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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
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 August 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 5.0%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dynatrace5.0%
CA App Synthetic Monitor0.5%
Other94.5%
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."
"The main benefit of Dynatrace is that it's easy to understand where exactly the issue is; when you see the PurePath, you know which particular machine or hop the application is having an issue with, allowing us to easily drill down to what is happening with the application."
"Enables my performance engineer to recreate a problem and give the developers what's happening, where to go look, all the information they need to be able to find what the root cause is."
"UEM helps to identify user experience and detailed steps performed by the user."
"In terms of one tool, right now I’m seeing Dynatrace can do a lot of things: the entire DevOps, infrastructure, application performance monitoring, all that can be done using just one tool."
"Since we moved to OneAgent, we are much quicker to address live incidents and problems that occur in our systems."
"It severely reduces the time spent doing performance test cycles."
"We have strongly evangelise to go ahead with Dynatrace OneAgent because we have reaped the benefits within the last six months."
"Dynatrace Appmon provides us with the ability to proactively identify issues within our systems which could be impacting our customers."
 

Cons

"The RBMS component is limited as you can only record using Internet Explorer."
"Pricing makes little sense. We had examples where it would be cheaper to have two basic accounts than one intermediate."
"It needs certain UI changes to make going back to certain Windows easier. Certain windows open up in a different category with different set values and throw you off if you are not used to it."
"With Dynatrace we need to upgrade and restart often. New Relic is more stable than Dynatrace."
"They should include more mission learning into the product and provide additional performance metrics for application learning."
"Right now, for AppMon, the maximum handling load, the transaction per minute, is around 6,500. We had an issue on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, some kind of stability issue for users who could not log in. I want to see an increase in the load, at least to 7,000 or 8,000 transactions per second"
"It could improve its GUI interface. The GUI design is too crowded and the icons are small. Sometimes I end up clicking on the wrong button."
"One of the features that we are lacking is on the reports side. We don't have much reporting available. And the dashboards. I checked on their blog and they said that they are working on the dashboard front where you can create the dashboards. We do have dashboards available. They said they are bringing in a lot of things there, so I'm looking forward to that, on reports."
"I would like to see internal synthetic tests in the next release, which is already on the roadmap.​"
"The problem evaluation feature is an awesome idea, but bit difficult to pick up initially."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We found a tool that can be utilized by testing, DevOps, marketing, software engineering, and monitoring. Before, we always had everybody doing their own thing. Now, everybody's utilizing one tool, which is huge. That is a huge savings."
"Everything is great, but the licensing could always be cheaper. With the every growing tool set of Ops teams, we find it harder to budget for tooling while ensuring we still have the proper insight into our applications."
"If there are no corporate requirements to run Dynatrace Managed (operating it yourself), I would definitely go for the size option. For small and medium-sized companies, the size option is probably the cheapest one. You don't need to look into operating it. You don't need to run hardware. It is pay as you go."
"Dynatrace is still kind of an expensive solution compared to others. But I recognize that they are ahead of the competition when we do a feature by feature comparison."
"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."
"It is quite expensive for startups."
"The pricing and licensing are very expensive."
"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
19%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
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

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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

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: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.