No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Aternity AppInternals [EOL] vs Dynatrace comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Aternity AppInternals [EOL]
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Dynatrace
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
359
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (3rd)
 

Q&A Highlights

JS
Pre-Sales at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees
Nov 13, 2017
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1374792 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Support Specialist at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Great for visibility but lacks many features and difficult to update
We're customers. We don't have a special relationship with the company. I am the operation's application administrator. At the moment, the solution is monitoring the applications that we want it to monitor. We're not looking at it on a daily basis. We just use it here and there. The challenge we have is that we believe that Dynatrace can address some tasks we'd like done that are not possible to execute on this solution. Dynatrace includes monitoring of not just the logs, but the applications as well. Dynatrace also makes us include firewalls, etc. We could have it so there are end to end solutions or identifications within the process. What we have right now is only the app server as well as the database server and its connectivity. The solution does save time that's caused when creating SQL coding. However, there are some issues around AppInternals changing the code and giving us issues. From the point of view of the top management, we want a more permanent solution. We want to identify what causes issues and we are looking for a more end-to-end solution. That is why we are looking at Dynatrace. I don't know if I have any advice for other organizations. The experience I have is only based on my own limited experience. However, I believe that the application has the potential to be really good if it identifies what is really important to an organization. It's still sort of half-baked without AppResponse. Without the other key features in infrastructure, like the network, firewalls, and proxies, it's lacking. It's not fully complete. I'd rate the solution six out of ten. It addresses some of our needs, but there's a lot lacking that could be added to make it a fuller, more interesting product.
Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
AI-driven insights have reduced downtime and improved cross-team collaboration
We encountered some challenges while using Dynatrace. Although the initial setup was smooth, fine-tuning alert thresholds and custom metrics took some time. Another challenge was that Dynatrace charges based on host units, so we had to carefully plan our agent deployments. The licensing model is expensive. Additionally, the complexity of setup is an issue. While OneAgent and auto-discover services are powerful, the setup is more complex compared to other tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. These integrations are simple and basic, but Dynatrace setup requires more complexity based on the environment. For new users wanting to use Dynatrace, it is difficult. However, the AI-related solutions and metrics took us to the next level for identifying and fixing things. Dynatrace requires an agent for operation. OneAgent is powerful, but it is also resource-heavy. On lightweight nodes or older systems, the agent can slightly impact performance. If Dynatrace could implement a lightweight agent behavior, we could make things faster. Additionally, if Dynatrace could add a long-term retention policy so that we could store more data and find fine-grained details, that would help us. While Dynatrace managed edition supports on-premises deployment, the SaaS version depends on cloud connectivity. For highly regulated or air-gapped environments, setup and updates can be challenging. Although the initial setup is smooth, if someone wants to fine-tune it and fully understand the tool end-to-end, it could be tricky.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I like it that one can match IPs with the application name."
"Transaction Tracing is the most useful. Being able to have the transaction stitched together so we can see where the problem is has proven invaluable."
"Many times what might have taken hours or days can be resolved in a few minutes."
"We just control on the backend of AppInternals what we want to instrument and what we don't want to instrument."
"The capability of analysing each individual transaction captured to a very low level detail (method call/line of code)."
"Mean time to isolate a problem has dropped by 50-75% in each region since we've deployed the Riverbed SteelCentral suite."
"By going to v10 it made our lives a whole lot easier because prior to v10, we had to put all of these assets, these Riverbed arguments, basically JVM start up itself."
"As an Administrator, before we bought this AppInternals, I didn't have visibility on why items were slow or why an application was not running. This gives us the ability to see what's going on. The application is load balancing. We can now see if its own server has issues or just one specific server has issues."
"We really liked the OneAgent technology automated instrumentation, it is impressive, better than the competitors, AppDynamics."
"The ability to real-time monitor servers and databases without any major drain on application resources is invaluable."
"Prior to the use of Appmon, our team was in the dark; we had zero visibility into our production application, and it would take up to days to find out why our clients were being impacted and how, but since Appmon has been leveraged, we are now down to just hours (sometimes minutes) in resolution times."
"We can analyse problems more quickly, and detecting problems becomes easier with Dynatrace."
"From a diagnosing standpoint, it has been a game changer. Before, we did not have monitoring, so anytime there was an issue, it was just guess-and-check."
"We can know exactly what happened in what time with PurePath."
"It helps our organization identify potential problems by doing thorough analysis of systems which integrate with one another."
"It prevents (together with performance testing) production performance issues which usually result in customer complaints or system downtime."
 

Cons

"Deployment and agent patch management is not managed centrally, resulting in a large level of effort to update."
"I would like for it to have automated updates, the way the product updates itself should be all automated, as opposed to what it is now."
"It would be great if the solution could offer fixed bundles and more features."
"We have put in a request as an enhancement that we would like to search for items. If we're searching for a URL and we want to know was it a get or was it a post."
"There are some functional bugs when using TTW and making report queries (to generate graphs)."
"It's not as good as it was three years ago before meddling by an activist investor, privatization, and subsequent layoffs hurt support."
"We had issues with the end-to-end view of unique customer: reviewing end-to-end customer problems to see where a problem is about customer, code, DB or network."
"We'd like to be able to find out performance problems on application class and methods."
"The pricing of the product could be improved. It's still very expensive compared to other solutions, although it is the best one."
"It needs container log monitoring."
"The customer support is not quick and helpful at this stage. We are deploying Dynatrace into our network. I've raised a couple of technical questions with the support team but the response was not fast and didn't cover all my questions at all."
"I still don't see the full depth of database metrics for database performance management. For example, I use Oracle Enterprise Manager and I use a type of access that provides me a lot of metrics and meaningful ways to evaluate database performance. That is something I don't see in Dynatrace yet."
"We're developing more and more microservices and, each time, for an AppMon license, you have to deploy it, you have to configure it, you to get charged for it. It's very time-consuming."
"The web interface, in some cases, is a little ambiguous to use."
"Custom reporting is still missing."
"When you're making that transition from AppMon, which is very dashboard-oriented, over to Dynatrace, which is no dashboards, there needs to be something in between so that business buys in a little bit. I would transition my dashboards over so that we don't have to recreate them, because recreating them is very difficult in Dynatrace. It's really hard to say, "Oh, the dashboards that you had on the team that you were using, you're not going to get over here." Or, "You have to re-create them all over again." People are going to ask questions about cost, who is going to do that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing model is expensive compared to its competitors, but the service it gives to your business, and the data quality, means that it's worth it."
"The licensing model for v9 is better where it is an individual license per server, while v10 licenses are per JVM/ .NET and server instance. The latter model appears to be the model that other APM vendors are using."
"I have not been able to observe more than 1% overhead, despite Dynatrace saying that it can be slightly higher in some situations."
"​Do a PoC and see if you like it."
"Dynatrace is the most expensive APM that we sell, compared to competitors' products. The license pricing could be improved. My customers pay for licensing yearly."
"The pricing is not bad, but it could be better."
"The product is really fast to implement and gives customers instant value. This is important, because it reduces costs on the implementation."
"Its license is a bit expensive. We renew it yearly."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was a pretty straightforward process. We had no hiccups."
"Its licensing is complicated or not transparent."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Answers from the Community

JS
Pre-Sales at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees
Nov 13, 2017
Nov 13, 2017
i don't 100% agree what @Scott mention. 1st - Please refer to the latest Magic Quadrant NPM & APM Dynatrace is good in APM space but Riverbed is offering end to end monitoring in NPM & APM space and the latest acquisition Aternity expands Riverbed’s SteelCentral offerings up to the end users performance monitoring level wish i personally love it. Traditional solutions base in DC to a...
2 out of 7 answers
it_user758499 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer IT with 501-1,000 employees
Nov 9, 2017
Riverbed is more of an NPM probe-based offering and only has a moderate level of application awareness. It is more aligned with Dynatrace’s DCRUM offering competitively. https://www.dynatrace.com/topics/performance-test/data-center-monitoring/ At some point our DCRUM will be integrated into the Dynatrace product, so one great thing coming is you will truly have a single platform/pane of glass for everyone down to the full network detail. For now, it is still a separate entity. Although Riverbed offers strong NETWORK analytics, it is not going to provide the application layer detail and provide a holistic all in one offering like Dynatrace does with RUM, webchecks, cloud, containers, network, infrastructure. It also samples and doesn’t provide a high fidelity of data. Dynatrace looks at every transaction, so we offer gap-free visibility into performance, bottlenecks, and issues. This is also important if you want to understand user and performance trends and understand where to align resources and focus on areas of development. With Riverbed, you’ll be making a lot of assumptions based on their sampling/averages output. It’s going to take you a month plus to evaluate it…minimum. It takes weeks to set it up and configure. And the cost of services to get installed and trained is costly. So ease of use with what you evaluated is not comparable. Dynatrace installs in 3 mins or less and our ROI is typically within 2-3 months. Maintenance of Riverbed is huge. Dynatrace is automatic in providing releases and upgrades, zero maintenance. Riverbed is going to require taking things off line, doing the updates, and putting things back on line. Lots of manual effort. Riverbed strongly emphasizes packet capture capabilities so it’s appealing to the network team. It captures and records everything from the wire and applies very light weight analytics. It’s a very reactive approach. If you want to apply the application layer information into the networking piece, you will be purchasing and managing multiple components instead of just one with Dynatrace. Dynatrace is application centric however it does provide some network analytics in relation to the performance of the applications it’s monitoring; This is like comparing an apple to a banana. So, for me, the top areas in which Dynatrace is better: • Ease of use, zero maintenance • Higher fidelity of data with Dynatrace-no sampling, aggregates or averages like you’d get from Riverbed. • Quicker ROI and user adoption • We show you every user, every app, everywhere. We provide gap free data from end-user, code, infrastructure, network. No blind spots, no samples, no averages. So no matter what device you are operating on, we’ll provide gap free visibility into performance. • Zero manual configuration. Just install one agent per host, we monitor everything. • AI gives you auto-everything. Automates, discovery, modelling, analysis, troubleshooting and stops you from having to figure this all out manually. • Automated root cause analysis. Avoid alert storms, get one single notification. • Seamless integration for cloud and containers.
it_user381273 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Nov 9, 2017
I am not familiar with these two anymore. I'm sure you can Google around as well as I can for general impressions, pricing, etc. I'll offer a bit of process guidance, though: Read the Release Notes for the latest version of each product. That will indicate what each company finds significant, and you can judge how well that aligns with the needs of your platform and your mgmt.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise299
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Any advice about APM solutions?
The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...
What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?
While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
 

Also Known As

SteelCentral AppInternals, OPNET ACE, AppInternals Xpert
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Instruments, Allianz
Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.