Dynatrace Reviews

We use Dynatrace for all our client-facing or student-facing core web systems, which give students access to their information. We are monitoring all those for user expectation and user experience management. We are also using application performance management metrics to detect and troubleshoot issues which pop up from time to time because it is a job. It's a Java-based environment that we're monitoring. 

Dynatrace AppMon has served us very well. We are able to get insights into our systems, which previously took us weeks to be able to detect. It gives us a much better view on the performance of our environments. 

One of the big benefits is being able to manage user expectation to better understand what the performance of our systems are versus what the users expect of those systems. We are also able to scale. 

We can prevent major system downtime because the system uses baseline monitoring. It can when something is about to horribly wrong and affect systems in a short while. This has helped a lot. We are more pro-active instead of reactive. Reactive monitoring in IT is always viewed in a bad light. People don't like it when you just react to problems.

Keeping a record of full user transactions which we can then go back to the SIEM. Mostly, when a user complains about poor performance, it's very difficult to put a metric on it. With Dynatrace, we can actually go into the user's transaction and look at all the transactions the user has. We can see the actual metrics behind those transactions and what caused them to slow down and have poor performance. 

If it's a case of the user's ISP and it is not actually our system that is the problem, it has given us a lot of capability to provide feedback to users, and say, "The system was slow because you were working from a slow ISP connection," or "You were working from a degraded browser." This helps specifically for cases where we want to educate our users on how to get the best performance out of their systems.

There is still a certain amount of technical skills needed to be able to understand what you are seeing on it. You also need a large amount of technical or infrastructure skills to understand how and where to install it.

The reason why we are looking at Dynatrace OneAgent is because Dynatrace OneAgent is better at troubleshooting than AppMon. Dynatrace OneAgent now comes with analytic engines and an AI system which helps you troubleshoot quickly. It also does root cause analysis. Therefore, we wouldn't need to do root cause analysis anymore, since it would show us the exact point where things go. 

The capability development and user experience management that OneAgent would gives us is a step above what we have with AppMon. For example, we can see exactly what our full user compliment is leading us towards. With AppMon, we could determine:

• How they use the systems.
• What systems they use the most.
• What effects there are if something goes down.
• How the user is affected.

Patching and updating is very easy. The system's stability is good. 

Depending on how much storage you allocate, you can actually keep quite a lot of information in regards to your system. You can scale it yourself. The system doesn't force you into a specific storage medium. 

It's able to scale linearly and vertically. It doesn't matter how many systems you have. You can just plugin more collectors and agents. It does this very well.

Every now and again, we contact technical because we have a few questions and they are very responsive and helpful. If it's a problem that we cannot figure out over the phone, they will make an appointment. They will come to our site. It's all part of the support contract, and there is no extra charges for it, which is good.

Previously, we were using infrastructure monitoring to a large extent. We didn't have application performance management. We realized that we have been spending a lot of time trying to figure out why applications were not performing correctly. That's the main reason why we went for the AppMon solution.

The initial setup was a bit technical. 

We've used technical support mainly for the original setup.

The time that we save troubleshooting or finding the actual issues within the application execution.

The vendors on our shortlist were AppDynamics, CA, and Dynatrace. We chose Dynatrace because they performed the best during our PoC trials. It was the best all-round monitoring platform.

Make sure that you understand the scope before you start looking at application monitoring. Understand your environment.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. They must have support in our country, so we may be able to contact them locally. 
2. They must be able to fit to our functional requirements up to 80% or better. 
3. They must be able to fit into the space that we operate in, which is the tertiary educational space. 
4. They must be able to integrate with our current systems, as much as possible.

I installed the demo application on an internal server and looked at the functionality of Dynatrace.

Through the demo server, we were able to see the functionality of Dynatrace and plan to apply it to our internal systems.

Through end-user monitoring, we were able to measure the user's perceived performance and build an SLA based on that information.

We hope the next version will have more powerful database monitoring capabilities.

Our primary use is application performance monitoring and real user experience. Our Dynatrace application monitoring has been in since 2012. It is performing extremely well. We have not had any downtime or issues with stability or scalability.

The benefits we receive using this tool increase productivity, which increase revenue for the state.  A huge benefit of having Dynatrace AppMon in our environment is the proactive monitoring it provides.  This help us avoid unexpected outages and downtime.

Its ability to deep dive into the application code and find bottlenecks that reduce productivity for the users and downtime.  Proactive alerts are extremely beneficial and help us keep IT out IT team small.

The AppMon solution that we are using is the Dynatrace AppMon. I am currently working to upgrade it to the Dynatrace Managed solution. This is basically leaving AppMon and going to their next generation. This will streamline everything: Ease of installation, ease of use, and built its own intelligence, which I like to call self-healing.

Dynatrace AppMon is a tested and stable product in my environment.  The only downtime I have is planned for patching servers.

Dynatrace is highly scalable and works well in our hybrid environment.

I would give Dynatrace's technical support a 100% rating. I feel like whenever I call or send an email that I get the right person automatically. For the most difficult answers, the most I have to wait is about three days and the answers have been relevant.

We have used Wiley from CA. It did not perform the way we wanted it to, which was a driving factor for switching over to Dynatrace products.

The initial setup started a year before I joined the team. I have been involved in the upgrade processes and they were straightforward.

Our implementation was with the help of Dynatrace.  We wanted it to be fast and right the first time.  Success on both counts!

I do not have dollar figures, but if I did, the ROI would be at least 100%. 

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. Since my last review, I have stood up a competitor's product.  My Dynatrace installation is two servers plus my collectors.  The competitor's product required seven servers.  That is significant when looking at the cost.

I feel the price is good for what the product does.

I have done research on other products that are in the same market space. They cannot provide the same in-depth detail that Dynatrace does.  I have since implemented, as a proof of concept, a major competitor of Dynatrace.  The result - I will never stop using Dynatrace.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit for my team would be less resources needed. This would streamline and automate things.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reputation of the vendor. We go read reviews. We also check vendor references and talk to other customers to find out what their experiences have been.

The primary use case of this solution is to investigate performance bottleneck issues. 

It helps our organization identify potential problems by doing thorough analysis of systems which integrate with one another.

• The detailed reporting and real-time gathering of transaction information.
• The exporting of data to a flat file for reviewing past performance.

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.

Product is very high tech and advanced on the one hand, and very easy to implement and maintain on the other. 

We are not blind anymore with our digital services performance; no more fire fighting. IT Ops is now proactive and collaborating with our development teams.  

• Code level visibility
• Smartscape: Modeling of the whole IT environment. 
• User experience analytics

• Product reporting still needs improvement.
• Session export for offline analysis, like it was in AppMon, would be also nice. 

Time to value was surprisingly fast.

Web applications, primarily Microsoft MS-NET and Java-based applications, running on either IIS, WebSphere, and in lesser instances, Apache Tomcat or similar platforms.

Dynatrace AppMon has allowed a deep dive review of performance problems in near real-time for our primary external website and related web apps and web services.

PurePath view of methods and the call stack are extremely valuable for troubleshooting and performance review.

Dynatrace is a rapid release product, so new features or support for newer tech are being added all the time. Our primary wish list for RFEs or feature requests are additional integration options with ticketing systems. Although, we are able to work around it, 'ticketing' is not a core function of the product.

Releasing a new product and going from an AS/400 to a Microsoft environment. 

We obtained a better insight into our environment and consolidated a lot of our old apps into one app. 

We are still implementing Dynatrace. We are in the process of a PoC to discover why our sync test failed. It also gave us the cause of what was at fault.

PurePath gave our developers some tools that they did not know existed, and they gained a faster, more robust use case.

It needs education and training to ensure you get the full value of your purchase. Maybe add in a certification for Dynatrace.

• Operational monitoring: How services ran in the last five minutes.
• NOC screens together with GTM monitoring.
• Troubleshooting of problems occurring in communication between microservices down to the code level.

• Reduced MTTR, thanks to smart problem detection and automated root cause analysis.
• Proactive monitoring of occurring problems and outages warnings.

• Automated dependency identification for HTTP conversations between microservices stack enables monitoring of microservices-oriented architecture. 
• .NET core and Spring code level analysis helps with root cause analysis.

.NET core support to the level of Java (at the moment, it is limited).

Custom reporting capabilities should be extended, because it now has basic charting capabilities. Alternatively, Dynatrace can create a bunch of plugins to popular BI platforms (e.g., Microsoft Power BI). All to allow custom reporting as well as SLA-oriented reporting.