Dynatrace Reviews

Our primary use case is for application monitoring. We have the AppMon product. It is performing well. 

We do not have a whole lot of organizational buy-in for the product yet, so there is a struggle in getting the resources to work on it to fully exploit the product's value. 

It will allow us to eventually become more proactive when problems start arising. We can see them before they happen and address them before there is any impact to our customers. 

• The overall application monitoring ability to do alerts. 
• The dashboard, so people can see what is going on. 

We do not know, because we are currently on the AppMon and we are looking at converting to OneAgent. Therefore, we are in that middle realm saying, "OneAgent, which is now Dynatrace, what is it going to buy us?" 

Then, we can say, "Well, what else might we need?"

Previously, we called support mostly about implementation issues. Docker was one which was early on and the support structure for Dynatrace. Typically, they were trying to help us figure out third-party applications and where the monitoring agent should be located. 

It seems to be very stable. We have not had any outages attributed to the product. We have not had any downtime.

We are a medium-size implementation. We have not grown a whole lot yet with the product, so we have not faced scalability challenges. It seems to be pretty straightforward to grow with it and add-on. They have guides to help you do this. 

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems will become more important, as we move forward in the cloud and with distributed computing overall with AWS.

Support is pretty good overall. Occasionally, you will get that support person who is not real responsive. However, for the most part, things have been very good. 

We have used siloed monitoring tools. We faced similar challenges using them to what we face today in that we do not have the management buy-in to get the resources needed to fully exploit the tools. 

I have been involved in the upgrade process in the finishing of the initial implementation. It was pretty straightforward.

I did not have any issues setting it up. The documentation really helped. If I did run into a question, I received a pretty quick response from our support people. 

We have not fully been able to get the full value out of the product. It is expensive compared to other things that we have had in the past. Paying that much and not being able to get the full return on the product is a downgrade. 

The technical team probably could help us learn more about the product, but some of the problem is on our side and not having the management dedication to fully exploiting the tool. 

The product is definitely worth taking a look at. Be aware that it is probably more pricey than other options on the market, but there are a lot of capabilities. Dynatrace has an eye toward the future and the computing and monitoring needs that we are gonna need for the cloud. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit for my team would be spending less time finding out what caused the problem and potentially being able to have those cases automatically routed to teams who could address them. Our team would be able to have more time to dedicate to other projects. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Capability
• Stability of the vendor
• Market share
• Number of customers. 

We have multiple applications deployed in production across different technologies. We're using AppMon to monitor the services, the memory profiles, the traffic that comes through them.

It performs well. I have a team that works on configuring it, so they have a little bit of work ahead of them. It's not used across our development space, yet; so, not wide adoption.

It definitely helps, because my performance engineer, he can recreate a problem and he can give the developers what's happening, where to go look, all the information they need to be able to find what the root cause is.

The PurePath, being able to trace what's happening; to try to identify where the problems are and find the exact place to start looking.

We're thinking about moving to Dynatrace because AppMon is not scaling for us. One of the reasons I'm here at the Perform 2018 conference is to find out if there is a better way to use the product, not knowing that they were talking about the Dynatrace version. But to me, that's the logical place to go now.

So far, so good. Looks like Dynatrace is very simple to use. The sessions that we've been through here at the Perform 2018 conference, everybody has pretty much said installation is easy. Snap it in, a couple days later, you start getting information and you can put it right to use.

Scalability is the part that I'm looking forward to, because we're developing more and more microservices and, each time, for an AppMon license, you have to deploy it, you have to configure it, you to get charged for it. It's very time-consuming. Dynatrace is much easier, because it's auto-discovery.

We have a guardian that helps us. He's knowledgeable and gives us the right answers.

I think the role of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and monitor and manage performance issues, is huge. I have a directive to go to AI, shift left, go cloud, go microservice. All of that fits within a space where I don't have the resources to do that stuff manually, so let AI do it.

AppMon is our first APM solution. If we had one solution that could provide not only data, but real answers, if we deployed Dynatrace, and it got its own baselines, and then it told us, "We saw an anomaly, here's a problem ticket, somebody needs to look at that," that would be tremendous.

My most important criteria when working with a vendor are 

• support
• usability
• stability of the products 
• are they adopting to the upcoming technologies, because they're coming fast and furious? 

And so far, it looks like Dynatrace is doing all of that.

I would rate AppMon about six out of 10 because it's hard to set up, you have to have somebody very knowledgeable in the product. It's not intuitive. Out of a couple hundred people, I probably have 10 that know how to use it.

In terms of advice to someone who is looking at implementing a similar solution, I would say: Know your technology stack, know your applications, know what the roadmaps are, so you can make sure that you're implementing the right product to support all that.

We use it for our development teams to make sure we have development feedback loops. We run about 50 different development teams and development streams. It is very important for us to keep on top of our deployments. We ran about 950 deployments and the tool gives us the flexibility to ensure that we are staying as close to those deployments moving forward.

Before we had the tool we had no visibility into the user experience and capturing what was going on inside the browser. We utilized tags so we knew how many times people were doing certain things, but we did not know how the performance was, if users were satisfied with what they were doing, and if we were serving up errors. We had no ability to correlate anything that was going on in our back-end systems and what users were doing. Being able to have that viability and that insight into what is going on for our customers was immensely valuable across the board from the development perspective all the way through to higher level business people.

One of the reasons that we are going into the new Dynatrace platform. We have a lot of data. With that amount of data and my team being very small, we are not specifically developers, we do incident management and problem management. The administer of the Dynatrace tool makes sure the monitoring is out and available for everybody where it needs to be. We do not have time to look at all the data, and with all the AI and automatic stuff being able to do management zones when that coming to us soon, a lot of the feature sets which are moving forward will make my job so much easier. I will not have to work 60 to 65 hours a week to ensure I am getting stuff to the developers so they can do what they need to do.

Dynatrace is staying up with IoT and a lot of the cloud solutions, which is really going to be helpful for us in the future.

The most valuable things that we have seen are the user experience and capturing what the users are doing inside the browser, and being able to equate that back to the business and telling them how much of their company is doing what. Also, what the performance time is, so we can give that back to our developers and make sure that the developers are spending time on what they need to spend time on to make sure that they are noting performance of the website.

Stability and scalability have been issues right now. My understanding going forward, and I am cautiously optimistic, is that we will not have these problems anymore. I would really like for that to be the case. We are a large company. We do a lot of microservices. We are going into the cloud. We are doing a lot of different things. We use PCF and Docker. We do a lot of the different technologies. The ability for us to scale the solution is going to be very important, especially going forward, because we are exploding in size. We are supposed to grow at least two times in the next year.

Session replay availability is going to be the most amazing game changer for our company. We are very heavy into user analytics. There is a completely separate segment inside of our company that looks into things like user tagging and making sure that we are gathering who is doing what inside the site. The session replay ability and the ability to send that over to the call center to say, "Hey, we know, say this," or an automated response to our users to say, "Hey, we have a problem on our website clipping coupons", or pulling in some kind of eCommerce would be absolutely pivotal. It would absolutely change the game inside the company.

We have had some struggles with scaling. We are on our way to the new platform, the new Dynatrace platform, which will alleviate some of these pains. We were not expecting the level of adoption that we got with the product. We brought it in thinking a few of the teams in a segment of our company would want to use it. Everybody jumped in on it and jumped in on it really quickly. Therefore, we quickly ran into scalability issues, but we are working on alleviating that going forward.

We were on AppMon, and AppMon has its own monolithic drawbacks. On the new platform, we will not have any these problems. We can scale in the cluster horizontally.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale into the Cloud and manage performance problems is very important. We were hitting a problem with our scalability issues but now we are going larger. Part of the problem is we have so much data and we have no idea how to use it all. We would find blind spots and be able to help and do what we can when the issues came to us. If we had the issues telling us when there were problems before development and before call centers got the problems, we could retroactively go out and get the problems before customer call centers had problems. We have a problem inside the company that we have so much data and we have no idea what to do with it all. AI will help solve that issue and help move us forward. It could pull the stuff that is problematic, the most performing or non-performing issues, in areas where we want to see certain things.

We have used support quite extensively. We have had many very imperative tickets with them, and they are very supportive. They are very good with communication. They are very transparent in issues, what they need to do, and how they need to fix certain issues and problems. We have worked very closely with a lot of the support. We get a lot of offshore support from the Austrian development teams and a lot from the Polish development teams. Anybody they could pull in to make things happen and to make the pain go away for us, they do it, and they do it very well.

I have used Wiley, though not at this company.

We used to use AppDynamics. We did a PoC for CA Wiley. Before we brought in Dynatrace, we did a PoC with all of them. We just got rid of AppDynamics (out of our environment). They did not allow for the deep dive visibility. 

A lot of the problems that we had with products like AppDynamics was it got us to a certain point, then we were not able to see any deeper. It would dump us in something they called a metric browser, then we just got metrics, but we did not see what was going on in the underlying code. 

In Dynatrace, we could decompile the source code. We could see the things on the fly. We could see what is actually going on inside the tool. It has been very helpful. We did this thing with the Wiley tool, but it was just way too immature and they were not even close to even having any of the conversations that we wanted to have. 

I was involved in the initial setup, but I have done it before. I have done it on multiple different sites so probably done three stand ups so far: two at the prior company and one at this one. It is not bad. It was easiest with this company, because this company had a level of technical maturity that was not available in the other ones. If you have companies that are doing things like continuous delivery, having built pipelines and having the ability to do these things, it is a little bit easier. I have a feeling that the companies that are more technically challenged, the initial setup is going to be a little bit harder. 

Our main problems were around security and network, but those are hurdles that almost everybody has got to get over and build. It was not bad.

The vendor team tried to help during implementation. A lot of the struggles were not with the product. It was more with the way that we do things inside the company, so it was internal struggles from the company side. The product was always there and I could always reach out for support, if I needed additional help.

Look at your audience. Who is the audience that is going to be consuming your data? If it is going to be primarily developers then you want to be able to push this out through the business, there is no other solution. If you want your developers and people to actually see what is going on inside the code and be able to fix and proactively fix stuff before it happens, this is the solution that you want.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The vendor needs to be very future facing. We jump on technologies. We are a huge company with over 400,000 employees. We jump on new technologies within days or weeks of it coming out. This is not the best strategy in most cases and most larger companies tend to stay away from change. I have been in production environments where we have upgraded and changed the version of one of our most pivotal production servers within two days of it being released from the company. This is not usually the best thing. 

Dynatrace does a good job to make sure they stay out in front of the new technologies. We have had to ratchet back our development teams and tell them, "You need to wait at least a two or three weeks before you jump on the newest version, especially going into production." We know that most technologies inside of Dynatrace that they will move with us to make sure that we are keeping up with our development teams.

It's performing well. We typically use it for its intended purpose: application monitoring, identifying trends of release-over-release of our solutions, of average response time, impacts, server metrics. 

Specifically, for the subteams that I'm on, it's very much allowed us to get real insights into the impacts of our changes. It's allowed us to see pre- and post-metrics and be able to provide dashboards for our business. It's been extremely valuable.

One aspect of development is the concept of continuous improvements. There are key screens in our applications. We get identification, through Dynatrace on its own, that these are our top ten slow preforming screens. They choose to invest in optimizing those, and then we can show them the outcome through all the dashboards.

In the AppMon, offering, currently, would be just the PurePath analysis, being able to deep-dive into call chains.

The session replay. That's probably the biggest. I think that's the struggle right now, the ability to reproduce the customer's behavior. "Oh, I had a spinning wheel," or "I observed a error." And you're wondering, "Okay. How? How did you do that?" and they say, "I don't remember." Being able to replay exactly, the exact screen movements and everything, it's very indicative of a good feature.

One of my key focus areas does deal with performance testing, and Andy, here at the Perform 2018 conference, had a good session on performance testing. But it was a lot of utilizing a custom thing he built and "hooks" there, but they should make hooks into some of the more modern performance testing tools a little easier. I think that would go a long way.

We actually experimented with Managed initially, very early in its introduction, and it very much came off as a beta product, because some of the core capabilities were just generally throwing errors. But in what I've seen in the demonstrations here at the Perform 2018 conference, it has gotten a lot more polished. The AppMon part itsself is also better polished. So, I think it's the nature of trying to rewrite from the ground up.

I know, at least from an AppMon perspective, there's very much a limitation on memory and things of that nature. I think with the move towards the Managed product that they have some better opportunities there from a scaling perspective.

I, myself, have not directly used technical support. We have a team that actually focuses on directly tooling. They're typically a go-between with support.

Custom, home-brew.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, I think AI is significant when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, especially in regards to shifting the need for manual observations, and in terms of identifying system degradation, etc. I think it's extremely valuable in terms of being able to anticipate potential issues, as opposed to the typical reactive identification of issues. I'd rather an AI system find it before a customer communicates such.

Regarding one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to just top-level data, I don't think that's a possibility. Unfortunately, I don't think that there's always a one-solution-fits-all to any problem.

If a friend said he was looking to adopt an APM solution I would tell him, "Use what we have available in the enterprise, which is Dynatrace."

We have multiple applications at our company and the user experience is really important to us. We started getting Dynatrace products in to see how we can improve user experience and find some of the performance issues that we were unaware of. Some applications were practically black boxes for us, and we could not get an in-depth view into them. 

Therefore, we started with DC RUM and AppMon to get more details for such applications and this helped us immensely. We have really improved in customer satisfaction and also we found out a few performance issues that we were not aware of earlier. DC RUM, especially, was able to identify faulty tiers very quickly and Apmon gets the root cause quickly. Later on, we started getting into synthetic monitoring to identify problems from any offshore users, so this was really helpful. 

The problem we had with Apmon was the instrumentation was difficult. It is really time consuming and you need to get into every process and tie it up. Therefore, we are moving to Dynatrace and their latest solution as managed. This has completely reduced time for us. It is an agent at the operating system level and the process gets tagged automatically, so that is very useful.

We are very happy with the way Dynatrace has worked out for us and we are slowly moving into Dynatrace Managed, but we hope to get our complete monitoring solution into Dynatrace Managed.

Dynatrace is almost a single pane of glass solution.

Root cause analysis is definitely very valuable for us. Also, the proactive monitoring that we can do with Dynatrace where it is 24/7 on with all the user experience indexed and everything coming into us. With this information, we have been able to avoid issues before they actually happen, which is fantastic. Each minute that we are down costs the company money. If we can avoid that, and we can stop things from going there, it has been the greatest use for us. Being proactive about issues and avoiding downtime.

We would like to see data from different monitoring tools. We do have some network monitoring tools and some infrastructure monitoring tools that were already there before Dynatrace came in, and we would like to see if we can send that data into Dynatrace.

Maybe it could send the data from load balancers, firewalls, and everything to Dynatrace. It is my understanding that they are developing on it. Once we get that working, that would be very useful.

There are a lot of features that could be added that would make this a very useful solution, but it is getting there.

It is very stable. The improvements that they keep making just make the tool more useful.

We are on a managed solution, so everything is on-premise. Even their cloud systems are very scalable. We have never had any problems with it.

We do not really work with cloud that much. Definitely, AI would help us in scaling because even though we are not in the cloud on our physical server, we have seen some instances where an application either has way more CPU than it needs or way more memory than it needs. Just by analyzing its resource consumption, we can scale it properly, then add more servers or reduce the number of servers accurately rather than throw resources at it as a solution for any performance problem.

The technical support is very knowledgeable.

There were a few cases where we were having trouble with something and the solution gets back to us within hours. So, that is really useful.

Initially, the complexities were due to lack of knowledge about the tool and it was our fault. Eventually, we even got into problems where we had an issue with Dynatrace servers not functioning as expected, but the support was very quick to help us identify the problem and fix it immediately.

We were using multiple tools, but they were not really a single pane of glass for everything. It was one tool for the network, one tool for the infrastructure, etc. and the people had to manually stitch everything together. It is not really reliable at times when you are stitching together all the data.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

Initially, we had technical support. As we started scaling, I did it by myself.

We just started getting into APM. We did a review of a few monitoring tools, but Dynatrace seemed to be on the top. 

If you are looking to implement something right now, look for any technology like Dynatrace OneAgent, which basically removes all the manual work like tagging each process. Therefore, if you have any technology that can just sit on an operating system level and view all the processes running in that operating system, that would be fantastic.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit to my team would be quick resolution. This way we would know what exactly the problem is and we could later find out how it went wrong, but the best thing would be the quick resolution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They have quick support and how willing are they to accommodate any of our requirements or needs. Also, can they get either PoCs or sale orders quickly to us. So, just have action in time.

Currently we use it for monitoring various systems, performance settings. It does very well for that, so I can say we're really happy with it.

It's close to real-time, so it's very accurate.

There are some features that are specialized towards our industry, but more along the lines of: Say you have a group of systems in a homogeneous environment and you'd like to find out if any are differing in their configurations, versus the rest of the group, I think it would be helpful if the AI would help bring that forward. You can already define a group of servers or machines, so if the AI would pick up on this group of machines, that they should have a standard configuration and say, "Some of these machines don't have that standard configuration." It would raise a problem or an alert. I think that would actually be very helpful.

So far, the solution seems very stable. I haven't really seen any crashes or downfalls and I haven't seen it cause instability towards anything else.

We haven't seen any adverse effects due to scalability.

I haven't had to use technical support, personally; I can't speak for anyone else at the organization.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, so I can't speak to whether it was complex or not. I did go through some initial training on OneAgent, and it looks extremely straightforward. I can't imagine it being too complicated.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, I think the role of AI for IT's ability to scale in the cloud, and managing performance, is very important because as large platforms grow, it's going to be extremely important to be able to pinpoint those problems and help find root cause analysis, that much faster. You're going to have that many more logs, and data, and code to flow through. A small subset of people just isn't going to be able to do it effectively.

We have used a small, limited set of siloed monitoring tools. In previous jobs, they were homegrown, so they were only as effective as we could make them be, which was only as effective as we had time to make them be. There was a balance because we had to fix what was going wrong and also try to build the tools to find what was going wrong. It was a tough balance to find. Switching jobs, we've used tools like Splunk alongside Dynatrace, alongside a couple other tools. They're all different tools used for different tasks, so I'm not sure if you can quite compare them side to side. It seems like the new Dynatrace has quite a few new features we're quite interested in.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, as opposed to top level data, that would be extremely helpful. That way, everything is concise, to the point, and in one location. Team members wouldn't have to go through different pages, different locations, and memorize where they would have to go and find what data they were looking for. They could find it all in the one place, very quickly and very easily.

The benefit would be that if you had everything in one place, you could save time looking for answers. Time is money, and when you are running into an issue, in an industry like ours, where seconds are basically hours compared to what most other companies have, it's an extremely important thing to have information at your fingertips, in a good location too. Having all that in one location and having the data immediately right there is what every company is really looking for.

I would give it a nine out of 10. I haven't seen everything out there, but it's up there.

If a friend was looking to adopt an APM solution, I'd probably steer them towards Dynatrace, just from personal experience. It's one of the only ones that I've had experience with, it's been generally very good. And seeing the direction they're going, it's a very good direction. It's where it needs to go.

We use AppMon to monitor our production system today. We're also looking at ways to get our development teams looking into things as they commit, and identifying performance problems, as soon as we can.

Our team is one of the few development spaces in our organization that actually uses Dynatrace to give us some feedback in terms of performance level, test regions, things like that. We're trying to find ways to get other people involved there.

When I first started, it was about five years ago, I don't really recall what was being done for application performance monitoring. But about three or four years ago they put Dynatrace into place, and I know it's provided a lot of insight, especially when we had production outages, to troubleshoot and quickly identify the problem.

For us, some of the troubleshooting features for development, the PurePath technology. The dashboarding gives us some good insight into some fluctuations in some of the application areas. But, seeing the new Dynatrace stuff makes me think, it could be a little easier.

If there was something that could be done at a local developer's station, something like, "Hey, here's a hint, this thing looks like it might not be optimized," or the like. More development features, to hedge that performance.

Some of the UEM capability interfered a little bit with one of our UIs. Aside from that, I don't think I know of any performance problem with the application.

I don't think we've had any problems with scalability.

I have not called tech support, but we do have a guardian. I know that one of our performance engineers actively works with him to work through any kinds of problems, configuration problems, things like that. We've had good support from them.

I don't know that we use too much in the way of AI to scale our production today. We do use Pivotal Cloud Foundry when we do have some auto scaling-up of some of our microservices. But those things, I definitely think are going to become more commonplace, and more part of everything that we do. 

I think the AI stuff is going to help us going forward, because we're breaking apart some of our bigger, monolithic applications, and building our microservices, so there are going to be things that need to scale up, scale down, based on what someone is doing. So I think that AI stuff is really going to drive a lot of that.

Regarding one tool that could provide not only data but real answers, even with PurePath and things like this, it still takes time, a day or whatever - or expert knowledge of some person - to be able to identify a problem quickly. From what I've seen so far, the AI stuff actually gives you at least five, six, different possibilities at worst case. So, just that insight alone would be a big time-saver for everybody.

When working with a vendor, I think it's really important that they're - I don't want to say available - but responsive. And I think with the guardian service we've been using so far from Dynatrace, it's worked pretty well.

I would rate AppMon a seven out of 10. I think at times it has given some folks some headaches from a configuration standpoint, and a maintenance standpoint, but aside from that I don't think they've really had many headaches with it.

Definitely weigh your options. I know there's some availability for proof of concept with Dynatrace, where they actually work with you, whether it's a guardian service or sales. They will work with you to identify the proper solution and setup for you, so I think that's really a good thing, instead of just dropping some software product on your platform.

Currently, primary use case for the usage of AppMon is what I will call our flagship applications across the bank. We have had it about three years. Adoption was over time, one app at a time. then more and more. All of our major flagship applications now have AppMon dashboards. We do have some SaaS, but that is because the applications are cloud-based solutions. The use case frankly is about improving monitoring, system uptime, and preventing of events. If you have thresholds set correctly, along with alerting, and all the other stuff, your operational teams can find things before the field even notices.

We have substantially lowered incidents in our organization. It is hard to really measure it exactly from a percentage of how many have been lowered. As a general statement, there is no question that the number of incidents and the duration of incidents have dropped. Even if we do get caught blindsided by some infrastructure failure or something, our ability to pinpoint the problem through things like PurePath have dramatically reduced incident time. Whether you want to argue about AppMon, SaaS, or cloud from a business value point of view, that is tangible even for our non-technical people at the bank. They get this.

• The threshold alerting is what makes the difference. 
• The PurePath stuff for deep dive analysis on problems. That is massive as far as having a benefit. 

The dashboard is eye candy, because it's just a screen. It looks nice but the thresholding and alerting is what makes it meaningful because we are a 24/7 operation. As you can imagine, 2:00 AM in the morning, you can't necessarily afford to have a bunch of people staring at glass. We have to have the mechanism of the alerts, which is tied into our others systems, like xMatters. That is how it works for us.

I do not know everything that is in the hopper. What I am about to say could already be in the hopper. I am learning more about so called 7.1, be it SaaS or AppMon. Setting up the thresholds and alerting, it is complicated to understand their use cases. In other words, as a business perspective, you want to say, "I want this to alert under these conditions." However, you have to translate that in terms of all the various settings in Dynatrace. Whereas, it would be easier if Dynatrace just had a button that said, "I want this alerting use case," and I just pushed a button, then it set the 17 values behind the scenes. That would probably be a more user-friendly way. It does not require the user to understand what a threshold is or even what the different intervals of thresholds are. It is just a black box. It is like, "I want this experience," and it just figures out what to set.

The product is evolving, maybe too fast; maybe it is a little bit fragmented of an evolution. It is sort of expected in a way because the company, in my impression, is spending a lot more money. It is a function of the fact that they are growing as a company and revenue is growing, so there is probably a lot more emphasis on R&D and different product development. My expectation is that over time it will become a more unified, stable product. However, generally, from the product itself, we have not had issues with it, like something that monitors the monitor. We have not really had to worry about it.

I have not been aware of any limitations. I know that the older version of AppMon, the so called classic version, had some limits on number of agents per server. However, those limits never really caused a challenge for our particular topology.

As our adoption was in its infancy, we had the physical Dynatrace guardians, local from local areas, if you will, in our city. That was like our support because they were physically onsite. As our own staff became enabled and just basically knew the product, we frankly did not really need support, unless it was a product defect or something like that. In which case, we had a team within our company that was the interface for them.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past. A lot of products have obviously been around for years, even before Dynatrace. Typically, they are technology or topology specific. You have got a certain operating system or environment which is the product of choice for that environment: different operating system, different environment, and different product. You will also end up with a whole lot of tools sets, even depending on if you want a synthetic use case, something like Foglight as an example. You just wind up with too many tools. Even this morning, Dynatrace's CTO talked about this very problem. I guess Dynatrace is trying to solve this with one-shoe-fits-all. Which as an organization, who would not want a multi-supported application product that can go across all the topologies, cloud, and everything else?

There was a product we used before Dynatrace. We are a big mainframe shop, so it was a mainframe product. It was really built for the IBM mainframe. Because we were heavily in mainframe and this is going back a few years now, that was the product for choice for mainframe. Then, with web-based solutions, all these applications, cloud, and everything else coming, we needed something else. I do not really quite know how it happened exactly, but somebody talked to somebody who talked to some Dynatrace person. Then, I remember actually going to the very first ever meeting where a Dynatrace person came on our site. They asked me to attend because I'm a big stakeholder and I guess it just went from there.

At the decision time, we did have a senior executive emphasis on the business that there just appeared to be too many incidents and we are a major financial institution with 40,000 employees in the field essentially generating revenue on practically a 24/7 basis. If one of the systems that they use is even down for 10 minutes, that is like $1 million lost. So, there were a lot of events and the timing was right. Whether that was good timing on Dynatrace's part, because we had a problem that we needed to improve, they came into our location, we had a marriage, and we have been with them since. 

I was involved in one of the very first implementations, but I did rely on an infrastructure team that did the physical installation and acquisition of virtual servers, as far as the agents and the nodes. I was physically involved on a team that wrote one of the very first dashboards. This is three to four years ago. It was more about just learning the product, frankly. I look back now and I can close both eyes now. At that time, it took some time getting used to it, but I would not call it overly complex.

There may have been minor things, but that was more our own people trying to understand it. We may have had it, such as, "Let's install this agent on this server," then it didn't work. Then, "Oops." You have to back it out, then three days later, put it back in. A lot of that is teething. I do not see that as a product limitation. It is just sometimes you don't necessarily know what you don't know and kick the tires a couple times. Now, whether the product could have maybe been a little easier? It's hard to say in hindsight.

I don't want to bring up Apple, but you can think of the Apple example. Apple has this idea that you just take it out-of-the-box and turn it on. That's it. That's your extent of configuration. Dynatrace isn't quite like that, but probably for a reason, because the idea that it could just work as is doesn't make sense, because the individual customer environments are just so different. You couldn't possibly have one-size-fits-all. It is almost impossible.

We had Dynatrace guardians onsite. 

I would definitely recommend Dynatrace. I would say not to be fearful and embrace it. It is a combination of personal comfort level in your staff, so I would probably recommend you start with a medium to low profile application and just aggressively implement Dynatrace. Once you get accustomed to it, then go with the all-in adoption. 

It is a great product, but your staff and your people, unless you are completely turnkeying it for someone else, they have to understand it. You implement it, and if people don't understand it and use it, then you are really not getting anywhere. That is probably the key part I would make to any recommendation, make sure you train your people or bring in the guardians or use the guardian for six months.

Our technology is constantly evolving. Obviously, the tools like Dynatrace we do hope and expect, frankly, that they will continue to evolve the AI element. I still think there is room in AI technology. Obviously it is getting better all the time. Voice assistant products are obviously the new thing now. So, there are a lot of changes in that technology. My expectation is that we will get way more sophisticated AI alerting and monitoring capability in Dynatrace and we will be happy to embrace it as it becomes available.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit to my team would be to reduce human interpretation where you have to log on and interpret data. Any automated interpretation on a user's behalf, or operational team, it will be better.