Dynatrace Reviews

Dynatrace is an extremely helpful APM solution in large, complex environments, whenever we need to have an integrated vision of our users, infrastructure, and applications. It excels when we need to do all this with the lowest resources possible, with the best data quality, across all layers, and with the least management overhead. 

The first time I came across Dynatrace, I simply remember the WOW factor. Being a performance enthusiast since the mid 80's, I cannot remember more than a handful of such technical experiences!

Dynatrace excels in troubleshooting scenarios. You do not get samples or gaps. You get the real thing. That is absolutely important when troubleshooting the strangest situations.

Focus on root cause analysis has dropped significantly for the importance of alerts. I was used to be drowning in alerts, but now have refocused. I still have them, of course, but now they are about minor things. I see myself getting rid of them very soon.

The most valuable feature is Dynatrace's commitment to bringing in new features. It is very difficult to keep pace with the new developments that are always occurring.

The OneAgent technology is one of the most important features. You install it, no configuration, and it just does all the stuff for you. It automatically detects whatever is happening, and even gets to automate JavaScript injection across different web server technologies. You can have tag management, but you can even forget that, because that is fully automated, too!

Given the full-stack approach, you are able to view from the end user perspective, almost down to the bare metal. It gives you all the way from the user perspective, network experience, web and application server view, application detail, process detail, operating system detail, and you even get to manage virtualization and datacenter support.

Dynatrace is capable of following all user actions across all monitored infrastructure, even to systems not monitored, but interconnected. This technology is known by the name PurePath, and being able to do this sometimes feels like magic. I have been told, time and time again, by very knowledgeable IT personnel, that this is not possible. Sometimes, you have to see it, to believe it.

One of the most promising features is the AI capability. I have seen some of its capability in production environments, and it is pretty impressive! It is not a marketing buzzword being abused, but it actually works. Being able to offload problem handling and root-cause analysis, and get to the point analysis of complex systems is something that I have not seen with my eyes, and in this depth, in any other IT solution to date. 

Dynatrace's online presence in APM "education" is second to none. Viewing the YouTube online videos, hearing the PurePerformance Podcast, getting to learn in Dynatrace University, and following the documentation is like being in performance heaven! You just can't grasp it all!

In the new Dynatrace solution, support for legacy applications is still not there. Given there is excellent support of legacy applications and protocols in the Appmon & DC RUM offers, they have the knowledge to put it there. Knowledge that their competition simply doesn't have.

One to three years.

Not seen one stability issue since I been dealing with it.

No issues with scalability. The solution is multi-tenant and based in Big data technology.

What impresses me more is the ability to be able to analyze 100% of all activity going on, and do that with so low overhead. I have not been able to observe more than 1% overhead, despite Dynatrace saying that it can be slightly higher in some situations. I sometimes get the impression that overhead might be negative (underhead?), because you can get rid of inefficiencies like log dumping, that typically have high (disk and CPU) overhead.

Support is just great. Part of it is public, so everyone can check it out. Dynatrace direct support is even better, and you sometimes get direct answers from the teams that are implementing the functionality.

I have worked with other APM, IT, and UX monitoring solutions before. None of them is even near what Dynatrace has to offer.

Never seen anything so complex be so simple to install.

Directly implemented.

Pricing can be high, especially for Portuguese standards. But as one says, you get what you pay for.

Setup cost is very low considering that it is an almost totally, automatic process. Installing SaaS or Managed is only some minutes away. Given that there is no configuration involved in the agents, you can develop how many you want per hour. It only depends on your IT deployment strategy. TCO is thus much lower than expected. Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier.

Since you cannot manage what you cannot measure, I do give the most importance to data quality. This is priceless. If you manage based on bad or incomplete data, you are leaping into the bad decisions direction.

The return might just be immediate. You install it and after minutes you are getting the full data in. The other day I compared Dynatrace to another APM solution, and the other person had been struggling nine months to get the data out. When he saw what Dynatrace did out-of-the-box, he simply could not believe it.

Finally, be prepared to be surprised! It is very fast pace. The Session Replay and the Augmented Reality are just two recent examples. Almost every day I get some new perspective in this field, like AIOps, and it just keeps getting faster! 

I use this solution for application monitoring.

The functionality needs improvement.

We do not see any major impacts on the stability of the product.

I would need to explore this further because I have not tested it further than our needs.

We have not needed tech support.

It is on the high-end of the price range of products.

I advise that when you are looking for a new product, consider:

• Features 
• Accuracy 
• Consistency

We use it to get the network stats and know how many clicks happened on both the front-end side and back-end side, then drill down on debiting to obtain the stats around that.

Dynatrace is working fine right now. It is working as we expected.

We can dig into Dynatrace to analyze data, then know where the user is going based on user navigation. 

Performance-wise, we can see if there are any issues. Then, we can dig into them.

It gives complete stats of the user and what they are doing.

Because we are financial, there are certain things that we cannot put on the cloud. However, that is a given fact, not only for us. It is a given fact for any financial company because of PCI compliance. Because of PCI compliance, companies don't take the risk of putting data in the cloud. Otherwise, we have had a very good experience with the cloud.

The stability is good. I have not seen any issues.

I would rate scalability at least an eight or nine out of ten.

Everything is excellent with technical support. Some of their personnel are our main point of contacts. They are always in touch with us.

The integration and configuration is very easy.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace is excellent. 

We did not evaluate any other products. Top management said. "Just go and use this."

It functions well. We are getting good support. It gives us everything that we were looking from it.

We use the on-premise version and have just begun onboarding the AWS version. 

We use it for application performance management (APM).

It alerts us, or can detect, potential problems which are building up. Then, it let us quickly adapt our websites.

• Dashboards
• Problem detection
• Troubleshooting

It is very stable and reliable.

We use a cloud version for everything that we look into, so we have had no issues. Scalability is working well.

The technical support is excellent.

We were previously using AppDynamics, then we switched to Dynatrace because it has more functionality, better additional components, and better management of problems. It also has a good AI.

The integration and configuration of this product were very easy.

It works quickly with all of our servers, databases, and load balancers. We are now testing it in AWS with AWS features.

It's helping us stay alive, afloat, and scale up as we need.

The pricing and licensing are very expensive.

Try it. It is a good product.

We have used both the AWS and on-premise versions. They are about the same for us.

The primary use case is for application performance management. So, we are using it to identify outages of different parts of the application as well as how we can make the application more efficient and rightsize it.

We can see down into the layers, such as with databases. We can see database queries which are causing problems. 

We can see CPU usage for different containers. I can do a run and see what errors exist in containers which are causing problems. We can rightsize containers on the fly and understand what is happening with our Docker, microservices, etc.

The most valuable feature is it has AI in it. The artificial intelligence (AI) engine in it is able to do alerts and some good analytics. During outages, it is able to identify and correlate where the actual root cause of a problem is. This connectivity allows us to be able to see a bit further into the application down through the layers. If it is a problem within AWS, a problem within a container or something that a user did. We are able to see and coordinate that, then we are able to tell the developers how to fix it.

The GUI has the most room for improvement. Sometimes, it can be a little cumbersome to find things and be able to create your own views, or be able to dig in and understand where things are.

Some additional features would be the ability to break out some of the permissions and allow some additional or different ways to tag services, events, and different things which run. We want to push down the ability to do that, so developers and other folks can get in there. Currently, more permissions are needed to be able to do certain things, and we want more people to be able to use it, own it, and understand it.

We don't put very much stress on it. We could probably stress it some more, but we don't have enough systems right now on it to stress it. For the most part, the ships don't cause as much stress. 

We are going to have it on about 40 ships around the world which will run it independently of our AWS platform. Those are don't stress it too much. We will probably stress it at a certain point, along with AWS, but we still very much growing the platform.

It can scale very well and very high. We don't need it to scale as much right now. It is able to absorb a lot of the systems that we have with the agents and and the API Gateways. It seems like it can scale very well when we need it to, so scalability is good for us right now.

If we needed technical support, we usually call our account team to help us figure out where the errors are, whether it is something with an agent or management servers.

It is pretty easy to integrate it into the AWS environment. You give it a username and password and it asks some basic permission. It can pull a lot of information very quickly. We are able to correlate more and provide more data for it. So, it was easy to integrate it into that environment.

We have it running on AWS. It integrates pretty well there. We have it on Red Hat Linux servers, as well as Windows servers. We have it running on VMware where it integrates very well. It understands these productions and understands our platform. It is able to read into Docker containers and all the databases that we run. However, it is limited as far as how many of a certain type of database that we can have, but for the most part, it runs pretty well and integrates very well.

It has been doing a good job of alerting us to issues. It has been very helpful and effective at identifying how we can do things to make our infrastructure and application a little better.

We considered AppDynamics, Datadog, and Crashlytics. We even considered things like Splunk for different pieces of it.

We chose Dynatrace because we needed something which could run both on AWS and VMware on our ships that might lose their Internet connectivity. This product gave us the flexibility of being able to do both. Dynatrace had the ability to run independently, so we could access it while it retains information.

A PoC is the best way to go. Put it against an application and go through the paces of tagging, analyzing, and alerting on it. You can understand what it does and how it does it. Give it a very complex application, so you can see how well it works.

We use the on-premise version because we have it running on VMware. We also use it on AWS to manage our systems on AWS for production and for our non-production environments.

Our primary use case for the product is going through logs and tracing through what has happened.

In general, it has helped me go through different logs more easily when something breaks.

Being able to quickly go through logs and figure out what is happening.

It needs a better way to figure out how to dig deeper into the details, e.g., sometimes we have to wade through multiple logs, etc. 

It has been stable. It doesn't break.

Its capabilities are good.

We have a couple AWS accounts that we are running on the cloud. Then, we have a lot of on-premises applications, as well.

The technical support is readily available.

The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment is pretty seamless and easy to configure.

We don't really integrate it with anything else.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was a pretty straightforward process. We had no hiccups.

I think the pricing is at a fair value for what it is.

We looked into New Relic and other logging solutions. 

After doing our research, we figured out that Dynatrace was the best for us.

It is a very useful product. 

Depending on your use case, try all the solutions out, then figure out which one is best.

We use Dynatrace for application monitoring.

We use this product with the goal to improve our abilities.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring of application performance.

I would like Dynatrace to be more flexible and user-friendly. They could do more in-depth analysis of the application monitoring. Also, they also could do some type of anomaly detection with positioning and have better integration with AWS.

So far, the scalability has been okay. Our customer base is hundreds of thousands.

The product needs a lot of the support, especially on the consulting side and post sales. You will also need an administrator.

I was not involved in the decision-making process. However, there are more competitive products on the market, which are more user-friendly, feature-rich, etc.

Research into similar products. 

It adapts well for integration with other products in our environment.

We don't use it for AWS.

We are using it track how the data flows throughout the entire AWS environment and seeing if there are any road blocks in between and trying to fix those. Dynatrace is really good at illustrating those. It provides a nice graph, and we can see where everything goes. It is easy to explain both to the people that work with it and the customers who want to see where their data is going.

In terms of tracing where the data is going, some clients don't want it to hit a particular instance, or even worse hit a database that is not part of what its designed for. Therefore,  it makes sure everything is where the customer expects it to be. It is a great tool for that.

The graphical interface is helpful, as it illustrates things well for anyone who wants to know about the information it provides.

If Dynatrace could take out the controller that would be great. It is one less thing to install right now. Though, I understand why they would need it. 

The less stuff that you have on the instances which are running on the actual apps themselves are better for people that watch user products. So, if it could go agentless, that would be great, but I understand why Dynatrace would need it to capture the points. However, every time we spin up an EC2 instance, we have to slap an agent on it and that is more work.

I would like them to make those agents and controllers as small as possible. That would be great. Or, if they could remove them entirely, that would be great too.

I haven't had any major issues with stability. Sometimes, the controller feels a little overloaded if you have a lot agents running, but that's just a matter of sizing things up.

The scalability ties into the Dynatrace controller, because there is just one which talks back to your on-premise. While it is nice to have just one point to talk to, when you start having a lot of apps and things trying to connect to the same thing, it can cause some issues. I do get it, it is just a networking thing along with design.

I have not used the technical support.

It is a brand new environment. They didn't have anything before.

In terms of explaining to a customer how their data works, it has been a great tool. Instead of trying to draw it out, then hoping that is exactly where the data goes.

Try it out. They are other tools on the market, but with this one, the graphical interface is what I like the best. If that is what you really want, definitely go for it.