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CA Application Delivery Analysis [EOL] vs Dynatrace comparison

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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

CA Application Delivery Ana...
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
4
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)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1237194 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Director, DevOps at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Good monitoring functionality, but technical support and integration with other products need to be improved
My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances. For CA Spectrum, the integration of this product is something that needs to be improved. Even some of their point products to not integrate very well, and ADA is one of them. The user interface needs to be improved. Technical support needs to be improved.
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

"Technical support is excellent."
"Once it is setup and seeing traffic, it is an impressive tool to show potential problems long before the general users are complaining."
"The most valuable feature is the fault management monitoring."
"The pricing is relatively low compared to other solutions in this area, and I'd go so far as to say it's even significantly less than the competition."
"The real-user monitoring is mostly used to gauge the difference in performance for multitenant applications, This is so we can discern if there are any local network or client-facing issues when we do a comparison between each customer. It is quite important for us to be able to identify a client-side issue, as opposed to a feature managed problem, because we're essentially providing managed services of business applications."
"I can get everything on a single page."
"The deployment itself is very easy and straightforward."
"Specifically, for the subteams that I'm on, it's very much allowed us to get real insights into the impacts of our changes, see pre- and post-metrics, and be able to provide dashboards for our business, which has been extremely valuable."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The dashboard is the most useful aspect of the solution."
"The Dashboard is very useful, as you can monitor different parameters on the same screen."
 

Cons

"The user interface needs improvement."
"Upgrades can be quite complex."
"Hard to setup right, hard to get the conversations right."
"My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances."
"It is not the best product on the market, but it is better than the competition if you were comparing prices."
"There continues to be some opportunity to expose the infrastructure from a broader reporting standpoint. Overall, the opportunity is in the reporting capability and the ability to more flexibly expose or pivot the data for deeper analysis. Oftentimes, the solution is good at looking narrowly at information, but when you want to broaden that perspective, that's where the challenges come in. At this point, it requires the export of data to external systems to do this."
"The thread traceability is something that needs improvement."
"Waiting for the session replay needs improvement."
"Session export for offline analysis, like it was in AppMon, would be also nice."
"The con of Dynatrace is that, at times, because it has so much information, it becomes difficult to see the root cause of your problem, and then you have to dig around to find the root cause."
"RFAs submitted via the forum need to be answered or resolved quickly."
"Dynatrace could be improved by having a fully functional applications and infrastructure monitoring feature. Their existing stack, which is SNMP-based, does not have full infrastructure monitoring, whereas if we compare it with other solutions like New Relic or Datadog, they have moved into infrastructure monitoring. The second improvement I would suggest is in regards to the cost. So far, Dynatrace is the most expensive APM that we sell, even compared to New Relic. I think they can improve a little bit in terms of the license pricing."
"I would like the ability to export a user session into csv format. (I am aware that I can export a user session via a webhook)."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an expensive solution and there is a single price to pay for licensing, with no options."
"​Do a PoC and see if you like it."
"​Make sure your leadership buy-in is in place. Ensure leadership understands that an APM solution is a fairly expensive, so they know what they are getting into."
"Time to value was surprisingly fast."
"We purchased a subscription for one year and it is an expensive solution for a large enterprise like ours."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was a pretty straightforward process. We had no hiccups."
"The licensing model is confusing in solutioning clients for the number of hosts needed to deploy."
"The solution is not cheap."
"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.​"
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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 ADA, Application Delivery Analysis, NetQoS SuperAgent
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ERGO
TD Bank, Zurich North America, Accenture, Macquarie, United Airlines, Raymond James, BT, Vodafone, Air France-KLM, TELUS, American Airlines, Air Canada, ADT, Virgin Money
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