Dynatrace Reviews

We use Dynatrace for application monitoring in production and we use it in Huawei testing sites for analyzing the performance.

The usability is worse than it used to be. They had a new Source Dynatrace and it didn't go as well as they had expected or hoped for in terms of usability. It would be beneficial to test some other features.

If the installation was improved, that would be helpful.

I have been using Dynatrace for three years.

We are always using the latest version.

There have been some issues with the stability of Dynatrace. It doesn't work in all cases. There are seven different applications being monitored and there was an issue with one of them.

In my experience, Dynatrace is scalable.

We have 100 users in our organization.

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

The technical support could be faster.

I have only installed the basics. I know that it is easier than it was in the past, but it hasn't been that great.

I completed the installation myself.

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

It's expensive. It could be cheaper.

I don't have all of the contract details, but I believe that it is a continuous license.

I would recommend it to large enterprise companies. It may be too expensive for smaller businesses.

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

We have quite a big application that is used by almost every single person living in this country. This application is quite mission-critical. So, it was very important to detect problems as soon as they appear anywhere in the application. Dynatrace was able to show us the problems immediately without even knowing the application, code, etc. It showed us all the problems, and we have been able to present reports and solve problems very quickly.

The agent deployment is the most valuable. You don't need to do any configuration. You just deploy the agents, and it can automatically detect your infrastructure. That was the greatest feature that we saw in Dynatrace. If there is any database, it can detect it automatically and present everything to you.

It required minimal setting, and after we deployed a couple of agents, the very next day, we had the full picture of the internals of the application, and all the problems were visible straight away to us. There was no need to go and search and do a couple of things. It was quite impressive.

When it comes to monitoring, we did the integration with VMware vCenter, and we were able to see some good stuff. The VMware vCenter integration was really great, but what we really missed was the integration with the network management stuff such as Cisco ACI. We wanted to see integration in that area, but it was not provided by Dynatrace. So, the main feature for us is integration with things like Cisco ACI. If they can bring that one in, with vCenter in there, it would be a total solution. It would be absolutely incomparable to anything else in the market.

We used Dynatrace almost six months ago. It was the latest version at that time.

It is extremely reliable.

We didn't have to contact them because it was so great. The solution was taking care of itself. For example, if there was any problem, we would shut it down, and the next day, when you try to figure it out, it would have got resolved by itself. That was quite impressive. So, we didn't have to call technical support at all.

There is absolutely no configuration that you need from any technical person. Our engineers are very junior, and they don't really know how to configure an agent or play with the configuration file. They're not familiar with that. We just deployed the agents, and these agents went and detected which is the application server, where are the logs, and what are the processes. 

We approached them and told them we want to try it. They were very cooperative. They sent us a link to download the software and the license. We did everything ourselves. They just came to do a quick onsite demo of how things work, but we had already figured out ourselves how it works. So, it was quite interesting.

We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good.

We have been a long-time user of Broadcom CA APM. In addition to Dynatrace, we tried Elastic and AppDynamic. 

Dynatrace gave us the license for around six months. We were quite impressed with it. It was very impressive, but unfortunately, due to financial reasons and the network management interface integration, the management decided to go with Cisco. We got a better deal with Cisco, and it was bundled with some of the other stuff that they were looking for, such as network monitoring, network management, etc. Our manager really wanted to see the network management interface integration, and it was available in AppDynamic, and that's why they went with it, but if it was for me, I would have gone with Dynatrace. So, we got a good deal with Cisco and went with AppDynamics. They've just bundled the whole solution and given it to us. We are standardizing on AppDynamic right now.

It is the best solution in the market. I can't believe the people classify it at the same level as the other leaders on Gartner Quadrant. It is way advanced than anything else. You can't find anything that is exactly like this.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 because it is just missing the network management interface integration. I would rate all other solutions that I've seen a six out of 10.

Overall, it's a good platform.

The solution has a very good user interface.

The product can scale.

It's fairly easy to set up and manage.

It will be great IF we could show (automatically, from the dynatrace dashboard) to the customer how much they are reducing costs, doing more business and no environment's stopped. 

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

No worries about that.

The solution can scale, however, if you have a large amount of infrastructure you will need to pay more. I find that if you start with just a small part (the critical part), you'll better understand why you need more of it and scaling will come naturally. It's not just about managing the servers and applications. It's about the user experience too.

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

We are also familiar with IBM SOLUTIONS.

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

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

What I try to say to my customer is that, okay, it's not so expensive, if you could see the return of investment you will get. However, in Brazil, we have some difficulties when it comes to showing these numbers to the customer (they don't have the actualized numbers). It might be better, in the current market to just try to sell it to IT instead of across departments. 

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

Dynatrace it has been our best APM Solution.

We are an IBM partner and are beginning to work with solutions such as Instana as well. We're also partners with Dynatrace.

In the last three years, we've started to grow our customers and have new use cases. I believe due to the movement towards digital transformation, we have more opportunities to show the benefits of a platform like Dynatrace.

We are using the private and public domain from Dynatrace, however, we have customers and major financial customers who prefer to use either private clouds or a private environment. We believe that it doesn't matter where they are. I'm happy with this model, as we could get faster results in two weeks when we are implementing Dynatrace to our customers. It's faster to implement on the cloud.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been quite happy with its capabilities overall.

We use it for infrastructure monitoring and real user monitoring on our website, i.e., monitoring how users interact with our website and digital experience. We use it to track if our website is up using synthetic monitoring, which we use for our website and mobile app. We use Dynatrace to track complete observability through our infrastructure to our digital apps. 

We are able to share information easier and improve user experience.

When a ticket is logged in Dynatrace, it automatically goes to the correct support team. There is no manual intervention, which saves time. We are saving probably $30,000 to $40,000 annually because we are not employing several people to do this work.

Dynatrace’s ability to help us visualize and understand our infrastructure, and to do triage, is very good. It provides a Smartscape view, which gives us an overall view of the topology. When a problem is raised, it draws out where the issue lies and also suggests the solution. This brings down mean time to restore very quickly, helping the resolution.

The fact that the solution is a unified platform has very much changed the way our teams work and collaborate. It brings teams together, because they are able to screen share, especially during COVID. Then, we are able to talk about the exact same thing.

The automated discovery and analysis help us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint the underlying root cause. If we are seeing error messages in our website for users who are seeing an error page, then we are able to go into the user's session, look at PurePath and the code, and see the reason why this is occurring in the back-end code.

If a user experiences an issue on their mobile, e.g., where they can't generate a ticket nor generate a benefit from our application, then it will automatically log a ticket. That will then feed into a database where the customer is contacted proactively.

Dynatrace uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery. This helps our operations because we can bake that into an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and roll it out.

The solution gives us 360-degree visibility of the user experience across channels. This is important in our environment. This helps us meet business goals because we are able to interact and serve as many teams. So, product managers and project managers are able to give metrics or data feedback to any team suitable from a developer to the C-level.

The key feature that stands out is being able to track real users within our website. We can feed this back to the developers and project teams, shaping what we develop next. This allows us to be proactive.

The AI capabilities are very good. This allows us to automate what we call AIOps. Any incident or alert raised from Dynatrace automatically goes into our ITSM tool. This saves a lot of money, probably $30,000 to $40,000 a year.

We have the Kubernetes module enabled. We can track pods, namespaces, and the performance of them. Dynatrace's functionality in this area is very impressive. It allows us to see the pure topology of our infrastructure and how the microservices interact. It also gives us a one-stop shop for checking the health of Kubernetes.

We offer Dynatrace as a service. Anyone in the business can use it. So, management is pretty easy.

We use the Dynatrace AI to assess impact. Because it links to real users, it is generally pretty correct in terms of when it raises an incident. We determine the severity by how many users it is affecting, then we use it as business justification to put a priority on that alert.

We use the solution’s real user monitoring, Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring functionalities. We use synthetic monitoring for reporting to get a definitive answer if anything is up or down. We will use sessions to check the health of our website and measure user experience. We also use it for feedback on a release and how it is affecting our end users. We use Session Replay to investigate issues that our users are experiencing.

I would like a testing module focused on quality gates.

I have been using Dynatrace for two years.

The stability is very impressive. We haven't had any downtime.

No maintenance is required because it is a SaaS solution.

Because it is an automated deployment, you can scale it up quite easily.

We have scaled the solution to AWS. We have not encountered any limitations in scaling to this cloud-native environment.

There are maybe more than 100 people working on Dynatrace: product managers, project managers, architects, developers, C-level, IT operations, service delivery managers, service managers, and testing.

The technical support is very good. They are always there and able to answer any query.

We previously used AppMon.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just install it, then automatically put it on. We did this in one big bang overnight, taking probably five hours.

We deployed it data center by data center. We grouped the application service together, then we had an offshore team sign off the health of the service before we went live. We also did a thorough testing strategy two weeks beforehand. So, we installed it on all test services and made sure there weren't any negative impacts by installing the agent.

We have seen ROI through the cost savings of manual work. Automation saves a lot of time.

As a result of the automated discovery and analysis, 60% to 70% of our manual work has been automated.

Dynatrace helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. This frees up time for developers and also provides constant feedback for continuous improvement.

The solution has decreased both our mean time to identification and mean time to repair by about 70%.

We have used Dynatrace to identify problems and trends. Identifying problems and trends has allowed us to fix underlying problems, which then leads to more uptime.

Dynatrace has decreased our time to market with new innovations/capabilities by about 50%.

It has saved us money through the consolidation of tools.

The pricing and licensing are fairly competitive.

We also briefly looked at AppDynamics. We decided on Dynatrace because of PurePaths, which provides the code that goes between applications and the service. This has provided overall observability.

You need to plan how it will be consumed within the company and assign a product owner to make sure uptake is there.

We have 100% adoption. Everyone who needs to use it, uses it.

I would rate Dynatrace as a nine out of 10. 

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.

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.

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. 

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

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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

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.

App Dynamics is a product in a similar space. 

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

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. 

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

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

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

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

I have been using Dynatrace for the last six years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am using the solution for application monitor to identify performance and other information about applications that are running.

I have found the solution has a wide range of tools able to monitor applications thoroughly, highly functional, and is very easy to use.

The solution could improve on integration, cloud services, and making the configuration less difficult.

In a future release, I would like to see better management reports on the dashboard.

I have been using the solution for approximately three years.

The company that I work for is a large organization using the solution.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is straightforward, it took approximately 12 hours.

We have a team of five that does the maintenance and deployment of the solution.

The price of the solution is expensive.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We implemented it ourselves.

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.

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.

The solution is amazing, it does well when you need to use it.

The dashboard could improve. The graphs available should have more features such as the ability to do data comparisons.

I rate Dynatrace a ten out of ten.

Analysis, PurePath comparison, database hotspots, user experience monitoring, agent overview, incident management, building charts/dashboards, business transactions, etc.

Dynatrace helped us with root cause analysis of poor performing components of our applications. 

With the Agentless monitoring and ability to create custom plugins, we've been able to transform the tool not just into a great APM solution but a really good enterprise monitoring solution too. 

The product allows us to build preferred/customized business transactions to track complex transactions. UEM (User Experience Monitoring) agents track user experience on webRequests. The advantage is that Dynatrace correlates the measures on the devices with those on the backend servers, giving us an end-to-end view of transactions, from the user's phone deep into the backend servers.

• PurePath and PureStack Technologies
• UEM
• Drill down to root cause analysis
• Deep insight into code, measures, and methods

RFAs submitted via the forum need to be answered or resolved quickly. This truly helps improve the product to the greatest degree.

Three to five years.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have been using Dynatrace for six months.

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

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

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.

We are satisfied with the technical support.

We were using AppDynamics and CA APM in the past.

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.

We completed the installation ourselves.

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.

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.

We primarily use the solution to monitor performance and point our issues in the user experience of applications - specifically mobile applications. We are able to more clearly identify problems.

We have a workflow in which we use Dynatrace with the developer and QA. We can test the application with load testing, duration testing, and then identify the applications ready for production. Sometimes, due to the findings, we have to go back to developing. Dynatrace it's really useful in that case due to the fact that we are able to avoid releasing a product that is not ready yet to go public.

The AI on the solution is excellent. The product can be used to identify situations or elaborate on some problems and find the root cause of issues and how they impact applications.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution needs better integration with networking appliances such as rotors, switches, and firewalls. It needs to work better with SNMP protocols and the like.

Dynatrace should put a little bit of effort into releasing documentation. They have a lot of new features that come out regularly. Pretty much every month there are new features. However, its information on those new features is scarce. Sometimes there's technical implementation information, however, it's really small. There needs to more information in order for the documentation to be useful. Some users are not that technical and need a little more help to understand the new features.

They should automate some settings. 

I've been using the solution for eight years at this point. It's been a while.

The stability is really good. I don't find it cumbersome and I haven't had any issues with it. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very good.

The scalability is really good. We were able to migrate to the new version almost seamlessly. We can use other functions or features of the software. It's really easy to add up and keep seeing different options and features. 

We work with some companies that are quite sizable. We work with companies that are in the food industry as well as three of the largest national banks. We also work with smaller companies as well. The solution can work for a company or pretty much any size. We alone have 30 or more clients that include companies of every size.

Technical support has been really good. Truthfully, we seldom use it. However, when we use it, it's fast. It's accurate and they are really good. They know their stuff. We're satisfied with the level of service provided to us.

We've had clients that have used other solutions in the past. Some of them used to use SolarWinds. Some of them have App Dynamics. There are others as well, including some software that isn't well known. Many use open-source tools and Dynatrace. 

The main difference and the main role of Dynatrace is the AI. No other vendors have AI integrated. Many also do not have such a simplistic installation. The automation of Dynatrace is great as well. You don't have to go to the application and modify it in a file, for example. However, Dynatrace can be a bit more expensive than other options.

We've found the initial setup to be quite straightforward. It's really easy. A company shouldn't have issues with implementing or deploying it.

Basically, we just have to assemble an environment, a QA or the development environment of a specific application. It usually takes two or three hours just to set up everything and keep it running.

We use about five to 10 users for an installation. Usually the IT Manager and the DBA security managers and also developers. We even have some product and marketing managers. They use it to identify users.

We don't need the assistance of an integrator or reseller. We can handle the implementation ourselves.

Although I see the value in the solution, the pricing can be a bit more expensive than other options.

As we're using the cloud deployment model, we're consistently on the latest version of the solution.

We are a reseller. We both use it ourselves and offer it to certain clients.

The best thing you can do is try it. You can try it for free. You can try it in an environment you know really well. That way, after a trial, you can decide if it really will work for your company or not. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give the solution a solid nine.

Used to baseline and compare performance regression tests in development and to troubleshoot performance problems experienced by customers using our application in production. We monitor both on-prem and cloud environments during testing in Agile sprints as well as applying the tool in live production environments with permission.  

It helps to improve code efficiency and has quicker performance analysis. It is possible to shift left with performance testing and analysis by implementing Dynatrace as a performance check/gateway in CI/CD pipelines with fully customizable alerts, filters and performance baselining as quality controls.

Automatic root cause analysis and automatic performance baseline features remove the manual effort and time to do so. Synthetic monitoring which enables you to monitor user experience from all parts of the globe to your application host. This has been invaluable in pointing out that slow web traffic is related to network problems in certain countries rather than actual web server performance. The ability to take memory dumps from hosts at will is also very handy for analyzing memory dumps during memory leak detection. Diagnostics tools like CPU analysis, Exception analysis, Top database transactions etc. is also very useful. The ability to split different monitored applications into unique Management Zones each with custom dashboards makes for easy tracking over complicated landscapes.

It could be more affordable and therefore, more widely used by including more features like DEM as part of licensing cost rather than an additional expense. The DEM is one fantastic tool to monitor traffic hot spots across the globe which enables one to identify user experience trends from all parts of the globe. This is very handy indeed however it comes as an additional feature with additional licensing costs. Would be really welcome if that is included out of the box.

We have been using a combined usage of Dynatrace Appmon and Dynatrace OneAgent for five years.

It's very stable.

Highly scalable.

20 years exerience in application performance testing and analysis.

No.

Easy.

In-house

Our ROI is saving time in profiling and helping customers being successful at using our product.

Make 100% certain you understand the cost and limitations of HUs versus traditional monitoring Agents.

We also evaluated Datadog and Application Insights.

Our major use case for Dynatrace is end-to-end performance monitoring and other types of monitoring for business transactions, commerce transactions, websites, and so on. We have about five to twenty users, though their usage depends on a few different factors. Some users make intense use of Dynatrace while others use it on a less frequent basis.

I use the managed version of Dynatrace, which means that it is deployed like a cloud solution but our data is stored on-premises.

Dynatrace monitoring is highly automated, enabling us to focus on more interesting things than having to maintain and configure everything all the time. 

Dynatrace is heavily automated which is a big advantage. You don't have to configure a lot, it installs and it runs straight away. There's direct return on investment and you can focus on more interesting stuff than always have to configure and change the configurations. Issues or problems in detection is also fully automated, which is great.

I think they're working on even more integration from external third-party input, but that is ongoing. So the faster it's there the better. Clock monitoring is one of these areas where improvements can be made.

Another thing is that, although the cost for Dynatrace has great return on investment, it could be cheaper. 

I have been using Dynatrace for almost two years now.

I think it's a stable solution.

Dynatrace is very scalable. With our recent experience in terms of scaling, I believe the limit goes up to 100,000 agents in total that can be deployed. 

Support is great. You can go by email and things, but also by chat. There's a chat functionality inside of the product, where you can open tickets for support problems and things like that.

Today, for me, Dynatrace is a winner over IBM ITCAM. For ITCAM, within IBM, I don't believe that they make a lot of investments anymore in that area as they're focusing on other areas. They're going with Cloud Paks now. Cloud Paks for this and Cloud Paks for that. So the Tivoli brand within IBM is in a censored mode, I would call it. It was a really good product years ago, but today it's not up to date anymore.

Setup is super easy. The SaaS version is, of course, the easiest to deploy. You don't have to do anything except install the agents. And that's quite simple, you just go to a webpage, you download and you click and it automatically connects. And it does everything for you.

If you go for the managed version, then you have to first see about hardware, by doing your homework for hardware requirements and things like that. But even then, it's quite straightforward.

You can easily implement Dynatrace by yourself. For us, it took about half a day to a day to do the whole installation and set it all up.

Because Dynatrace is so heavily automated, there is very little that you have to do to install and maintain it. With this fact, there's a lot of return on investment because we can now focus on more interesting activities rather than having to constantly change configurations.

There is a license cost, which is obviously more expensive than an open-source solution, but for the return on investment from what you get from it, it's a great investment. Of course, it could always be cheaper.

I will continue using Dynatrace and I can confidently recommend it to others.

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

We use Dynatrace for monitoring channels like mobile banking and internet banking.

It is being used in a commercial organization for monitoring two high priority services. If you are changing some PCs or doing some updates, it provides some responses. It has been very useful for us.

It is really comfortable and easy to use for application monitoring. We are able to see and go deep into the problem. We didn't have any issues with this product.

Its pricing could be better. Dynatrace has an option to monitor the end users to see what they are doing, but it required a separate license and had an additional cost. It was coming out to be expensive, because of which we didn't use the feature.

I have been using this solution for about two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We are currently using it only for four channels, but we want to add more servers. Next year, we may extend the licensing for eight more servers.

We never had a problem, and we never had to create a case with Dynatrace. The company from which we buy this product also helps us in using it in our organization. We don't have support problems. 

The initial setup was really easy. We had the first testing environment in just two days. We tested how the agents work, and it was easy.

I would recommend this solution. In Georgia, it is already very popular, and many companies are using it for applications and external channels. 

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

We use it to discover the root cause of any problem. We are using the latest version.

Its monitoring and key purpose capabilities are the most valuable. It provides the root cause of problems and helps peers join the war room.

Dashboards and monitoring capabilities can be improved for monitoring applications in Azure. In Azure, it would be cool to be able to monitor network consumption as well as flow communication.

I have been using this solution for three months.

It has excellent stability.

It has excellent scalability. We have more than 2,000 users.

Their technical support is excellent.

We also use other solutions, such as Datadog, Zabbix. Dynatrace is better than other solutions. It is a very powerful technology and has better integration.

The initial setup was very easy for us. The installation and configuration of the application and the dashboard took around 31 hours. 

We implemented it on our own. We have five people for its maintenance.

We have a three-year contract. We have 30 licenses for the full stack and 3 licenses for the DEM unit.

I would recommend this solution to others. We plan to keep using it. 

I would rate Dynatrace a ten out of ten. It is perfect.

We are in IT services. We implement and provide support to our clients.

They have a feature that allows you to monitor the user, and we are able to create a VIP customer.

Normally when you are doing application monitoring, you are only trying to look for the high priority applications. The reality is if you are a CIO or have a CEO or another C executive who is trying to use an application, even though it's not a high priority from the perspective of the overall organization, being a VIP user, whatever we are trying to do with the non-critical application also becomes a critical activity.

It needs to be more user-friendly.

They could have a better user interface, better automation, better support for cloud-based, and SaaS applications.

Nowadays, everybody is going to SaaS or the Cloud. 

Historically these products started on-premises, but now obviously they start with a data center.

Dynatrace is evolving but it has a bit of catching up to do.

We have been familiar with Dynatrace for approximately a year. One of our clients is using this solution.

Technical support is fine. We have not had any issues.

We have also worked with AppDynamics.

I think that the price is reasonable.

As IT service providers, we are always looking to explore other solutions that may be suitable for our clients, that might be better than Dynatrace.

I would rate Dynatrace a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to monitor business activity, transactions, and root cause analysis.

The metrics that it can capture and identify, based on the positions that have been defined help us speed launch time.

The single agent is the most valuable aspect of the solution. It's great due to the fact that you're not capturing the data.

The solution has great machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Once you are trained on the solution, it's easy to navigate. It's got very good documentation and training offerings.

The solution can scale.

The product is stable.

I don't believe the solution is missing any features per se.

The pricing of the solution should be improved. It's on the high-end of cost if you compare it to other options.

It's not really user friendly. You need to go through a certain type of training. 

The solution needs to offer KPIs so that we can read data and develop customized reports.

We've been using the solution for about six months at this point. 

The stability is quite good. It's pretty advanced in comparison to what else is on the market. It's quite reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution is pretty scalable. It's flexible. A company can scale fairly easily if they want to.

We have a small number of people on the solution currently. They are mostly application architects or developers. We are using it only as a POC right now in a particular business area.

The solution offers pretty good training modules, documentation, and community platforms. We're quite satisfied with the level of service provided. I'd rate them a nine out of ten so far.

We were using a different solution and the price was more reasonable. However, it was not as user-friendly and it didn't really have good features. We were looking for a product with better features and we're hoping this solution will provide that.

The initial setup isn't too straightforward. It's rather complex.

The solution is rather expensive. There are less expensive options.

We're just a customer.

Only a few of us are using the solution. We're currently evaluating the solution.

I believe we are using the latest version of the solution.

Aside from the pricing, which is quite high, I would recommend the solution.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use this solution for our customers for a wide range of tasks and for application optimization and such. It can be used in a performance test environment where developers run a new release to check they're headed in the right direction. I'm a senior analyst programmer and we are resellers of Dynatrace. 

This solution is very powerful for the end user. It's a valuable solution but because of the cost, we try to explain this to our customers that they are not only buying a monitoring tool. Dynatrace offers a really important approach because the tool is able to monitor a lot of different features. 

I think that they have to make improvements to the product, particularly with regard to the infrastructure monitoring which is not yet complete. Although it's very powerful for application and end user monitoring, the infrastructure needs to be significantly stronger. Configuration is also not so simple and that could be improved. 

This is an expensive solution which makes it difficult to sell to customers. Even though the features are good, the price is too high. At the moment, we are able to sell the product, but only to really big companies. It's quite difficult to sell to a mid-size company. 

I've been working with this solution since 2007. 

The product is stable, they generally provide an automatic update on the tool every couple of weeks although we tend to test and then do a manual upgrade. There have been a few issues but the support is really quick to solve problems.

The technical support is very good and they have a live chat. You can open the chat from the product and check any issues. They are highly skilled. Sometimes the issues are more complex but even then they deal with it professionally. 

I have some experience with APM Elasticsearch. It has a module that you can activate and then make an analysis. I also know some of the other tools but they don't compete well with Dynatrace. 

The initial setup has improved over the years and is now quite straightforward. There's a lot of work involved to customize the entire environment.

Anyone looking to implement this tool needs to take a 360 degree approach. If you take that approach then everything will be easier because you can see all the stakeholders and the value that the tool can give. If you approach it from only one angle, such as from the developer or operations perspective, then it would be very difficult to get an idea of all the features that the products has. This tool is very complete, but the price can become a bottleneck for some.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

When we started with Dynatrace we were an on-prem organization. We used it in the early days as an APM, the way most people used it.

Our usage of Dynatrace has grown over the years, not as much in terms of capacity as in usability. It is now used by three departments within our organization. It originally started with just my group, which is IT, and then we rolled it out to development because they saw the advantages of being able to identify code bottlenecks in existing code. We've rolled it out to operations and they use Session Replay to troubleshoot customer-specific issues. And the sales department also uses it to gauge productivity and how many visits we get to a particular page, how many times people watch a particular video, how many take a certain practice exam, etc. 

Those use cases are all in addition to its core use, which is to help us keep our infrastructure running. 

We're currently using the Dynatrace SaaS, the Dynatrace ONE product. We're not using anything in the old, modular product. It fits very well for us. We are a cloud organization. We're all Azure now. We migrated from on-prem to cloud about three years ago.

The automated discovery and analysis definitely help us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint underlying root cause, both from a code perspective as well as an infrastructure perspective. When we get an alert, or we're seeing a degradation in performance, Dynatrace will lead us down the path: Where do we need to look first? It will tell us that it has analyzed so many trillions of dependencies and that it thinks that the problem is "here," and it will point to a query or a line of code or perhaps to a system or to a container that is not functioning properly. Depending on what the problem is, it saves us an enormous amount of time in troubleshooting and identifying problems.

I estimate it has cut our mean time to identification at least in half, if not more. Before, we were relegated to combing through logs. We would take Splunk, look for the error, find out where it was occurring, how many times it was occurring — do all that type of investigation that you normally need to do. We don't have to do that anymore because it's all automated. 

And as far as decreasing our mean time to repair goes, it's closer to 60 to 70 percent. The reason is that we don't need to take such drastic troubleshooting time. We take its recommendation, and the time that we spend is checking that Dynatrace was right. We'll test out a quick fix in dev and then take it to QA and then push it to production. In some instances, it does reduce our MTTR by anywhere from 60 to 70 percent, although it really depends on the problem.

I operate an entire stack on four people, and the only way I'm able to do that is by automating as much as I can and having tools that I can rely on to reduce time-dependent tasks. Dynatrace has allowed me to function and keep my people productive without working them 24/7. Dynatrace works 24/7 for me.

Another thing that Dynatrace gives us is very deep visibility, not only into user actions but systems interactions. How are the systems relating to each other? Are the right systems talking to the right systems? When we first deployed Dynatrace five years ago, it showed us, through its Smartscape tool, that we had servers talking to servers they shouldn't be talking to. That was quite an eye-opener. I've noticed that a lot of companies are trying to copy what Dynatrace came out with in its Smartscape, but to me, it is the best visualization tool of your app stack and network that you'll ever put together, and you don't have to do anything. The system puts all that together. You deploy your one agent, it maps out the system, and you can see everything from application to network to infrastructure connectivity. It depends what you want to see, but it's all Smartscape'd out. You can tell what traffic is going in which direction and where it's going.

In addition, when I first started using Dynatrace, I had a routine. I would come into the office early and go through all of the night's activities. I would check for any problems we had: Was anything broken, were there any active alerts? With Dynatrace Davis, I started getting those reports automatically, through Amazon Alexa, and I do that on my drive to work. Instead of having to go in early and spend time in the office, I'm able to stay at home a little later, have breakfast with the family. Then, when I'm in the car, I invoke Alexa to give me my Dynatrace morning report, which will include my Apdex rating, any open problems, and a summary of closed problems. It's probably one of the least advertised aspects of Dynatrace, and one which I think is among the most highly efficient tools that they offer.

The amount of time we have to devote to maintaining Dynatrace is next to nothing. The time that we spend in Dynatrace is actually using it. We're using it to look at what's happening, what's going on, is something broken, or do we have an alert? We go in to find out what's wrong. Maintaining it is really almost nonexistent.

Another advantage is that it is much more of a proactive tool than it is one for putting out fires. Of course, it helps us tremendously if we have to put out a fire, but our goal is to never have a fire. We want to make sure that any deployments that we put out are fully tested in all aspects of use, so that when things are fully deployed, there isn't any need for a rollback. In the last three years, we've had to roll back a production deployment once. I don't attribute that all to Dynatrace, but I attribute a large part of it to it.

It has increased our uptime because we find out about problems before they're problems. The one goal that my team has, above anything else, is to know about problems before the customer does. If the customer is telling us there's a problem, we have failed. We are so redundant and so HA-built, that there is absolutely no reason for us not to be able to circumvent an issue that is under our control, and to prevent any type of a work stoppage or outage. We can't help it if the internet goes down or if Microsoft has a core problem, but we can certainly help by making sure that it's not our application stack or our infrastructure. I would estimate our uptime is better by at least 20 percent.

In the end, it has decreased our time to market with new innovations and capabilities, because anything that reduces time-to-produce decreases time to market. Once the code has actually been developed, it's in testing and deployment and that's where my window of efficiency is. I can't control how long it takes to build something, but I can control how long it takes to fully test it and deploy it. And there, it has saved us time.

Before we had Dynatrace, and a lot of the processes that Dynatrace has helped us put into place, everything was manual. And the more manual work you have, the more margin for human error you have.

The most valuable features really depend on what I'm doing. The most unique feature that Dynatrace offers, in my opinion, is Davis. It's an AI engine and it's heavily integrated into the core product.

The Session Replay not only allows us to watch the user in 4K video, but to see the individual steps happening behind the scenes, from a developer perspective. It gives us every single step that a user takes in a session, along with the ability to watch it as a video playback. We can see each call to every server as the user goes through the site. If something is broken or not running optimally, it's going to come up in the Session Replay. 

We also use the solution for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. We are in the process of converting from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, but that is in its infancy for us and will grow as our Kubernetes deployments grow. Dynatrace's functionality in this is really good. 

We use JIRA as well as Jenkins. We have a big DevOps push right now and Dynatrace is an integral part of that push. We're using Azure DevOps, and tying in Dynatrace, Jenkins, and JIRA and trying to automate that whole process. So Dynatrace plays a role in that as well.

In terms of the self-healing, we use the recommendations that it provides. I'd say the Davis engine runs at about 90 percent accuracy in its recommendations. We have yet to allow automated remediation, which is our ultimate goal. It's going to be a bit before we get comfortable with anything doing that type of automated work in production. But I feel that we're as close as we've ever been and we're getting closer.

User management is extremely — and I hate to use the word "easy" — but it really is. And it's a lot easier today than it was when we first started with Dynatrace. We create a lot of customized dashboards both for the executive teams and management teams. These dashboards are central to their areas of oversight. It used to take quite a bit of time to create dashboards. Now it even has an automated tool that takes care of that. You just tell it what you want it to present and everything falls together. It has templated dashboards that you can customize.

The single agent does all of it. Once you deploy the one agent to your environment, it's going to propagate itself throughout the environment, unless you specifically tell it not to. It is the easiest thing that we've ever owned, because we don't have to do anything to it. It self-maintains. Every once in a while we'll have to reinstall the agent on something or a new version will come out and we'll want to deploy it, but for the most part, it's set-it-and-forget-it.

I would love to see Dynatrace get more involved in the security realm. I get badgered by so many endpoint protection companies. It seems like a natural fit to me, that Dynatrace should be playing in that space.

I'd also like to see some deeper metrics in network troubleshooting. That's another area that it's not really into.

We're in our fifth year of using Dynatrace. We were the very first paying customer for the new platform, Dynatrace ONE. We used it right at launch.

The stability has been phenomenal. I'm not going to say that Dynatrace has never had an outage, but I've never had an outage where Dynatrace wasn't available for me. It's always been there. It's always there when I need it. It's always on. Our uptime is five-nines, and we do attribute a large portion of our ability to maintain that figure to Dynatrace.

In terms of scalability, we don't have anything that it can't do. As we add to our infrastructure, it scales. Yes, every time we add a node, we're going to spend more. But it's up to me to decide if I want to monitor everything or a set of everything. My philosophy is to monitor all of production. Anything that is deployed to production is being monitored by Dynatrace. 

From a dev and test perspective we don't monitor like that. We keep a secondary Dynatrace instance that we use in the event that we need to troubleshoot something in development, but for the most part, our Dynatrace usage is relegated to production. And that's for cost reasons.

We have four environments in our builds. We have production, where we cover everything. We have a development environment, which is a subset of production, with different copies. We have QA, which is where everything goes from development for final testing. And then we have staging, which is the final step before it's pushed to the production clusters.

As we add to production, we add to Dynatrace. That is always going to be the plan. We will not deploy anything to production that doesn't have Dynatrace on it.

I don't get involved in the minutiae, but from what the guys tell me, with Linux servers you don't even blink. They have to watch Windows servers a little bit more because it's more intensive. Windows itself doesn't tend to perform very well when you first build. You've got to massage it and get it to where you want it to be. Dynatrace helps us with that, but Windows is more finicky.

We have about 50 users of Dynatrace between infrastructure, development, operations, and sales.

Their technical support is the best ever. I know I sound like a broken record, but we get chat support on the Dynatrace site, not from some guy in India, but from a high-level tech in the US who has all the answers to the questions. That person is not like some first-level guy who's going to ask you if your machine's booted up. The techs can answer our questions and, if they can't, they open the ticket and get back to us later. It's the best support model I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

We were using New Relic at the time. We were having a lot of frustrations with that in terms of its dashboarding capabilities, and the amount of time that my people had to spend keeping it updated and running correctly. We started looking at other products and we ended up settling on Dynatrace. Aside from its major capabilities, what Dynatrace ended up doing for us was to assist us in our migration to the cloud, because it gave us the sizing recommendations and the baselines that we needed to formulate what we were going to start with in Azure.

New Relic was the primary APM at the time and we were just very frustrated with it. We started looking at other products and really didn't see much of a difference in the competition, differences that would warrant going through the change, until we came upon what was then called Ruxit and is now called Dynatrace.

The biggest difference was that the other solutions required overhead. My biggest complaint was the amount of time we had to spend with these tools, because they're supposed to save you time, not take up more of your time. Dynatrace was the first one to actually complete that promise.

We ran hybrid for a year, collecting data on both ends, using Dynatrace both on-prem and in the cloud, and now it's all cloud.

The setup is really not much different, whether you're an on-prem organization or a cloud or even a hybrid. It's still the one agent. I have no experience with their AppMon product, so I can't tell you how much easier the new product is versus the old. But I can tell you that this product that we have been using is the easiest thing we've ever had. The only comment I got from my systems team is, "Why didn't we get this sooner?"

I am not the norm when it comes to policy and procedure. I tend to buck the trends a little bit. If I have a new product that I feel is going to be advantageous to the company and my team as a whole, then once we've done our due diligence, we will just deploy it. I know that larger companies with different criteria and regulations have to follow different channels and paths, through security and infrastructure and storage, etc. But ultimately, as long as you have "air-cover," and by that I mean an executive sponsor who believes in what you're doing, then you really should be able to get it done with minimal effort.

We were fully up and running in a week. It took me longer to remove New Relic than it did to deploy Dynatrace. We only needed one person to deploy Dynatrace. One of my systems people took care of it. I took care of the administrative stuff, creating the initial dashboards and getting the payments set up and so forth, but my systems people took care of the actual deployment of the one agent.

I didn't hire any contractors or deployment services. I signed up for Dynatrace's free trial and we went to town.

From a monitoring-tool perspective, Dynatrace has saved us money through consolidation of tools. We used to use a number of tools: PRTG, Pingdom, and we used to pay for an additional Azure service that we don't pay for anymore. And we used to use Splunk for log mining and now we don't. Just in the tools that we eliminated it has saved us $30,000, but there are more soft dollars that I could add to that.

I'm not sure how you come up with an ROI because it's pretty much all soft dollars. It's a line item in my budget that doesn't have to grow unless we grow. We have not experienced a base-price increase from Dynatrace.

Dynatrace is not the cheapest product out there and it's not the most expensive product out there. In our business, you get what you pay for. 

Dynatrace has a place for everybody. How you use it and what your budgetary limitations are will dictate what you do with it. But it's within everybody's reach. If you're a small organization and you have a large infrastructure, you may not be able to monitor the whole thing. You may have to pick and choose what you want to monitor, and you have the ability to do so. Your available funds are going to dictate that.

The only additional costs that I incur are for additional log storage space, which is like $100 a year.

My advice would be to compare and compare again. Everybody's offering free trials, and I know that they're a pain to do, but compare the products, apples for apples. Everybody's going to compare costs, but be sure to compare the functionality. Are you getting what you pay for? Are you getting the bang for your buck out of what the product is returning to you? If all you need to know is "my server's down," you can probably get by with the cheapest thing out there. But if you want to know why the server is down, or that the server is about to go down and you need to do something, then you want a product like Dynatrace.

I go to their Perform conference every year, and it's amazing to me to see the loyalty and dedication from the customer side. It's like a family reunion every year when we go to Perform. I hope we have it next year.

From a core-product perspective, Dynatrace is doing everything that we ever asked for. Everything that we've ever wanted to monitor, it has always been there first.

My use cases are typically working in conjunction with our business partners. For the most part, I get questions from the business as to what our conversion rates are on the eCommerce website. E.g., what the typical user journey looks like, especially when they're doing AB testing. They like to sort of double verify that in Dynatrace with a user session tracking to see which users are taking which path. 

I often get diagnostic questions about things like latency. Somebody on the business side will perceive some latency on one of our pages, then give me a call to use Dynatrace to go in and do a waterfall analysis of the page load to see if it is in fact loading more slowly than it has been in the past.

Since we are a 24/7 support shop, our primary job is to make sure that revenue keeps going in through the site and the site itself works. We have categorized issues into three tiers: Priority 1, 2, and 3. Depending on where a given issue falls, the Dynatrace alert is generated and sent to my team, then prioritized into one of those three categories. The response then to that issue will fall into a bucket for that type of priority. 

My primary use of the tool is to keep revenue coming into the business and to use it to help our business team in running their site analytics and web performance tools. They have things like Adobe Analytics that provide them with one layer of data. We use Dynatrace as another railroad metric to both confirm the Adobe Analytics data and enhance it in certain places where Adobe won't give us the answers that we need. In terms of metrics, we've had roughly about 120,000 unique sessions per hour on our website. So, we're capturing a lot of session data and real user data, and all of that data is kept in user sessions. We can look this information up by user ID to tag any given session that we want to find by date/client. E.g., if the user said that they had an issue last Thursday at 11:00 PM, then we can just do a search on their email address, go through all their sessions, and find the one that they mentioned, then dig directly into that one.

It has completely transformed the way that we do eCommerce from a couple of different perspectives. The first one is that we are really tied in with our business users to a much greater extent than we were in the past. A lot of the Dynatrace data is data which not just the technical team wants to see and to work with, but it is data that the business team wants to see as well. It has sort of facilitated a better communication stream between my business partners and my team to allow us to go back and forth on different aspects of the website. We didn't have that in the past. 

It has also built more solid relationships between the application development team and my support team because they will often have questions after new releases as to how those new releases affect different areas of the site. So, we have constant sessions with those guys in standing meetings on a biweekly basis to go through different aspects of what a release has done to the website, how we can use Dynatrace to track differences from one release to the next, and see if there is any latency as a result.

There are about 24 dashboards built, not only for my eCommerce support team, but I've also built dashboards for our development, business, analytics, and senior management teams that allow them to log into the product. Without having to know much about Dynatrace, they can just click widgets on the dashboard that I've customized for them to get to the information that they need. This saves me a lot of time because I don't have to go in and investigate every single issue that crops up. I can go in and just ensure that there's a dashboard available for diagnosing that type of issue and point the user who is interested in it to that dashboard.

After the dashboards, the Davis AI engine is fantastic. We're able to set thresholds within the Dynatrace application for what acceptable load times are for our web pages or API callback times. Davis actually monitors what those thresholds are and notifies me, not only when the thresholds are violated, but when they are either over or under the threshold. Then, it makes suggestions for tuning those thresholds based on what it sees in real user actions. Therefore, I'm never dealing with outdated data. Every day Dynatrace is updating what the user experience looks like and letting me have that compared to my benchmarks, which is super useful.

It's super easy to manage, especially the SaaS solution. We deploy the JavaScript through Tealium, which is one of the tools that we use to deploy tags to our website. Whenever we get a new version, or if we/Dynatrace create it off the Dynatrace JS, then we just deploy it through Tealium and that goes out to every page on our website automatically. Our users' browsers then start getting that new payload dropped into their browsers the next time they visit the website.

We use both Session Replay and synthetic monitors:

• A Session Replay is primarily for our customer support operation. We sometimes have customers call in to complain of issues with the website, and it's really useful to be able to look a customer session up and replay it in its entirely so you can see exactly what happened during that user journey. You can even find the point that the user is calling in to raise an issue, so you can dig down and resolve it. We record every single user session on the site. We don't have a limit on the number of sessions we capture because it's just so useful for our customer service folks to be able to do this. It's worth the trade off for us.
• Synthetic monitoring is set up on a couple of different levels. My primary synthetic runs every five minutes, every day, 365 days of the year. It is a simple, single page pane that tells me whether the website is up or down. If it is down, then an email distribution gets emailed and a pager text goes out to whoever is on call at that time to let them know that the site is down. We also use synthetics for the user journey testing. When new features go in from development, as part of our QA process, we'll often set up Dynatrace synthetic that simulates what that user journey should look like. We will then allow the synthetic to run every given set of minutes (whether it's 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or half an hour), to collect data on what that user journey looks like. This allows us to go in and run our reports against that synthetic module rather than against real user search.

Some of the analytics that you get in, e.g., a waterfall analysis of a web page could be clearer. A lot of that is not directly attributable to Dynatrace. Sometimes a vendor will implement a tag or JavaScript plugin that's named something entirely different than what it does. This makes it difficult to track that from the waterfall list, figure out where exactly that component is, and dig more into what it's doing. Dynatrace could probably improve a bit on that waterfall layout to make it clearer as to what exactly is there. It does a wonderful job of telling you what loads and when, but it could be improved in terms of telling me what exactly it is loading.

We have been using it for about 18 months. We first installed it last year in January. 

It is remarkably stable. They push out new releases of the SaaS application every two to three weeks. Dynatrace has a super active development schedule on their side. When they push out the release to us, all we have to do is push our JavaScript component back out to the website to allow it to go out to our users' browsers. Dynatrace has never gone down a single time in the 18 months that we've been using it. It's never been down when we needed it, and it's always collected the data that we need to analyze when we go into it.

Dynatrace itself doesn't really break, but the website does on occasion lose connectivity with a given API vendor, whether it's a payment processor or one of our other API pieces. Dynatrace is very good at alerting us when that happens, but we're not using any sort of self- healing capacity for that. What we do is we get alerted when those APIs aren't available or when a web page has an issue. My team gets alerts on a 24/7 pager basis, then we go in and investigate to resolve them.

The solution has given me a better view into uptime, in terms of how much downtime our website has. However, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud solution is remarkably solid. We rarely have downtime. Even during the holiday season for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we've had zero percent downtime for the last two years. From one perspective, it does let us know when the site is down using the synthetic monitor. The good news is that it has not had to give us much data because the site just doesn't go down.

We have 96 users logging into Dynatrace right now.

Our primary eCommerce environment is Salesforce Commerce Cloud. That is where we have the agent list SaaS solution implemented. We also have internal API servers within Azure, where we've implemented user agents to track them. We have not encountered any limitations in scaling to cloud-native environments with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We've had remarkably smooth deployments.

We have not scaled up to any other environments at this point.

It is fantastic. You don't even have to pick up the phone. You can submit a Jira ticket from directly within Dynatrace to the support team. Those Jira tickets are categories based on the component of Dynatrace that you're looking at. You actually get a live agent chat within the tool, so you're not only submitting a ticket and getting a case number, but you have the support rep right there in the chat session to walk you through it. It's the only product I use that has a similar interactive of an online health system.

We had AppMon, which is the previous version of their tool, before upgrading to Dynatrace. The first thing that we did was upgrade our on-prem AppMon solution to a solution that our Dynatrace agent setup in our DMZ on the network, then we added user agents on each of our API servers. This has morphed, as of last October, into a SaaS agentless solution that we run through a JavaScript snippet on our website. Every page on our website has a bit of JavaScript with a tiny JavaScript module that deploys out to the browser. For every user who visits our website, Dynatrace then collects metrics on what those user's actions are during the session and gives us reporting tools so we can check performance on the website.

We have used other monitoring applications, like SolarWinds and Gomez, in the past. However, they have all been replaced by Dynatrace at this point.

From the infrastructure perspective, what we have installed is the user agent on our API servers. So, we have six API servers set up in an Azure load balancing pool. There are three active at any given time. It was super neat when we installed the agent, because we actually went out and had lunch after the installation. When we came back, Dynatrace had generated the Smartscape view of not just the API and the different services they connect to, but it had crawled our entire network and found everything that it recognized from SQL Server databases to .NET Servers and API services. All of that stuff showed up in a sidenav automatically without our having hands on anything whatsoever. It provides a good quick view in the morning when you come in and just flip to that view right away, because it will flash in "red" for any given service or platform that is having a problem, then you can zoom to that problem and look into it right away.

Being able to capture every single user session on the site and work with our customer support team has been a huge return on investment for me. Of course, the additional support on top of Adobe Analytics to be able to try things, like website conversion, is also a huge return on investment.

The time to diagnose has decreased on average by 34 percent in its implementation. That is primarily because Dynatrace not only alerts you when something goes wrong, but the Davis AI also gives you suggestions as to why it may have gone wrong. This gives you a head start on triage and resolution.

Because the Davis AI gives us such a head start on problem identification, this leads into triage and diagnosis. Our diagnosis time has gone down significantly. We can find, identify, and get problems triaged more quickly than we could in the past by approximately 25 percent.

The only limitation with scaling to cloud-native environments is licensing. It all depends on how many DEM units you're willing to license. The more of DEM units that you purchase, the more user data you can collect.

We did compare it with several other products in the market when we did our due diligence before purchasing an APM and SaaS solution. Dynatrace came out just leaps and bounds beyond the pack. We're very happy with the results we're getting with it today.

We compared Dynatrace with AppDynamics, Opsgenie, and New Relic.

We do not use the solution for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. It was on our development roadmap for this year, but I think COVID-19 has probably pushed it to next year. While it is something we will be doing, we're not doing it now.

We have not yet integrated the solution with our CI/CD and/or ITSM tools, as it was on our roadmap for this year. We are a GitHub and Jenkins shop, and Dynatrace has plugins for both of those tools. One of the very next things we want to do with the tool is plug it into our CI/CD process so we can have sort of a hands-free built. We want to allow our builds to run through the entire pipeline and be managed by these three tools, then allow Dynatrace to do the reporting on the deployment and the resulting difference in the web application based on that new format.

My advice would probably be to start with the SaaS implementation to get a feel for Dynatrace, what it does, and what it can deliver. Then, based on results with the SaaS platform, evaluate installing the onsite on-prem solution. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. They obviously work best when you use them together, but there are some instances where our firm does not need an on-prem solution and may need just the SaaS application. Vice versa, there may be some firms that just need the on-prem solution and don't need the SaaS cloud based solution. In my opinion, it is best to start with SaaS, then based on what you discover with SaaS, decide whether you need on-prem.

I would give Dynatrace a solid eight (out of 10). It's beyond the expectations that I had when we purchased and installed it. As I went along and learned more about Dynatrace after the implementation, I was impressed with how much the tool does. Another aspect is not just how much it does, but how easy it is to do it. The AI engine runs 24/7/365, providing input. The dashboards make it super easy for my users to use as well as myself. 

The analytics that it provides are very easy to read. You can present them in pie charts, bar charts, or single table data. There's just a myriad of ways you can display the data that you get from Dynatrace to make it more consumable for users. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Three years.

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. 

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.

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." 

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.

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

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.

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

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).

We're a health plan, a health insurer. We're not a big one, we have about a million members. We are growing through adding new business and we're looking to expand into the government programs: Medicare, Medicaid. Right now we provide individual and family, large corporate, self-insured, and a couple other types of health plans. 

We are headquartered in Minnesota, outside of Minneapolis. We have a data center in Minnetonka and one in another suburb. We do most of our work on-premise. We don't have much in the cloud for our core backroom applications. We use a package from a company called HealthEdge in Boston, to do our claims processing, membership, enrollment, etc.

Our main use case is application performance monitoring, right at Dynatrace's sweet spot. First, we wanted to know what the performance of our healthcare and our health claims processing system was. Then we wanted to be able to segment it by where the transaction response time is spent. We also wanted to get into the deep dive of the Java profile, because HealthEdge is a Java application that runs on several JVMs. We wanted not only to get into the Java code but to get into the SQL that's created to call into the database, which is where the response-time problems are. 

We're using Dynatrace SaaS now. It's the newest version.

Since we have the OneAgent feature available, we have real-user monitoring. So not only do we know the response time and availability of the synthetic route, but we know what real users experience on our website. If our service desk gets a call, which seldom happens — but let's say you, as a member, had trouble with something — we can go back and find exactly what you did and why the response was poor. We've used that many times to find errors. JavaScript errors caused by a setting in Internet Explorer were the latest ones that were annoying the members. But members don't call our service desk and say, "Hey, your website sucks." So we have to look at the data and say, "Geez, why does Internet Explorer have these huge JavaScript errors?" And then we find out.

We found an error where developers used a Google API that was supposed to find a Medicare workshop by loading a Google Map and help a member find a place where they could go to a Medicare workshop. The API had so many calls an hour and we saw that, usually, about 45 minutes after the hour, that transaction was failing. It turned out that we'd used the 1,000 allocated calls and, when, the hour turned over, it worked again. It integrates all things monitoring, from an application perspective: synthetic, real users, and Java deep-dive.

Dynatrace provides us with a huge benefit for triage because by the time a Dynatrace problem is open, AI has identified all the components and where the response-time issue is or where the failure is. It's really mindless. We don't have to try to pull out a map and figure out how the application looks. 

And Dynatrace has a feature called SmartScape. I don't use it a lot because their AI is so good that I've never had to go dig through it myself. But if I were to go through it, it would go from data centers to hosts to processes to services and applications, to show how they're all linked together. So it has a topology view. We use that sometimes when we're doing performance testing, which is something another part of my team does. They need to know which pieces are involved and this helps them know that. 

But from a day-to-day event-management and IT operations-center perspective, the Dynatrace AI is what has identified the failing component. The dashboard has all the problems. They open up these problems, which are already events in our ServiceNow environment, and these problems have the call-path and everything else laid out in them. So I've never had to dig into the Smartscape to figure out where my failure is. The Dynatrace AI has done that for me.

What we found early on in our HealthRules environment was that the response-time problems were, 99 percent of the time, in the type of SQL that we throw at the database, because the DBAs would say, "It's not the database, it's the bad SQL." Dynatrace helped us focus immediately on that and get away from: "Is it the network? Is it the server? Is this too busy?" There are all the different things that the vendor wants to throw at you. I went up to Boston to help the vendor a year or two ago. I took them right through the code and the response times and said, "Here's the piece of SQL that makes this particular function slow." Dynatrace was able to do that. We got there in minutes. They said, "Well, your server might be too busy, it might be your network," and I could say, "No, it's none of that. Here's the response time of that transaction and here is the decomposition of it. The thing runs for 13 seconds and spends 12 seconds on this one piece of SQL. I think that's where your problem is." Dynatrace was a huge help there.

The solution has decreased our MTTR by well over 50 percent and maybe by as much as 90 percent. It enabled us to identify some things, first of all. Before, it was endless war rooms, and not really an identification. Dynatrace has driven that almost to zero. When the problem is opened, we know the root cause.

As for mean time to repair, since we know what we need to repair, we can point the developer right at it. It has decreased that by 50 to 60 percent.

It has also dramatically improved our uptime. One of the biggest problems we have with the JVMs, of course, is garbage collection and memory saturation. A memory leak will develop and Dynatrace will show the memory increasing steadily. It will create a problem and they'll work on the problem proactively, and either fix it or schedule graceful downtime. If they have to shut down the environment, they can stage through the three different servers in a type of HA arrangement. So without any disruption to the client, we've been able to fix things that would have turned into major outages of the whole environment. It's a definite help on the preventive side.

In terms of time to market, the guys who work on our web portal interface, who are in-house, were early adopters of the technology on our team and learned what works and what doesn't. Dynatrace has significantly decreased their time to market. They're not really part of the development cycle, but the way they use it and the things they say about it and the reports they've made indicate that it has probably cut nearly 50 percent of the development of their portal code.

It has also helped us with consolidation of tools. We got rid of some New Relic and we got rid of some older tool which was a great, early innovator in this space, but it was acquired by CA or Microsoft. We were still paying licenses for that and were able to consolidate it. We were about to buy a network tool to help us with ACI conversion on our network side, a tool that would mainly tell us who an application is talking to on the and network. We use Dynatrace to do that, so we saved tens of thousands of dollars in not acquiring that tool. We also took the synthetic work that we paid an outsourced company to do for us and we converted all of that. Once we had Dynatrace in the house, we could do it ourselves and that saved $20,000 to $30,000 a year. There's probably more, if I were to look at it, that I could do with Dynatrace. I have to focus on the core system right now, but I think they'll get it in the SNMP monitoring space soon, if they're not already there. And the plugins on the ActiveGates have a lot of capabilities we could use. We already monitor our VMware environment with it now.

We've started to use the Apdex score in all of our communications. It's a standard metric that's used for websites to indicate how they're performing. That idea is baked into Dynatrace and we've built on that throughout our company. The weekly service quality reports that are produced and sent via email to all Dynatrace users are starting to get some notice. They show, from the web portal side, what the Apdex is. Is it acceptable, tolerating, or unacceptable? It shows the percentages of the time of use and where they're coming from. It also shows it geographically and what type of browser most of your users are using. It shows how much of it is mobile versus desktop, which has proved very valuable to our digital experience people. Things like that are a huge benefit, and those are things I didn't even know existed when I bought it.

In addition to just the monitoring of the HealthRules ecosystem — which is typical BusinessWorks, Oracle Databases, and JVMs for transactions — we do a lot of web monitoring. With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place. We actively synthetically monitor our websites from two or three geographic locations. Our business is in nine States, so we're not international by any means. We sell health insurance to members in Oklahoma, Kansas, North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota. We monitor those synthetically.

It also instruments .NET, and BusinessWorks out-of-the-box.

It has an integration with ServiceNow, which is great. Dynatrace creates tickets for things and its AI finds root cause. We have integrated that with our ServiceNow to generate events and incidents, so that all of our event management will be done in the ServiceNow Developer. We're working on that now. In terms of the self-healing aspect, we don't use Dynatrace to do that, although we could. We've gone down the path of trying to use ServiceNow's Orchestration. But we may come back to Dynatrace for that, depending on how that works.

In addition to ServiceNow, there is a CMDB integration, so when a Dynatrace problem is discovered, the Dynatrace ID correlates to a CMDB and that's how we open an incident or event. We don't need to do the correlation. If an event turns into an incident, then the correlation is done automatically with the Dynatrace ServiceNow application, which is in the ServiceNow store. It syncs up the CMDB's entries, the CIs, with the Dynatrace IDs so that all of the different pieces of the response-time puzzle that Dynatrace has, can be assigned to a CI in our CMDB. We are actively working on improving our discovery in CMDB, as it's not the most robust. Dynatrace is a huge help there because the OneAgent discovers all these things for us. So it helps with ServiceNow discovery as well.

The Dynatrace panel generally lets you know how many users it affects, and how many transactions or events in that application it affects. We don't use that a lot. That's beyond our capability right now, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be quite useful to assign severity from that.

Around the way licensing works, I would like to put it everywhere in infrastructure-only mode and I want it to be reasonable to do that.

From a technological standpoint, there is the OneAgent versus plugins they have. They called them security gateways when they first came out. They're the way that the OneAgents talk to local active gates, which communicate out to the Dynatrace cloud to store all the performance data. Instead of every agent going out to the cloud, there's just one spot and security likes that. But they've leveraged those security gateways and renamed them ActiveGates, and now there are different web plugins we can run on it. Sometimes the plugins are designed for things where you put in an agent, Like an Oracle instance of Exadata, or an Oracle appliance. We can't put a OneAgent on that. It's not a standard Linux or Windows OS, so the ActiveGate solution is better there. Sometimes the development of those seems to be running very fast and it's not complete. They don't yet function quite as easily as the OneAgents do. But I have hopes that that's going to get better. We have tried the MQ, the Citrix, and the Oracle ActiveGate plugins. They could be sharper. It's the right direction to go. It just seems like it could be smoother.

I have been using Dynatrace for close to three years in my current company, and before that I used the earlier versions of Dynatrace, DC RUM, at a previous job.

I had one problem early on with WebLogic where Dynatrace was not stable and it would actually affect the ability of one of the WebLogic components. It was instrumented because we thought we needed it to be, but it didn't need to be. When we decided not to instrument it the problem went away. 

But that's the only stability issue I've ever had with it. That was the only time it's caused an outage or been responsible for high resource consumption. Typically the OneAgent is well under 1 percent CPU utilization and takes very little memory.

It's used constantly by several teams. They use the Dynatrace mobile app on their phones to get notified of problems in the environment before ServiceNow even notifies them. Our platform services team, which is the team responsible for the HealthEdge environment — if we were a bank, it would be all the backroom functions. It is where you pay claims, enroll members, credential providers and maintain all that stuff. That support team has it on their phones. Our portal team also has the mobile app, so it's used constantly. I hear about it when it's not available, or if there's something odd going on with the mobile app.

It could handle a much larger environment. I add ActiveGates mainly for redundancy. I don't think I need as many as I have. I could scale it out very large. I don't see any limitations. I've never had a problem with that other than my checkbook.

We've tried scaling it to cloud-native environments a little bit. We have a few things that are off-premises, like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce, which are in the cloud. We have a cloud-based application that does provider credentialing, as well. We don't have anything that we own in the cloud, so we can't instrument AWS or anything like that with it.

Tech support has generally been pretty good. We get good response. They have a thing called Dynatrace ONE and I find the tech support to be best if I engage it through a chat window on Dynatrace. There's a place, right in the tool, where you can get a hold of a Dynatrace ONE person and they'll look at your problem right away. That seems to work better than the old model of calling support or sending an email, because you would go back and forth. "Send me more doc. What about this? Send me that." The Dynatrace ONE agent gathers everything he needs and, once he has all that, if he doesn't know what the problem is, at something like a level-one triage, he'll open the incident for you and it's done. I like that part. The traditional send-them-an-email, open-a-ticket-online takes too long. The Dynatrace ONE agent available through chat is a great concept. I encourage my team to use that rather than opening a problem. And that's included in the standard licensing.

For our deployment, we did the first 40 in less than an hour. That required a part of one guy, and he maintains it all now. We have close to 200 nodes with OneAgent on them and four ActiveGates, synthetic monitoring, and plugins for MQ and Citrix, among other things. That takes three-fourths of a person on my team. I've federated the support for a lot of the stuff on our portal side. Our portal team developers fell in love with it so much that I just let them run with it and install it as needed. I give them more and more administrative rights. If you add their time, it works out to the equivalent of about a person.

We have close to 100 users. Some of them are just management who use the reports. Some of them are the portal team who are administrators, just like my team, and the majority are in IT. We're starting to take it out to our sales organization, as they're interested in the response time and other things.

We see ROI in performance tuning — improving application performance — big-time. We have teams using it constantly to make our digital experience better, performance-wise and availability-wise. Another part of my group is load testing. They use it as they do their load tests. They use LoadRunner to build a load test and use Dynatrace to monitor after every new release of the HealthRules code to tell them what's better and what's not. There is a huge ROI on load testing and performance testing.

There is also incident response, preventative incident response. We even had the CIO come into my boss's office one day and he was able to say that Dynatrace saw a problem and it was fixed and we didn't have an outage. And he looked at him and said, "That's how it's supposed to work, right?" What the CIO had been promised for 10 years, he finally actually saw an instance of it "in the wild" where we preemptively discovered a problem and fixed it. That's a huge win.

Also, reporting and analytics — to know what the response time is, and how many users use it, just the simple things — are huge.

I'm not sure how to estimate how much Dynatrace has saved us overall. But it's had to have saved us on the order of millions.

We license it for two environments, typically all of production and all of one lower environment, usually our staging environment. If there is a downside to Dynatrace, the only thing I can think of would be the cost. If it were cheaper, I'd have it in all my environments. I don't think they're charging more than it's worth, by any means. It's just that good software costs money.

They have the OneAgent which you buy and install. You can run that in infrastructure-only mode and pay less. The cost is a bit funny, it's calculated based on the memory size of the server you put it on. Sixteen gigabytes of memory, for instance, is one host unit and a host unit costs you, say, $1,000. (I don't recall what the actual cost is, I'd have to look at our contract). There's a switch they've added for infrastructure-only mode, which will cut that cost to about one-sixth or one-seventh of the cost of a full host agent. You won't get the deep-dive response time metrics, but you'll get the infrastructure stuff, which sometimes is all you want.

In addition to the host agent fee, which was the first thing I bought, based on the memory size of the server, the other is in metrics that we collect through the ActiveGate plugins. They charge you per metric.

So the three principle things they charge you for are OneAgent, how many metrics you collect through the ActiveGate, and digital experience monitoring units, or DEM units. Those are basically the cost of the synthetic things, per test. Those things are quite reasonable in cost. The biggest cost is the OneAgent.

The cost to get us up, my first allocation, was under $100,000. My first PO was for about $60,000 and it covered almost our whole production HealthRules environment. We started out with 40 host units and we've grown to 200-plus, and we're a small place. Down the street is a health-related business and I think they have 20,000 host units.

We started by looking at industry reviews and selected the top four or five up in the upper-right quadrant: Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, and we had a brief look at what at that time was a CA product, or it might've been BMC.

We evaluated the four of them on paper and then brought two in for a trial, a proof of concept: Dynatrace and AppDynamics. Ultimately we selected Dynatrace.

There were several advantages to Dynatrace. Dynatrace was new. Its presence in the cloud was nice, but I could also run it on-prem if I wanted to and, at the time I didn't know which way I was going to go — which way I'd be allowed to go by security. AppDynamics was cloud-only at the time.

For installation, Dynatrace was trivial compared to AppDynamics. AppDynamics had an engineer onsite for two or three weeks and they still couldn't meet all of our use cases, which were pretty simple. I did them first. Then I went to Dynatrace and they said, "Well, download it, install it, and call us If you have any questions." And I thought, "Well, geez, don't I get any hand holding or anything?" It turned out that it was because I didn't need it. It was that simple. You download it, install it, and it injects itself. You can control it. It was just engineered for ease of use, by far. So the installation was night-and-day different. 

We have a lot of TIBCO BusinessWorks code around that that we wanted to instrument, and with AppDynamics we had to go into every business process and change the startup. We had hundreds of them and that was a real pain. We had to select which ones and do the work, whereas with Dynatrace, it would discover. Dynatrace has a concept called OneAgent, which you install on the server and it discovers things that you can monitor. You just click on them and say, "I want these monitored," or "Don't monitor these." It takes care of all that work and that was a huge difference. I didn't need a huge staff to maintain it. I didn't need a lot of time from the support teams — because they don't have it — to help me with monitoring. We were able to do the monitoring ourselves.

Then, once it was up and running, the use cases were pretty simple. One was to create a business-level dashboard of response time, and I don't think AppDynamics ever got that out for me. 

Dynatrace is easy to use from that perspective. It's easy to install and maintain. I have a small team and one person is my Dynatrace SME, but he does other things as well, so it's not even a full-time job.

I've been doing this for close to 30 years. I've worked for software vendors and I've worked for major companies and now I'm at this small healthcare organization. The "holy grail" has always been the ability to decompose response time and Dynatrace has done that and integrated all of my APM needs in one tool. That is the biggest benefit to me. I can do application performance, from web to Java deep-dive, in one place. That's probably why it costs so much.

If you're thinking about Dynatrace, consider how easy it is to install and maintain. It has broad coverage and it's easy to use. I don't know how the rest of the market even competes anymore; it must be on cost.

As an APM tool, I'd probably rate it at nine out of ten. There are a few rough edges, but I think that's mainly because they're trying to do the right thing too fast.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

I have been using Dynatrace since February 2019.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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. 

I was involved in the initial implementation.

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.

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).

We use it to follow up user experience data. It's all banking applications. For example, when you're viewing your account, you open up your mobile app and the click you do to view your account is measured in Dynatrace. It's stored and we are checking the timing at each moment. 

We are also following up the timing differences between our different releases. When we have a new version release, we are already checking within our test environment to see what the impact of each change is before it goes to production. And we follow that up in production as well.

In addition, we are following up the availability of all our different systems. 

And root cause analysis is also one of the main business cases.

So we have three main use cases:

1. To follow up what's going on in production
2. Proactively reacting to possible problems which could happen
3. Getting insights into all our systems and seeing the correlation between these different systems and improving, in that way, our services to our end users.

We use the on-prem solution, but it's the same as the SaaS solution that they are offering. They have Dynatrace SaaS and Dynatrace Managed, and our is the Managed. Currently we're on version 181, but that changes every month.

The dynamic microservices for Kubernetes is really value-added because there is a lot of monitoring functionality already built into Kubernetes Docker. There are also free things like Prometheus which can display that. That's very good for technical people. For the owner of the pod itself, that's enough. But those things don't provide any business value. If you want business value from it, you need to extract it to a higher level, and that's where you need the correlations. You need to correlate what is between all these different services. What is the flow like between the services? How are they interconnected? And that's where Dynatrace gives added value. And the fact is that you can combine these data, which are coming from Kubernetes, and include them in Dynatrace, meaning you have a single pane of glass where you can see everything. You can see the technical things, but you have the bigger business value on top of it, as well.

Before Dynatrace, we were testing just by trying out the application ourselves and getting a feeling for the performance. That's how it very often would go. You would start up an application and it was judged by the feeling of the person who was using it at that moment in time. That, of course, is not representative of what the actual end-user feeling would be. We were totally blind. We actually need this to be able to be closer to the customer. To really care about the customer, you need to know what he is doing. 

Also, incidents are resolved much faster by using Dynatrace. And that's for front-end, because we actually know what is going on. But it's also for server-side incidents where we can see the correlation. Using this solution our MTTR has been lowered by 25 percent. It's pinpointing the actual errors or the actual database calls, so it goes faster. But, of course, you still have to do it. It still needs to be implemented. It doesn't do the implementation work for you.

Root cause detection, how the infrastructure components interact with each other, helps. We know what is going wrong and where to pinpoint it. Before, we needed to fill a room with all the experts. The back-end expert would say, "I'm not seeing anything on the back-end." And the network expert would say, "I'm not seeing anything on the network." When you see the interaction between the different aspects, it's immediately clear you have to search in your Java development, or you have to search in your database, because all the other ones don't have any impact on the performance. You see it in Dynatrace because all the numbers are there. It really helps with that. It also helps to pinpoint which teams should work on the solution. In addition to the fact that it's speeding up the process of finding your root cause, it's also lowering the number of people who need to pay attention to the problem. It's just a single team that we need to work on it. All the rest can go home.

It has decreased our mean time to identification by 90 percent, meaning it only takes us one-tenth of the time it used to, because it immediately pinpoints where the problem is.

Dynatrace also helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and to shift quality issues to pre-production because we are already seeing things in pre-production. We have Dynatrace in our test environment, so we have a lot of extra information there, and DevOps teams can actually work on that information.

Finally, in terms of uptime, it's signaling whenever something is down and you can react to the fact that it is down a lot faster. That improves the uptime. But the tool itself, of course, doesn't do anything for your uptime. It just signals the fact that it's down faster so you can react to it.

The most valuable aspect is the fact that Dynatrace is a correlation tool for all those different layers. It's the correlation from the front-end through to the database. You can see your individual tracks.

One of the aspects that follows from that is the root cause analysis. Because we have these correlations, we can say, "Hey it's going slow on the server side because a database is having connection issues," for example. So the root cause is important, but it's actually based on the correlation between the different layers in your system.

Dynatrace is a single platform. It has all these different tools but they are actually all baked into the OneAgent technology. Within that OneAgent — which is growing quite large, but that's something else — you have the different tool sets. You have threat analysis, memory dumps, Java analysis, the database statements, and so on. It's all included in this OneAgent. So the management is actually quite easy. You have this one tool, and you have server-side and agent-side which are ways of semi-automatically updating it. We don't have to do that much management on it. Even for the quite large environment that we have, the management, itself, is quite limited. It doesn't take a lot of time. It's quite easy.

The solution's ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is great. It's exactly what we need. The severity impact is based on the users, the availability, and the impact it has on your business.

We also use the real-user monitoring and we are using the synthetic monitoring in a limited way, for the moment. We are not using session replay. I would like that, but it's still being considered by councils within the company as to whether we are able to use it.

We are using synthetic monitoring to measure the availability of one of our services. It's a very important service and, if it is down, we want business to be notified about this immediately. So we have set up a synthetic monitor, which is measuring the availability of that single service each minute. Whenever there is a problem, an incident will be immediately created and forwarded to the correct person. This synthetic monitoring is just an availability check in HTTP. It's actually a browser which is calling up a page and we are doing some page checks on this page to be sure that it is available. Next to the availability, which the synthetic monitoring gives us, we also measure the performance of this single page, because it's very important for us that this page is fast enough. If the performance of this single page degrades, an incident is also created for the same person, and he can respond to it immediately.

Real-user monitoring is a big part of what we are doing because we are focusing on the actual user experience. I just came from a meeting, 15 minutes ago, where we discussed this issue: a slowdown reported by the users. We didn't see anything on the server side but users are still complaining. We need to see what the users are actually doing. You can do that in debug tools, like Chrome Debugger, to see what your network traffic is and what your page is doing. But you cannot do that in production with your end-users. You cannot request that your end-users open their debug tools and tell you what's going on. That's what Dynatrace offers: insight like the debug tools for your end-user. That's also exactly what we need.

Most of the problems that we can respond to immediately are server problems, but most of the problems that occur, are front-end problems, currently. More and more, performance issues are located on the machine of the end-user, and so you need to have insight into that. A company of our size is obliged to have insight into how its actual users are doing. Otherwise, we're just blind to our user experience.

Dynatrace also provides a really nice representation of your infrastructure. You have all your servers, you have all your services, and you know how they communicate with each other.

While it gives you a good view of all the services that are instrumented by Dynatrace — which is good, of course, and that's what it can do — in our case, our infrastructure is a lot bigger than the part that is instrumented by Dynatrace only. So we only see a small part of the infrastructure. There are a number of components which are not instrumentable, like the F5 firewalls, switches, etc. So it gives a good overview of your server infrastructure. That's great, we need that. But it's lacking a bit of network segmentation and switches. So it's not a representation of your entire infrastructure. Not every component is there.

The solution's ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is great. In my opinion, it could be extended even more. I would like it to be more configurable for the end-user. It would be nice to have more business rules applicable to the severity. It's already very good as it is now. It is based on the impact on your front-end users. But it would be nice if we could configure it a bit more.

Another area for improvement is that I would like the alerting to be set up a little bit more easily. Currently, it takes a lot of work to add alerting, especially if you have a large environment, and I consider our environment to be quite large. The alerting takes a lot of administration. It could be a lot easier. It would not be that complicated to build in, but it would take some time.

I would also like the visual representation of the graphs to be improved. We have control of the actual measures which are in the graphs, but we are not able to control how the axes are represented or the thresholds are represented. I do know that they are working on that.

I have been using the Dynatrace AppMon tool for six years and we changed to the new Dynatrace tool almost three years ago.

We haven't had any issues with the stability of Dynatrace, and it's been running for a long time. We use the Managed environment, so it's an on-prem service, but it's quite stable. We are doing the updates pretty regularly. They come in every month but we are doing them every two or three months. First we do them in the test phase and then in the production phase. But we have not experienced any downtime ever.

For us, Dynatrace is scalable and we haven't seen any issues with that. We did need to install a larger server, but that's because we have a managed environment. You don't have that problem if you go with the SaaS environment. We don't see any negative impact on the scale of our products, and we are already quite large. It's quite scalable.

In terms of the cloud-native environments we have scaled Dynatrace to, we are using Dynatrace on an OpenShift platform, which is a Docker Kubernetes implementation from Red Hat. We have Azure for our CRM system, which Dynatrace monitors, but we are not measuring the individual pods in there as it is not a PaaS; it's a SaaS solution of course.

As for the users of the solution, we make a distinction between the users who are deploying stuff and those who are managing the Dynatrace stuff. The latter would be my team, the APM team, and we are four people. The four people are installing the Dynatrace agents, making sure the servers are alright, and making sure the management of the Dynatrace system itself is okay.

The users of the tool are the users of the different business cases. That includes development and business. There are about 500 individual users making use of the different dashboards and abilities within Dynatrace. But we see that number of users, 500, as a bit small. We want to extend that to over 1,000 in near future. But that will take some advertising inside the company.

I use Dynatrace technical support on a daily basis. They have a live chat within the tool and that comes for free with the tool itself. All 500 of our users are able to use this chat functionality. I'm using it very frequently, especially when I need to find out where features or functionalities are located within the tool. They can immediately help you with first-line support for the easy questions and that saves you a lot of time. You just chat and say, "Hey, I want to see where this setting can be activated," and they say, "Just click this button and you will be there." 

For the more complex questions, you start with tickets and they will solve them. That takes a little bit longer, depending on how complex your question is. 

But that first-line support is really a very easy way to interact with these people, and you get more out of the tool, faster.

We purchased the Dynatrace product because we had some issues with our direct channels, our customer-facing applications. There were complaints from the customer side and we couldn't find the solution.

There were also a number of our most important applications that needed more monitoring. We had a lot of monitoring capabilities on the server side and on the database side, but the correlation between all these monitoring tools was not that easy. When they came up with a problem they would say, "Hey, it's not the mainframe, it's not the database, it's not the network." But what was it? That was still hard to find out. And we were missing some monitoring on the front-end. The user experience monitoring was lacking. We investigated a number of products and Dynatrace came out as the best.

We kind of grew into Dynatrace. Our initial scope was quite small, so it was not that complex. Currently, our scope is a lot broader, but it is not complex for us because we have been working with the tool for such a long time. Overall, it's quite straightforward. If you're starting with this product from scratch and you have to find out everything, it can take some time to learn the product. But it's quite straightforward.

We started with the AppMon tool, which was the predecessor to the current tool. Implementing that went quite fast because it was a very small scope. When we changed to the Dynatrace Managed it took us half a year. And that's not including the contract negotiations. That was for the actual implementation: Finding out all business cases and all the use cases that we had, transforming them into the new tool, and launching it live for a big part of our company. That took half a year.

We hired some external experts from a company in Belgium, which is called Realdolmen. They really helped us in the implementation. They had experience in implementing Dynatrace for other companies already, so that really helped. And I would advise that approach. If you're doing it all by yourself, you are focusing on what your problems are, while if you are adding an external person to it, who is also an expert in the product itself, he will give you insights into how the product can benefit you in ways you couldn't have imagined.

The issue of whether Dynatracec has saved us money through consolidation of tools is something we are working on. There are a number of things that we are replacing now by things that are already present in Dynatrace. If you currently have a lot of different tools, it will save you money. But Dynatrace is not the cheapest tool. Money-saving should not be your first concern if you buy Dynatrace.

It depends on your business case, but as soon as you are at a reasonable size and you have different channels to connect within your company — mobile and web and so on — you need to have a view into your infrastructure and that's where Dynatrace provides real benefits. It's not for a simple company. It's not for the bakery store around the corner. But as soon as you hit a reasonable size, it gives enough added value and it's hard to imagine not having it or something comparable.

"Reasonable size" depends a bit on your industry. But it is connected with the number of customers you have. We have about 25,000 concurrent customers, at a given moment in time. As soon as you have more than 1,000 concurrent customers, you need this tool to have enough analysis power. It gives you power for tracking the individual user and it gives you the power to aggregate all the data, to see an overview of how your users are doing. This combination really gives you a lot of benefits.

It is quite costly. Dynatrace was the most expensive, compared to the other products we looked at. But it was also a lot better. If you want value for your money, Dynatrace is the way to go. 

In my opinion, the product is extremely good and comparable. We did compare it to AppDynamics and New Relic and we saw that Dynatrace is actually the best product there is. If you are looking for the best, Dynatrace will be your product.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from Dynatrace is that application performance monitoring is very complex, but the easiest part of it is the technical aspect. The more complex thing is all the internal company politics around it. We see a lot of data and if you are targeting some people and say, "Hey, your data bridge is going slowly," they will respond to it very defensively. If they have their own monitoring tools, they can say, "Oh no, my database is going very fast. See my screen is green." But we have the insights. It's all data, and gathering the data is the technical aspect. That's easy. But then convincing people and getting people to agree on what is obvious data is far more complex than the technical aspects.

The way to overcome that is talking. Communication is key.

I'm a little bit skeptical about the self-healing. I have heard a lot about it. I have gone through some Dynatrace instances where they have this self-healing prophecy. I think it's difficult to do self-healing. We are not using it in our company. There is a limited range of problems that you can address with it. It's only if you definitely know that this solution will work for this problem. But problems are always different, every time. And if you have specific knowledge that something will work if a particular problem arises, most of the time you can just avoid having the problem. So I'm a little bit skeptical. We are also not using it because we have a lot of governance on our production environment. We cannot immediately change something in production.

We are using dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment, but the self-healing is a little bit baked into these microservices. It's a Docker Kubernetes thing, where you have control over how many containers or pods you want to spin up. So you don't need an extra self-healing tool on top of that.

In terms of integrating Dynatrace with our CI/CD and ITSM tools, we are working on both of those directions, but we are not there yet. We have an integration with our ITSM tool in the sense that we are registering incidents from Dynatrace in our ServiceNow. But we are not monitoring it as a component management system.

We are not doing as much as I would want to for these Quality Gates. That can be improved in our company. Dynatrace could help with that, but I would focus on something else like Keptn, or something else that integrates with Dynatrace, to provide that additional functionality. Keptn would be more suitable for that, than the Dynatrace tool itself, but they are closely linked together. For us, that aspect is a work-in-progress.

I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of 10, because it has really added value to my daily business and what I have to do in performance analysis. It can be improved, and I hope it will be improved and updates will be coming. But it's still a very good tool and it's better than other tools that I have seen.

It's used in two major use cases:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have about 2,500 people using it.

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

We want to leverage even more services:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our primary use cases are operational awareness, health of the systems, and impact on users. Other use cases include proactive performance management, system checkouts (as we investigate the ability to manage configuration and integration to the CMDB), some usage of it from a product perspective in terms of application usage, and I use it to manage and improve the user experience by understanding user behaviors.

We are in both Azure and AWS. We have both on-premise and cloud Kubernetes environments that we're running in. In fact, we have been using less efficient deployment methodologies. We haven't encountered any limitations in scaling to cloud-native environments. 

We have only used version 1.192 of the Dynatrace product. We have not used any previous versions.

It has improved our critical incident response, exposing critical issues impacting the environment and our ability to respond to those events prior to client impact as well as resolving those events more quickly. We have use cases where we have studied a 70 percent improvement for response times in an occurring event as well as future reoccurrences being improved.

The solution's use of a single agent for automated deployment and discovery helps our operations significantly. Oftentimes when you are looking at endpoint management, centralized monitoring teams need access to data across systems. They need to manage agents deployed throughout the organization. Remote polling of data can be helpful, but it's not deep enough, especially for APM capabilities. Having one agent significantly simplifies that functionality in such a way that it enables a very small team to manage a very large environment with very limited overhead. It provides the ability for external teams to manage it because they don't need any deeper knowledge of the application than installing the agent. They have the ability to integrate the agent into deployments and to do the work with very limited overhead.

The automated discovery and analysis helps us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint the underlying root cause. We have had scenarios where we can see end user impact. One of the use cases was where we had an individual system and a cluster of nine for a content management system that was having an issue. Through Dynatrace, we were able to quickly identify the one host that was having a problem, take that out of the active cluster, recycle that application instance, bring it back, and reintroduce it to the cluster in a very efficient manner. Historically, these processes take multiple hours in order to diagnose and identify the instance, then do the work. With Dynatrace, we are able to do the work in less than 20 minutes from when it first occurred to issue resolution. Thus, there have been scenarios where you can quickly identify infrastructure issues and back-end services. 

Out-of-the-box, it's the best product that I've seen. Its ability to associate application impact, as well as root cause from an infrastructure standpoint, is by far ahead of anything that I have seen due to its ability to associate infrastructure anomalies to applications. We are still on our journey of identifying the right business KPIs to see how we can associate this data.

Dynatrace is doing an excellent job of giving us 360-degree visibility of the user experience across channels in most technologies. We are working with Dynatrace to expose the full transparency to the mainframe, as we have transactions that call from the cloud onto the mainframe and back out to other services. This is a critical visibility that isn't there yet. Otherwise, with a lot of the cloud and historical systems, we do see a lot of transparency of transaction trace across the environment.

1. Automated discovery
2. Automated deployments
3. The AI

These are probably the most key, because it gets into the traceability from tracing transactions of the end user all the way through the back-end systems. We are still working through the mainframe integration, but the scenarios where we can integrate through the mainframe are very useful.

We can see issues that occur, sometimes before the clients do. Before we have client (or end user) calls for issues, we are able to start troubleshooting and even resolve those issues. We can quickly identify the root cause and impact of the issues as they occur, and this is very helpful for providing the best client experience.

We have found the self-management of the management cluster and Dynatrace processes to be highly reliable. There have been minimal issues with managing the infrastructure.

We've targeted deployment of the real-user monitoring to the most critical applications in the company to understand if there's something that's happening in the environment and the user impact. This is to be able to understand the blast radius of issues, helping us understand if an issue is impacting one app or multiple applications. We can then quickly diagnose where the common event is (the root cause), resolve it, and then leverage the product to validate healthy user traffic after completion by seeing transactions be processed again. 

From a synthetic standpoint, we use the synthetics in two ways: 

1. We do lower-level infrastructure pings (HP pings) primarily in order to validate individual, technology services on the back-end, i.e., the API endpoints. 
2. We use the front-end synthetics to validate user experience 24/7. When you have low usage periods, you are still able to validate the availability and performance of services to the organization. Oftentimes, changes may be implemented to reduce risk during lower usage times and the synthetics can be valuable to validate during that time.

It has been very easy to deploy and obtain basic information. 

It's very good from a problem troubleshooting perspective.

I find the value from the out-of-the-box features to be extremely valuable. However, there will be gaps and challenges as you go into a much broader set of infrastructure technologies to consume that necessary information. This will be a challenge for the company. The things that they need to focus on is the ease of integrating external data sources, which can then also contribute to the AI. There is a ton of value gotten out-of-the-box, but moving to the next steps will be an interesting journey. I know this is something they are focused on now. When bringing in other telemetry, whether it be network devices, databases, or other third-party products that all integrate into a larger ecosystem, there will also be a lot of successes, but there will also be some challenges on this journey.

There is some complexity in the alarm processing logic within the product between the alert policies and problem notifications.

Expand the user session query data to be inclusive and enable that for the application or other telemetry within the system. Currently, in order to analyze the data outside of dashboards, it requires exporting to other reporting systems. If you want to do higher level reporting, then this may make sense. However, there is a desire to be able to do some of that analysis within the product.

There continues to be some opportunity to expose the infrastructure from a broader reporting standpoint. Overall, the opportunity is in the reporting capability and the ability to more flexibly expose or pivot the data for deeper analysis. Oftentimes, the solution is good at looking narrowly at information, but when you want to broaden that perspective, that's where the challenges come in. At this point, it requires the export of data to external systems to do this.

Adoption lagged primarily due to:

1. The prioritization of monitoring as a functionality when teams do their work, as our teams are more focused on business functionality than nonfunctional requirements.
2. Getting familiar with the navigation of the product. With our implementation, we have a single node where people get access to all the data within the enterprise. They're able to see everything. It takes time working through the process and getting the correct set of tags and everything else in place to allow them to filter and limit data to what they need to see and can consume. It takes some time for them to understand the data, what's there, and how to consume it as we learn how to limit the data sets to what they really want to see.

About two years.

At this point, we have about 1700 host units. We're monitoring 2000 to 3000 systems. We have 300 to 500 users a month using the systems with approximately 700 users overall. 

Their Tier 0 is better than most companies that I have ever worked with. Normally, I'll get useful information even at that initial level/Tier 0. 

The in-app chat is extremely helpful. It helps not only with the ability for me to troubleshoot, but the ability for the rest of the organization to ask how-to questions. We have hundreds of those chats across the organization per month which are leveraged by end users.

Everything else is as expected when working through engineering and our product specialists, who have been helpful.

The initial setup and implementation are almost too easy. With real-user monitoring and all the application monitoring, you are introducing change into the environment. It is so easy to set up, configure, and implement that you can get way ahead of your organization technically from where they are from a usability standpoint. We have run into virtually no technical limitations in implementing the product. It has purely been from the ability to get users to adapt, understand, and leverage the value of the product.

We implemented and installed the Dynatrace platform (and everything) within a couple of days. We deployed the product in certain environments within overnight of instrumentation. Onboarding of teams and the training required, that took months. Even though we were able to technically implement the product from non-production into production within a month of deploying everything, having it there, and instrumented. It took us another eight to nine months to onboard individual teams into adopting and leveraging the product. From there, the rolling out is really limited more by organizational change, communication, and facilitating training with teams and their technical capabilities. Key teams have adopted the product and used it very quickly. Therefore, we are seeing value within four weeks of deployment from our centralized critical incident teams, but the product adoption from application and development teams has lagged.

If you are implementing Dynatrace, the first thing is to not underestimate your users and their experience, providing them personal service to onboard and consume the information, then leverage the product on the front-end. Technically the product makes it so easy to implement and deploy, this makes it difficult to stay in front of the rest of the organization when adopting the product. You need to ensure the data starts presenting itself before they are ready and able to consume it. You need to focus that into your implementation.

The solution has decreased both our MTTI and MTTR.

In 2018, we were having on average one issue per day. It is one of the reasons that we purchased the product in 2018. Last year, we significantly drilled those numbers down in outage time by 70 to 80 percent, as an organization. While Dynatrace is part of driving that avoidance as well as reduced outage time, it's impossible for us to have a direct correlation of its direct impact because there are so many other factors at play in an organization. I had to change management processes and everything else that could also influence that. However, we know that it was part of that increased uptime to where we've decided to invest significantly more in the product.

It's understandable to do a smaller scale initial evaluation. However, as you identify the product value, don't hesitant in your scope and scale to maximize the initial investment and your opportunity to do a bulk investment of the product.

We have other competitive products. The automation instrument will be extremely valuable as we look to consolidate our solution set. The insight to quickly gain information is interesting and good information that we can use. There will be a challenge internally with our teams since application teams were never exposed to infrastructure information and infrastructure teams have never been exposed to application nor end user information. Organizationally, we have to change where people are now going to see this insight and figure out how to leverage it for good, which will be helpful. It will be a game changer in terms of how we can identify and respond to events in the organization from the point of view of data and analysis, as opposed to tribal knowledge and fear.

Dynatrace was initially brought in to eliminate one competitive APM product. We are now on to eliminating the second, and we'll be consolidating all APM on the Dynatrace platform. We are also in the process of consolidating other infrastructure monitoring products on the platform. We expect there will be a small incremental investment from a purely licensing standpoint to consolidate the products, but we expect realization of a significant amount of benefit from the capabilities it provides from root cause analysis, impact analysis, transaction trace observability in the environment, the reduced administrative costs of disparate products, and the ability to integrate data. However, a lot of these were not measured previously because we had a lot of disparate tools across disparate teams managing things. Therefore, we can't measure the savings but we expect it will be significant.

We have CA APM Introscope, New Relic, and AppDynamics. We are users of all three of these products, though we are probably using AppDynamics the least. We have almost completely migrated away from Broadcom and are starting the replacement of New Relic.

Holistically, Dynatrace's traceability starts from the user endpoint, meaning the ability to trace a transaction from a user session all the way through other technologies. We've had more comprehensive traces than with other products. Other products do not offer an easy interface to see the trace of the user session in a comprehensive way. Dynatrace offers the ability to go from a mobile, microservices, or mainframe and be able to trace across all those platforms. It also has the ability to associate or automatically correlate user transactions to applications, then into the underlying infrastructure components. Another Dynatrace benefit is the whole function of the AI as well as bringing in other external data sources. E.g., we are looking at things like a DataPower and F5 data integrations, but also incorporating those into the trace. Finally, there is support of legacy technologies, because it really gets into traceability, AI, and the supportive legacy. Mainframe technologies are the big positive differentiators and kind of come to a conclusive root cause analysis.

CA APM Introscope and New Relic have simpler interfaces to consume data. With Dynatrace, you need to develop plugins to obtain easier API interfaces for pushing data into other products. This is a little easier with the other products. The New Relic Insights product is a stronger reporting feature than what Dynatrace provides.

There are also other products that we are looking at eliminating in other product suites, such as Broadcom UIM, Microsoft SCOM, and Zabbix. We have a lot open source solutions where we're looking to roll out infrastructure, then consolidate and centralized data. The primary function and capabilities gets into mobile to mainframe traceability in order to simplify or expedite impact and root cause analysis processes for the teams. The solution also has the ability to support our modern technologies running in AWS and Kubernetes cluster microservices as well as traceability all the way through the mainframe.

We have integrated our notification systems through PagerDuty, Slack, and our auto ticketing app. This is to generate incident records. The integrations with PagerDuty and Slack are effective. We're in the process of migrating some tools to ServiceNow. Thus, we are in the process of doing synchronization of both the events while also evaluating the CMDB integration with ServiceNow. There are some recent capabilities that make this look more attractive to automate discovery and relationship building that we're looking forward to, but we have not yet implemented. The integration to ServiceNow will be good.

The desire is to have Dynatrace help DevOps focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. We are not there yet. The vision is there and it makes sense with the information that we see, but we have not had the opportunity. Even though we've been using the product now for two years, we're only now just starting an effort to roll the product out across the enterprise and replace competitive products for application infrastructure monitoring. We'll then have the opportunity for that full CI/CD integration or NoOps opportunity.

We will be rolling out to some highly dense environments in the near future. We haven't run into any performance issues yet. The only issue that we ran into previously is with the automated instrumentation of the product. We accidentally disabled the competitive products that teams were using as we were evaluating Dynatrace. You can get in front of yourself in rollout.

We don't have the solution’s self-healing functionality integrated into the automation product. Dynatrace doesn't have the self-healing capability of restarting services. Therefore, from a monitored application perspective, we haven't enjoyed that capability yet.

We are in the process of testing some parts of the session replay. We see value there and are working through understanding the auditory or compliance impacts to leverage this feature.

Based on my experience and history of the products, I would rate it at least a nine (out of 10). It's been far superior to other products in its capabilities and comprehensiveness, especially across both cloud and legacy technologies, such as older technologies (like mainframes and server-based monolithic applications).

We are using it to monitor our e-commerce applications and the full stack that our e-commerce applications run on. That includes both our Rack Room Shoes domain and our Off Broadway Shoes domain. We use it to monitor the overall health of the entire stack, from the hardware all the way to the user interface. And more specifically, we use it to monitor the real user's experience on the front-end.

What Dynatrace has really allowed our team to do is focus more on innovation, rather than on monitoring and bug-squashing. Now that we have a tool like Dynatrace, we can continue to do forward-thinking projects while Dynatrace is doing the monitoring and rooting out the root causes. We're spending a lot less time trying to find out what the problem is, versus letting Dynatrace pinpoint where the problem is. We can then validate and remediate much quicker. That's the impact it's had on our business.

The automated discovery and analysis helps us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint underlying root cause. We recently had some issues with database connections. Our database team was scratching their heads, not really knowing where to look. What we were able to do with Dynatrace, because we had some of the Oracle Insights tools built into the database, was to provide, down to the SQL statement, what queries were taking up the most resources on that machine. We provided that to the database team and that gave them a head-start in being able to refactor the data so it was quicker to query. That really helped us speed up the user experience for that specific issue.

Dynatrace helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and to shift quality issues to pre-production. We are just now starting to use it in that way. When we first launched Dynatrace, we only had monitoring in our production environment. At that point we were using it as an up-front, first-alert tool for any issues that were happening. Now what we're doing is instrumenting our lower environments with Dynatrace so that it will allow us to monitor our load-testing in those environments, to find out where our breaking points are. So it does allow us to push out products that are much more stable and much less buggy because we're able to find out where our breaking points are in the lower environments. What this is going to do is allow us to do is push out, at a faster rate, more solid, less buggy releases and customer features, and allow us to continue to innovate on the next idea. We're just starting that journey. We just got fully instrumented in our lower environments in the last couple of weeks.

In terms of 360-degree visibility into the user experience across channels, we're only monitoring our digital channels right now, specifically our e-commerce channels. But we do have ways, even within the channel, to dissect by the source they came from. Did a given customer come from a digital ad? Did they come from an email? Did they come to us direct? It does allow us to segment our customers and see how each segment of customer performs as well. This is important for us because we want to make sure that we're not driving specific segments of customers into a bad-performing experience or to a slow response time. It also allows us to adequately determine where to spend our marketing dollars.

Another benefit is that it has definitely decreased our mean time to identification, with the solution and the Davis AI engine bringing the most probable root cause to the top. And within that, it gives us the ability to drill down into the specific issue or query or line of code that is the issue. So it has saved us a lot of time — I would estimate it has saved us 10 hours a week — in remediating issues and trying to find the root cause.

It has also improved uptime, indirectly. Because it gives us alerts early, we're able to mitigate issues before they're actually bigger issues.

The alerting systems are definitely the most valuable feature. The AI engine, "Davis," has proved to be a game-changer for us, as it helps to alert us when there are anomalies found in our applications or in their performance. We find that very helpful. There's still a human element to the self-healing capabilities. I wish I could say, "Oh, it's magic. You just plug it in and it fixes all your problems." I wouldn't say that, but what I would say is that the Davis engine gives us that immediate insight and allows us to cater to our solution so that the next time that problem arises it can mitigate it without a lot of human involvement.

Dynatrace's ability to assess the severity of anomalies, based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs, is really good, out-of-the-box. But it does an even better job when, again, we as humans give more instruction and provide more custom metrics that we're trying to monitor that are key to our business. And then, letting the Davis engine find those anomalies and push them to the top, especially as they relate to business impact, is very valuable to us.

We find the solution's ability to provide the root cause of our major issues, down to the line of code that might be problematic, to be valuable.

And we get a lot of value out of the Session Replay feature that allows us to capture up to 100 percent of our customers' real user experiences. That's helped us a lot in being able to find obscure bugs or make fixes to our applications. 

We also use real-user monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring functionalities. We use real-user monitoring for load times, speed index, and overall application index. And we use Synthetic Monitors to make sure that even certain outside, third-party services are available to us at all times. In certain cases, we have been reliant on a third-party service, and our Dynatrace tool has let us know that that service isn't available. We were able to remove that service from our website and reach out to the service provider to find out why it wasn't available.

We also find it to be very easy to use, even for some of our business users. Most of the folks who use the Dynatrace tool do tend to be in the technical field, but use is spread across both the business side, what we call our omni-channel group, as well as our IT group. They all use it for different purposes. I'm beginning to use it on the business side to show the impact that performance has on revenue risk. I can then go back and show that when we have bad performance it affects revenue. And I can put a dollar amount on that. So the user interface is very easy to use, even for the business user.

Dynatrace continues to innovate, and that's especially true in the last couple of years. We have continued to provide our feedback, but the one area that we get value out of now, where we would love to see additional features, is the Session Replay. The ability to see how one individual uses a particular feature is great. But what we'd really like to be able to see is how a large group of people uses a particular feature. I believe Dynatrace has some things on its roadmap to add to Session Replay that would allow us those kinds of insights as well.

We started using Dynatrace in September of 2017. At that time it was an older product called AppMon. But we quickly upgraded to the current Dynatrace platform the following year. We've been using the SaaS platform ever since.

It's been very stable. We've had very little downtime. In the last four years there may have been one outage. Overall, it's been extremely stable. Many times, Dynatrace is our first alert that we have issues with other platforms.

It's extremely scalable. We're one of the small players. We're running with about 70 agents right now. We've been at Dynatrace's conferences and have heard of customers who can deploy 5,000 agents over a weekend and have no issues at all. For our small spec-of-sand space, it's extremely scalable.

We are hosted on Google cloud. That's where all of our VMs are currently set up. Our database is there, our tax server is there. All of our application and web servers are there, and Dynatrace is monitoring all of that for us. We haven't encountered any limitations at all in scaling to our cloud-native environment. We can spin up new auxiliary servers in a matter of minutes and have Dynatrace agents running on them within 15 minutes. We're starting to play a little bit with migrating a version of our application into a Kubernetes deployment and using Dynatrace to monitor the Kubernetes containers as well.

We have plans to increase our usage of Dynatrace. We just recently updated our hosts. We needed to increase the number of host units so that we could put Dynatrace on more servers, and we've already just about used up all of those. So next year, we'll likely have to increase those host units again. And we're going to start using more pieces of Dynatrace that we haven't used before, like management zones and custom metrics.

Technical support has been great. The first line of defense is their chat through the UI, which is really simple. They're super-responsive and usually get back to us within minutes. We have a solutions engineer that we can reach out to as well, and they have been very helpful, even with things like setting up training sessions and screen-sharing sessions to help enable our internal teams to be more productive using the tool.

We were using a tool called New Relic and we were really just using it as a synthetic monitor to make sure the application was up and running, but we really weren't getting a lot of insights. When we decided that we wanted a tool that could give us more insights and that we needed a tool that could give us the ability to monitor more of our customers' behaviors, there just wasn't another tool like Dynatrace that we felt could do things as well as Dynatrace, through a "single pane of glass." We chose Dynatrace over New Relic at the time because New Relic just didn't have any solutions like it.

We haven't found another tool that can help us visualize and understand our infrastructure, and do triage, like Dynatrace. We haven't found one that can give us that full visibility into the entire stack from VM all the way to the UI. That was really the reason we picked Dynatrace. There just wasn't another tool that we felt could do it like Dynatrace.

The fact that the solution uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery was the second reason that we chose Dynatrace. The ease of deployment, the fact that we could use the one agent and deploy it on the host and suddenly light up all of these metrics, and suddenly light up all of these dashboards with insights that we didn't have before, made it extremely attractive. It required a lot less on our part to try to do instrumentation. Now, as we add more Dynatrace agents to more of our back-end servers, we think we'll gain even more value out of it.

We started with AppMon, which was more of an on-premise version, where we were installing it, although it still was a one-agent. Then we moved to the SaaS solution, and it was very easy for us to migrate from AppMon to the SaaS solution, and it's been extremely easy to instrument new hosts with the agent.

We were up and running within 30 days when we were first engaged with AppMon. When we migrated to the SaaS solution, it maybe took another 30 days and might have even been less. I wasn't involved with that migration, but I worked closely with the guy who was. I don't remember it taking much longer than 30 days to migrate.

We had an implementation strategy. We knew specifically which application we wanted to monitor, and all of the hardware and services and APIs that that application was dependent on. We went in with a strategy to make sure that all of those things were monitored. And now we've progressed that strategy to start monitoring more of our internal back-end systems as well — the systems that support our stores, not just our e-commerce channel — to see if we can't get more value and maybe even realize more cost savings on our brick and mortar side using Dynatrace.

We have definitely seen return on our investment. It has come in the form of being able to produce more stable, less buggy applications and features, and in allowing our team to focus more on innovating new ideas that drive revenue and business, versus maintaining and troubleshooting the existing application.

It hasn't yet saved us money through consolidation of tools, but as we continue to find more value in Dynatrace, it does make us look at other tools and see if we are able to use Dynatrace to consolidate them. We have replaced other application monitoring tools with Dynatrace, but we've not yet consolidated tools.

Whatever your budget is, you can manage Dynatrace and get value out of it, but you need to manage it to what your needs are. That's the one thing we found. We did not budget the right amount to begin with. It has cost us more in the long run than if we would have been able to negotiate it upfront. But we didn't really know what we didn't know until we'd been using Dynatrace for awhile.

Your ability to catch your Session Replay is based on the number of what they call DEM units, digital experience monitoring units. That's where we were short to begin with. There is an additional expense to determining not just the platform subscription but also the number of hosts units that you want to run and the number of DEM units that you need to be able to capture all of the user experiences that you want. In our case, we wanted the ability to capture 100 percent. Maybe in another business someone would only be worried about capturing a sampling of the traffic.

We evaluated New Relic, AppDynamics, AppMon, which was the Dynatrace solution at the time, and we also looked at Rigor.

Dynatrace could do pretty much everything. It wasn't just the real-user monitoring piece of it. It was also the full stack health aspect. The Davis AI engine was probably the biggest differentiator among all of the tools. The Davis AI engine and its ability to surface the root cause was a game-changer.

My advice would be to jump all-in. There doesn't seem to be another tool that can do it like Dynatrace, and from what we've seen the last two times we've gone to their Dynatrace Perform conferences, they are dedicated to innovating and adding features to the platform.

We are not yet using Dynatrace for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. We are beginning to play in that arena. We're looking at tools that will help us migrate from our current VM architecture to a Kubernetes deployment architecture, to enable us to get more into a no-DevOps type of environment. But today, we're still on a virtual machine deployment architecture.

Similarly, we have not integrated the solution with our CI/CD and/or ITSM tools. That is on our roadmap. As we migrate and transition into a no-DevOps and continuous improvement/continuous deployment operation, we'll begin to use Dynatrace as part of our deployment processes.

The solution hasn't yet decreased our time to market for new innovations or capabilities, but we believe that we will realize that benefit going forward, since we'll be leveraging Dynatrace in our lower environments to find out where breaking points are of new features that we release.

We have half-a-dozen regular users who range from our e-commerce architect to DevOps engineers to front-end software developers. My role as a user is more of a senior-level executive or sponsor role. We also have some IT folks, some database administrators and some CI people, but most of our users are in the IT/technical realm.

We don't have a team dedicated to maintaining the solution. We do have a team responsible for it, though. That is the team that just helped instrument our lower environment with Dynatrace. We've got some shared responsibilities and some deployment instructions that are shared across three different groups. They're from IT, our omnichannel group, which is really our business side, and we leverage a third-party for staff augmentation and they use Dynatrace to help us monitor during our off-hours.

The primary use case is performance, capacity, and availability management along with user experience monitoring of 20 systems on a variety of technology stacks. User experience monitoring and optimisation of system performance and workflow. It has created good visibility on these topics for audit and compliance purposes, supporting adoption of a DevOps culture and practices within the team. 

We have FACT, COLLATE, and CODIX iMX technologies as well as in-house developed Java and .NET applications. These are hosted on Windows and Linux OSs and primarily on SQL Server and Oracle RDBMS. 

It has created total transparency between technology and business on all aspects of systems and performance as well as being a proxy for network performance through user experience monitoring. This followed a major performance degradation of our primary frontline system, which highlighted inadequacy of infrastructure focus tools, e.g., Nagios and Zabbix. It helped detect and remediate several performance issues on systems on both vendor supplied packages as well as in-house developed systems. It also improved InfraOps and development teams understanding of system behaviour and performance characteristics.

• AI
• Auto-discovery
• Automatic baseline
• Synthetic monitoring
• Log Management
• Drill-downs
• Root cause analysis
• Apdex
• PurePaths make system management simpler, better, and faster. 

I would like more flexible data export functions and APIs. The end user experience data is very useful to the solutions team to determine actual system usage and misuse. Flexible, easier data APIs would allow us to export the data more easily to other analytics platforms to enable this analysis as well as enable storage of this data for longer term analysis since DynaTrace only holds user data for 35 days.  

When we use the Dynatrace API to extract the data it only allows for 5000 records or less, and the data is not sufficiently granular for our needs. 

Dynatrace can be configured to continually send user session data to a HTTP Webhook endpoint. Our user session export sends JSON data for all monitored user sessions to the configured HTTP endpoint(postgresql db).

The data is sent in bulk to improve performance, with a flush every few seconds to keep the data rate near real-time.

The data format is one JSON document per line, so we must split the data by line to get valid JSON documents.

We are raising an RFE with DynaTrace to have this data more easily accessible via API

Nine months.

It is very stable with frequent updates and feature expansions. 

It is very scalable. Agents limit its own consumption, no longer impacting server hosts.

Our experience was very good. Online help via in-app chat was very helpful. Excellent webinar and online training was provided.

A host of open sourced tools, which could not get beyond basic infrastructure resource monitoring. We needed APM and UEM.

It is easy to get the basics, but more complex when you want more complex metrics and dashboards. E.g., we mapped IP addresses so we knew which corporate campus end users were connecting through it.

We used both. IT Ecology was the vendor. They had excellent knowledge and were able to transfer knowledge to our staff.

Good.

It's more expensive than other solutions, but worth it. We use full APM monitoring on our primary systems, but only resource monitoring on lesser systems. We shift licenses around our environment when a deeper dive into lesser systems is required.

We did not really evaluate other options. AppDynamics could do the job, but we had access to an experienced Dynatrace service provider which enabled us to accelerate implementation, rollout, and knowledge transfer.

Anecdotally, it is not as user-friendly as AppDynamics when it comes to configuring dashboards, etc. However, I do not have personal experience with AppDynamics and cannot say for sure.

We use this product for troubleshooting performance issues in our growing set of IoT portal solutions.

This solution has helped us to unearth quite a few issues that were present for a while. Also, it has helped us improve the performance of many of our applications.

The most valuable features are code-level visibility, real user monitoring, and response time statistics.

This solution could be improved with better compatibility with legacy applications.

In our case, we were not able to deeply monitor proprietary solutions such as Windows CE or some BI/ERP applications, which either got crashed or slowed down noticeably.

These kind of issues are bound to happen considering the intrusive nature of the instrumentation process (which is necessary to get good performance insights).

However, some of these technologies would often warrant quite an extensive amount of work to be made compatible, if even feasible.

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.

This solution is used to monitor an IoT customer portal. It is hosted on Amazon Web Services. It is using Drupal, Microsoft SQL server, and eWON. By using Dynatrace Managed, we have given recommendations to developers and application owners on coding practices, but have also raised alerts on performance and availability.

By using Dynatrace Managed, we have improved customer satisfaction and have also helped internal teams and subcontractors make the application more stable. Communication between different teams has also been made easier and more fluid.

Dynatrace Managed has given us an in-depth, comprehensive view of every single layer of the entire application stack in a single, easy-to-use point of access. We have had several wins and increased our credibility among all actors involved with the application.

If we can gain more insight into older applications, using not-so-recent technologies, then it would be a plus. Also, having more flexibility to have different user profiles could be beneficial. No real frustration though.

I am a Dynatrace partner and the company where I work is a system integrator. We propose the Dynatrace solution to our customers for monitoring the performance of applications and integrate the solution with the other tools that they have.

Our customers are now able to control their infrastructure with a single tool and can easily check the connections with all components. With the Smartscape and AI, they can see everything and have reduced the number of events.

The ability to monitor a hybrid environment is very valuable. The AI is able to discover useful information in term of connections. We like the easy method of creating a dashboard, and the ability to see the real user experience with the new functionality of the replay.

In the next release, I would like to see some new reports and more tiles on the dashboard. I would also like to see the Synthetic Mobile application improved.

Our primary uses for this solution are Production monitoring and RUM (Real User Monitoring).

Since implementing this solution we have gained stability, with 100% uptime.

The most valuable feature is the RUM. Finally, we have 100% visibility on website performance, including third-party sources.

This solution would be improved with the addition of annotations for automated custom metrics creation.

Our overall stability has improved with this solution.

The primary use for this solution is for monitoring and performance challenges.

Using this solution has increased log traceability.

The dashboard is very useful, as you can monitor different parameters on the same screen.

The thread traceability is something that needs improvement.

This solution is primarily used for performance analysis and problem-solving.

Dynatrace helps us to improve overall performance and allows us to detect the root cause of an outbreak on our systems.

The most valuable feature is the indication of root cause at the moment there is a failure in our system.

The configuration of this solution is quite complex.

Our primary use case is to helps solve Java bugs.

This solution has helped us to improve application performance and reduce issue-impact with faster resolutions.

The most valuable features are Root cause analysis and User session replay.

Two things that can be improved are the licensing and the Business dashboard.

We use Dynatrace OneAgent as a solution to monitor applications, as well as infrastructure. This idea was appealing to us for time management and efficiency purposes.

Since we moved to OneAgent, we are much quicker to address live incidents and problems that occur in our systems. This has given time back to our Ops teams to fix problems rather than spend time looking for the root cause. This had been problematic for us in the past.

So far, Problems grouped in one place is a personal favorite. This allows me to stay on top of reoccurring issues and drive teams to minimize those. This constantly improves our services. The Problem history also helps keep track of previous issues, should we be required to look them up.

So far, OneAgent has been very useful for us. However, there is room for improvement. More integrations could prove very beneficial to us. One example is more AWS Redis integration, which would help us monitor our digital estate more efficiently than we do today. Licensing and user management could also be improved.

We were previously using Dynatrace AppMon, which had limitations to monitoring applications. We were then demoed OneAgent, and it better suited our needs.

This is primarily used for Dynatrace Customer Managed Configurations in a closed customer environment. The operating systems include Microsoft Windows Server and various Linux distributions.

The Dynatrace solution has an important role in optimizing application code and SQL queries for customer solutions. It is also used for identifying, alerting, and reporting on real-time problems.

The most valuable features are the Smartscape, Resolution Path, synthetic and availability reports. These give a deep understanding of the environment being monitored, as well as addressing problems in terms of playback, code analysis, database calls analysis, and the system as a whole.

For an easy view of global and entity-specific configurations, a separate tile or pane aggregating these configurations should be implemented. This would make managing global or entity-specific configurations easier, as it would show previous configurations made to the environment by another DT user.

This solution is very stable.

This is a very scalable solution.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We did not evaluate other options before adopting this solution.

We are using this software to monitor an online banking system in a production environment.

Dynatrace has improved our organization because we can see big problems in the most important systems before these issues will be seen by clients.

The most valuable feature is the PurePath analysis. We can see each session, end-to-end, and discover issues.

The user interface needs to be improved.

APM monitoring and troubleshooting for any kind of technology.

This has improved our organization because any kind of technology, even legacy equipment, is now monitored.

The user experience monitor is a real added value.

It would be nice to have a simplified monitoring feature for non-Java applications.

We run our application on a Windows 2008 to 2016 environment. We needed a tool to give us insight into how our applications were running. Dynatrace was the answer.

Dynatrace gives excellent insight into the performance of our applications. This helps the IT department to respond quickly to problems because the root cause is reported by Dynatrace.

We find almost all of the features valuable, including Integration, Smartscape, and Problems.

The extending of Dynatrace with plugins can be better. 

We are a partner and are selling this solution. We also use it internally.

This solution has helped us to reduce the time to detect the root cause incident and also to avoid missing incidents.

The most valuable feature is the beautiful UI. The correlation between events and impacts is helpful, as is the automatic detection of the infrastructure.

Improvements are needed in the navigation and time-frame selection when browsing problems, sometimes, the time-frame set change and I need to re-set it again, plus I find the navigation bar on the top left quite cumbersome, when i'm analyzing problem and I want to go back to the previous view, for me the nav bar should be the solution but often, when selecting the last element in the bar, I do not go back to my previous page but to the "main element page" (Aka, When doing deep analysis the analysis components are not shown on the nav bar and the only way is to press the browser "go back" button).

We use this solution for continuous monitoring in our customers' environments, auditing, and troubleshooting.

This is an easy to use solution and our customers like it.

The most valuable features are the UEM (User Experience Monitoring) and the DEM (Digital Experience Management). It is also easy to install.

I would like to see more default dashboards included, and maybe more possibilities in terms of customization.

The ROI for this solution is fast.

As a system integration company, we provide it as an APM solution to our customers.

Dynatrace solved various kinds of Ops / DevOps issues for our customers including bad code, bad configurations, operational issues, etc.

The features that we find most valuable are automatic root cause detection, topology discovery, and session replay. Basically, all the features provided are valuable.

I would like to see an App store for plugins and extensions. This would provide a single point for all Dynatrace users to download and install product extensions from.

Very good.

Exceptional.

Exceptional. Very quick replies (sometimes in the order of minutes), very professional.

Not really.

Very straightforward.

In-house.

Case by case.

N/A

AppD, New Relic

Have Dynatrace or one of its partner do a PoC. You will not regret it.

Our implementation is not a single case. We are the local partner for Dynatrace in Romania and have very different use cases that differ based on our customers.

Dynatrace is being used from monitoring the end user experience to infrastructure monitoring and real-time business and impact analysis.

The ease of use and full stack, 100% visibility inside the monitored applications has really helped us improve, showcase, and implement Dynatrace throughout our clients' systems.

Ease of problem detection,  alerting, visual timeline, and user-sessions are some of the best features of Dynatrace.

There are lots of features that Dynatrace provides that really help the business grow. From user experience, where you can view exactly what your users are experiencing, to AI problem detection, and root cause analysis where the IT department is really keen to use Dynatrace.

The web interface, in some cases, is a little ambiguous to use. From passing through different screens to go and drill down, to not propagating the filter timeframes from different screens.

Apart from that, all of Dynatrace’s features are a real plus to have implemented.

We used this solution in a production environment to perform stress testing and evaluations to help find bottlenecks. 

We monitored user behavior and identified the funnel most used by our customers. In other services, we wanted to detect third-party tools with the wrong service.

The most valuable function is the ability to replay a customer session. It is very useful to know all of the customer details (device category, Operating System used, browser version, location of the customer, and connectivity).

We also need to know which areas of our site have the worst performance.

It would be an improvement to know where we lost our conversion funnel. It’s very important to share the same information with other departments of the company and converse using the same dashboards.

We would like to see an AI tool that detects issues with our site in real time.

Nowadays, we are not Dynatrace customers. However, we want to keep up to date with product functionality in order to evaluate the necessity of changing our current solution.

We use this solution for performance monitoring and identifying resource management problems.

We hope to improve our customer experience by making our webpage, native applications, and B2B interfaces function properly. In our environment, we have several databases and several types of code. The databases include Oracle, MSSQL, and MongoDB. 

It is critical to have the proper tool.

One of the features that sets this product apart from its competitors is that it generates a solution. We really like the number of reports it generates and the information that is provided to assist with analysis.

This solution also has the capability of analyzing our messaging software.

We would like to see more third-party tools for training.

We carefully looked at all of the options on the market and currently, we are in the process of a pilot installation of Dynatrace. The initial results are encouraging and we are waiting for more data to make the final decision.

At this time it seems that Dynatrace has almost everything we need.

We use this solution to assist with resolving incidents in a banking environment.

This solution helps the bank to detect problems faster.

The most valuable feature is the workflow, which helps you to easily have an overview of the infrastructure that you are analyzing, without having worked with it previously.

The AI is not that intelligent and there are different places where it could be even more automated. For example, when you are looking at the code tree and you must manually click to expand the tree until you find the process.

Our primary use case is to monitor the full stack of our digital platform, including the user experience. This provides us with business insights.

This solution has helped us with faster identification of the root cause, allowing faster resolution and increased uptime.

The most valuable feature is the AI, which makes root cause identification much faster, and the support much easier.

I would like to have the ability to share live data with selected third parties so that they can see how their product is performing for our company.

We use the Dynatrace platform to perform Application Performance Management for our Kubernetes clusters and some other legacy clusters. We have many Kubernetes clusters in our company and we are connecting each to an on-premise Dynatrace platform so that we can analyze the performance of each one separately.

Besides being an Application Performance management platform, Dynatrace has many important features that are easy to use. This gives us more time to focus on business. From installation to page load analysis, passing by monitoring hosts. Everything works like a charm.

The most valuable features of Dynatrace are the ease of installation and management, as well as its extensibility.

Dynatrace provides a wide range of platform supports that can be installed.

The service should be improved such that it is more useful to its clients. For instance, detect repeated performance-issue-related root causes, optional log streaming for hosts, processes, or a group of processes.

It needs a dashboard for cluster events in general, and for Kubernetes specifically.

For the Kubernetes part, we have a good operator that takes care of updating the agents so we have nothing to do.

Our primary use cases are for APM and digital experience management.

The ability to solve production issues quickly is the most valuable improvement for each of our customers. Also, rolling out and maintaining the solution is more than easy and requires very little effort from the customers. This is unique compared to other vendors.

The most valuable features are the speed of deployment without any changes to the monitored environment, and the very well defined and implemented user interface.

Working with the user interface is a pleasure for any customer since it is fast, responsive, and very well designed.

From the other features, the ability to drill down to the code level is often very valuable when doing an analysis of issues. Also, the integrated AI (assisted machine learning) helps to analyze anomalies without the requirement to define and describe your environment.

As the product is evolving quickly and product features are added on a monthly basis, a more transparent roadmap would be more than welcome.

Also, some parts of the business operations, such as pricing, should be improved since the terms are changing and it is not easy to do estimates.

We get APM requirements from various customers raising concerns about poor performance for their application. They do not know what is wrong and, most importantly, what is causing it. Dynatrace has helped a lot to identify performance bottlenecks and helped to fix them before the impact is increased.

Partnership with Dynatrace has given access to training, their knowledge base, etc. This has given us awareness about the latest trends in technology and how we can utilize Dynatrace to align with it. We have gained customers’ trust that we can provide them the best value from the Dynatrace solution.

The most valuable features for us include problem detection, root cause identification, Smartscape, and integration with cloud infrastructure like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.

This solution supports integration with Gen 3 solutions.

The following features are also valuable:

• PurePath and stack trace details
• UEM (User Experience Management)
• Service flow mapping
• Ease of deployment
• Kubernetes monitoring

The chat support definitely needs to be uplifted. Most of the time, chat support is not good enough for answering queries. Local support should also be increased. 

There also needs to be more frequent training for partners, so teams can be enabled on product features and enhancements.

We use Dynatrace to monitor the API performance of the server.

Dynatrace has an auto-baseline and uses AI to monitor the performance of each API. The response time is related to the baseline.

The most valuable feature is the auto-baseline because I don't have to set it with Dynatrace. With New Relic, we had some problems with the configuration.

I would like to see the same features as in the New Relic Insights in the dashboard. That is the only thing I want to see improved in Dynatrace.

Dynatrace is quite stable. I don't have any issues with it. With Dynatrace we need to upgrade and restart often. New Relic is more stable than Dynatrace.

I have not had any issues with the scalability of either New Relic or Dynatrace. They are both quite scalable.

Currently, we get the vendor support directly. Their support is adequate.

Last time we were using another APM and the company discontinued the APM product, so we had to switch.

The initial setup of Dynatrace is quite easy.

We implemented the installation ourselves without any issues or problems at all.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the features and local support of the agency. Those two along with pricing are very important. 

The reason we eventually chose Dynatrace was for the automatic (auto-baseline) of detection for the API performance issues.

We use New Relic as well in the same facilities.

I will rate the software a nine out of 10 because they are able to help solve our issues for us even though we don't understand the system fully. 

To make it a perfect 10, Dynatrace needs to implement the features from New Relic in the dashboard so that I can monitor my own performance. Even though New Relic is not as good as Dynatrace, I have to understand my own system. I set each parameter manually before every launch by five minutes.

I would suggest to prospective buyers to evaluate both Dynatrace and New Relic to see which features are best for your company. 

If you are not sure about the system requirements, choose Dynatrace. If you understand your own system and know by seeing a network outline exactly what you need for support, then choose New Relic.

Our primary use case for both Dynatrace and AppDynamics is for application performance monitoring (APM). The main reason for having application performance monitoring is, when we see something is running slowly, we can immediately look to see where the issue is at before our systems crash on us. So, one of the major roles it plays for us is the ability to keep our system performing in peak shape.

Our ability to see issues coming, then quickly isolate and correct problems was our main use of Dynatrace. We are not there yet with AppDynamics. It has been ten months, and we are still spinning our wheels trying to set it up and figure out how it works.

When collecting data with Dynatrace, we saw every single transaction that happened in real-time. Whereas, with AppDynamics, they take snapshots, and we only see a tenth of the information that we did with Dynatrace. While the information is there, if an issue with an application happened in-between snapshots, it would not be readily identifiable. You would have to go hunt and peck for it. We don't have time for that.

Using Dynatrace, we collected application metrics within three hours, in most cases. The majority of our triage were within three hours, then we were able to discover the root cause of issues.

With Dynatrace today, you have a single agent. You stick it on a server, and it doesn't matter if it's Linux, Windows, etc. It is a single agent and executable. You run it, and it injects itself into your collecting data. This is compared with AppDynamics, which on some of servers, we have had to install as many as four different agents and configure them all individually, trying to collect the same type of information.

The dashboarding for Dynatrace is ten times easier to set up and has more options of what you can put on it, especially if you are in a single payment class environment.

With Dynatrace in our environment, the managed server required root access to run. As a government agency with tight security, this has been an audit concern for us. A major area of improvement for Dynatrace would be to make it so the program does not need root access to perform. AppDynamics does not require root access to the servers. Once they are set up and configured, they can set their end run without root access.

The number one area of improvement for AppDynamics is to simplify their agent install. Instead of having four or five different agents to get all the different things that you need with different pieces of information, they need to figure out how to put theirs into a single agent, like Dynatrace has done.

We have not found AppDynamics in our environment useful at all. We are struggling to try and make it work. AppDynamics is for applications that are static. In our government agency, we are too dynamic. Everything is changing constantly, and AppDynamics does not work in this type of environment.

The stability for Dynatrace is probably 85 percent. We had enough issues where one of the services would just stop running, then we would have to restart it. Not very often, but it happened.

With AppDynamics we haven't been able to use the system long enough to determine its stability.

Dynatrace is very scalable. We grew it over the 12 years that we had it. So, that has proven that it is scalable. 

AppDynamics is scalable as the environment grows. However, we are still in the product's infancy, so we haven't seen this happen yet.

A company with a single application over multiple locations, like a retailer, but only needs to worry about one application and monitoring it, this is the perfect fit for AppDynamics. If you have an organization with more than 40, you definitely want Dynatrace. AppDynamics is not a viable product for an organization with lots of applications.

On a scale of one to ten, my experience working with the AppDynamics onsite people and offsite support is maybe a five. I feel that they don't want to take responsibility for the areas that AppDynamics is lacking in. When things don't work in which they were sold, then they want to tell us that it is our environment more than their application not functioning correctly. 

Whenever we had issues with Dynatrace, you could get Dynatrace support on the phone, and they were all over it. They would get into our machines, then take screenshots or look at the performance of the systems while it was running. They wrote custom patches to help us resolve issues that we had. I would rate the support that we receive from Dynatrace as a ten out of ten. 

We have been using Dynatrace since 2007 and AppDynamics for just about a year. We have not been using them concurrently. Dynatrace was not renewed, and management decided that we would use AppDynamics. This decision was beyond my control.

With Dynatrace, the installation and setup were a piece of cake. It could be accomplished usually within fifteen minutes, and definitely, within a half hour of deciding to do it. 

A big difference that we found between the two vendor is in setting the system up and getting them ready for production. With the latest version of Dynatrace, it took three days and we had it in production. We are still trying to get AppDynamics in production since last May.

With our Dynatrace system, it required three servers and the program when we installed it on the servers. It was straightforward. You just clicked, clicked, and clicked as it went through the setup, then you were done. 

With AppDynamics, we are now on eight servers to make it function like it should. We are ten months into it now, and we're still trying to get it right. We have AppDynamics folks onsite to help us with it. It is just difficult to implement. There is so much to it. 

I sat down with one of their architects to decide how many servers that we needed, how they need to be spec'd out, etc., and that is what we built. Then, when we stood it up, and it didn't work, some other personnel from the AppDynamics team came in to look at it. They said, "None of this is correct. You are on the wrong this and that." 

Thus, we did not have consistent information and support from AppDynamics when implementing the system. However, it is up and running now.

Our annual costs were about the same for both AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

When learning Dynatrace, we brought in Dynatrace people to come onsite and take my team through a week long training. We did that two or three different times. They offered this type of training. They also have online training out on their community that I could set up for my team members. The effectiveness of that training was about 75 percent. 

With AppDynamics, they have provided some online training. The take away from it (from my team) has been maybe 10 to 15 percent. The training is geared more towards sales than using the product for what it was intended. It boasts the features and selling points of the AppDynamics product instead of the ins and outs of how to use it once it has been installed in our environment.

I would definitely recommend Dynatrace. I have the benefit of having used it for so many years. It takes less infrastructure to set it up initially. It's a single agent engine. You just set the agent up and run it, then it configures itself. It goes out and finds all your processes with everything that's running, configuring itself. The simplicity of the infrastructure and simplicity of setting it up, then actually using it, along with setting up your dashboards to monitor your metrics is much better. There are more features than the AppDynamics dashboarding.

I would rate it Dynatrace as a ten out of ten. 

At the point of where we're at with our AppDynamics experience, I would rate it as a five out of ten.

Dynatrace is an extremely helpful APM solution in large, complex environments, whenever we need to have an integrated vision of our users, infrastructure, and applications. It excels when we need to do all this with the lowest resources possible, with the best data quality, across all layers, and with the least management overhead. 

The first time I came across Dynatrace, I simply remember the WOW factor. Being a performance enthusiast since the mid 80's, I cannot remember more than a handful of such technical experiences!

Dynatrace excels in troubleshooting scenarios. You do not get samples or gaps. You get the real thing. That is absolutely important when troubleshooting the strangest situations.

Focus on root cause analysis has dropped significantly for the importance of alerts. I was used to be drowning in alerts, but now have refocused. I still have them, of course, but now they are about minor things. I see myself getting rid of them very soon.

The most valuable feature is Dynatrace's commitment to bringing in new features. It is very difficult to keep pace with the new developments that are always occurring.

The OneAgent technology is one of the most important features. You install it, no configuration, and it just does all the stuff for you. It automatically detects whatever is happening, and even gets to automate JavaScript injection across different web server technologies. You can have tag management, but you can even forget that, because that is fully automated, too!

Given the full-stack approach, you are able to view from the end user perspective, almost down to the bare metal. It gives you all the way from the user perspective, network experience, web and application server view, application detail, process detail, operating system detail, and you even get to manage virtualization and datacenter support.

Dynatrace is capable of following all user actions across all monitored infrastructure, even to systems not monitored, but interconnected. This technology is known by the name PurePath, and being able to do this sometimes feels like magic. I have been told, time and time again, by very knowledgeable IT personnel, that this is not possible. Sometimes, you have to see it, to believe it.

One of the most promising features is the AI capability. I have seen some of its capability in production environments, and it is pretty impressive! It is not a marketing buzzword being abused, but it actually works. Being able to offload problem handling and root-cause analysis, and get to the point analysis of complex systems is something that I have not seen with my eyes, and in this depth, in any other IT solution to date. 

Dynatrace's online presence in APM "education" is second to none. Viewing the YouTube online videos, hearing the PurePerformance Podcast, getting to learn in Dynatrace University, and following the documentation is like being in performance heaven! You just can't grasp it all!

In the new Dynatrace solution, support for legacy applications is still not there. Given there is excellent support of legacy applications and protocols in the Appmon & DC RUM offers, they have the knowledge to put it there. Knowledge that their competition simply doesn't have.

One to three years.

Not seen one stability issue since I been dealing with it.

No issues with scalability. The solution is multi-tenant and based in Big data technology.

What impresses me more is the ability to be able to analyze 100% of all activity going on, and do that with so low overhead. I have not been able to observe more than 1% overhead, despite Dynatrace saying that it can be slightly higher in some situations. I sometimes get the impression that overhead might be negative (underhead?), because you can get rid of inefficiencies like log dumping, that typically have high (disk and CPU) overhead.

Support is just great. Part of it is public, so everyone can check it out. Dynatrace direct support is even better, and you sometimes get direct answers from the teams that are implementing the functionality.

I have worked with other APM, IT, and UX monitoring solutions before. None of them is even near what Dynatrace has to offer.

Never seen anything so complex be so simple to install.

Directly implemented.

Pricing can be high, especially for Portuguese standards. But as one says, you get what you pay for.

Setup cost is very low considering that it is an almost totally, automatic process. Installing SaaS or Managed is only some minutes away. Given that there is no configuration involved in the agents, you can develop how many you want per hour. It only depends on your IT deployment strategy. TCO is thus much lower than expected. Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier.

Since you cannot manage what you cannot measure, I do give the most importance to data quality. This is priceless. If you manage based on bad or incomplete data, you are leaping into the bad decisions direction.

The return might just be immediate. You install it and after minutes you are getting the full data in. The other day I compared Dynatrace to another APM solution, and the other person had been struggling nine months to get the data out. When he saw what Dynatrace did out-of-the-box, he simply could not believe it.

Finally, be prepared to be surprised! It is very fast pace. The Session Replay and the Augmented Reality are just two recent examples. Almost every day I get some new perspective in this field, like AIOps, and it just keeps getting faster! 

I use this solution for application monitoring.

The functionality needs improvement.

We do not see any major impacts on the stability of the product.

I would need to explore this further because I have not tested it further than our needs.

We have not needed tech support.

It is on the high-end of the price range of products.

I advise that when you are looking for a new product, consider:

• Features 
• Accuracy 
• Consistency

We use it to get the network stats and know how many clicks happened on both the front-end side and back-end side, then drill down on debiting to obtain the stats around that.

Dynatrace is working fine right now. It is working as we expected.

We can dig into Dynatrace to analyze data, then know where the user is going based on user navigation. 

Performance-wise, we can see if there are any issues. Then, we can dig into them.

It gives complete stats of the user and what they are doing.

Because we are financial, there are certain things that we cannot put on the cloud. However, that is a given fact, not only for us. It is a given fact for any financial company because of PCI compliance. Because of PCI compliance, companies don't take the risk of putting data in the cloud. Otherwise, we have had a very good experience with the cloud.

The stability is good. I have not seen any issues.

I would rate scalability at least an eight or nine out of ten.

Everything is excellent with technical support. Some of their personnel are our main point of contacts. They are always in touch with us.

The integration and configuration is very easy.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace is excellent. 

We did not evaluate any other products. Top management said. "Just go and use this."

It functions well. We are getting good support. It gives us everything that we were looking from it.

We use the on-premise version and have just begun onboarding the AWS version. 

We use it for application performance management (APM).

It alerts us, or can detect, potential problems which are building up. Then, it let us quickly adapt our websites.

• Dashboards
• Problem detection
• Troubleshooting

It is very stable and reliable.

We use a cloud version for everything that we look into, so we have had no issues. Scalability is working well.

The technical support is excellent.

We were previously using AppDynamics, then we switched to Dynatrace because it has more functionality, better additional components, and better management of problems. It also has a good AI.

The integration and configuration of this product were very easy.

It works quickly with all of our servers, databases, and load balancers. We are now testing it in AWS with AWS features.

It's helping us stay alive, afloat, and scale up as we need.

The pricing and licensing are very expensive.

Try it. It is a good product.

We have used both the AWS and on-premise versions. They are about the same for us.

The primary use case is for application performance management. So, we are using it to identify outages of different parts of the application as well as how we can make the application more efficient and rightsize it.

We can see down into the layers, such as with databases. We can see database queries which are causing problems. 

We can see CPU usage for different containers. I can do a run and see what errors exist in containers which are causing problems. We can rightsize containers on the fly and understand what is happening with our Docker, microservices, etc.

The most valuable feature is it has AI in it. The artificial intelligence (AI) engine in it is able to do alerts and some good analytics. During outages, it is able to identify and correlate where the actual root cause of a problem is. This connectivity allows us to be able to see a bit further into the application down through the layers. If it is a problem within AWS, a problem within a container or something that a user did. We are able to see and coordinate that, then we are able to tell the developers how to fix it.

The GUI has the most room for improvement. Sometimes, it can be a little cumbersome to find things and be able to create your own views, or be able to dig in and understand where things are.

Some additional features would be the ability to break out some of the permissions and allow some additional or different ways to tag services, events, and different things which run. We want to push down the ability to do that, so developers and other folks can get in there. Currently, more permissions are needed to be able to do certain things, and we want more people to be able to use it, own it, and understand it.

We don't put very much stress on it. We could probably stress it some more, but we don't have enough systems right now on it to stress it. For the most part, the ships don't cause as much stress. 

We are going to have it on about 40 ships around the world which will run it independently of our AWS platform. Those are don't stress it too much. We will probably stress it at a certain point, along with AWS, but we still very much growing the platform.

It can scale very well and very high. We don't need it to scale as much right now. It is able to absorb a lot of the systems that we have with the agents and and the API Gateways. It seems like it can scale very well when we need it to, so scalability is good for us right now.

If we needed technical support, we usually call our account team to help us figure out where the errors are, whether it is something with an agent or management servers.

It is pretty easy to integrate it into the AWS environment. You give it a username and password and it asks some basic permission. It can pull a lot of information very quickly. We are able to correlate more and provide more data for it. So, it was easy to integrate it into that environment.

We have it running on AWS. It integrates pretty well there. We have it on Red Hat Linux servers, as well as Windows servers. We have it running on VMware where it integrates very well. It understands these productions and understands our platform. It is able to read into Docker containers and all the databases that we run. However, it is limited as far as how many of a certain type of database that we can have, but for the most part, it runs pretty well and integrates very well.

It has been doing a good job of alerting us to issues. It has been very helpful and effective at identifying how we can do things to make our infrastructure and application a little better.

We considered AppDynamics, Datadog, and Crashlytics. We even considered things like Splunk for different pieces of it.

We chose Dynatrace because we needed something which could run both on AWS and VMware on our ships that might lose their Internet connectivity. This product gave us the flexibility of being able to do both. Dynatrace had the ability to run independently, so we could access it while it retains information.

A PoC is the best way to go. Put it against an application and go through the paces of tagging, analyzing, and alerting on it. You can understand what it does and how it does it. Give it a very complex application, so you can see how well it works.

We use the on-premise version because we have it running on VMware. We also use it on AWS to manage our systems on AWS for production and for our non-production environments.

Our primary use case for the product is going through logs and tracing through what has happened.

In general, it has helped me go through different logs more easily when something breaks.

Being able to quickly go through logs and figure out what is happening.

It needs a better way to figure out how to dig deeper into the details, e.g., sometimes we have to wade through multiple logs, etc. 

It has been stable. It doesn't break.

Its capabilities are good.

We have a couple AWS accounts that we are running on the cloud. Then, we have a lot of on-premises applications, as well.

The technical support is readily available.

The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment is pretty seamless and easy to configure.

We don't really integrate it with anything else.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was a pretty straightforward process. We had no hiccups.

I think the pricing is at a fair value for what it is.

We looked into New Relic and other logging solutions. 

After doing our research, we figured out that Dynatrace was the best for us.

It is a very useful product. 

Depending on your use case, try all the solutions out, then figure out which one is best.

We use Dynatrace for application monitoring.

We use this product with the goal to improve our abilities.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring of application performance.

I would like Dynatrace to be more flexible and user-friendly. They could do more in-depth analysis of the application monitoring. Also, they also could do some type of anomaly detection with positioning and have better integration with AWS.

So far, the scalability has been okay. Our customer base is hundreds of thousands.

The product needs a lot of the support, especially on the consulting side and post sales. You will also need an administrator.

I was not involved in the decision-making process. However, there are more competitive products on the market, which are more user-friendly, feature-rich, etc.

Research into similar products. 

It adapts well for integration with other products in our environment.

We don't use it for AWS.