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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
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

"Browsermetrix, which is real-user monitoring via JS injection and linked back to TTW via cookie. It allows us to see the experience of every user hitting our sites and analyze performance by region, browser, etc."
"From the experience I had with these three tools, I realized that Riverbed was superior in all aspects (performance, user experience, and features)."
"We just control on the backend of AppInternals what we want to instrument and what we don't want to instrument."
"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."
"Mean time to isolate a problem has dropped by 50-75% in each region since we've deployed the Riverbed SteelCentral suite."
"I like it that one can match IPs with the application name."
"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."
"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."
"Dynatrace has significantly improved our organization by providing full-stack visibility and automated root cause analysis, helping us detect and resolve issues faster, reduce downtime, and improve user experience."
"So, overall I recommend Dynatrace."
"Never seen anything so complex be so simple to install."
"The solution offers a better overview of applications. It offers end-to-end monitoring, and the user experience is real."
"We got to know which modules of my application are used more by the customers, as well as which modules of my application are very slow, and using this tool I got to know even before the customer told me that a particular module was not working, so when the alert came we resolved the issue proactively and the customer's satisfaction improved overall."
"Improved visibility on performance and application issues."
"Real user monitoring is one of the best things in solution. The possibility to analyze any particular user session is wonderful."
"We spend less time investing in problems, and we can spend more time on developing new projects."
 

Cons

"It's not as good as it was three years ago before meddling by an activist investor, privatization, and subsequent layoffs hurt support."
"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."
"The recording mechanism for synthetic transactions could be improved as well."
"The technical support is not very good and should be improved."
"There are some functional bugs when using TTW and making report queries (to generate graphs)."
"Deployment and agent patch management is not managed centrally, resulting in a large level of effort to update."
"They should find a way for report generation from TTW to run quicker."
"It wasn't a critical issue, but it was hot enough to where it would have been nice to get some guidance from Riverbed, but they went ahead and let us down, but that was only one occasion."
"We would like to see more dashboarding capabilities and the ability to export custom reports."
"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."
"For the user, for the customer, they expect a solution to be not so expensive."
"SSO options are missing."
"The reason I don't rate it higher is that the learning curve on the tool is, you have to have some experience with it to be able to figure out where to find things and the best way to get to things."
"I need more experience.​"
"Dynatrace itself is a very good platform where the UI interface is very simple and usable, but I would say if it were made even more simple, similar to our Splunk dashboard, that could help users or newer users understand it more easily, especially since sometimes I have seen when using Dynatrace, we are not able to add the time frame properly."
"With Dynatrace we need to upgrade and restart often. New Relic is more stable than Dynatrace."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"There is time savings. People's times have been cut in half using this solution because we were previously doing a lot of that manual work. Now, it's a lot more automated, and the data is just there."
"The pricing is a little high, but still cheaper than competitors because Dynatrace at least has pay-as-you-go. Others do not. However, the pricing is confusing. I wish it was more simplified when trying to price out moving to a yearly contract."
"The setup costs for Dynatrace are low, however licensing costs are high."
"The cost is somewhat high."
"We have a three-year contract. We have 30 licenses for the full stack and 3 licenses for the DEM unit."
"We found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost."
"Dynatrace is bit costly and not easily affordable."
"The licensing for Dynatrace is high. If you want to go for monitoring solutions, then why Dynatrace? If you have a particular budget, you can go for many other monitoring tools - apart from Dynatrace - and they can help you more and give more data than Dynatrace can. It's not worth the money that you spend for Dynatrace."
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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
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

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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
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: August 2026.
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