Dynatrace Reviews

When we first got Dynatrace, it started just as a developer's tool. As we used it more and more, we started using it not only for applications but for hardware. Now we're using it for servers. it's evolved over time.

The use cases are monitoring, alerting, triaging, and for statistics and dashboards.

It's basically used to make sure that everything is running okay. You can check dashboards in each group. The DevOps group can use the dashboard and say, "This is how my code is working." So it's more peace of mind, and to keep things available, which is really important to us: availability and reliability. That's what it's being used for.

At product start-up, it was not very visible at first. But now, since people have actually been using the product, and they've actually seen the visibility and what it can provide, it's doing well. So that's why we're deciding to upgrade.

We've had the product for about eight years now. They started using it more and more, so the company decided to invest in it more and more.

Right now in an AppMon, when you have DevOps teams looking to see where transactions are going through from business transactions, and they want to set up measurements to see how things are. And dashboards - dashboards are extremely important now. Thresholds are important.

After today, at the Perform 2018 conference, I can say more because I can see, even though we're AppMon 6.5 now, and we're going to Dynatrace, I was really impressed with everything I saw. The fact that I was impressed, and I was seeing everything, what the future looks like, made us feel like we made the right choice as to what's going on.

Dashboards is one, troubleshooting is another. I come from the monitoring perspective, so the ability to triage quickly is important, and the ability to alert and tell people where the problem is, that's what I really like about the product.

I haven't had a chance to go through all of it, but I would like to see the ability, from an administrative standpoint, for it to collect statistics. I want to be able to see the servers that the agents are installed on. I want it to be able to start doing collections for me by platform: How many Linux servers do I have? How many Windows servers do I have? Statistically give me the information of how things are performing, but I want that in a dashboard, where I can look at a dashboard and I can look at a section. So the ability for me to drill down will make it easier for me.

Ours is pretty stable, being that we have AppMon. We have collectors and DTs in there, they're load-balanced all over the place. And every now and then we have issues, but it's been pretty stable. It has to be, because it's being relied upon more and more. If it was not stable then management wouldn't say, "Okay, we're going to go this direction." 

Stability is extremely important because when you're in my business, you need to have data available 24/7. If I have systems that take a hit, and I can't depend on my dashboard to pull up data, then that's a problem. And if they can't triage, then that's a problem.

We have encountered downtime. When we have downtime we look at it and say, "How quickly can you get it up?" The good thing is that when we had downtime, we also had load-balancing in place. If you have that in place that really helps out, because then you go from one to another. It doesn't mean that it wasn't down, but it wasn't down long.

We can't afford to be down, because being down costs money. Everything is equated to money, to some degree. If this tool is not available during this time, how much money am I losing because I can't triage it? How many resources am I using? We've had some downtime, but not much. Even when you do maintenance, it's done a certain way.

Nothing is 100%, but it's pretty reliable. It had to be impressive enough for our management to allow us to invest into it going forward.

It scales pretty well. I'm from a pretty big company. The solution started out small and scaled out, because we have a lot of collectors.

We scaled up. The good thing is, that's where Dynatrace SaaS is going to come in, when you look at what it's costing us to maintain the hardware on-prem, and do the analysis. 

Scalability: We're always building more applications. And the fact that we can get rid of a lot of hardware and run that tool is really important.

Scalability is really important with growth. You need something that can scale quickly and not have to go through this whole process. It's one thing to look at it and do an analysis and say, "Okay, I need to scale." But, it would be easier if you could look at something and put in a formula and say, "Alright, we can scale based on this." Or something that could tell us. "You're at a point where you need to scale," so that would help out.

It's easier when you can get to a level-2. We've had guardians on site for a while. Because we've had guardians on site they made it easier for us to get to support. So we know how to navigate support. 

From my perspective, support has been quite satisfactory, because it's not like we're a novice going at this. We understand, these are the people you need to talk to. And they recognize the urgency when you're calling. So, I feel comfortable with saying support has been pretty good for us.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but since then we've upgraded so many times. The upgrade is pretty easy. Complexity comes in when you have to schedule things. If I have a DevOps team that's in prod, once we were able to actually cookie cut the upgrade process, it was easier.

It also depends on the different platforms you're dealing with. You're dealing with Windows versus Linux, and you have to inject code into certain places, that's an issue. 

I'm glad when Dynatrace says they have a different agent, because I wasn't crazy about the agent, the way we were deploying it. Not only me, but you have people who are quite protective of their code, and if you've got to inject an agent, they're not really comfortable with that. But with the new agent, that makes it easier for me too. That's another reason I was happy, that's one of the things I asked about: How are we doing the agent? Even though we were automated, there were still some configurations. But with this new product, it seems like deploying agents is going to be awesome.

I'm excited because I like the AI piece. I want to get rid of the thresholds piece. That's part of the excitement as to where we are going to go, because a lot of the conversation occurs when you have to say, "What's the real threshold based on the applications that we have?" We have over 500 applications, easily. Each one has its own behavior. Then everyone wants to discuss a threshold. Now, I'm thinking, with Dynatrace SaaS, we don't have to do that anymore. Bit it will be awhile before we get there.

AI is really important. We're on-prem right now for hybrid to go to the cloud. So when you have the numbers and trends based on what AI can do, it helps you along the way. I can run reports and see the things that I need that will satisfy my customer, that will make it easier for me. We are looking towards the cloud, we do have applications up there. It becomes a sizing issue, as far as what do you need, because you have to pay to be in the cloud. So AI is really important because it will not only help us troubleshoot, it will actually predict some of the things we need to help us get there. I can't put a number on the importance of AI right now.

It's going to change a lot of analysis and things that you have to do. The one thing I would like to see is what's involved in setting up the AI. Because I'm excited about it, I want to see what's involved in setting it up, and see that component.

Regarding siloed monitoring tools, portability is one of the challenges. Siloed monitoring tools make it really hard to port out to other places. You get data, but you can't necessarily use it as far as fitting it into other areas. That's the problem with siloed monitoring tools. If you're good for that scope then you're okay, but when it's time to go beyond that scope... Going enterprise-wide is important. So, where siloed monitoring tools were okay at the time, they're just not keeping up what's going on now. The monitoring field is evolving. It's more than about just monitoring. Monitoring is one thing, alerting is another thing. But the AI part puts it together, makes it easier, not only for you to do your job, but the self-healing piece that goes with it. That's really exciting, when things can self-heal and then just report on it. That makes life a lot easier.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, the benefit would depend on how you look at a benefit. First of all, we would be more efficient. However, I'm not sure if it would help from a resource standpoint, because then I'm not going to need all those resources, if I have a tool that's going to do everything I need. But, it would help in the sense that, if I can resolve something like that, and things fall into place. That would greatly help. And not only that, then I could just depend one tool. Right now, people look at a solution as, "I need a tool for this, and a tool for that." But if I can move towards one tool that will provide me everything I need, then that would be great.

Our most important criteria when working or selecting a vendor: Of course, there's always cost. Stability is another. The amount of time they have been in the market. Then we do a PoC and see if they can meet the use cases that we have. We have a standard, some 125 use cases that we put out there. We see they perform based on those use cases. It's completely agnostic. I don't care who the vendor is. Can they meet my use cases? Do they have stability? Do they have the reputation? And then we negotiate cost.

Right now, the solution we have in place, I would give it about an eight out of 10. Things are changing, technology needs to change. It's been doing a job, but I mentioned the things I asked for. I'm looking for more, so that's probably why an eight. It's doing the job, but I'm looking for it to go further. 

They have a new product that's going to go further, so that's how we do it. Now, the new solution, I'm not sure how we're rating it yet. I have to see what it's going to do. 

But would I recommend it? Yes. Because we have the experience, it has done this and this for me. Can I depend on it? Yes.

If a colleague at another company was looking to implement a similar solution I would need to know they were looking for before I could advise them. I would tell them from my perspective, this is what the tool has done for us. If they ask me the questions, I'll tell them exactly what I think. At this point, would you recommend this solution? Sure, because it does this for me. If you're looking into looking at code, at that part, yes it does that for me. If you're looking for monitoring, yes it does that for me. I would recommend it. 

We currently use AppMon. It has been performing great compared to what we replaced.

The main use case is application performance monitoring and availability.

The main benefits will be more proactive, high-quality performance monitoring and availability with more insight into the application. It is very impressive.

It has helped my business move forward probably just by taking the next step that everybody needs to think about, which is AI and the possibility of cloud. I do not know what direction the company will go with that yet.

• PurePath
• Being able to drill down and detect what the problems are.
• More insight into detecting what the problem is with some of our applications. 

We are still struggling a bit with finding an answer quickly. It is all there, but there is so much that it is still really hard to figure out exactly which way you want to go:

• What do I right click? 
• Where do I go? 

It is a little overwhelming with the amount of data that we have. I think it is more of an issue on our end. We just need to get more familiar with it. We just started implementing it last June, are still relatively new, and are currently struggling with some performance issues.

We have already seen the next release. It is doing so much more than what we ever expected. 

Right now, we are struggling a bit with stability. 

We have outages. We have not pinpointed what the problem is. We have data loss. We have had to restart and have not narrowed down exactly what the problem is yet. So, that is in the works.

Scalability is good. 

Because we are having stability issues right now, it depends on what we need to do:

• Do we need to add more memory? 
• Do we need to add more collectors? 
• Do we need to bump up something? 

So, this is a little uncertain at the moment.

Technical support is good. 

There was only one time that I had to contact someone at two o'clock in the morning and the response was not as quick as I thought it was going to be. However, we addressed that with meetings. I think they have done a lot better job of their support.

We have used siloed monitoring tools, specifically CA APM. The challenges were probably the end-to-end and getting the full picture of what the problem was. There always seemed to be some major piece missing and Dynatrace has allowed us to get as close to that big picture as we possibly can. Then, with OneAgent, it has to provide the problem to you. It does not really get any better than that.

We picked Dynatrace because of the value that it provides.

Our environment is very complicated anyway, so the initial setup was a bit of a struggle, but only because we have so many applications and JVMs that we have been working on for long time. We had to move everything from CA APM to Dynatrace, so it was a big conversion process.

We found a tool that can be utilized by testing, DevOps, marketing, software engineering, and monitoring. Before, we always had everybody doing their own thing. Now, everybody's utilizing one tool, which is huge. That is a huge savings.

Definitely look at Dynatrace if you are looking to purchase an APM solution.

We did evaluate other solutions, but I was not a part of that process.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers as opposed to just data, the benefit to my team would be time savings. We are scrambling all the time to try to figure out when there is a problem. If we could have something else telling us what the problem is, we could spend more time fixing it, providing valuable dashboards. and other valuable monitoring, then have a better proactive monitoring environment. So, it is huge.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the Cloud and manage performance problems is huge and really important, especially after seeing OneAgent. We will probably be moving to that, then probably be upgrading to version 7. I think that is the direction that the company will be going. They do not say that they are not supporting it, but it is highly encouraged that you jump onboard the OneAgent train.

Most important criteria when selecting an APM solution: Something that was less overhead for us. We were finding with our old tool, which we still support because we are still not off of it, to get the same thing that we get with Dynatrace required more servers and effort on our part to address everything that we wanted to from the performance side. So, there is less infrastructure to support and it is a little more consolidated.

We are using AppMon UVM and Dynatrace synthetics, which we recently implemented. We are looking forward to using the new releases of Dynatrace in the future, where the use cases then will look at the following:

• User actions
• Analyzing PurePath to see what the user is doing.
• Transactions on our website since we have an eCommerce website.
• Availability and response times
• Drill down to see if there are any issues
• Gather old clients.

Being able to identify quickly what the problem is. It allows you to better utilize and focus your talent, and tell management that you are not only looking at problems, but how you can ultimately make the product better for the end user.

Business Case: In our implementation, AppMon and UVM are fairly infantile. The implementation was less than six months ago which means that we have been able to scale down some of our infrastructure. Not needing as much infrastructure to run compared to what we have been running in the past. From this perspective, it has been cost effective in allowing us to scale down infrastructure.

It allows us to make better business decisions based on what we are seeing, not what our customers were telling us was going on, but what we are actually seeing. Using this, I have been able to identify what the customers are experiencing. It allows us to optimize our site, our eCommerce solution, to better suit the needs of our customers. We can actually see what they are seeing and almost feel what they are feeling, because of the eyes that we have into their experience. It allows us to better code and better develop, allowing us to be able to optimize our website based off what we are seeing the customers truly experiencing.

The ease of use. Being able to readily identify a problem and be able to get someone there to fix or manage it properly and quickly. Our eCommerce website deals with users and time is critical. One of the best things, we are able to identify problems quickly and are able to resolve them.

They have had years developing this technology. When we go through it and we use it on a day-to-day basis, we see some things and think, "Hey, if they just had this, man this application would be a lot better." Then, in the next release, it comes out and it happened. We are using AppMon 7.0.15 right now, so AppMon 7.1 is coming out. Everything that I have identified in the version that I have as needing to be improved/fixed has already been addressed in the newer versions. Therefore, I can't think of anything that they have not addressed.

One of the things that find to be a challenge is I tell everybody that you almost have to be a private investigator to try to figure out what it is you want and how to get it. What I would have wanted was a solution that makes that process less cumbersome. 7.1 has already identified that. The Dynatrace solution has already identified that because of the way that PurePaths were looked at in Dynatrace compared to what they were looked at in AppMon. That would have been the one thing that I would have said, "If this product could be better, it would be from that perspective," but they have already identified it. They have already come up with the solution because I was not the only one that thought of that. Other people have thought of that using it, and they said, "Okay, this was a gap in Dynatrace, that gap has already been closed." That was the one thing that I had and they have already identified it.

We have not had any stability issues with it at all. This has been the most stable solution that I have worked with. I have been in IT for over 22 years and the solution that we have implemented here in the last six months has been the most stable solution that I have worked with in all my 22 years in IT.

It is limitless when it comes down to being able to scale up or even scale back, if we need it to. 

I have definitely had to use technical support. The technical support team, customer service team, and Dynatrace altogether have been the best team that I have worked with industry-wide. Whenever I have a problem, most of the time they are hounding me for more feedback on the problem than me having to hound them. They have been great. I have a monthly call with technical resources, and I also have sales resources on a monthly call. Whatever our need is, they are there to help us, hold our hand, and walk us through it. It has been amazing.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. I will not mention any particular names, but the challenges have been that they are silos. It does not give you a holistic view of everything that is going on in your application as compared to a solution like Dynatrace which allows you to see from start to finish. With Dynatrace, you get a complete holistic view of the application, and it helps you not point fingers, but be able to identify visible problems.

I was hands on in the setup of the solution. Initially, it seemed a little daunting. Once we started working with it, it was a very easy solution to implement and put in place.

The vendor that we brought in to help us move our platform from Legacy to NextGen was using Dynatrace in their dev testing. So, just for amount of consistency, we continue to use Dynatrace, and we can see why they chose Dynatrace to use as their dev testing. It was the best tool out there. I do not know what tools they have considered in the past, but I know that was the one that they brought to the table and it has proved to be a valuable tool for us.

I would recommend to give Dynatrace a call if you are looking for an APM solution.

AI is the solution of the future. I say the future but actually right now moving into the future. It is interesting looking at some of the applications using AI to solve problems, like betas, and being able to integrate that with Alexa for things like adding voice control to identify and solve problems. I think going forward it will be the way that IT works.

It would be invaluable to have one solution which would allow you not only to gather data, but to be able to make intelligent solutions based off of that data. It would be industry changing.

Most important criteria when selecting an APM solution: Cost is one of them, but we also needed something that did not just collect data. We needed something that provided a true benefit. If I am going to spend my day focusing on what a user is doing and what is that user's experience like on my website, then I need a application that can go and figure out the things that I am not seeing and what I am missing, so the tool that I am using provides the information right now. What I have seen from Dynatrace is that it takes that to a totally different level.

1. We use Dynatrace for performance testing. We use it to dig down for application layer or slowness issues, getting a clear idea of what is causing the issues, then reporting back to the engineering team. 
2. We monitor our infrastructure using AppMon, where our hosts have their CPU thresholds and our memory issues are going on. We use for that.

It is performing well. It makes our lives easier as we drill down to problems. If something happens in production, and a client reports the issue, say our page is loading in 10 seconds, and the issue comes to the performance testing team, we can get the exact API call or query level regarding what is causing the slowness. Then, our job is to open Dynatrace and test the filter on the time span if it is there. Some matters cannot be captured, because by default, Dynatrace does not capture everything. For some matters, we need to add sensors, then handle it.

Whenever a developer does a code change or new feature implementation, it comes to performance shifting. We just do not raise a bug saying that your page is loading in 10 seconds, please go and fix. What we do is analyze Dynatrace and test PurePath. We analyze metal hot spots, which are the exceptions, and we share data that in AppMon where we have a facility where we save station and take screenshots of what metal or what class it is causing issues, and share that to the engineering team. With the bugs, we have to go and do line numbers, and the same thing with the code.

Getting the EM data, we have to open a browser. Generally, one of the asks from our clients or our engineering team is to change this. However, there is not a performance single tool, which opens a browser. That is one of the problems.

It is very stable.

For our company, it is on-premise. It will be around a 100 plus hosts and 3 different servers, so it is fine in terms of scalability. 

I have not used technical support. There is a strong user community. There is no need to talk to the technical support, because all the questions which I have had, all the solutions were in the documentation. Or, I have been able to post a question to the user community and get an answer within a day or two.

No. This is our first APM solution. We have not previously used siloed monitoring tools either.

I was not involved in the initial setup, though I was involved with upgrades.

We take care of our own environment. We are responsible for our performance setting environment. We place the first sensor. We do all those things.

I would definitely recommend this solution, because it has all of the new features coming with Dynatrace OneAgent. It will be awesome for any client or company. 

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, and benefit my team, it would be one solution where you can get all the data stating this is the root cause and this is the solution. That would be awesome.  

AI will definitely play a bigger role when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. ZSA will need to predict things like rolling insights to the client on the sales and marketing front.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Ease of use
• Enough documentation
• Strong community. 

We are actually using it in the test environment, not in production. That is our use case. What we want to do is we want to test it and find issues either with our core or infrastructure before it goes live.

We are able to fix issues rather quickly, by identifying then fixing them. Therefore, the efficiency of the organization has improved. We are spending less time fixing issues.

Business case: We had a problem with the previous solution where we were spending more time on it. That meant increased costs. Now, we are spending less time, so costs have decreased. That is how you improve the efficiency of the organization.

The ability to use PurePath in analytics is definitely the most valuable feature. It helps you pinpoint issues, then develop and focus them in the right way. It helps to fix them rather quickly.

I am more interested in the end-to-end performance system, not only the server site from the client's side. 

For example:

• How much time is spent on the client when the user is interacting with the mobile application or even web application?
• How much time each click took?
• How much time the page object domain took to load up?
• Even if it is a mobile app, when you interact with the app, how much time the control took to respond to it? 

Right now, we use the Dynatrace library to build. Then, we would like to generate the overall transaction and the performance it has when the request is coming from different networks across different regions, different periods, and different parts of the world, like the synthetic monitoring solution. So, there are desperate systems. 

What we would like to see is to make it easy, more automated with an easier way of doing these things. OneAgent is an easier approach which you just install it automatically into the installed application and it sends you the information. For the mobile clients, we want to get the end-to-end thing that makes it easier to set up, that will be cool.

With stability, we have seen some issues. Then, we fixed them. So, it is stable now. 

The scalability is another objective. We are trying to test the scalability of Dynatrace. We have seen some scalability issues because of the non-optimal users of the resources and the infrastructure, so we made it more scalable. So, it is acceptably scalable.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance is very important. The AI definitely works.

Technical support is pretty good. Not only the technical support, but the upper managers, they are also very technically, savvy people. Most of them, not all of them are. Also, some of the sales accounts, they are able to find you the right technical people, if necessary. 

In my organization, I am dealing with more than 20 applications. I have to scale with limited resources, so I needed a sophisticated tool to tell me where the problem is. Traditionally, I would be telling you that you have a problem. Now, I am able to tell you that you have a problem right now and what it is. That has made a big difference. I was looking for tool to do this, then I found Dynatrace.

The AppMon 6.5 is problematic in configuring. It is little finicky. When we configured the JVM, it did not work. 

Sometimes, people are making mistakes, typos, or even if you just sit down you need to be in the light, either in the beginning or in the end. So, this is always a little problematic for us. The issue is not super small, but it is okay.

We are buying more licenses, because we are seeing more value.

I would advise a colleague or friend to use Dynatrace.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• PurePath
• Ease of use
• The dashboard
• Having the metrics easily understood and easily articulating the information.

We use AppMon and synthetic, especially synthetic for monitoring the users and user experiences, and finding the JavaScript errors. Our working flow is mainly single page application. Therefore, it does help to improve the speed and performance of pages. I am excited about the session replay feature.

We will actually be integrating with Mouseflow, which does the same thing. It is not a big deal to integrate and disintegrate it. If session replay does what Mouseflow is doing, then it is probably our best bet.

It gives more visibility into all the coding (the black screen). It gives a nice screen. You can see ups and downs. You can see where the traffic is getting impacted, more on the convergence side. 

It is a platform that is very well-suited for marketers, but also for technology people. That is the key: the dashboard.

We are waiting on the new features to see how they perform.

So far, it seems good. We are not seeing issues. We are happy with it, and we have in-house based Dynatrace. Now, we are moving to the SaaS-based. We cannot comment much on the SaaS yet, because it is moving, and we are not there yet.

In the context of adding monitoring to all your instances, we have scaled up, because it is a cloud-based solution. It just scales on its own. 

What you need scalability for is around the ease of adding a new platform or new servers to the platform, and that is pretty fast.

I have not spent much time with the technical support. I am an enterprise architect, so the time spent from the technical side is more the DevOps team, and so not much me.

We did use siloed monitoring tools. We used AppDynamics. Our challenges using siloed monitoring revolved around integration. You needed more manpower to manage things. Now, it is just a few clicks, and it scales up. That is the difference.

We switched to Dynatrace based on feedback from the business and the technical team. It was the usability, and how you transform data into a more meaningful presentation or graphical interface.

I was involved with the new setup process. We have Adobe Stack, so we are doing Adobe Stack.

It is pretty straightforward. You just go to the install Dynatrace UI. It gives you the command. You just need to run the command. It is pretty straightforward.

It is so easy. You would probably need technical support if you ran into issues, but it is pretty easy. The agent talks to the cloud solution right away.

I am not sure about the cost, because I was not involved in the initial implementation.

No.

If I had a solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit for my team would be turnaround and evaluation time. If you could transform these into a language that management understands, that would be the key.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems plays a big role. There are various platforms, offerings, services, and applications, which integrate with so many things. You will not need to spend time hooking this to that. The AI will figure it out, which is pretty cool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• How much you really need to know about it. E.g., how easy is it to know about the product capabilities.
• Cost. Everybody thinks about cost.
• From a technology standpoint, the product should not ask you to build using manpower to set up your own infrastructure.

We've installed it to help us with performance issues and we use it when there's a problem, but we find it difficult to get in to find out what's really wrong. We always have to call someone from Dynatrace to help us figure out the problem, because we're not very good at it, which is why we want to get to OneAgent or the new Dynatrace.

Our organization really hasn't improved because they haven't adopted it very well. We've had it for three years and the adoption of it has been really, really slow.

One thing it helped with: We should never get traffic from outside the U.S. and we were getting traffic from Europe, and that was a problem. And we found out what caused it was that an agent outsourced some of their work to someone off-shore, and they weren't supposed to do that. Dynatrace helped us find that information out. We wouldn't have found it otherwise.

The amount of detail it gives you about what's really going on in your system.

It would be nice to get the AI piece into AppMon. If we can't get to where we need to be, it would be nice to have that AI as part of it. And I think, actually, you can do it now with the availability of Davis.

Very stable. I've never had any downtime with it at all.

I can tell you it scales very well. We went from nothing - we're a small shop - but we went from nothing, five agents, to installing 150 in a week. It was very, very scalable, especially OneAgent; it's even  or more scalable. I was able to actually turn off AppMon and put OneAgent on it as a demo, and it took me 30 minutes for 100 agents.

They're very helpful. They help us get right to the problem.

It's been Dynatrace or something called Reveille. Those are the two products I've used.

The problem with siloed monitoring has always been the complexity; trying to figure out how to get the information that you need out of the tools, that is usually the problem.

Regarding the importance of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, for our company, we don't do AI. So it's not important at all. However, I absolutely believe it's the future of technology. I would love to move our company in that direction, to use AI to help us - especially with Dynatrace - be proactive with problems, see them coming before they actually happen, which is what the AI piece can help deal with.

If there was one solution that could provide real answers and not just data, the immediate benefit for our team would be ease of use. It's easy for people to see, "Oh, I just caused this problem," especially if you want to get into a CICD, which is where we're trying to go. When I release some code into my performance environment and I can see impact immediately. That's something that would be great to have.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are stability, and what other people in the industry are saying. We look at industry reviews for what they think about a company. That's where we look: How other companies in the same industry look upon a vendor.

In terms of rating the product, I think with all the changes they're making with it, it's probably a nine out of 10. It's probably one of the best ones out there. You can always get a little better.

Make sure you go with the Dynatrace SaaS option. It's easier and it all comes out-of-the-box. It figures things out for you.

We have hundreds of applications in our organization which are currently instrumented. We define business transactions and provide real-time monitoring for these applications.

Overall, I'd say we're pretty satisfied. However, as a larger corporation - our environment is very, very large, we have over 15 production servers and a total 20-plus Dynatrace AppMon servers - it's increasingly difficult to manage as our environment grows out. It's simply because our team is not fully staffed to support such a large environment, and to do the maintenance work with all the upgrades from 6.5 to 7 to 7.1. We have some challenges where our hardware that we are using today is hosting one servable host with two different Dynatrace AppMon instances, which is not, I guess, a typical setup. So sometimes it's a little bit challenging with the support, but we work through it.

As an administrator for the AppMon servers, we see the benefits every day when we help business teams to figure out some of their problems, troubleshoot to root cause. When we hear of these cases where we save business teams or application support hours or days of figuring out problems, that's probably what we're most proud.

Definitely HA, because we have so many applications that are dependent on AppMon that it has been deemed critical. Any downtime, it just affects so many users. So that's one of our key asks for the future.

Stability is where the "fairly satisfied" comes in. I think it's also due to our environment and having multiple servers hosting dual instances of AppMon, where we've seen a few challenges. We do work with the vendor. However, because we've had instances of down AppMon servers, although we can recover fairly quickly, one of the key pieces that is missing is having high availability. I believe it's coming in 7.1, so it's on the roadmap, we just wish it would be sooner.

As an organization we keep growing, because everybody wants AppMon. Even within my last two years, since I've joined the team, I think we've added four new production servers and probably eight to 10 including dev and QA. However, instead of having two very large Dynatrace servers, we had to scale out laterally. 

We've had challenges. I would say it's not scalable, because we've had to move large applications that were in a shared environment to their own separate Dynatrace server instance. Those are some of the challenges we do have.

Support has been very good. We are in constant contact with our sales engineer. 

They're very responsive, and anytime we do have an issue and raise a concern, we get immediate feedback. We have a good relationship with Dynatrace.

I was not involved with the initial setup. But since I've been there we've upgraded from 6.3 and 6.5, and we're currently rolling out, I'd say, 90% of our environment is at 7, we're just missing one server. I would say the upgrading is fairly straightforward. It was just a lot of work, due to the size of our environment.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, that's the direction that we're already going, and I don't think we can avoid it. It's something that for us, as a large organization, we will need to leverage. I think we will adopt it, hopefully, sooner rather than later.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers and not just data, the immediate benefit would be that we'd be able to do more work, free up our time to do other tasks. Also, as a trickle down effect, the more time we have to do other people's requests - we have hundreds of applications in our organization  - so the trickle down effect would benefit all teams.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are stability of the product, and HA is definitely on the list due to our nature of our business. Also, new features being added on, that's always a big plus.

I would give it a solid eight. Again, it has a few features lacking or which haven't been there since the inception - the HA - because we've gone through three or four upgrades. When we lose our one server, we might lose two server instances, so it affects more applications.

I'd definitely say sign up for the trial, test it out in your test environment, and get your business users and app support teams involved quickly just to see the benefits. Just being able to look at the PurePaths; the first time I saw PurePaths I thought, "Wow. This is a pretty powerful tool."