Dynatrace Reviews

The primary use case is to monitor all our applications. We are doing an eMPOWER application, which is a new project including customer engagement across eCommerce, CRM, etc. We want a single place where we can monitor all our applications that we are building. Therefore, if something goes wrong, we immediately can find out what went wrong. 

We have not gone live yet. We just configured our environment and just started using it. So far, it is pretty good. 

We have not gone live yet. From a technical perspective, the expectation will be it is going to provide quick turnaround on issues and provide more stability. Based on how we observe Dynatrace, it will provide us some insight on what we can expect. 

From the business perspective, I think it is going to be a big deal. The conversion rate of people searching for a product and buying a product, these do not exist in our company right now. 

We expect there will be big business impact once we properly go live. 

• PurePath: Right now, we are using it for all our applications.
• Web monitoring: What we have is currently good. 

Cloud monitoring is insufficient. There is something that they are introducing for Salesforce, which is called agentless monitoring that I like. However, it is not going to cover the server side of Salesforce, it is going to cover the UI side of it. So, we would prefer Dynatrace to make more partnerships with major cloud applications like Salesforce, C4C, etc. That way they have an agent in their cloud services, and we can capture the code level analysis of what is going on in the Salesforce side. Right now, we do not, so that would be good. 

Given our scenarios so far, it is pretty good. The expectation is to remain the same.

The number of failures and the number of collectors servers, those look good right now and I do not see a need for increase for at least the next two years. Maybe after once we go live, once we will see the traffic, we may decide to if we want increase the scale. However, it may just be the extendability, and not a drastic change in the architecture of how we deploy the interface. 

We used the Dynatrace three month package, where I worked with a technical support person for three months and she helped in building the dashboards and exposing more features of Dynatrace. So, it was very helpful.

In our company, we had Microsoft SCOM, but I do not think it did the job well. Once we figured out there is a monitoring system that can show us code level details, nothing came closer. 

The initial setup was challenging for us. Initially, when we heard about Dynatrace, we knew why it was so good. However, it was complex until you grasped the nuances of the product and the building blocks: what makes what,  from where you can derive what, thresholds, goals, measures, etc. It took time for my team and me to get a grasp of what things are, so now we know what at least we have and have a good handle on it. Therefore, it is easier for us, so whenever there is a challenge, we have an idea of how to handle it. 

New Relic is one company that we had in mind, but our company preferred Dynatrace. New Relic was on the shortlist. As the technical team, we sat with Dynatrace for the PoC and we were able to do the PoC for Dynatrace. We loved it, and we explained the same to the executive team. Another team did the PoC for New Relic and our executive team decided on Dynatrace.

I would recommend the Dynatrace solution. I know firsthand that it is the most proven solution.

In today's sessions, I heard more about Dynatrace monitoring. We are using app monitoring. Dynatrace monitoring seems to be much more helpful.

Once the engine of AI is properly trained with sufficient amounts of data, it is going to be very critical for IT and it will be helpful and suggestive for the users. The only fear is that stage where it is trained, but not sufficiently, it will be very annoying. This is because it might pull up error messages, often times irrelevant. However, the concept of AI is going to be the future. 

If I had one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be that it would solve our problems much sooner.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The baseline is when a user comes in, we want to know everything he does in our landscape. It does not matter whether it is two applications or 10 applications in our landscape. We want to be able to follow exactly they do. 

That was the baseline we needed and Dynatrace fitted it pretty good, except there are some legacy applications, which Dynatrace doesn't support. Still, those are made as black box code. The bottom line is the traceability of any user. If something goes wrong, we should be able to pinpoint where exactly things go wrong. 

We are using it in an operational mode, when we have trouble easily getting the root cause, getting the application back up and running. 

Based on that, the product has worked very well for us. We are happy with it.

It's really opened our eyes. We had point solutions where we could see different elements of the stack, and Dynatrace ties everything together. Before, we could never get that full-stack monitoring. It prevents that, "Oh, it's your problem. No, it's your problem," type of an issue, and it allows us to get to that problem.

It also helps us get us the context of the customer experience. What's the business impact of those problems? And we've never had that before. That has been good.

• Ease of use
• The full stack - Everything from the browser, all the way back to the database, and being able to see everything, and really narrow in very quickly on what is the root cause. That's the biggest bang for us.

Where we are struggling is being able to pull that information out and combine it with other contextual information that we have in other sources. Mining that data in a big-data environment, and joining it together and coming up with larger types of analysis on it. Big-data types of issues. We're still blazing a trail, trying to figure that out. But it's not as easy as some of the other things we've been able to do with the product.

Very stable. Very happy with it.

We have a lot of our infrastructure on it, so it's meeting our needs, for our enterprise. We have thousands of agents that are out there in over a thousand applications, and it's meeting our needs with that.

I think it's good. They are very responsive and get back to us. They try to give us workarounds and follow up with us. So, we're happy with that.

We have an infrastructure group and I'm more on the business-unit side, but I was part of our PoC as we brought it in, and stood it up. Generally, it was very easy to get it set up and get going very quickly. It was pretty easy. We used some of the Dynatrace sales team and the engineers to help us get it set up, but in short order, we had it going.

AppDynamics and New Relic were the other two.

We were never able to get AppDynamics working in our PoC. We couldn't get it working on our web servers. New Relic didn't meet some of our shortlist criterion.

Regarding the nature of digital complexity, I think the role of AI is becoming more critical when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems. It's because of the complexity and the number of elements that are out there, and being able to completely understand what the problem is. There was a good quote from one of the last keynote presentations here at the Perform 2018 conference: "Let's not chase $500 issues. Using AI allows us to go for those bigger issues," and look for more value, rather than worrying about all the little things that happen. AI would give us the ability to handle that low-level work, very quickly - the auto remediation - get that back up and going. It would buy us time to do higher-level work.

We've used a lot tools at our company, including siloed monitoring tools. Some of the main things we're seeing with them are gaps in the ability to handle emerging technology; things like single-page applications, Angular applications, single sign-on applications, those types of things.

When looking at purchasing an APM solution, we wanted something that was a proven leader. We looked at industry review rankings. Did it support the technologies we develop our applications on? Can it give us that full-stack view into our architecture? Can it tell us what's going on with the customer experience? Those types of things.

If I had a friend looking to adopt an APM solution, I'd really have him take a look at Dynatrace. It's an industry leader. We've had a great experience with them. It meets our needs. They're future-looking. Even though we're not where they are in terms of the capabilities they have, we know we're going to need those capabilities in the future. Great product.

The primary focus using this product is to find performance issues and then to find the root causes to provide a full recommendation. Coming from a performance engineering background, we love this tool. We focused on PurePaths, looked at hotspots, and this helped us a lot in rectifying most of the performance issues.

We are using it for production monitoring, mainly testing all the new applications and performance monitoring.

The core features are the monitoring alerts and an easy, faster way of getting to the problem, and identifying what should be fixed.

The most valuable feature is, I can quickly go to the PurePath and find the problem in the application. I can say that it provides me a way by which I can quickly find the root cause of the problem. Then you try to tune it. So that has been an amazing experience.

The new Dynatrace release is already fully loaded. I still need to explore it. We are still using it and the new features, like log analysis and session replay, are good. As of now, I don't see any particular feature that is missing in Dynatrace, except one.

I still don't see the full depth of database metrics for database performance management. For example, I use Oracle Enterprise Manager and I use a type of access that provides me a lot of metrics and meaningful ways to evaluate database performance. That is something I don't see in Dynatrace yet.

It's very stable. I haven't seen any issues with the stability.

We started with a couple of the applications initially, and it was fast. We wanted this tool to be part of the applications and that's when and we started adding more and more application into Dynatrace. Then, we realized that there were some slowness issues, but we were quickly able to see what was causing them and then we added adequate hardware and storage so that it became scalable. 

Now we know what the math is between the number of applications and the sizing requirements of Dynatrace. After finding these things we know what to do, how to scale in terms of how many applications we want to put into Dynatrace.

They're very quick, they're always on top of our questions. Most of the issues are getting resolved quickly. I can say the support is fabulous.

We were using the Wily Introscope before, and we had a hard time setting up and capturing method-level performance metrics. For example, in Dynatrace the way PurePaths show insight into the method-level level hotspots, stack trace - that was missing in Wily Introscope. And Dynatrace was more intuitive. These are the few things that pushed us to go for it.

It was complicated in the sense of teaching the support team how to do this because they were new. But once we showed them how to put the agents and how to administrate it, then it was easy for the ops team to take care of supporting, administrating, and putting all the applications into one stack.

New Relic, and Wily.

What we have seen in the last two or three years is the technology space has been continuously changing and new features are being added. What we realized in the last quarter was, we should have a better way of identifying in production, end-users' scenarios using artificial intelligence. Since our alpha, we are excluding thousands of test scenarios. Better to run focused test scenarios based on artificial intelligence and our log analysis, and focus our energy on testing the key scenarios that have been performed by end-users. I think that is a new space where we need intelligent solutions like artificial intelligence.

The problem with the siloed monitoring tools was you could not save the past or the story of your test results, and it needed a lot of setup. You needed to work with so many tools and it didn't provide all the key features that we were looking for. Maybe it is good for one thing, maybe just plain CPU and memory. If I need holistic metrics, that's missing in the siloed monitoring tools.

If we had just one solution that could provide real analysis, as opposed to just data, that would be fantastic. We would not need to find so many different tools and capture all the individual bits and pieces of the data. It would be faster and more meaningful.

When picking an APM solution, it should be able to support all heterogeneous applications: it can be mainframe, it can be integration, it can be Java, .NET. The tool should be able to support a wide range of applications. And it should be scalable. As we add more applications, it should not see any slowness issues. It should be easy to use. There are so many folks in the performance team, the ops team, so it should be easy to use.

I can definitely say use Dynatrace, but I would say evaluate what, in terms of space, you are looking into and make you are able to support it fully. Make sure you evaluate all the technical criteria you are setting up, based on the workspace.

We use it primarily for performance. We bought it so we could be more proactive versus reactive with our customers. We are using it for anything from database monitoring, performance monitoring, end user experience monitoring, etc.

It is performing great. No issues so far. It is fast, and there is no overhead.

We are not in the cloud yet. We are moving to the cloud. This is one of the reasons why we bought Dynatrace. We know Dynatrace is going to OneAgent with the its product. That was a big part of our decision of buying Dynatrace, so when we move to the cloud we will have something to monitor.

I am getting emails every day about how great this application is. We are rolling it out to a few teams. They are using it. They love it, and it is easy for them. They can just get right in, look at things, and say, "Oh yeah, there's an issue right here." I got an email today from another team saying, "Hey, this helped a customer with their slowness issue," So, it is good. 

The most valuable feature is being more proactive versus reactive, because before customers would call us with issues and we had no clue what they were. Now, we can call or alert them that there is an issue and we are working on it. That is the most valuable part.

I would like to see single pane monitoring.

We have had no problems with stability. Though, we did have a couple issues in our production environment getting the UEM working. It would crash some of our applications. Agents were injecting the JavaScript twice so it was bringing down our apps, but we worked with support, and they fixed it pretty quickly.

It scales well. We are going to be able to use it for everything we need.

They have a very active community.

I have used CA Wiley. It was slow and cumbersome to use. It was good, but it just did not have anything like Dynatrace has.

I have been a performance engineer for about 10 years. Using Wiley, you could look into the system. I moved to this company and went to SEP Con in San Diego where I met with some of the guys from Dynatrace, then I knew the company needed this tool. 

When I moved to this company, they did not have any production monitoring or QA monitoring, so that is where we have started Dynatrace. This is what we have needed.

I was involved from the PoC to the setup, then roll out. I am not an admin, but I was part of all it.

It was pretty easy. Our middleware architect, he had no problems with it. We rolled out all our environments (QA and prod) in about three months.

New Relic and AppDynamics were on our shortlist. We picked Dynatrace because of the training and ease of use.

Dynatrace has great training available. It is easy for everybody to use. Anybody can go out to YouTube, watch a video, and figure out how to use the piece that they need. All these other application monitoring tools, they are all basically the same. They are going to give you the same data and just present it a little bit differently, but Dynatrace goes above it with their training.

If you had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be time. Everybody would have more time to do something; get things done a lot faster and go out on the golf course and play golf.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: With this vendor, the most important piece was the amount of training which is available. There are so many YouTube videos. The website has so much to offer. None of the other APM tools had anything close to it, so that was our number one criteria.

My main use case would be for a business transaction and doing a monitoring solution that my client is looking for.

We feel the Dynatrace Managed, the stage that this product is in right now, is not 100% mature. Its admin is the best compared to the managed. I understand it is under the transformation from AppMon to Dynatrace, but we are still waiting for the better dashboard views to come in to play for the executive views, the business transactions, etc.

I used to be a monitoring person for IBM, for close to 10 years. I moved to monitoring Dynatrace recently, and I see lot of benefit while monitoring the microservices related to this product.

The one thing we have tried the most is the microservice monitoring. All the apps are moving from the native server base to serverless. Some of them are AWS microservices, for example. This product seems best when compared to other vendors.

It still has a long way to go to reach that single pane of glass based on the releases that it launched into this training session. It looks like slowly features are coming out every month, and I am expecting more features to be released. However, I would just like to have a solution that cleary works with the current situation, i.e., how we can integrate the products to achieve better results for what we seek.

Also, it does not have mature enough dashboards.

I am fairly new to this product, but stability is good. 

They have quick answers for scalability. When we wanted to get up from two nodes to three nodes, it worked quite fine. We are happy with that.

When something goes wrong, support is unbelievable. I really can't expect that they are so slow in the support, which I really did not like. They expect the customer to do the basic analysis, do all the solutions, and find the solutions themselves. If it is really a product problem, only then will they be able to identify and spend time on the customer. 

Several issues in the last month took us the whole day to get our system back online. It is good that we are not 100% live with all our critical applications, so management is not so hard on the Dynatrace team. I can't imagine that will happen again, and I am wondering how do I improve the support? Long story short, the support is not good.

Siloed monitoring tools were for old style of application deployments. They were good for that aspect, but not anymore. 

CA Wiley and similar products are good for a JVM in-house infrastructure. Now that technology has changed in the last two years, so they are not the ideal solutions anymore.

We are partially enrolled, but I have not done it 100%. Next week, I am setting up a lab environment in my organization. Then, I will be doing it completely.

Coming up from the OneAgent side deployment, it is basically a daily job and a 100% improvement. It is a lot better improvement from the agent side. Earlier, it used to be every tiny agent for each aspect.

Being on the technologies team, I get to use all the products that the people see. We always pick the top three in the market to do the PoC. Dynatrace being reliable, backed up with the support, etc. So, we did a PoC with Dynatrace, New Relic, and AppDynamics. Then, we have chosen this one, which meets all the company standards and requirements.

Definitely implement the solution because I can see the Dynatrace team is working with all the customer requirements. I am hoping to have a better solution by the end of the year.

The importance of the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in their cloud and manage performance problems:

1. AI is not the 100% solution for all organizations.
2. It is the common quick solution for all the apps. 

If anybody is interested in doing more real analysis and baselining in AI, it really does not work out. I need my SLA for my set of transactions. I do not need somebody telling me and defining that this is your application solely. So, it is good and bad for the solution.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, I would need Dynatrace Managed to be my back-end and I would want AppMon to be the front-end. Basically, I am relying on both the products to fit my exact solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: I am a supporting person, not the decision maker, but my review is definitely considered and valuable. I am the APM architect in my group with middleware background, which has knowledge on all the moving parts in web application technology, not just monitoring.

Support is the first criteria, because that is the lone factor after purchasing the product. Features, while I am not 100% happy with this, with all the technology and the innovation, Dynatrace has already met this target, but the support is missing. So, the vendor, in my view, as an active technician, needs better support. From a management standpoint, it is the other way around. Also, there is licensing and costs.

My primary use case is for monitoring our applications in production. We have a number of consumer-facing applications. 

It performs really well. I have been using it for a few years now, and every year we see a lot of benefit in the many features that come out in product development.

The main benefit right now is that we really know how production is behaving at any point in time and if we need to scale; we can be more proactive versus reactive, serving our customers. We have a number of different apps in other countries, so I think it gives us a holistic view, not just for one app, but for all of our apps.

It's all consumer-facing, so it has a direct revenue aspect to it. If things were to go down, we would lose actual revenue. So it's really not a nice-to-have, it's a must-have.

It's the dashboards. The dashboards provide very good visibility into it no matter what your role or title is. They provide very good visibility into what's happening in production. It's kind of a one-stop shop for all that information, instead of having to through logs, or through multiple systems to get that information.

I also think it's more than monitoring, that's what we are learning here at the Perform 2018 conference. It's more of a platform, and it's trying to enable a bunch of different functionalities, not just the monitoring aspect of it. I think the whole AI part of it is going to be pretty interesting. To me, another area that's personally of interest is native integration, so that we can make native apps today that look like they're getting better, in the long-term perspective.

I'd like to see native support, because we're launching native apps in multiple countries so we really want to have a really good feel for how those apps are going and how well they're performing, if there are issues. 

The other one is AWS. I think they've just announced something with them. We do have a lot of AWS Lambdas in production right now for a couple of apps we have, so I'm looking forward to that being available to use.

I can't really think of a limitation, I think that it has a lot of good features. Maybe some mobile, tablet-based dashboards, even though I do believe they're already supported, but a better native capability from that perspective, having those dashboards available from the native experience.

I think it's pretty stable. I haven't really heard of any outages or things that have gone wrong. I don't use it literally every day, day in and day out, but from what I've seen and experienced, I've not really had any problems.

I think it's pretty scalable, because of the way its designed and architected, it works pretty well.

They were pretty effective. We've had to open tickets a couple of times for their new features that we were trying to integrate with, or a problem with a current feature. Their helpful resource is the guardian, which is the best security program. There is a person dedicated to each client. I think that's a pretty good idea. Most of the companies I'm typically consulting with are Professional Services type set-ups, but I think the Guardian program is pretty awesome. It's really beneficial.

I wasn't too directly involved. I worked with the team that was doing the setup, but I think it was pretty straightforward. It was pretty quick, actually. Without doing much, just installing the agents, it gives you so much automatic capability. And then you can always tweak that and configure that and make it better. But, right out of the box, I think it's really easy to install.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, I personally think AI plays a pretty wide role when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and to manage performance of product. As we have more and more data in our systems, getting more complex, going into the cloud, we will need to rely on AI in certain aspects of the decision-making. There will still always be a human aspect, in my opinion. But AI will assist with a lot of trivial or not mission-critical type tasks.

I have used siloed solutions at other organizations. Honestly, I don't recall a lot of the details, but in general they did not have a great interface. The information wasn't easy to use when troubleshooting issues in production. They didn't have as many good integrations with other products and tools, so a combination those were the challenges with them.

If there was just one solution that could provide real analysis as opposed to just data, I think that would really tell us what we need to work on and help us prioritize, and not have an ocean of issues. We could focus on the ones our customers are more impacted by. It would be pretty good to take care of them. And the other part would be, it would help us get into consumer insight and help us build our product roadmap, accordingly. We could learn from the customer and then act on that learning.

When looking at vendors, one of the things we look for is the least amount of setup. That's the number one. You don't want to have to invest in a lot of configuration and coding to enable the product. The other thing is, what kind of user interface does it have and how good is the troubleshooting tool. A lot of monitoring will tell you there's a problem, but won't really tell you how to solve it. And third is innovation, because technology is changing so rapidly and a monitoring tool needs to be up-to-date. So it's important that we will continue to be able to monitor and do stuff that's coming out.

Definitely start with a program in mind and know how you measure success, and adoption of really any tool, whether a monitoring tool or not. That's really how you get buy-in from all the right stakeholders, you get the right training in place upfront, versus, setting it up and then struggling to plug in everybody, to get on it and show the value of it . So I would think having a program or a better plan upfront helps.

Our group handles a multitude of applications using Dynatrace. In my experience, I have used a lot of different tools, and Dynatrace has been pretty awesome with handling all the various issues that pop up.

PurePath is pretty awesome. The amount of data that the tool exposes compared to a lot of other agent-base suites is dramatically different. A plethora of people  embrace a lot of the topology views and various different things. I am primarily doing DC RUM, so on that side there are a lot of awesome abilities where people who can't implement an agent are able to still monitor a lot of their apps and decodes.

We are not using the ServiceNow integrations. We have to go through this event engine, so some of the data and the alerts get taken out. We have a script that pulls in some data around what the alert is dealing with, but maybe there is more data that could be exposed there. Besides that, in regards to Diffie-Hellman encryption stuff, it is a hurdle with what we are doing with DC RUM, where everyone is embracing stronger security suites, but the whole point of DC RUM is to get that data between the tiers.

We have big data solutions now coming in, so we are being asked to export some of that data into Tableau and various different platforms, so anything that makes that easier is welcome. DC RUM has an API that they can call, and Dynatrace can stream out to it. Those APIs are welcome.

There have been problems, but nothing that we could not figure out. There have been a couple issues where agents have caused issues with applications, but you could chalk that up to QA testing or other stuff. Overall, it has been a good product.

I hear it is supposed to be improving. My impression is mixed. We have a lot of Dynatrace servers with a lot of agents, so we are pushing the capacity of some of those servers. At the moment, we are not doing any cross-server stitching between the agents, so we are missing out on that piece a little bit. However, that will improve with the next version. Therefore, we are managing the capacity, but currently it is decentralized.

Technical support is awesome. I primarily do DC RUM, but all of that is in Poland, and they are phenomenal.

I have used CA, Wiley, CA CEM, and a little BMC stuff; those are the main ones.

They were good in their own silo. They just did not bring everything together in one central view. That was the difficulty. A lot of teams did not embrace it as much as we have seen the Dynatrace platform be embraced.

We switched from CA to Dynatrace, because limited data that was being exposed from Wiley. You get similar response time volume and error rate for instruments and components, but it is a lot more manual to get those components instrumented. Whereas a PurePath is right in front of you, so it is really easy to see what areas you want to alert on and catch.

Initial setup is straightforward. I have stood it up at multiple companies. I did it at Verizon Wireless, PNC, and Merck Pharmaceuticals. I knew what to do, so it was easy. 

When I first did an install, there were some hurdles. However, everything was well supported by our site rep, who came on site frequently in New Jersey, and was helping me out. It helped.

I was in for onboarding DC RUM. We did a PoC with BMC, CA, Dynatrace, and AppDynamics. There are some other competitors who are always being looked at, but the data exposed was dramatically better from Dynatrace, so that is why we went with Dynatrace.

Look at Dynatrace. Having worked with it and recommended it for approximately eight years, it has been a great platform.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is very important. We must embrace the AI overlord. There is a lot of data that comes into Dynatrace, and anything that makes it easier to arrive at the end resolution of a problem is welcome. There is always more analysis that needs to be done, but I think it is important to start using AI to get there more quickly.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit I would like to see is anything that helps the app team know how to get the answer more quickly and save us time in the middle of the night. 

We get woken up all hours of the night for issues. You would hope that app teams would start to use the tools themselves, when it comes down to it, we know the tool best because we manage it. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

The two main things I would say are critical:

1. Obviously, the technology cannot fall behind competitors, but at the same time, they have to remain pretty agile in developing the tool. 
2. They need a large enough support staff where any issues which arise, we get support on them. 

From an operational perspective, monitoring systems. We've primarily deployed it in production to give better awareness to application support teams of how their apps have been doing. We do have it deployed in pre-production as well, and are actively pursuing these cases in that space as well. It's just easier to sell to executives from the operations side first.

Mean time to resolution is probably the biggest improvement. Also, operational awareness is probably one I haven't touched on too much. I think in the past a lot of teams really didn't have a comfortable feel for how well, or not well, their applications were performing. You would get log files, things like that, just a small amount of perspective. In a lot of cases, people complaining was their first indicator of a problem and, really, nobody wants to be in that situation.

We started using this product about five years ago, and with AppMon. That was one of our first big wins, getting these big TV dashboards up all over the place. It really gave executives confidence that we did have things under control. At least we knew what was going on. It wasn't always the green check-mark up there, but we knew when there was a problem, before people called in and told us there was one. So that was a huge benefit.

• End-to-end visibility of the applications, since we have them instrumented. Understanding where the hotspots are in the applications. 
• Quick Fault Domain Isolations: When people are having a problem, understanding where to look, and letting all the other people go back to their day jobs. 
• The UEM feature, User Experience Management: Understanding how users are perceiving the application and then connecting that back into back-end systems to understand why things have gotten slow and then dealing with things.

Over the last year, one of the things we've had a challenge with is, we've used AppMon for so long, people are quite comfortable with it. We had a pilot of Dynatrace SaaS up and running for about a year, trying to transition application teams over to it: "Try this new tool out," - especially at microservices-based applications. And a lot of the features at the time that were in AppMon were not yet available, or worked differently, so we had some challenges in internally selling it. Since then, a lot of those features have been added into the new platform, and I'd say in some cases have leapfrogged over where AppMon is.

The one thing people really liked that we can do in AppMon is executive dashboards and, until recently, you couldn't even create the business transactions you need for the data at the back-end of those dashboards. But if I had to ask for one thing it would be: In the new platform, give me the ability to do dashboarding in the way it's done in AppMon, and I think that would bridge a lot of the missing pieces. If I could do the same type of executive dashboards on the walls, they would be happy.

As far as the new tool goes, we haven't had any issues with stability at all. I'm really impressed with the way they've architected it and made it much more scalable than the AppMon solution. 

We've had some challenges with AppMon in the past, mostly due to the top-end Dynatrace server not having an HA solution, which they're addressing now with the new version. So that's a big win for us as well. 

These things, when they first started out, were kind of neat and cool but they were never considered mission critical early on. Fast forward a few years to now, and nobody can afford the Dynatrace solution not being online. People are using it to support their apps. It is considered mission critical. So having HA built in, making this stuff rock solid, is very important to us.

So as far as AppMon, we knew where there were ceilings in the product. We've got a pretty big company and we hit some of those scalability limitations early on, to the point we were running about eight AppMon servers just for production load alone. One would never handle it. 

The thing that impressed me about the new Dynatrace Managed offering is that people are seeing, here at the Perfrom 2018 conference already, about 100,000 host limitation, at this point. But that's more than enough for us to handle our entire production infrastructure, so I'm looking forward to actually collapsing all of the AppMon stuff into one big solution where I can see, end-to-end, any app offering. Even if it crosses lines of business, you get full visibility. So I'm very impressed.

I wouldn't say we need to call them that often, the solution does not require a lot of hand-holding from that perspective, but we've had it for five years so there are always a few bumps in the road. We've had to call in for a few things, and they're really very professional. If we've needed to escalate issues, we've never had a problem doing that. Always been able to get to root cause, and in every case, been satisfied with the outcomes.

Five years ago, Wily Introscope was in place for a lot of our WebSphere infrastructure. At the time, we were actually looking at it more as an infrastructure tool. The guys supporting WAS, whether it be in Windows, AIX, Linux, or z/OS, needed something to give them a lot more visibility into what was going on, and Wily at the time just wasn't doing it. 

Wily Introscope was only lightly used at the time, but it just wasn't giving them the depth they needed. Realistically, nobody was using it. We had a product that was sitting there, unused. At the time there really was no APM-type thinking at all. It's kind of by chance since we moved to Dynatrace to satisfy that first requirement.

Since then, we've flipped it on its head, and we use the tool that much more from the app perspective. And that's really the way to do it. And we had no problem making that shift at all. We could still satisfy what the WAS team needed to do with the tool but get a lot more value out of it by giving app teams a lot more perspective. We've been able to get 500 percent more value out of it just by putting it with app teams as well.

One of the challenges, when we were looking through all the different solutions out there was, which one supported all of those things to give you that big picture? And Dynatrace met the mark. 

I was only loosely involved in the initial setup. At the time we brought Dynatrace in, it was one of my peers in the same larger group that was doing the evaluation. I was in the background, watching it. I then ended up inheriting the whole thing about a year later, so it was kind of good that I did have some visibility into it.

Overall, the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We did a bake-off against some of the competitors at the time, and it was pretty clear Dynatrace was the best fit for our organization.

I know AppDynamics was one of the other ones we were evaluating, and IBM's offering, ITCAM. And given the different types of technologies we had to deal with, specifically mainframe, Dynatrace really stuck out as the one tool that could handle all the requirements we had at the time. And since then we've actually grown the use cases up quite significantly, and are even more happy with it.

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 properly - is huge. We saw it when moving to Dynatrace AppMon and started the Gen 2 platform and wondering how did we deal with problems just a few years ago without tools like this? Now we've gone into the Gen 3 platform space and really, with apps exploding from the perspective of complexity - as it's impossible to manually understand where all the moving parts are at any one time, where to look for a problem if it happens - AI really rolls all that up in a way that makes it useful, and we don't waste time trying to dig through things like we would have even with AppMon. So it's immensely important.

We still use siloed monitoring tools to some extent, and we've used quite a few of them. They have their place for what they do but, in reality, we've had to look at other aggregation-type tools and bringing feeds from each of those together. Let's say a Windows Server monitoring tool can tell you the CPU is higher, but it doesn't give you any perspective on what the actual impact is for the user of the app that's sitting on it. And that one server might only be a small cog in the wheel of the overall app. It's great at telling you what it does, but it doesn't go any further than that. You really need something that aggregates all those things together and has perspective. And that's really what app teams want. I think those tools are better served in the operations space, but then that's where they're stuck, they'll never go further than that.

If there was just one solution that could provide some real answers, as opposed to just data, the benefit would be that looking in multiple tools definitely slows you down. The fact that a tool like Dynatrace can bring all those things together and really help pop problems up right into your face is a huge time-saver. I don't know anyone that's got extra time on their hands at this point, so anything that helps us save time and get us to a resolution of a problem faster is of huge importance. Looking back, a few years back, trying to look at multiple tools to help us figure out problems, teams could spin for weeks because we'd have no idea where to look; classic war-room scenario, where everyone's pointing fingers at everyone else in the room, "It's not my problem." Dynatrace has really done a lot to help us get rid of those types of scenarios and be productive, really addressing actual issues.

I give it a nine out of 10. Compared to the other solutions out there, I'd still say it's top breed. It's great to see they're doing a lot more with the product on a big scale. But there are a few things they need to knock off the list to hit that 10; it's not perfect, but it's really, really good.

In terms of advice, the one thing that I've seen from other app teams internally: Do a PoC. It's much better to see your data in the tool than trying to demo it with easy travel or someone else's app. You just don't get the perspective of what they're looking at is some cases. Set it up, kick the tires, and give it a try, and that will win most people over.