Dynatrace Reviews

The one that we recently scripted was just to see if an application was up, it was a very simple script. We had an issue with a vended solution at the university in which the application would just go down and the vendor had said that, "Oh, it never goes down, we have 100% uptime." We didn't have a good way to monitor that before. We said, "Our students our reporting that they cannot log in." With Synthetics, we wrote a very simple script that went to the landing page and tried to type and hit "enter," and that's it.

We have two-factor and some other things that prevent us from going too far into it, and we haven't figured out a technical solution for it, but it's a very simple use case of just making sure that the application is up.

Dynatrace itself is performing well.

We now know when the application is down, as opposed to students opening tickets and letting us know. So it's more proactive.

That it's always running.

From what I've learned today, here at the Perform 2018 conference, there are two things that I really want to see.

Number one, the thing that is preventing MSU from moving forward with Dynatrace right now is that we can't tag our customer traffic with a customizable tag. All of our students have a unique identifier and in AppMon we tag that and we can search by it very easily and it's very useful. But in Dynatrace, you can't yet customize and find people like that, so that's really preventing us. I heard that it's being worked on but I'm not sure when it's coming out.

The second thing that I'd really love to see is - I'm very impressed by all the new features that I've learned about at the conference - and one of the features is "impacted users." I would like to see a rate of impacted users. For example, how long has the problem been going on: 100 users in five minutes. Does that mean that in 3 hours if we don't get this solved, we're impacting x number of people? Understanding the rate at which the problem is impacting people would be a cool feature.

It seems very stable.

With the AI, it seems very scalable. 

We're going through a proof of concept right now, so we work very closely. They're knowledgeable and we get the right person whenever we call.

We didn't have a previous APM solution. We didn't know we needed this solution until we saw it. It was literally students calling in with problem tickets.

I'm just a supervisor, so I sat with our technician during setup. I didn't do any of the actual work, but it seems seamless. It installed in about two minutes. I really wanted to see it. I have to go to the assistant director and, eventually, the director and try to explain why I think we need the new technology.

They went through a whole eight month process. I wasn't there, I'm a new manager, but I understand they had over a dozen companies. They had spreadsheets of all the pros and cons. They went with Dynatrace because it just has more features.

Regarding AI and the ability of IT to scale into the cloud and manage performance problems, we don't have the new technology yet, we don't have the new AI, we have the old AppMon and Synthetics. But it seems like it's very important.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. The university is very old and very segmented and different departments use different tools and we don't all talk to each other. We still have this problem today and we're trying to get more user adoption for Dynatrace. But it's difficult.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, I think that we would spend less time working on things that probably don't matter, like mundane routine operations.

To me, the most important criteria when working with a vendor is responsiveness to issues.

My advice to colleagues would be, do your homework. But, I would be surprised if anybody would beat Dynatrace.

We are using Dynatrace for application monitoring. 

In the past, we would spend more time on identifying the root cause and finding the solution. After implementing Dynatrace, we easily see that we are capturing all the exceptions. Just build on the error message, then we usually quickly fix it.

Dynatrace is performing well so far.

We have identified some critical issues, which are not available or recreatable in the Dev or QA environment. They are only happening in production, and they are easy for us to identify in the production environment. We can usually identify issues and fix them.

The data monitoring is good for us, and also the performance monitoring. We have been using both extensively for the last three to four months. We have been capturing all the information and evaluating whether it can be improved or not.

Since we have been receiving alerts from Dynatrace, we go ahead and fix them without the user knowing about them. Sometimes the users never know that they are having issues and they are stuck. So, in 10 minutes, we fix it and business runs as usual without any problem.

I am able to identify issues very quickly.

I just heard about the management zone. I also got some hands-on with the early version. I feel it is a good feature to handle integrating all the services together in one place.

So far, the stability has been good.

Not yet, we started just six months before. Right now, we are on six to seven applications been monitored. 

We started implementing microservices. Microservices means now it is hundreds of services. In the future, maybe in three to six months, we are expecting thousands of services will be implemented. In this way, the solution will definitely help us to identify the entire thousands of services that need to be monitored. So, it will gives us some alert and we build on it.

We did use technical support in the initial phase when we were struggling to get into the tool. We felt they were knowledgeable.

They do have a salesperson we can contact in India.

Our switch to Dynatrace was very internal. We got a different management team, and the new management team came in and decided that we needed Dynatrace now. They had experience with it already. They knew that where we were facing issues on monitoring side.

There were some other monitoring tools, like SolarWinds. However, the new management team felt that Dynatrace would be the perfect for us.

We were and still are using SolarWinds as a monitoring application.

I was not involved in the initial setup or upgrades.

I would recommend doing a PoC.

Before adopting Dynatrace, we were evaluating multiple systems, such as AppDynamics and SolarWinds.

I am not much into the area of AI, but I still see it removing some of the non-value added work which we are doing daily, such as sitting and monitoring the server, which is not a value addition. AI is an area where we get somebody to watch it, we get alerts, then we act on them instead of just going through all the locks. Especially IoT side, even though I am on the development side, still we concentrate on AI and IoT, where we see more focus and we just started learning all those things, and implementing them in our company.

If I had a solution which would give me a real answer, not just a data, the immediate benefit would be a global application and support, because we are working in Asia. Sometimes we get incidences during the US morning when we are not at the office. If I can get the benefit of a solution, which can alert us and solve itself. It is an automation thing where we do not want to wake up late at night and work on the application.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: A vendor should be reachable at any time.

The primary use case is we have customer-impacting production issues, so we have to get in there and quickly find out the root cause. It used to take days because we did not have an APM tool. With Dynatrace, we are now able to identify the root cause in 15 minutes. It has helped the entire operations of our company. It is working really well.

PurePath is the best. I have never seen it before and the way it is helping is really cool. It is eliminating lots of hops we go through to find the cause and reach out to the person. Now, we know exactly which line, which method, and which program needs fixing, so we directly go to the right developer and the guy comes in fixes it. Then, in the next week at least, it is done. 

I am looking forward to new Dynatrace features coming out. However, I am still hoping for more.

It is 99.9% stable. For the 0.1%, there were too many users who were using the client. This was the problem. So, we had to move to the business rich client, then the issue was gone. 

We scaled from 300 agents to 800 agents in six months. There were no issues at the server level, which is pretty good.

We have used the problem management, which is available on the management support community site. We have used that. 

Dynatrace is my first APM tool. We were previously using CA Wiley. With Wiley, we did not have the ability to get inside the process. We were outside. Now, with the Dynatrace, we are getting inside the PurePath, which is a great help. 

I helped my administration to do the initial setup. It was very easy.

If you are looking to implement it, go straight ahead. Don't even think about it, just use it. 

When it comes to IT's ability to scale to in a cloud and manage performance problems, now that we are activating more agents of Dynatrace, AI is going to be tremendously helpful to us. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be the ability to add up more applications into the performance support, then help more applications with the fewer number of resources in our app.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. The sales rep with their technical team coming to see us and giving us a demo is the key. We need to understand exactly what level of depth they have.
2. We need security in place.

Our primary use case is to combine and transform a lot of metrics from our production environment and utilize Dynatrace to turn that data into knowledge which we can act on to prevent outages, increase application performance, and improve end user experience. This tool enables us to make intelligent, fact-based decisions faster.

With Dynatrace, we have identified and solved "mystery" issues that we have experienced for a long time, including sporadic latency issues on storage volumes and SQL databases not scaling properly when under certain loads. 

We are also monitoring web services and using synthetic web checks to actively monitor specific parts of our production website and production web applications. With the SaaS version of Dynatrace, we started monitoring our VMware hypervisors and that gave us valuable system specific metrics into our virtual environments. Therefore, we have built smart alerts to notify our team of potential problems before they manifest themselves to end users.

I really like how easy it is to deploy and use the SaaS version in our environment. We have a lot of other tools that have plenty of capability but they do not get a whole lot of use because they require a dedicated resource who is an expert to use them. With the SaaS version of Dynatrace, all the admin functions are taken care of by the Dynatrace team (updates, patches, new features, bugs, etc.), and our small shop can focus on getting valuable metrics, alerts, and issue resolution from the product. That is very important because despite how many features and how powerful a product is, it will only return value to an organization if it is being integrated and used regularly for its intended purpose; Dynatrace SaaS makes that easy for us.

As far as more technical features go, we are a small shop and wear many hats in the IT department, so the automatic baselining and AI engine take a big chunk of work off our hands. It collects, analyzes, and summarizes the application and host level metrics (including host log files and hypervisor host details) from VMware virtual environments as well as physical stand-alone servers, then presents that data to us in an easy enough format to help us make better decisions and tune accordingly before our end users inform us of problems. 

In addition, we use the synthetic web checks to emulate the end user experience and availability of our public website and internal web applications, which is a wonderful feature to have access to. 

If I had to pick something to improve, it would be the fact that it requires manual intervention to uninstall the cloud agent from servers you want it removed from. The installation part is the easiest of any Linux tool that I have ever installed, so I do not have a problem with that at all. What I have a problem with, is that in order to 100% remove the product, you will need to manually go to each machine and uninstall the cloud agent. I wish there was a feature that would allow a Dynatrace administrator to remotely uninstall/remove the cloud agent from the Dynatrace management console without having to physically logon to each server to achieve the task.

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. 

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).

With nothing more than three commands, or a simple dockable container, everything was executed in minutes. In one week, we had enough customizations to be ready for production. 

It would have taken us at least two months to hire another person from SysOps to achieve registration, supervision, alerts, and APM implemented with cheaper or free open source solutions. It was much cheaper and faster to go with Dynatrace.

We had users in a remote office complaining about the latency of the application and were able to determine the problem derived from the configuration of a router with the help of Dynatrace. 

Dynatrace has designed its agents to capture limited stack traces for each transaction executed. It is a product that helps developers, testers, and operations to make sure their applications work quickly and reliably.

We also love the automatic alerts. Dynatrace alerts are based on deviations from the reference metrics which are constantly collected.

The one thing that I do not like about Dynatrace is their Web UI dashboards are very slow. They seriously have to improve their Web UI dashboard configuration and SSL timeouts.

No other provider provides record ingestion, Kubernetes/docker monitoring, and application monitoring for Node.js. Some competitors offer aspects of these, and some offer all these, but not with Node.js. 

Dynatrace was the perfect fit.

Dynatrace was an incredible find! 

We are old school, we don't have proper documentation on how our application interacts with the downstream components. We tried CA Wily, that didn't provide a solution. We had CA Wily for three years, but when we deployed AppMon it gave us the complete picture, how the application interacts with downstream components, the application flow.

Based on that, my development team is developing the application automation diagram using the app map. It's like reverse engineering I guess.

It's really helping out. The term we call the mean time to repair, that has improved a lot. Before we had a "command center" type of setup. We had all the dashboards on the screen and five to six people sitting in front of the computer. When there was an issue they used to call a "bridge" meeting and everybody would login to the bridge.

The AppMon solution helped the OCC, the operations guys, to pinpoint one problem area and to call the specific group, instead of opening the bridge for everyone and asking them to join there.

The mean time to repair and the resource utilization time, they are totally reduced deploying APM.

The Transaction Flow diagram and the class and meta level information, those are really key selling points in the automation for AppMon. Also, the meta level instrumentation and the dashboards that most of the people use in our organization. 

Most importantly the back-end components. Most of the back-end components that the application connects to; nobody knows how our application interacts with, for example, the DataPower Gateway. But AppMon really provides that information for us. So finding the gaps is the key here.

One thing I'm missing and that is the JMX from the MBeans, it's missing completely. 

Also the reporting. We have a load testing team, they completely rely on the reporting for analyzing the data. They should have a template to create a report and they should have something to auto-deliver the report into your email box. 

They also need to develop how to capture the JDBC and MBeans metrics. That is something they're lacking. Also integration for the extension to DataPower and MuleSoft Gateway.

The other feature that Dynatrace should have is - from what I see in Dynatrace in our PoC - when you auto-upgrade the agents, the JVM or the application has to be restarted. But if you have something like an "auto-attach" feature, to attach the agent for the running process, it would not require a JVM restart. That would be nicer. That is a killer point.

We haven't seen it that much but it's promising. We haven't had any downtime.

We have a small portion deployed right now, but they're planning to go enterprise-wide, we're thinking about 8,000 to 10,000 agents, so probably at that time we'll know the scalability. But the small one we have right now, it's good. It's doing well. The UI is faster, people like it.

We used tech support one time. We did in Fabric. We have internal cloud, called C3. So C3 and Fabric, we had a little bit of an issue, we called the support guys to fix it so and they were knowledgeable.

I have used HPE Diagnostics, CA Wily. I'm now doing a PoC with Dynatrace and AppDynamics.

With CA Wily, the problem was the complexity of our environment. It's not the tool, we have too many security layers. CA Wily, there's a breaking point. When we have the agents on multiple servers, it's not creating that link because of the security. But Dynatrace, I don't know how they did it, it's really awesome.

We switched because of the Transaction Flow diagram. There is a complexity in CA Wily that it is not able to integrate into our security layer, whereas AppMon can. That's the main thing that's missing. We were looking for that flow diagram. Nobody knows it. The developers call it but they really don't know what the main functionality is that's behind it: How the Apache layer connects to application server, and the application server connects to the different services, and the services to the back. Nobody knows it unless you have proper documentation. Proper documentation is very difficult to get in any organization. 

Upper management really liked the Transaction Flow diagram. No matter what, that's the key.

Comparing AppMon to Dynatrace, I like Dynatrace very much because of the ease of use. AppMon is complexity. You need to know more to use the tool. The adaptability comes when you have a nice GUI that is easy to navigate. I saw that in the Dynatrace SaaS model. 

When I'm looking at AI, the problem identification and anomaly prediction is important. It's good to know, beforehand, when the problem is going to happen. The anomaly detection is the key area, and part of the AI I think.

If we had a solution that gives you an alert that said, "This is your problem, this is how you're going to solve it," that would be really awesome. Pointing out a problem to a specific group is a key point. That would really help, instead of globally alerting everybody, alerting upper management. If before they know it, you can solve the problem that would be nice.

When looking at vendors, we have a key set of requirements. Among them are container health monitoring, flow diagram. Also extension monitoring the non-Java applications, or non-supported applications, because Dynatrace works mostly on the .NET or Java applications. There are applications out there which are non-Java based like PeopleSoft. At least we can see the interaction with those components, but it would be nice to see what's going on inside those external components. That's what I'm looking in future releases, more support for things like PeopleSoft.

I would rate Dynatrace an eight out of 10 compared to other tools. The amount of data it provides is awesome. Other tools work on a sampling methodology but Dynatrace captures all the RAM sessions that are running. It's more data, but they have the filtering options so I can pick the data I want. Capturing all the data gives me more insight into what's going on, I can compare a bad response to a fast response, that type of thing. Capturing all the data is awesome.

I've worked with HPE Diagnostics, I've worked with CA Wily, now I'm doing a PoC with Dynatrace and AppDynamics. Compared to all these products Dynatrace stood out.