No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Dynatrace vs Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] 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

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 (5th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (3rd)
Quest Foglight for APM [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

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.
AK
Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Drill-down monitoring shows us the entire transaction chain, from the front end to back end. It needs HTML5 interface.
I want to see a new interface that contains HTML5 features. The current version of Foglight (on-premise edition) is so fusty in comparison with leaders of Gartner APM Quadrant - i.e. Appdynamics, NewRelic, Dynatrace. If you try to compare SaaS and on-premise Foglight versions you can see differences in UI-design. It's my subjective experiences, but SaaS version looks more modern. Hope this helps

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It prevents (together with performance testing) production performance issues which usually result in customer complaints or system downtime."
"Everybody can show charts and metrics, but Dynatrace’s infographics are amazing. The dashboarding is simply best in class.​"
"We can analyse problems more quickly, and detecting problems becomes easier with Dynatrace."
"The speed and problem resolution."
"It is a robust solution that would help anyone get to the solution and resolution pretty fast.​"
"It has helped us improve the performance of many of our applications."
"​The stability for the solution is pretty solid overall."
"Dynatrace's power lies in its ability to inspect and chart transactions, and draw the PurePath tree."
"Infrastructure Monitoring and End User Monitoring are the product’s most valuable features to me."
"Capacity on database and file servers. I found the algorithms to forecast growth and concerns particularly intuitive."
"Excellent monitoring capability and business service views"
"This level of viewable monitoring had many benefits such as alerting, scalability, reporting and service dashboard we could promote."
"A lot of features for the price: Java/.Net instrumentation, End User replay (similar to TeaLeaf), and a huge library of monitoring cartridges."
"With the APM you can replay the end user session and see issues quickly by viewing the session."
"Foglight has been our go to monitoring tool for several years in the DB2 and Oracle space."
"It was easy and saved costs."
 

Cons

"With Dynatrace in our environment, the managed server required root access to run. As a government agency with tight security, this has been an audit concern for us."
"There's no download action for the reports, so if they could add something like that, it would add value for us. We cannot save data for more than seven to 10 days, so it would be better to add a feature for downloading. At least we could store the data and then we could compare for ourselves, where we are starting and where we are and where we are heading. I would have those metrics."
"If you want to see a month's data, it keeps on spinning. Here is an improvement which needs to happen, which is the case with all applications or tools. There is a lot of data, and either we have to change the way we are logging or the application needs to be enhanced."
"Financially, Dynatrace was a lot more expensive than AppDynamics."
"Monitoring asynchronous code requires manual instrumentation (most of the time)."
"I'd like to see native support, because we're launching native apps in multiple countries so we really want to have a really good feel for how those apps are going and how well they're performing, if there are issues."
"I still don't see the full depth of database metrics for database performance management."
"There is a limitation on timeframe. Now, if you look at the dashboard, it will state five minutes, then 15 minutes, then one hour, then six hours, and finally 24 hours. I would like them to provide a set of options defining the business hour."
"I want to see mobile access application in the next release."
"We have not realized a good ROI on the product due to the fact that we were not able to monitor our core application which runs on Webmethods."
"SQL agents often failed but again this may have been addressed in future versions."
"The “cartridge” concept for every little thing is a bit of a bother to implement."
"We had stability issues for FTR. The player used to get hung while running the robot scripts."
"Being able to incorporate other bespoke monitoring into Foglight would have made the tool even more useful."
"My only complaint from Foglight for monitoring is that you only get a plot for five minute average for metrics like CPU and Memory, on the application side I can see metrics more quickly at 15 seconds for metrics like active sessions, heap."
"Complicated setup and maintenance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price range is quite high."
"As compared to New Relic and other providers, it is more expensive, which is its biggest disadvantage. Its biggest advantage is its capability. It is more feature-rich."
"Licensing is a bit complicated for Dynatrace, and pricing is dependent on how much your organization invests."
"They could improve their price ranges, as there is no option for startups or testing."
"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.​"
"​A Dynatrace partner will always be willing to give you a trial. Go through the trial to see if there is a benefit for your company."
"The only limitation with scaling to cloud-native environments is licensing. It all depends on how many DEM units you're willing to license. The more of DEM units that you purchase, the more user data you can collect."
"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."
"The price is expensive for us."
"I recall it being a very expensive solution relative to function and stability."
"Since the product split – the licensing is a bit more complex."
"Foglight can be expensive I would go with the pricing at a three year deal."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
885,728 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise299
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

No data available
Foglight, Dell Foglight
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Anji Automotive Logistics, Unimat, Priceline.com
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: March 2026.
885,728 professionals have used our research since 2012.