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CA Application Delivery Analysis [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

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
360
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (2nd), Log Management (5th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (2nd)
 

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

"Once it is setup and seeing traffic, it is an impressive tool to show potential problems long before the general users are complaining."
"The pricing is relatively low compared to other solutions in this area. I'd go so far as to say it's even significantly less than the competition."
"Technical support is excellent."
"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 most valuable feature is the fault management monitoring."
"Daily metrics which us analyze the page composition and the corresponding performance metrics so we can quickly and easily determine when something has changed, to aid in root cause analysis."
"Reduced MTTR, thanks to smart problem detection and automated root cause analysis."
"Automation and anomaly detection has helped reduce MTTR and MTBF."
"It helps our organization identify potential problems by doing thorough analysis of systems which integrate with one another."
"Dynatrace helps in that we can easily get one view, correlate, and everything will be one single pane."
"We have used PurePath data (response times) to improve and tune application performance."
"The memory dumps, the tracing, and PurePath. All the tracing that you can do with the tool is, for us, our life. It's our daily job and it saves us a lot of time looking for performance issues."
"I am able to customize my dashboard based on the test requirement and it helps me to focus on the area that really needs close monitoring."
 

Cons

"My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances."
"The user interface needs improvement."
"It is not the best product on the market, but it is better than the competition if you were comparing prices."
"My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances."
"Hard to setup right, hard to get the conversations right."
"Upgrades can be quite complex."
"I still don't see the full depth of database metrics for database performance management."
"It needs to focus more on open source areas, like Apache umbrella products and availability monitoring areas."
"Improvements in Synthetic monitoring would be great. Certain features of thick client, if available in the web interface, would also be a great improvement."
"For the manage services, they work on CloudWatch logs and are given CloudWatch logs only. I would like more collaboration with AWS and insight into CloudWatch services."
"Most of the time, chat support is not good enough for answering queries."
"Some of the APIs and integrations are a bit tougher than others to integrate."
"We're not quite there yet, but the thing I would like to see is to really have that view of how issues relate to the business. Often enough, the tools that IT have for IT stop at the IT level. They cannot go into the business level part. They can't understand, because they don't have the information that the business needs to provide them with - for example how much an hour of downtime costs the business. For us, in IT, it's an hour of downtime, but it equates to money and equates to hours lost and equates to a lot of things, and often enough we don't have that information. This is where I would like to see us going."
"We're thinking about moving to Dynatrace because AppMon is not scaling for us."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an expensive solution and there is a single price to pay for licensing, with no options."
"I think the pricing is at a fair value for what it is."
"The product is superior to others, but it comes with a price tag that is often difficult to position back to clients."
"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.​"
"There was also some complexity in the adoption rate of it because of how costly the licensing is."
"I think that the price is reasonable."
"You get a really well-planned out monitoring suite for the money spent."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was a pretty straightforward process. We had no hiccups."
"The solution is not cheap."
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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 Business78
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 ADA, Application Delivery Analysis, NetQoS SuperAgent
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ERGO
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: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.