Dynatrace Reviews

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."

Our company primarily uses the AppMon product and we have it divided up in different business units: line support, corporate systems support in our organization. We primarily use it to monitor internal HR applications, enterprise document applications, anything that involves Java, database SQL. We're trying to monitor and make sure that we're tuning performance.

We have an initiative going on this year, high-availability, so we're trying to get as many applications in our organization to be monitored through this tool as, much as possible, to make sure they're all running most efficiently and performing the way that the management would expect.

So far it's going well. Quite a learning experience for us.

The dashboard gives us something to show managers and our business where the problems are. That's really been eye-opening for them. They can see, yes, this tool has been a good investment. They can see where the problems are and how we can take advantage of it for making those necessary corrections, so it's been helpful to us.

I like the end-to-end monitoring - we can see. Also the user experience, that's been really helpful for us because a lot of times things just aren't detected and I hear from the users. This isolates some of the issues from their experience, so that's definitely been useful for us. 

We're also starting to learn some of the Synthetic monitoring, hoping to do some performance testing in the future.

We'd like to see them continue to develop the AI, what they introduced today here at the Perform 2018 conference, with the whole Synthetic monitoring. I'm glad that they're starting to merge a lot of the tool-sets into one to make it easier.

There's definitely been some challenges around stability, as far as PurePaths sometimes. Also the history, we've got so much data being built. We have to be careful to keep a short amount of history available to our users, so it's been challenging.

I think the design is pretty scalable. It's pretty easy to add additional nodes if we need to. Also, it's easy to migrate changes from one environment to another. That makes it so you can scale it. I think it's met our expectations for scalability.

I personally have not used tech support, but we have other people on the team that do engage with the vendor more avidly and they've said that support has been pretty adept at meeting their needs, time-wise. We're pretty pleased so far with the way the vendor has handled problems we've proposed to them.

We've used SiteScope for monitoring a lot of our web applications. I know we've used Tealeaf and Splunk. They're great tools but there's quite a learning curve there. 

This one, Dynatrace, seemed to be a little bit more straightforward. It's certainly more robust in what it can do as far as the end-to-end monitoring. You can also see how big these conferences are, like here at Perform 2018. There are a lot of other users for networking who are familiar with this tool, so that's helped us adopt it a little bit more easily and to push that incentive towards our directors.

SiteScope is limited. It doesn't do Angular apps as much. It doesn't do single-page apps, so it's more just one web page; it's easier to write scripting for that. But when you have something that goes through a whole set series, it's been challenging. With Dynatrace it has been a little easier to monitor those types of situations. That's the primary reason.

I would like to see them improve on their licensing and the cost. It's been a challenge for us because the way they have it broken out right now, you have to buy it by units. It's hard for us to know where to put those units because our company is broken up into all these different business units, so it's been challenging in that sense. I just would like to see them improve that model a little bit.

I wasn't really involved in the process, but when we saw what the tool is capable of, it certainly went to the top pretty quickly. It has met most of our expectations since we purchased it. 

I do believe that they evaluated one other vendor, product but I don't remember who.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance is certainly a big thing going on right now. It's very important to us. I want to make sure that there's not only learning when there are issues, but also that there is taking action automatically to correct it. That's where the intelligence is at, and once you program it in, it knows how to fix the issue and you don't have to troubleshoot and find out what the issue is. That's a big initiative that's going on, it's very important to us, this AI.

In terms of one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to just data,
any solution that could tell us, definitely, when there's something going on across our organization - not just in one area, one department - something that could tell us from each point when there's a communication such as sign-on; we want to know if it's something with the network, it's something with the area that supports that application, or if it's something on a host server. Something that tells us, all the way across the board what the issue could be. That's what we're driving towards.

I'd rate Dynatrace about a nine out of 10. There are some things that they need them to improve upon, but they are pretty close to the top.

Talk with them, go out and seek, look at all the options you have. Make sure that you talk with your business and discuss what is most important when you're looking to invest toward performance issues. Look at a tool that spans across the company, that can meet multiple areas of needs, not just your own.

We have AppMon, and our primary use cases are to

• gain greater visibility into our applications and our full stack of technology
• be able to provide our developers with insight into their applications 
• be able to see our systems, monitor them for availability
• really reduce our mean time to resolution, if and when we have problems.

It does really well, it really gives us that insight that we need. We have a large instillation and it does a decent job of handling that. I do foresee us looking at the Dynatrace product long term, to help address a couple of the things that we have some issues with time to time, but overall I would say it's really good.

I think it has improved the way our company has functions because of the insight that we have now into our applications. On top of bringing in the AppMon product to our organization, we've also really been trying to push APM as a culture, trying to get everybody in our organization, developers, to start think about APM ongoing and in the earlier environment, like our system integration environment, our user acceptance testing environment, and our production environment. Having AppMon has provided the visibility and capabilities that we needed in order to be able to drive that culture.

For me, the most valuable feature of this solution is that deep dive that we get out of the AppMon product with the PurePath technology, and the way that the PurePath stack works. It's visibility that we didn't have into our applications before, and it really filled a void that we had within our organization of being able to understand what's going on at that layer.

I've learned a lot during this Perform 2018 conference about the direction and the roadmap that Dynatrace is going with the actual Dynatrace product. One thing that I would like to see is for companies like us - large AppMon customers that have a lot of presence in AppMon, a lot of manually configured things and customizations - would be something that would help us be able to make that journey more easily, the transition from to AppMon to Dynatrace. That would be something that would be really helpful for us, because we do see a lot of benefit, and a lot of new features and things that are really positive in that Dynatrace environment. Now it's a matter of figuring out how we get there.

Overall, stability is good.

We've had some scalability issues with the AppMon product. We're rather large, we have a lot of shared infrastructure, and a lot of shared code. We have one single profile, and we throw a lot of data at it, a lot of applications, we have a lot of agents, so we have had some hiccups in the past with that environment not being able to handle that. But we've worked closely with our contacts at Dynatrace who have been helping us through those situations and trying to improve that going forward.

Tech support is good. They are really responsive to our support tickets. We work really closely. Not only do we have our sales contacts and a sales engineer contact, we have a product success manager as well. We talk to them twice a month, we do calls. We always talk through those open issues, and they're really supportive if there are things that we need to have pushed and escalated, to help us do that.

I've never called, I've opened tickets through the Support Portal, that's the way I've engaged with our support. I'm more on our application business unit side of the house, so not directly involved with the configuration management of the Dynatrace server and environment. I'm more from a usage standpoint, and the configuration of our applications, how we have those set up in the AppMon environment.

We really didn't have a rich monitoring presence in the past, from the distributed environment. We also have IBM z/OS, and we have some tooling there that is meeting our needs. We did have a product before, it wasn't very well adopted in our organization, and that was one of the goals of bringing in AppMon, that it was more usable, more user friendly, have more capabilities, and that we could really push adoption across our organization. I would say that it's helped us to be able to do that.

There was a gap that we had, and one of our big initiatives was availability of our applications, being able to make sure that our applications are available and stable; and being able to have that insight to know when they are and aren't. On top of that, was our customer-first efforts, and really trying to ensure that the products that we are putting out there, whether they're for internal or external customers to use, are really meeting their needs and performance needs.

I was involved when we initially went through the PoC, worked with our sales engineer, and brought the product in. I'm on the business side of things, so not necessarily the configuration of the server, the deployment of the agents, but really the configuration aspect that we need to gain the visibility into our applications.

I don't have any complaints about the installation process. We were able to get it ramped up really quickly. From where we started, the scale that we went to in just a couple, three months, was really impressive to me.

We had some other vendors on our shortlist. Dynatrace was able to demonstrate the full capabilities and functionality, working in our environment. The other aspect was its capturing of all PurePaths, that was really appealing to us as we want to make sure that we get that data so that we have it and we can use it if we need it.

Regarding the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud to monitor performance problems, we don't have a product that has AI right now, but that's something that we're really looking at right now. We're in the middle of PoC on the AI, and capabilities that are built within the Dynatrace product are really appealing to us. We're a large company, and we have a lot of applications, a lot of processes, a lot of hosts, and having something that will automatically detect anomalies and tell us when there are problems, without us having to tell the product when to tell us that there are problems, is something that's really appealing. That is certainly one of the features that we like within the Dynatrace product.

If we had one solution that didn't just give us data, but also real answers, the immediate benefit would be not needing either to have to sit there and watch a dashboard, or to go through the efforts of identifying and programming - within the tool - what is considered bad performance. Something that would detect anomalies, deviations, would certainly free up our time, because we would only have to engage when those things occur.

I think the most important criterion when working with a vendor is having people that obviously believe in the product and know the product very well. We've been very fortunate with the contacts that we've worked with. We have a really experienced sales engineer, and really good sales consultants. We look for ongoing engagement with them, and having them want to ensure that we have a success and ongoing success with the product. We want somebody who is really engaged and feels passionate about helping us get to where we want to get to with a solution.

I give AppMon an eight out of 10. With some of the new things that are coming with the Dynatrace product over the AppMon product, there are a lot of things there. With the couple of the stability issues that we've had throughout our tiers of experience, obviously shoring those things up would help make AppMon a 10. I understand they have a new platform and where they're going with that. I also think the new platform also has solved some of the complexity around it. For AppMon, in order to use the rich client especially, I think you have to be somebody who is in there more often than not. It's not necessarily as intuitive as it could be. The web client has certainly helped with that.

Obviously, find a great partner, find a great associate within the company from which you're looking to implement a solution. But then I would say internally, one of the biggest things that has helped us be successful is, we have a cross-business unit, a group of power users - we call it our APM COE group - that really have a vested interest and a passion around driving APM as a culture in our organization. On top of that, they are working very closely together to continue to innovate and support the Dynatrace AppMon environment that we currently have. That same group is working closely together to look at where we see us needing to go in the future. Where is technology driving us? We've got a really good overall pulse on what's going on within our organization, and how to pick the right solution for the right things.