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reviewer1610259 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jul 1, 2021
Easy to manage with nice dashboard but has a steep learning curve
Pros and Cons
  • "Technical support has always been quick to respond."
  • "Due to the fact that you doing a lot, you have a problem with the learning curve. We're really looking for ways to make this product more accessible."

What is our primary use case?

The solution is primarily used for user happiness monitoring. Basically, we look at how well we'll use it to run some arbitrary metrics over the website's behavior. I'm trying to understand how the user experience is going. Therefore, we're doing user experience monitoring. We're also using it for monitoring and listening, where we fire off specific test cases against that site with it. 

Typically, it does quite a lot. We can also do health monitoring of the actual service hosts, and servers, and dependencies.

Dynatrace provides us with the ability to actually map out the whole ecosystem and our websites and services that exist within it. You have that whole picture even though it's now a distributed network of products and things. We use Dynatrace to just monitor the health of that ecosystem and manage, and identify where the dependencies are. In doing that, we can also look at hotspot monitoring, so that we can determine bottlenecks within our system. We can use it to follow metrics to help us figure out how fast things should occur, to identify slowdowns of speed - or potential slowdowns - which can cause us to have those little mysterious bugs where suddenly the user experience drops out because something three or four levels down is not behaving itself.

Basically, it's a lot of use cases based on the user experience. There's lots of user monitoring. Lots of looking at where they're entering the sites from, where they're exiting the sites from. The behaviors can sometimes help us detect failures in our overall user experience. It's a lot of user experience management that's assisted via AI. We can use AI to develop, identify, establish, buy, and build trends so that we can look forward to purchasing requirements. Ideally, the AI will make it that we can identify where the system is going to fail in the future. We're still working on that side of things, but we're getting there.

What is most valuable?

The ability to play back individual user sessions is very helpful. I can look at what people actually do when they interact with our product when I use that website.

The solution has a lot of use cases based around the user experience that helps us make a better product.

The AI is great. In the future, we hope it will help us predict problems before they arise.

They provide a lot of quite useful training equipment for training materials for it. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The solution is very easy to manage.

You can set access fairly easily so users can see only parts that are relevant to their roles.

The solution is quite stable.

The product scales well.

Technical support has always been quick to respond. 

It does do nice dashboards.

What needs improvement?

Due to the fact that you doing a lot, you have a problem with the learning curve. We're really looking for ways to make this product more accessible. That comes back to training and also having the information within the system presented well. Right now, quite a lot of time is spent learning the idioms of the system.

That said, they work very hard on taking the edge off it. However, the reality is that it will take time to learn. It does take time to come up to speed with this product. Most of the problems I've had are just a lack of familiarity with the product so far.

I haven't pushed it far enough to discover that my answers are not met by the product fully. I still need time to explore it before giving it a full review. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've personally been using the solution for about seven months or so. It's been less than a year so far.

Buyer's Guide
Dynatrace
January 2026
Learn what your peers think about Dynatrace. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of the product is very good. It's rock-solid. there are no bugs or glitches. We haven't had any issues at all. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution can scale quite well.

Basically, the way it works is you put in it, you put an agent into each of the deployments you're using it to monitor, and then it just gathers data. It doesn't really impact the operations of things. The majority of its work is actually done by the parent in the cloud.

We have one or two administrators and various people in the company have various levels of access. We have quite a fine-grained control over what people can see, however, at the same time, we can provide some useful information to them to know what they need so that they can know what they actually do need to know to do their jobs.

How are customer service and support?

We haven't been in touch with technical support lately. However, when we have contacted them in the past, they have been helpful and responsive. We're quite pleased with their capabilities so far. 

How was the initial setup?

I wasn't actually involved in the deployment itself. It was a case of just coming in and seeing it was available for various use cases.

However, looking back, it's a relatively straightforward process. It's often as simple as installing an agent with your deployment, and it takes off from there. My understanding is the deployment was very seamless and quite quick.

There's definitely a maintenance contract with it. It's a case where you subscribe to it, and they provide regular updates. You've actually subscribed to a service and there's regular maintenance happening organically.

What about the implementation team?

We got a lot of support from the vendor. There was a lot of ongoing support from the vendor at that time.

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

The solution is a SaaS. If we were to stop paying the subscription entirely, the service would end shortly afterward, based on the contractual arrangements we have with them. Assuming we were not to renew our contract, the facility would just go away.

I was not a party to the actual license negotiations or costings. I can't fully answer to the exact cost, to any degree of certainty, other than to say it's not a free product. It's a business. I believe that we have been getting value for money. We do have to watch how we use it. We have to watch that the costs are not substantial. We do restrict where it's actually deployed and how it's deployed. That's part of our management strategy and that's kind of informed by a budget. That said, I'm not aware of the actual budget numbers.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

App Dynamics is a product in a similar space. 

It compares well to other instrumentation tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.

What other advice do I have?

We're a customer.

We tend to use the most up-to-date or stable version of the solution. 

I would recommend Dynatrace as an application performance management tool. It does its job quite well. I am able to see a wide range of the application I'm looking at, and what other applications it is interacting with. We do get quite a lot of information, which allows us to better understand what's going on. I would recommend exploring an IPM tool. I haven't used one of the IPM tools yet. 

I'd be interested to see how it handles a security event or security incident and event management. That is a bit of a gap for me at the moment. I'd love to know if it does that. There are other tools available, however, it is kind of nice to be able to sort of stop in one spot.  

I need to learn more about the tool. I was kind of running up against my limitations with the tool, rather than the limitations of the tool itself.

I'd rate it seven out of ten, simply due to the fact that I still need to explore it more. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1589394 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Solution Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
May 31, 2021
Best support, reports anything that goes outside of a baseline figure, and tells you that something is going to break before it actually breaks
Pros and Cons
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Dynatrace for the last six years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

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

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Integrator
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Dynatrace
January 2026
Learn what your peers think about Dynatrace. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
880,745 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Olive Kusumbara - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
MSP
Top 5
Apr 21, 2021
OneAgent monitoring, easy to set up, and you get an immediate response to web chat support
Pros and Cons
  • "I like the full-stack agents, the Oneagents, and the futures dynamic."
  • "I would like to see income monitoring for the servers and infrastructure monitoring."

What is our primary use case?

We use this solution for our customers. Our customers are enterprise companies. We have several customers who are in automotive, finance and telecommunications which is the biggest one.

What is most valuable?

I like the full-stack agents, the OneAgent, and the futures dynamic.

It is using a Kubernetes container-base.

It is quite easy for our consultants to set up, even with it taking two or three days for an on-premises installation.

What needs improvement?

Moving from a traditional filo functional APM to an integrated One stack agent is an area that needs improvement. They have simplified the installation process, the integrated monitoring, and the correlations.

The downside is that it is very expensive in terms of the price range.

I would like to see income monitoring for the servers and infrastructure monitoring.

The full-stack agent only covers the infrastructure monitoring, but the fields do not cover network monitoring. Once they have network monitoring, with full-stack capabilities, it will be complete.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working closely with this solution for approximately a year.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is good. They provide a webchat that responds almost immediately.

In terms of ticketing, with a formal inquiry, they do not have any severities for immediate support, even though it is promised by them to respond within four hours.

With their web chat support, you can ask several questions or inquiries and get information immediately.

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

We are also working with IBM.

We have several products. We used to have CA APM, we also work with SolarWind APM, eG Innovations APM, and System Center (SCOMs) APM.

That is the product range that we used to work intensively. 

We prefer Dynatrace.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is quite easy. 

We have had several deployments that have been fast and on-premises. After the setup, it can almost be immediately used. 

The on-premises version can take up to three days.

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

It's an Open-Source platform.

The price range is quite high. It's the highest compared to the other top APM products that are available. 

They only deliver on a subscription model.

What other advice do I have?

Dynatrace is a good product. Some of the things to be considered in Dynatrace are compatibility, support in terms of new technologies, and there are many features that are good in Dynatrace.

They have a good AI correlation but it still requires humans to interpret the data and follow up with the advice of the root cause analysis.

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. partner
PeerSpot user
CEO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Reseller
Top 20Leaderboard
Mar 2, 2021
An easy-to-install solution with weak integration capabilities
Pros and Cons
  • "If you look in the APM sector, it is a very nice package to install."
  • "The flexibility when it comes to integrating with other tools is very low."

What is our primary use case?

Our network and security managers used this solution. They had many problems with it because of the injection. 

What is most valuable?

If you look in the APM sector, it is a very nice package to install. It's very easy to install. It's also locked up. You can not do a lot of things yourself.

What needs improvement?

We were planning to use it to assess things from Jira, but after we installed Dynatrace, Jira was not working anymore because of the injections that were put in Jira — we could not integrate with Jira.

The flexibility when it comes to integrating with other tools is very low.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have not used it for a long time. We had problems with it so we used it for about six months and then we decided to throw it out the door.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's both scalable and stable. We've never had an issue.

How are customer service and technical support?

There is room for improvement, support-wise. We have a lot of experience in many different areas — I worked for years in the IT industry. I missed in-depth knowledge of audit tools. They know Dynatrace very well, but when it comes to solving problems, for example, in PeopleSoft, they don't know anything about PeopleSoft — that's what's causing the problem in my opinion. You need to know the tools to able to resolve the problems.

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

Yes, we had IBM Tivoli in place. We still use Tivoli — they were running at the same time. We wanted to compare the results from both tools.

APM is nice for application performance, but there are a lot more problems you need to resolve. You need a helicopter overview of the total environment. That's what we were missing from Dynatrace.

We stayed with the IBM solution (Netcool) but combined it with Riverbed. Netcool is a new tool that can do everything.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was very straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented it ourselves.

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

The pricing is a concern because the price of Dynatrace depends on how much memory is in a system. Our customers have systems with over 300 84 gigabytes of memory. In addition, you have to pay the head price, too.

What other advice do I have?

If you're not working within real big enterprise environments, then it's a nice tool to implement; however, if you have a huge assignment enterprise, then I think Dynatrace is not suitable and would be expensive.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of six.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Data Engineer Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Feb 11, 2021
Very easy deployment with good dashboards and helpful technical support
Pros and Cons
  • "The deployment itself is very easy and straightforward."
  • "The pricing of the product could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

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

What is most valuable?

The dashboard is the most useful aspect of the solution. 

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

The solution's interface is good.

We haven't had any issues with support.

The solution offers capable configuration options. 

The solution offers integration with other solutions.

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

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

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

How are customer service and technical support?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

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

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

What about the implementation team?

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

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

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Our clients also evaluated AppDynamics from Cisco.

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

What other advice do I have?

We are partners and implementors.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

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

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
PeerSpot user
reviewer1497948 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Director, Application Performance Management Solution Design & Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Feb 11, 2021
OneAgent platform that is scalable, stable, easy to install, and has good support
Pros and Cons
  • "We like the on-premises platform and the horizontal scalability."
  • "They could also, develop an observability platform where you could have the ability to inject events, locks, and traces."

What is our primary use case?

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

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Dynatrace for six months.

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

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

How are customer service and technical support?

We are satisfied with the technical support.

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

We were using AppDynamics and CA APM in the past.

How was the initial setup?

It was a straightforward installation.

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

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

What about the implementation team?

We completed the installation ourselves.

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

Financially, Dynatrace was a lot more expensive than AppDynamics.

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

Dynatrace should reduce their pricing. It should be cheaper.

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

What other advice do I have?

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

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

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1367220 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Product Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jun 21, 2020
Our performance test teams are more aware of how product features are performing. This helps to prioritize our testing.
Pros and Cons
  • "The user experience allows us to be able to gauge customer experience and understand the performance impact of our platform."
  • "The real-user monitoring is mostly used to gauge the difference in performance for multitenant applications, This is so we can discern if there are any local network or client-facing issues when we do a comparison between each customer. It is quite important for us to be able to identify a client-side issue, as opposed to a feature managed problem, because we're essentially providing managed services of business applications."
  • "Dashboarding and having different templates available for more business reporting, or even other metrics, would be useful."

What is our primary use case?

We are using the solution in the operations space.

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

For how long have I used the solution?

Three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has very high availability.

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

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

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

How are customer service and technical support?

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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

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

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

What was our ROI?

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

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

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

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

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

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

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

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

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Front-end Architect at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jun 16, 2020
We utilize User Sessions Query Language in combination with Session Replay to gauge the impact of a problem
Pros and Cons
  • "The User Sessions Query language has definitely been the most helpful with its key user actions and user session properties. Using those together, that has completely transformed how we're able to identify customers and their problems on our site. It has made a very big impact over the year."
  • "We ran into a problem where the Dynatrace JavaScript agent is returning errors, and it's very apparent that there's a problem. However, the customer support will ask us for seemingly unnecessary details instead of looking at our dashboard through their account to see what the problem is. They ask us for a lot of details not really related to solving the problem. As a result, we still have a few issues that were never resolved. They're not major issues, but they're kind of frustrating."

What is our primary use case?

We have several uses for Dynatrace. Most of the time, we use Dynatrace for looking into potential site problems, investigating reported issues, and trying to replicate those problems in a test environment using the information provided by Dynatrace. 

We use Dynatrace for performance monitoring. Quarterly, we will specifically see if there's anything that we can optimize on the front-end of our website, so that's what you see and interact with on the web page. 

We also use it to get ahead of any potential problems in our stack. E.g., if Dynatrace is indicating a problem, we will look into it and determine if it's affecting users. Depending on its impact, and usually if it's impacting customers, we can use that information to decide on what we need to work on next to benefit the customer experience.

I use the tool as more of an analyst. I will use Dynatrace to show where systems need to be fixed, etc.

This solution is SaaS. We use Google Cloud Platform, where we just use their compute engines as far as our hosts. We also have a few services that are on-prem. Dynatrace works fine with both of them. 

How has it helped my organization?

The solution helps our DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. We recently got a staging environment implemented with Dynatrace. We are mainly using it for load testing at the moment. Dynatrace has been detecting failures, letting us know immediately what types of failures are occurring so we can catch them before releases. Our developers have been able to identify bottlenecks and other types of problems that they would not have been able to before by just using standard logging and analytics tools.

The solution give us 360-degree visibility of the user experience across channels, which is a great benefit. We're in eCommerce as a retailer. We are selling across multiple channels and platforms. We have a mobile app and a website. We even have other services which we may instrument with Dynatrace in the future. As far as our website and mobile app that we have instrumented with Dynatrace, it has all been very positive. 

The solution has decreased our time to market with new innovations/capabilities because we have been able to quickly identify areas that we can improve for new features and gather that data from Dynatrace. Then, we have been able to verify that our new features and releases are working as expected.

What is most valuable?

The User Sessions Query language has definitely been the most helpful with its key user actions and user session properties. Using those together, that has completely transformed how we're able to identify customers and their problems on our site. It has made a very big impact over the year.

Using synthetic monitors, we monitor our websites. We have two main domains. There are several plain HTTP monitors, then there are actual browser based monitors that emulate browser behavior. We use both of those types. We have several mobile browsers emulated under synthetic monitors that we use. Those ping our website every 15 minutes. On some of these synthetic monitors, we use multiple data centers to get an idea of geographic availability. We also monitor some of our third-party providers using our synthetic monitors. We monitor our customer support live chat server, which is hosted by a third-party, where we are given alerts if that system were to go down. We are also monitoring an email capture API that's a part of our website.

With user session queries, the main thing that we use that for (and the most valuable), is when we get a problem. If we get some type of a report, obscure problem, or Dynatrace reports a problem, we go straight to using the User Sessions Query Language to find sessions with Session Replay, then we replay those sessions to figure out exactly what the customer did and what conditions may have caused the problem to gauge the impact of the problem itself.

We also save user sessions queries into dashboards, then create different dashboards based on different projects to try and gather data. E.g., last year, we redid a part of our website and used Dynatrace sessions queries and Session Replays to verify that our customers were not having any problems or being confused by their experience. We wanted to verify that, which is one way that we've used the User Sessions Query Language along with the dashboards. We've also created some other dashboards that return custom metrics for us, which goes along, in some cases, with user session properties and user action properties. In that way, we're able to get a very granular look at certain statistics where it would be more difficult to get those numbers from our traditional analytics suite. 

What needs improvement?

The solution’s ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is a bit off. I have found that even though Dynatrace detects a problem and gives you a count and estimate of impacted users, this number is usually much higher than is actually the case and not fully accurate. E.g., I recently noticed an error. Every time someone would experience this error, Dynatrace would create a new problem and it would say, "Several hundred people were impacted." However, using Dynatrace's own tools (user Session Replay), then going back and actually tracing through these requests, we found much fewer people were actually impacted. In some sessions that Dynatrace said were impacted, when you view the Session Replay videos, you could see that the customer was not impacted in any meaningful way.

The solution’s ability to visualize, understand our infrastructure, and to do triage is helpful. I wish that you could do user session queries with those host level metrics and be able to create custom graphs the same way you could with user session data. They're both part of Dynatrace, but they don't feel like they're integrated together well. E.g., we're having an issue that has to do with just HTTP codes and we would like to marry that up with a user session query turning that into a dashboard. We can't currently do that because the User Sessions Query Language does not have access to the HTTP errors or HTTP status code data that is part of the hosts and infrastructure package. Otherwise, if you're just focusing on the infrastructure part it, I think it does a good job.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Dynatrace since February 2019.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have noticed a few times where data collection did get interrupted. It was two or three times within the past year. Obviously, it's our monitoring system and we don't want that to go down at all. However, three times for no more than 30 minutes each time is pretty good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability has been able to meet all of our needs. We have not encountered any limitations when scaling Dynatrace with the Google Cloud Platform.

In the past 365 days, we have two websites that we monitor with Dynatrace, including mobile apps. We've recorded over 23 million sessions for Rack Room Shoes and 8.1 million sessions for Off Broadway Shoes. 

There are three users who are active users of Dynatrace:

  1. The user experience architect, who is designing new interactive features and studying customer behavior
  2. The product owner, whose focus when using Dynatrace is on the metrics, dashboards, and the user experience as far as using user sessions, queries and Session Replay. They may troubleshoot or look into problems as well.
  3. The back-end architect, who looks into certain problems and figures out with Dynatrace where they're coming from. They use information from Dynatrace for writing more detailed support tickets.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have noticed a few problems with the service before. I reached out to support and the system did appear to resolve itself on its own (after there was a problem). Then, the support staff couldn't see any further issues. The solution’s self-healing functionality works.

We ran into a problem where the Dynatrace JavaScript agent is returning errors, and it's very apparent that there's a problem. However, the customer support will ask us for seemingly unnecessary details instead of looking at our dashboard through their account to see what the problem is. They ask us for a lot of details not really related to solving the problem. As a result, we still have a few issues that were never resolved. They're not major issues, but they're frustrating.

The technical support is below average. They've solved some of the problems that we had, but it took several weeks to resolve almost each problem we had when they probably should have been fixed within a day or two.

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

There was an initial implementation of AppMon (another Dynatrace offering) before the current Dynatrace SaaS offering.

Dynatrace has definitely made an impact. We were never able to get granular data with any of our other solutions. They were all very disconnected and separate, whereas Dynatrace seems to have good integrations with our entire stack. There haven't been any problems getting additional data now that we have Dynatrace,

How was the initial setup?

It is very easy to use and set up. It did take some customization to get it working for our sites, but after that, it's been pretty easy and straightforward.

The initial setup is complicated, but it's much less complicated than similar systems that I have used in the past. For Dynatrace's setup, maybe there were problems with how our web application was initially developed before I joined Rack Room, because there were a lot of features related to error reporting. It would report errors for things that weren't actual problems, etc. You have to configure it to get around those types of problems, but it's usually fine afterwards.

Over the past year, we've been tweaking Dynatrace. It's been a slow phase-in rollout as far as how much we rely on the data it's giving us back. 

What about the implementation team?

I was involved in the initial implementation.

What was our ROI?

The solution has decreased our mean time to identification by about three days.

The solution decreased our mean time to repair by around a week.

There has been a huge increase in uptime. It's hard to say by how much for certain because we've made other development practice changes.

What other advice do I have?

It is a great platform. We found a lot of value in setting up user session properties and user action properties, then being able to use them to identify individual problems/customers. We use that to sort of streamline the whole process of finding and fixing problems.

Biggest lesson learnt: Customers do not always behave as expected.

I would rate Dynatrace as an eight (out of 10).

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Google
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Buyer's Guide
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Updated: January 2026
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Download our free Dynatrace Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.