stop memory leaks has been invaluable, especially in ATG where sizing is crucial. 
• Dynatrace allows real-time visualisation of what is happening instead of making changes, running a command to pull stats every hour or so. This enables us to make changes in an environment and instantly see the impact.
• Some systems can run low over a period of time. It allows us to predict when the server is going to struggle and proactively stop that from happening.

This is not a simple product. You cannot fire and forget. Maybe not a specific function issue that needs resolving, but certainly an area for consideration upon adoption of the product.

Training is required for all of the people who will be using it, and this should not be overlooked. I would even recommend nominating an SME in each of the three areas covered: user behaviour analysis, development, and infrastructure/operations support.

We have had some issues, mainly in the JS embedded in the page.

None.

We have used them extensively. They are very eager to help.

Reviewed other products, but never switched.

Fairly complicated, but it is an in-depth product.

In-house.

As a user, I can testify that we found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost.

Do not ignore the training!

Yes, AppDynamics, New Relic, and one other.

Being able to dig into code to figure out errors and where response time is slow.

We have setup proactive alerts to notify us when certain conditions are met, such as when we are out of memory or high threads.

I cannot think of any off hand. They are continuously making the product better.

I've been using Dynatrace Application Monitoring and Data Center RUM for three years.

(version 6.0)

I'm not aware of any issues.

No, it is very scalable.

10 out of 10 as they are great to work with.

9 out of 10, but it could be 10 out of 10. They are very prompt and technical. They will work with you to fix any issues.

No, we reviewed other vendors and thought this one was the best.

It was simple to implement.

Dynatrace came in, helped install it and then showed us how to use the product.

We serve multiple customers and everyone wants to use Dynatrace. It has paid for itself. We can now figure out issues so much quicker.

CA was one other options we considered amongst others.

• The more environments you have on it, the better off you are.
• Make sure to work with the programmers as they understand their application
• Get training on how to use Dynatrace so it can be used effectively
• They have a lot of training resources online

We use Dynatrace for a number of internal applications that we track in addition to API calls associated with the API engine. We have a partnership with Dynatrace and I'm a project manager.

We monitor critical internal applications including some public-facing applications. Internal transactions are being tracked and we get immediate feedback from the solution's monitoring which makes a big difference to us.

The value of this solution is in terms of the functionality, and every aspect of the hardware and connection-oriented signals that we get. We use most of the features on a daily basis.

Network monitoring doesn't seem to be a key focus of the company and if that were improved this could be a one-stop solution that would monitor the application. It would be quite useful in the data center environment as well.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, we have around 50 users. 

I am unaware of licensing costs. 

It's a wonderful product and I would definitely recommend it. I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

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.

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

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

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

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

I have been using Dynatrace for the last six years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The primary use case is monitoring and diagnostics for production marketing usage.

The visibility into the application's performance helps the executives and managers by using easy dashboards. Our engineers are also super happy with the ability to drill down and fine-tune based on issues which we have seen. A bunch of issues with OpenID were easily investigated, then we were able to fix them quickly.

It has been a very enabling tool for us, especially for my team. The visibility that it provides through the application's behavior allows us to find trends based on our customized metrics.

• Alerts: The alerting system is really nice.
• The ability to drill down and pinpoint issues.

The new Managed Edition is too complex. I feel like a fish out of water. From the on-premise version to the AWS version, our initial use has been very complex. 

For the integration, I use a hollow testing tube called Performance Center. I would like the ability to integrate with it. This would be a good feature. While I believe it is there, it needs to be fine-tuned.

I'm pretty impressed with the stability. 

With the AWS version, you can access the updates through the browsers, not worrying about the tick line. 

With the on-premise version, you need to use the tick line for updates. There are times when architects, who do not use the product constantly, find their stage and production options out of sync, then they need to have two tick lines on the same system.

There was an issue on-premise. We were trying to troubleshoot a production issue. We had to run a bunch of queries for different time frames to see where the issues were and how recently they had been seen. This crashed the Dynatrace server.

We are now moving slowly moving in installments of the AWS version because our environments are not large enough right now. So, we haven't tested it yet.

I have only heard positive reviews.

We went with Dynatrace because of its ease of use and it is feature-rich. It helps you to drill down into bottlenecks and find issues. When you have highly integrated systems, it gives you an extra lens through your whole ecosystem.

The Dynatrace team helped us with the integration and configuration in our AWS environment.

There have been many advantages in terms of production and issue resolutions.

The product is pricey, but it is feature-rich, which is why we probably haven't looked away from it.

We are also using New Relic. Our product teams keep explore new options to see what is out there.

I prefer Dynatrace over New Relic because there are better features.

I would recommend Dynatrace Managed because it has more features, and go straight for the AWS version because it is simpler to manage. It can also be accessed through the browser. 

We previously used the on-premise version, but have switched to the AWS version, which has more features.