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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
360
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (5th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (2nd)
 

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

"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."
"Synthetic transactions, WMI and SNMP query capability."
"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."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is the integration with their other systems. It's easy to understand and it points out the relevant problems in the enterprise."
"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."
"My advice to others would be to use this solution for monitoring."
"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, and this gives us the ability to see what's going on."
"If you want to save time for problem resolution, and to address problem on your environments you should try Riverbed OPNET."
"Dynatrace is a single platform. It has all these different tools but they are actually all baked into the OneAgent technology. Within that OneAgent... 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."
"Since we moved to OneAgent, we are much quicker to address live incidents and problems that occur in our systems."
"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."
"Using that telemetry from Dynatrace, we are able to pinpoint what our performance issues are so we can tune the system."
"I'm also involved on the practical side, putting in all the automation, that automation platform. To have a tool like Dynatrace, where I don't have to work out for hours how to configure and set up alerts and monitoring - especially in a solution that is not completed yet - it's not only a major time-saver, but I know going forward that it will be able to learn how the system operates. Day one, we're getting all of that stuff for free, out-of-the-box."
"Service discovery with artificial intelligence automatic anomaly root cause detection, and problems replay."
"The cloud integration, because it allows us to monitor serverless services as well as Docker containers, etc."
"The real-time monitoring, which we are getting, is amazing."
 

Cons

"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."
"Deployment and agent patch management is not managed centrally, resulting in a large level of effort to update."
"The technical support is not very good and should be improved."
"Deployment and agent patch management is not managed centrally, resulting in a large level of effort to update."
"Support for PHP, DB and other applications need to be supported."
"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."
"It's not as good as it was three years ago before meddling by an activist investor, privatization, and subsequent layoffs hurt support."
"It would be great if the solution could offer fixed bundles and more features."
"The products or company go through a rebrand/renaming about once a year, which creates some confusion with our customers."
"I would like to see an App store for plugins and extensions."
"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."
"I would like more flexible data export functions and APIs."
"Nginx monitoring service did not work out-of-the-box, so we had to tinker with it for quite some time."
"I would suggest to have more rich client features on Appmon as soon as possible."
"We have a couple of one page apps that it has a problem with because it doesn't call to the server all the time. I believe part of that is taken care of in the next version."
"The scalability is there, but it is a headache when you do a lot of stuff and when you need to compare a lot of servers and do a lot of things. The scalability is very difficult to maintain."
 

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."
"Dynatrace's pricing for their consumption units is rather arcane compared to some of the other tools, thus making forward-looking calculations based on capacity planning quite hard."
"Look at the product and the product features, not the price. Too often people look at the price and turn away. Dynatrace costs a little bit more than the other products I researched, but it can do far more.​"
"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."
"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."
"Consider volume because that is where you will get the most benefit. Doing a point solution is not cost-effective."
"​Do a PoC and see if you like it."
"The product is superior to others, but it comes with a price tag that is often difficult to position back to clients."
"I would like to see them improve on their licensing and the cost. It's been a challenge for us because the way they have it broken out right now, you have to buy it by units. It's hard for us to know where to put those units because our company is broken up into all these different business units, so it's been challenging in that sense. I just would like to see them improve that model a little bit."
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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
21%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
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 Enterprise300
 

Questions from the Community

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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
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