Dynatrace Reviews

I am a Dynatrace consultant, and I work with a partner in South Africa.

Once you have it running, Dynatrace will show you a picture of your environment that nobody else would have, except perhaps for the architect. IT environments are inherently complex, and this will help figure out what you've got in the environment.  

The most valuable feature is the AI. In the older version, it would highlight errors but you still had to figure out the root cause. With the latest version, the AI engine highlights the root causes automatically. 

It would be nice if there were a way that it could be made simpler, given the complexity of the things that we're monitoring. It can get a bit overwhelming. The AI has helped in this regard.

This solution has been very stable.

I am in a small shop so I do not have direct experience with scalability, but I do know that it is one of their design goals. In our company, we have a couple of guys working on huge sites and scaling farms, so my impression is that the scalability is good, or even excellent.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The agent installs and configures everything automatically. In the older one, you had to manually configure everything. Now, you install the agent and you may have to restart some processes, but then it just starts giving data.

In this solution, they try to take a whole lot of complexity and make it look simple. It is not an easy thing to do.

There is a release every month of new features. They are pretty good at implementing things when you log a feature request or enhancement. The vendor is running DevOps and has a high frequency of releases, so you don't normally have to wait for the next major release, provided that there is enough requirement for it.

Quite a lot of the new design in the new version has been influenced by the new privacy rules in Europe. They've had to restrict a lot of what can be seen, in terms of the user's personal data, which can be seen as a good thing. Generally speaking, they've gone from a very open design where you can see all of the database queries and the data, to a more closed system. You can still find that stuff, but you have to turn on a lot of things and implement them. They are not there by default.

I find this a source of frustration because some of the time, the problems are because of the data. For example, someone put in their name wrong or put in an apostrophe. Without seeing the data, you don't know and can't figure out what is wrong. You have to figure it out by looking at it. This is a GDPR thing, however, and it is necessary for compliance. Companies have to decide while consulting with their customers, how much people are allowed to see. Then it can be configured.

My advice for someone who is implementing this solution is to take some time to plan out your operational environment in advance. Try to maintain consistency in naming, because I think that you can get additional value through this planning. You can roll out ad-hoc and it will be fine, but if you take some time to name things then you can get a better picture of your environment.

This is a very good solution, but nothing is perfect.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

We use this solution for monitoring a monolithic application in ASP Classic 3.0 over IIS server. The database is SQL Server 2016 in an AlwaysOn cluster. Over three IIS instances for the core application, two IIS instances for reporting services, and two instances for the batch process in .NET 4.0.

The major improvement was the ability to find errors immediately and predict future failures, or when resources reach the maximum capacity.

The most valuable feature is Session Record because the developers can reproduce an incomplete issue after it is reported.

This solution needs better support for security and monolithic batch processes.

We use this solution for APM and synthetic monitoring, as well as real user monitoring and other basic host monitoring. We have problems sent to PagerDuty via webhook in Dynatrace. This also goes to our on-call center.

Debugging the worst transactions and other slow stuff is also done with this solution.

This has very much improved our organization. We now have a great solution for doing Application Performance Monitoring and doing synthetic checks.

The most valuable feature is the ability to perform synthetic checks for monitoring sites using click paths. Also, real user monitoring and basic host monitoring are really useful features.

Problem analysis is also great.

The user interface needs improvement. Sometimes it is not really clear how you can get to the right place, where you can find all of the information you need. It is sometimes really difficult to understand. If the user interface were made more intuitive then it would really benefit the product.

In Dynatrace, I really do not see any bugs.

Previously we used SolarWinds but it was really buggy.

Installation of OneAgent is really easy. We have installed this solution in a short time on nearly one hundred hosts.

We use this solution for APM Monitoring on .NET, Java, and NodeJS, as well as Infrastructure Monitoring for Linux and Windows Based Systems, Kubernetes and Docker on-premise as well as in AWS.

We perform automated monitoring using the Dynatrace API within our CI/CD jobs, and further, synthetic monitoring and HTTP Checks from different locations.

Dynatrace helped us to get a better understanding of how our services are communicating with each other, as well as better problem detection before something really breaks. We have been able to consolidate different tools, like standard host monitoring and synthetic checks.

The OneAgent with Network Flow detection is really amazing. It is simple to install, where you run just one command and you are finished. It automatically detects which applications are running, and injects the tracing automatically without any adjustment in our deployment.

The configuration options should be better accessible. Sometimes it is hard to find the right setting for what you want to change. In K8s deployments, the configuration of the Active Gateway sometimes changes, and when it's automatically updated the monitoring breaks and you don't know why.

This solution is used to create dashboards for business-related applications.

This solution has helped us with improving the monitoring and RCA.

The most valuable feature is the 360-degree view for monitoring, infrastructure, and application worlds.

This solution needs improvement in terms of automation.

We use this solution for application monitoring across regions. It can give a quick overview of the current health status, end to end, and can quickly point to the root cause if there an issue or problem in one of our applications. It helps our managers to keep track of everything on the dashboard.

Dynatrace is not only used by the IT Operations department but also by sales and customer service. It provides an overview of the service that we offer to the customers. The main benefit is that it helps the development team deploy more quickly and with better quality. 

The features that we found most valuable are the monitoring, alerting, and Davis the AI. With this combination of features, the Operations department and developers can sit back and relax. They can concentrate on how to improve the service for the customer and work towards a better overall experience.

We would like the AI to produce more scientific data with less configuration. That will help us, as the customers will focus on integrating all of the IT, without hassle.

We need more options for sharing and exporting reports to other systems and platforms.

This solution is used for:

• Integrating the diagnostics for all of my team members with the same point of view through Dynatrace link.
• System integration for automatic remediation; to launch Ansible Tower jobs in response to problems or events.
• User experience tracking based on session behavior.

We have a DevOps team distributed between several offices and we need to keep track of every microservice evolution. Dynatrace helps us to do that, keeping the same dashboards and same links for problems in our production environment, or profiling at staging. 

I think one of the most valuable features is the Dynatrace API, for both metrics and configuration. With that API, we were able to launch automatic tasks or jobs in response to a specific condition. We also have the option to open a JIRA ticket to keep track of a particular issue. 

I think Dynatrace needs improvements with respect to reporting; not just performance, but the business-level reports. The navigation can be improved because when you press the back key, sometimes you lose the time frame. Also, when you are in a problem description and want to leave, it is hard to do.

We use this solution for end-user experience, infrastructure monitoring, analysis of bounce rates, service calls to the database, root cause analysis, and problem management. For end-user analysis, I can monitor where the connections come from, the time, the number of navigated pages, bounce rates, and finally, if the usage was satisfactory or not.

This solution has improved our organization in several ways, including the speed of detecting problems, predictive maintenance, root cause analysis, and alert generation. We are also better able to understand trends with respect to user behavior like time zone connections, and the times when there is less usage of the system by users.

Our organization is too IT oriented. I think with Dynatrace, it has helped to bring value to the business because now we can speak using the same language.

The most valuable features for me are end-user analysis and problem detection. I am responsible for adoption, availability, and performance. In the case of adoption, the number of new users coming to the system is a good metric for management. For problem management, problem detection is a good feature to save time.

I have reported a bug where a CI was not reflected in the dashboard, yet it was detected in the problem management.

On the side of the end user experience, I would suggest adding a new service for analyzing the backtrace of users.

Also, I would like to see an option to export the dashboard to create better reports and avoid copy/paste.

In terms of stability, it is ok and we have had no issues reported so far.

We cannot properly address scalability yet.

Prior to this solution, we used Gomez. It was part of the original solution that was installed. We had many problems with synthetic monitoring because it was down most of the time.

The tools were installed before I joined the company.

There are long term benefits in using the monitoring tool. There is also strategic value added, as is the case of transforming the internal language of the technical teams.