Dynatrace Reviews

We developed an application problem. We have had some issues that we can not bind. A lot of people recommended to us using an APM solution. By chance, one of them worked for us.

Now, it has been three years. Fortunately, it helps us to diagnose problem more quickly.

We spend less time investing in problems. We can spend more time on developing new projects. 

We use PurePath to see exactly what the user observed from the web browser to the end of the request to the dialog box. Every step of what they do is very useful for us to diagnose a problem.

The missing feature that we really need to have is session playback, because customers say, "Oh, it didn't work! I have the error page," but it is very difficult to point to exactly what they do. That is why with session playback it will show us exactly where the customer pointed, clicked, or went. This makes it easy for us to see, "Okay, you went there," because before we used the view. Right now, we do not have a user-action type in the reality to follow page to page. Now, with the new future that Dynatrace is releasing, it is exactly what I wanted.

Also, I would like a tool that can give me a one page view of all the problems and issues.

It is stable. I can see it is stable because we do not have any issues with the project that we use it for everyday. We have a lot of people dedicated to using it.

It is easy to scale because every tool that we integrate with the solution we can do so easily. 

I do not deal directly with the support team of Dynatrace. We always have special work to do when we deal with them.

From everything that I have heard about the support team, I would say they provide very good support.

We did not have an APM solution before Dynatrace. Dynatrace was our first APM solution.

We do not use siloed monitoring tools.

It was difficult to initially use the solution, how to use it and where to navigate. After that, they said, "We should some course training for people." 

After people were trained, it is easy. The first time, however, was very difficult for us, not knowing how to get started.

I would recommend Dynatrace. It is amazing.

I look into application degradation issues for mostly eCommerce, retail-based customers. The main agenda of it is to have a better user experience. When I look into it, Dynatrace plays a vital role. We use Dynatrace products to make sure that the applications are running per their guidelines as to whatever the application team designates. This is one of the key factors.

We have been having awesome responses and reviews from the customer. After Dynatrace was installed, there was a lot of outages that Dynatrace could actually catch even before there was a major outbreak within the ecosystem. So, we have been receiving good testimonial. 

OneAgent, the new platform of Dynatrace, it is called artificial intelligence (AI), so basically that artificial intelligence correlates multiple infrastructure competence transactions services and application processes. It is one of the most important features, so when there is a fire break, you do not have to go multiple hops to go look where exactly the issue is. Dynatrace can do that because of its artificial intelligence. 

AI plays a vital role in most of the customer's work that we have done, because all the implementation, Dynatrace OneAgent is on SaaS. Data is a limitation in human capability. AI takes care of a lot of things: autoscaling, you do not have to worry about taking care of the infrastructure, etc. Everything has been taken care of on the cloud. Most of the inputs we get from the AI engine, they are already integrated with Dynatrace. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the most important benefit would be the AI engine which correlates your multiple infrastructure competence with any environment. The firefighting within the environment is quite less. There are days where we used to take close to 24 hours to find a problem by looking into multiple tools involving multiple teams. When you have a single tool doing all this, there is only one place to go look. From 24 hours, we have come down to one to two hours.

I was keenly looking forward to the next releases for this platform. I saw that they are going to release by March something which is really interesting, and I am looking forward to: How a user can replay a session. E.g., if I have access to a website, I can do a whole replay of the session and where it actually went wrong. Right now, there is a log analysis feature. This is maybe a little more deeper than the log analytics in comparison to other tools, like Splunk or Sumo Logic. If Dynatrace can come up with this replay feature, that would be great. 

Technical support is good. Dynatrace OneAgent is a pretty new tool in the market. In comparison to other products that Dynatrace have, they are scaling up. We have been getting good resolution. We are quite happy with the support that they have been providing. 

We have a plethora of tools within most of our customer places. When that is actually an issue or problem, the 24/7 team comes into play. If they do not know which tool to look into when there is a problem, they go into the network tool or infrastructure. Here, Dynatrace plays a vital role by correlating the network, infrastructure, and application telling you exactly what the root cause is. 

We switched to Dynatrace because we were previously using an APM tool, which did not yield benefit, so then we had to look into other products. 

The initial setup was straightforward. The documentation and the university helped on Dynatrace. 

Surprisingly, it is quite expensive. That is something that we could always see: Improved pricing and the overall construct on how do we use each license in regards to usage of the tool. 

On our shortlist, we did have all the competition for Dynatrace. We evaluate all the major three tools and found Dynatrace to be the best fit because of the AI and Dynatrace's innovation.

AI, ease of use, and SaaS were the things that we were looking for when selecting a tool and we found them all in this particular box.

We have strongly evangelise to go ahead with Dynatrace OneAgent because we have reaped the benefits within the last six months. We have seen what Dynatrace can do and because of ease of use, SaaS based, you don't have to worry anything (everything is taken care of by Dynatrace), and the AI, the technology feature, functionality. We strongly recommend other customers to go with this product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We look into innovation. We look into the new feature functionality regarding what is coming. The Dynatrace platform comes with new releases every week. Every week they do an update, and every update is not just a normal update, it comes with a very strong feature, which is actually useful for the application's users. This makes them ahead of the technology. 

We are using Dynatrace for application monitoring. 

In the past, we would spend more time on identifying the root cause and finding the solution. After implementing Dynatrace, we easily see that we are capturing all the exceptions. Just build on the error message, then we usually quickly fix it.

Dynatrace is performing well so far.

We have identified some critical issues, which are not available or recreatable in the Dev or QA environment. They are only happening in production, and they are easy for us to identify in the production environment. We can usually identify issues and fix them.

The data monitoring is good for us, and also the performance monitoring. We have been using both extensively for the last three to four months. We have been capturing all the information and evaluating whether it can be improved or not.

Since we have been receiving alerts from Dynatrace, we go ahead and fix them without the user knowing about them. Sometimes the users never know that they are having issues and they are stuck. So, in 10 minutes, we fix it and business runs as usual without any problem.

I am able to identify issues very quickly.

I just heard about the management zone. I also got some hands-on with the early version. I feel it is a good feature to handle integrating all the services together in one place.

So far, the stability has been good.

Not yet, we started just six months before. Right now, we are on six to seven applications been monitored. 

We started implementing microservices. Microservices means now it is hundreds of services. In the future, maybe in three to six months, we are expecting thousands of services will be implemented. In this way, the solution will definitely help us to identify the entire thousands of services that need to be monitored. So, it will gives us some alert and we build on it.

We did use technical support in the initial phase when we were struggling to get into the tool. We felt they were knowledgeable.

They do have a salesperson we can contact in India.

Our switch to Dynatrace was very internal. We got a different management team, and the new management team came in and decided that we needed Dynatrace now. They had experience with it already. They knew that where we were facing issues on monitoring side.

There were some other monitoring tools, like SolarWinds. However, the new management team felt that Dynatrace would be the perfect for us.

We were and still are using SolarWinds as a monitoring application.

I was not involved in the initial setup or upgrades.

I would recommend doing a PoC.

Before adopting Dynatrace, we were evaluating multiple systems, such as AppDynamics and SolarWinds.

I am not much into the area of AI, but I still see it removing some of the non-value added work which we are doing daily, such as sitting and monitoring the server, which is not a value addition. AI is an area where we get somebody to watch it, we get alerts, then we act on them instead of just going through all the locks. Especially IoT side, even though I am on the development side, still we concentrate on AI and IoT, where we see more focus and we just started learning all those things, and implementing them in our company.

If I had a solution which would give me a real answer, not just a data, the immediate benefit would be a global application and support, because we are working in Asia. Sometimes we get incidences during the US morning when we are not at the office. If I can get the benefit of a solution, which can alert us and solve itself. It is an automation thing where we do not want to wake up late at night and work on the application.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: A vendor should be reachable at any time.

Application monitoring: We use the application monitoring of the core Dynatrace products. We mainly use it the demarking, troubleshooting, and monitoring to the PurePath for analyzing where our performance is not up to snuff.

Performance has improved substantially since we started using Dynatrace. We are able to really keep the performance solid with daily monitoring and daily dashboarding. It is a one page view of exactly where we need to focus our attention each day.

The PurePath is the real silver bullet for Dynatrace, but also the ability to create any dashboard that you want for different levels of reporting for technical people, managers, or even executive level. They can get a one page view of what the system health and performance looks like.

They need a capability similar to Tealeaf where you can actually view what the consumer is doing and record the sessions. That is the biggest missing element. Tealeaf has done it before with the Dynatrace product and exploited it, but from what I understand is Dynatrace is now incorporating this feature into a future release.

It is lacking in another area. However, I do not know if it is the way we configured it or not, but it is historical data. I do not like after 60 days or 90 days it gets aggregated to summary data. I would like to be able to analyze specific PurePaths after 30 days or 60 days with real numbers. I believe that is a limitation that we have put in place in our storage. I can't say it is a Dynatrace product problem or not, so I do not have an answer to this.

I do not recall us having any instability problems, so I would say it is stable.

I am aware that we have some limitations, but I could not specifically talk to that.

We have used and still do use some siloed monitoring tools. Looking at one part of the equation, whether it be server health or system health, it does not necessarily impact positively or negatively on performance. Without understanding of what system performance is, you can't necessarily look at what the system health is at the same time.

We used Compuware for many years, but that is part of the Dynatrace family. So, ServerVantage and Compuware were our only products prior to the implementation of Dynatrace, and Compuware was the company that purchased Dynatrace several years ago.

We are more of the user community than the architecture or infrastructure, so I have people that are architects, experts, and guardians who have had to deal with this (not me).

I would recommend implementing Dynatrace. It gives us all the data on all the calls, which is something that is very different from any other APM solution that I have seen or used in the past. 

We have lived without AI for a long time. There is minor AI and there is machine learning, so I would not say it is that important.

We wanted to buy a tool which would take care of monitoring our application performance. That's the primary reason we went for this product. 

We've been using it for the past two months and so far we've been very good with using the tool. It's been very helpful for us.

We have moved up to the next level, and once we move on to the cloud I think it's going to be more complex to monitor. That's where Dynatrace is going to help us, with identifying problems.

The benefit is that it keeps track of the application. The better the application is going to perform, the better the users are going to do their jobs. When we work with the customers it's going to be really helpful.

Overall it's helped our business in time savings. When everything happens on time you move on to the next job or activity, where you focus on things you really need to focus on.

I like the drill-down feature, that it can drill down to the code level to point to where the problems are. It's also helpful for the developers to identify what exactly happens, rather than the operation team having to do so. It works well for the developers to fix issues, so that way it's very good.

There are certain features which were introduced today here at the Perform 2018 conference, like the playback. I was very much impressed with that. It's going to help us a lot. That was something I was looking for and that's what they did. The new features that were launched today were the ones that we were expecting, and we're quite happy with that.

I can't think of any limitations at the moment. It's too early for me to comment, it's only been two months.

It's too early to comment on stability. It's been only two months so I'll have to wait on this.

I think scaling is going to be pretty easy. We're not up to that, so once we are in a position to think about the scalability we will take a look at it.

The technical support team is really good. We do have guardian services, the dedicated resource who works with us. We always reach out to him. The online chats have been effective. The webpages, the university where we can go and have a look at solutions and the like, have been very helpful so far. The technical team has been very good with support.

We have not used any tools before this one, not siloed or otherwise.

We went to a consultant to tell us which is the best product on the market. We read some reviews and we came up with Dynatrace, that it would be the apt product, based on feedback and information from the other resources. That's why we zeroed in on Dynatrace.

I was not involved from the first phase. I got involved only in the middle of the project, so I really can't comment on this. But from when I got involved, I think it has been pretty good. I would have to ask colleagues who did the other parts to check how they were.

AppDynamics. I think it's easier to work with Dynatrace, right from the installation, and I thought Dynatrace was better than AppDynamics working with SAP.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity I think the role of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to stay natural and manage performance, is very important. The AI of Dynatrace is really excellent. It would be very difficult without Dynatrace AI, so I think it's very important.

I would definitely say go with Dynatrace. I also like Dynatrace because of their integration with other products like ServiceNow. It's very good. And again, working with SAP HANA it's very good so. So, overall I recommend Dynatrace.

The primary use case is we have customer-impacting production issues, so we have to get in there and quickly find out the root cause. It used to take days because we did not have an APM tool. With Dynatrace, we are now able to identify the root cause in 15 minutes. It has helped the entire operations of our company. It is working really well.

PurePath is the best. I have never seen it before and the way it is helping is really cool. It is eliminating lots of hops we go through to find the cause and reach out to the person. Now, we know exactly which line, which method, and which program needs fixing, so we directly go to the right developer and the guy comes in fixes it. Then, in the next week at least, it is done. 

I am looking forward to new Dynatrace features coming out. However, I am still hoping for more.

It is 99.9% stable. For the 0.1%, there were too many users who were using the client. This was the problem. So, we had to move to the business rich client, then the issue was gone. 

We scaled from 300 agents to 800 agents in six months. There were no issues at the server level, which is pretty good.

We have used the problem management, which is available on the management support community site. We have used that. 

Dynatrace is my first APM tool. We were previously using CA Wiley. With Wiley, we did not have the ability to get inside the process. We were outside. Now, with the Dynatrace, we are getting inside the PurePath, which is a great help. 

I helped my administration to do the initial setup. It was very easy.

If you are looking to implement it, go straight ahead. Don't even think about it, just use it. 

When it comes to IT's ability to scale to in a cloud and manage performance problems, now that we are activating more agents of Dynatrace, AI is going to be tremendously helpful to us. 

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be the ability to add up more applications into the performance support, then help more applications with the fewer number of resources in our app.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. The sales rep with their technical team coming to see us and giving us a demo is the key. We need to understand exactly what level of depth they have.
2. We need security in place.

Considering the application and what we are using at the client site. We have a user interaction related application where users fill in their information, and they are processing the formality and completing the business transaction. The business transaction generates a policy or a report out of all the services. This is from the user interface point of things. 

Other than that, they are that second aspect of us in elite services called back-end services. There is no actual user interface with these services for the end user. There are some other applications, which will be calling the services. At the client side, we are monitoring Layer 2. One service that we use it for: What are the issues, what are the problems, and what are we facing for services.

Similarly, when the user interaction is there, what are the challenges users are facing and how we can proactively use Dynatrace and get the problem resolved. That is what the current setup of Dynatrace offers our client base.

1. The deployment configuration and everything is simple. It is not that complicated. That is critical, because that saves time. Whenever something goes wrong, since in deployment everything is easy, you are saving time solving the issues. 
2. The user interface. The user interface is like a type of dashboard. You can use the tool as an end user into the tool interface, which is good. This is simple, not complex as where to find something. Any layman, if you give them the tool, who has knowledge of how to use an internet browser will be able to use the tool if you just explain it in a few words. It is intuitive.

Mainly, if the user rarely utilizes user monitoring, this is the biggest feature. Because when the user has an issue, we have configured the alerting so the error or the incident will go to the respective team. Then, the team can contact the user once they see that they have an issue and ask if they can them resolve the issue. That is the key thing, because that helps with revenue loss. This is the key feature that we see.

There is a limitation on timeframe. Now, if you look at the dashboard, it will state five minutes, then 15 minutes, then one hour, then six hours, and finally 24 hours. I would like them to provide a set of options defining the business hour.

In the morning from 5AM to 6AM is my business hour. If you could give me that option, it would be easier for me instead of just lasting one business hour to finish. This would be a cool feature. 

A lot of organizations are 24/7, but they will be mainly looking for limited data for their business hours. My business hours are about 12 hours, which is when all my analysis is done.

We had only two or three major downtimes. We were able to resolve those in less than eight hours. These were not big, major downtimes that we experienced for the solution.

We have used technical support many times, because there are some issues which we were not able to figure out based on the information provided. There are some things, which we need the technical support team's help in making the changes, and also before changes are made. There should not be a case where we make a change and certain features get disabled, or certain featured get enabled.

We have used technical support in the past, but the support is limited. Though, I have never had an issue that the technical team has not been able to solve. I show them the problem, then they see the problem, and solve it. That is what is very successful for me: no back-and-forth with support.

Support can ask in a list what information they want from me and what problem I am facing, then I will explain it. This will help us to solve problem more quickly than just chatting.

Before, I came to that account, they had a network monitoring tool. They also had some JV monitoring tools, so two different things. There are some network-related issue you can take from the network monitoring tool, some with a JVM and some you need to take from Java.

For the end user, application, or web tier, the monitoring was not there.

I have used, as a part of my team back home in India, CA Wiley. We did a PoC implementation with it. I did a PoC of Wily in 2005.

The deployment was simple, as well as the upgrade.

The first upgrade was little bit complex because you have a data you need to maintain. With an initial deployment, you are starting from scratch and have nothing to worry about. When you upgrade, you need to plan well in advance what you want see.

We needed to do see what was intact, because when we moved from 6.1 to 6.3, the migration tool that they had, it was not quite solid or sound. Now, they have a good migration tool whatever they developed.

The challenges that we face were not that big just minor challenges, since we did a PoC with the tool. Therefore, we could migrate easily with minimal impact on the end user.

When I came in the picture for this particular engagement, the client had already done a PoC with Dynatrace. However, if I say Dynatrace right now, it is a total different flavor, as I am currently using AppMon.

When I came here and I was working another engagement, I attended some training for DC RUM which was a Compuware APM to Dynatrace. Now, it has totally changed since when I started using it for deployment. Everything is fine. As compared to the Wiley, it is not an apple to apple comparison. 

Make sure your application team or the development team is going to use the tool. If your application or development team is not going to get any benefit in the sense of not being involved in this particular APM monitoring, then the benefit will be less. For example, if you implemented a solution and your monitoring team is using it, then to achieve the full-fledge benefit, your application development team should use it, because during the development itself they will see that these are the challenges we are facing. They will fix the problems during the development instead of in testing.

This will save time for any application for release, because the development team will fix the problems before the release of anything. This is the foremost thing that they need to consider whenever they are going for the solution.

The other thing is an organizational point of view. You need to have some center of excellence, which will be dedicated for the APM. It is not okay for some part-time people to just be looking on. There has to be a dedicated team if you have this tool in your organization.

Only then you will get whatever you are expecting out of this tool.

AI's playing the key role in the way all the monitoring solutions are going now. They are computing all this information which is available and providing information it for human beings to try to solve problems.

The AI is playing a key role otherwise just imagine. Previously, you would need to analyze all the logs for an error and coming out with the solution would take hours. Nowadays, because of the AI, the log analysis and everything has been done in backing. You can use your experience logic, take that information, and solve the problem.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be time to resolve issues that would be useful for the team. To solve the problem for the end user, because from his point of view, the problem should be resolved quickly. So, this is definitely an advantage for the end user as it is for the team.

Support team could use the information and will be able to pinpoint the issue, who the user is, and where their location is. When we have these issues with this technology, the issues will be resolved more quickly because you have the information regarding what went wrong, what is the error, and what stage the problem is at.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: What is their market share? Where are they standing? Are they a leader or they just initially starting? Because based on the customer's budget, if they want to sell out or work with a type of market leader's solution, then we will definitely look at that particular area.

However, there are some company that might not want to sell out. We see this in some companies, which are in their startup faze. The investment will be minimal, but the challenge is that you won't be able to get the features that other companies at the top are offering.

We have been using Dynatrace for almost two years now. Our primary focus is to understand where the critical bottlenecks are. We have a wide range of applications running on technologies right from mainframe: the client server, cloud, Node.js, etc. 

In order to accommodate all these things, we were looking at one simple product which would help us with all these issues that we were facing. Before choosing Dynatrace, we did a survey of the market to understand what other products there were. 

We ended up choosing Dynatrace because of fantastic capabilities, which it provides. Our business is critical to our customers. With a variety of technologies and different groups, we are experiencing more diverse issues.

The issues are identified well ahead of time because there are a series of operations that form the upstream and downstream applications. The earlier we catch an issue in one of the upstream applications, we can handle it and put a mechanism in place to effectively handle the downstream applications. Without that in place, if something breaks in upstream, then we are definitely sure that some application in downstream will be affected. This is really critical.

PurePath. In addition to routing mechanisms, they have set up the latest profiles and the latest threshold for alerts that go to several teams, including development, support, and infrastructure teams. This helps us be ahead of the game before something happens.

A couple of things that we have actually pointed out in the past:

1. The log analytics, which OneAgent should be carrying forward.
2. Getting the data out of Dynatrace and consuming it in development for other analytical purposes. The analytics feature provides us some information, but is limited for now. We want to see how we can consume the data further down and have analytics guys look at the datacenter information.

We have been running it for more than two years now. We have never had issues with the platform. One hiccup was the front-end server being low in memory because many users logging and running a wide range of reports. So, we limited that to some information by moving some of our users to the platform. In terms of stability, we have never had any issues.

It is scalable. We initially started with fewer agents because we just wanted to have the development team working with this new product. Therefore, we started small and have not had any issues scaling up to what we have. We never had any incidents because of it neither in VM or physical boxes.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is definitely very important. The sheer volume of data we are creating from across all these systems is one of the critical pieces of the enterprise window that happens from 4:00 to 7:00 PM EST, where we send out all the NAV updates to various clients including NASDAQ. There are a variety of products which have their own limitations and quality of information. It is necessary to focus all the important technologies into a single source so we can follow the timelines and know exactly who is going to call us.

With the new managed OneAgent, that is what we're looking at. Currently, we are on AppMon, so we need the AI metrics in place at least until the process of OneAgent to manage the elements that is there. Then, we will see the critical elements and information.

We had to use technical support before, primarily in the areas of adding additional features to the product. For example, we have some applications in Python. We do not have support for Python, which is not really the product, but more adding features on top of the product.

We have used siloed monitoring tools in the past and some of them are already part of the infrastructure vertex system. Then, some are home grown, so we have a good system which is homegrown and looks at various metrics. It is a challenge because we have to write one solution which can handle everything, and our timeframe and resource constraints are a long process in writing. 

I was not involved right at the beginning. It was not complex at all. We had the Dynatrace agent helping us in person with the issues.

Look at Dynatrace. It has helped us by reducing the number of incidents that we have had in the past. It is a robust solution that would help anyone get to the solution and resolution pretty fast.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It came down to a critical component because we have numerous applications with different problems from apps or databases. Before the APM platform for narrowing down the problem became a critical issue, so at this point it was narrowing down and pointing to the exact core component. That was very critical.