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CA App Synthetic Monitor vs Dynatrace comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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

CA App Synthetic Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
68th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
360
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of CA App Synthetic Monitor is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 5.5%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dynatrace5.5%
CA App Synthetic Monitor0.5%
Other94.0%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2286675 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
A reliable solution for SSL offloading and to encrypt outside traffic
If you are responsible for monitoring the logs in F5, it isn't very easy. The format is complicated compared to different vendors. For example, Fortinet and Cisco have feasible formats for sending and fetching logs. Suppose I'm monitoring the logs and everything, and when I am retrieving logs from F5, I want to know whether it is regular traffic or any abnormality is happening. The logs itself is not user-friendly. It may not give you a clear way of what's happening. You have to go through different websites and work on it. You have to waste so much time on it.
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

"From our experience, it really helps managers in measuring application SLAs and viewing historical performance data."
"Each had strengths in one area or another, but CA covered the majority of our needs end-to-end."
"Helps in managing capacity planning, services performance, and tuning database performance and optimizing queries."
"When collecting data with Dynatrace, we saw every single transaction that happened in real-time."
"Email alert and mobile app alert are very useful for informing the team that something is going wrong."
"The most valuable feature is capture of 100% of the traffic, and exposure to downstream services that gives visibility to some pieces that might be forgotten or even obscured."
"With this information, we have been able to avoid issues before they actually happen, which is fantastic."
"It has more functionality, better additional components, and better management of problems. It also has a good AI."
"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."
"It will allow us to eventually become more proactive when problems start arising; we can see them before they happen and address them before there is any impact to our customers."
 

Cons

"Pricing makes little sense. We had examples where it would be cheaper to have two basic accounts than one intermediate."
"The RBMS component is limited as you can only record using Internet Explorer."
"The Web UI can be slow and hard to understand."
"I did like the old dashboards, the legacy 6.3 for example; the way we were able to do the dashboarding in the client. I would like to be able to see that in the new version of Dynatrace."
"I'd like to see more agents ready to be deployed. I know that it's possible to develop integration with Dynatrace API, but in day-to-day operations it's hard to do that kind of customization. So if they had more agents for more platforms and more applications, I think it would be better."
"There are two main features that we're very interested in. Number one is, when the tool ingests data from other tools, being able to correlate those with the existing topology, so that the AI engine can draw more conclusions in case Dynatrace does not monitor those instances."
"Under heavyweight, Dynatrace becomes slower when listing PurePaths."
"They should include more mission learning into the product and provide additional performance metrics for application learning."
"Custom reporting capabilities should be extended, because it now has basic charting capabilities."
"The UX/UI needs improvement. It is not easy to learn."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The cost is somewhat high."
"Product pricing can seem a little over complex, however this is minor and does not detract from the benefits of the solution."
"Its licensing is complicated or not transparent."
"The price could be improved."
"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."
"Pricing is still too expensive."
"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."
"Decodes on less used/popular protocols are available, but they should be included. Additional investment should not be required."
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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
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise300
 

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

CA ASM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Lexmark
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 CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. Dynatrace and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.