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CA App Synthetic Monitor vs Dynatrace comparison

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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
73rd
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
359
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of CA App Synthetic Monitor is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 4.8%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dynatrace4.8%
CA App Synthetic Monitor0.6%
Other94.6%
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

"Each had strengths in one area or another, but CA covered the majority of our needs end-to-end."
"From our experience, it really helps managers in measuring application SLAs and viewing historical performance data."
"We are using it on most of our platforms, which are on a big scale and across the globe."
"Their support system is good. I would rate them at 9.5 out of ten."
"The monitoring is very good."
"What I like about it, is how it auto-discovers everything rapidly; within a matter of seconds you get to see the business transaction and how it's mapped within the product itself."
"PurePaths. The ability to see the transaction flow of the web request. It's valuable because our developers, when we have an issue, they can drill down to see exactly where in the application, the call in the application; where the high response time is, or where something is wrong."
"The ability to take each individual request and dive in to inspect what methods and calls are being made is extremely helpful."
"Overall, it is an amazing tool for application root cause analysis and business function analytics."
"The ability to really drill into performance issues and help our application teams understand what is causing the business's problems."
 

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."
"So far, we have not achieved the benefit of preventing issues."
"There is still a certain amount of technical skills needed to be able to understand what you are seeing on it, and you also need a large amount of technical or infrastructure skills to understand how and where to install it."
"Beginner video tutorials would really help."
"Make sure older frameworks, like PHP 5.3, are supported."
"It is necessary to improve the integration with the product, Oracle Siebel."
"It does not have mature enough dashboards.​"
"Our main problems have been that it has a high learning curve to it. I've used it for about three years now and I'm still learning it. There are some videos and there is some documentation out there, but it still requires you to delve into the tool to learn it. A little bit more comprehensive self-paced training would help."
"They need a capability similar to Tealeaf where you can actually view what the consumer is doing and record the sessions. That is the biggest missing element."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Product pricing can seem a little over complex, however this is minor and does not detract from the benefits of the solution."
"This is an expensive solution, but it is also worth the money."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace is excellent."
"The pricing is not bad, but it could be better."
"Decodes on less used/popular protocols are available, but they should be included. Additional investment should not be required."
"The licensing model is confusing in solutioning clients for the number of hosts needed to deploy."
"There was also some complexity in the adoption rate of it because of how costly the licensing is."
"The limitations I see are more to do - and maybe it's because of the nature of the job I have - but they have to do with pricing. It's a little bit pricey. It's a very good tool. It's worth the price, to a certain degree. But it's hard to justify when it's that costly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
18%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
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

CA ASM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Lexmark
TD Bank, Zurich North America, Accenture, Macquarie, United Airlines, Raymond James, BT, Vodafone, Air France-KLM, TELUS, American Airlines, Air Canada, ADT, Virgin Money
Find out what your peers are saying about CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. Dynatrace and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.