Dynatrace Reviews

Our primary use case for the Dynatrace OneAgent solution would be OpenShift migration or OpenShift transformation, as part of our business is thinking about going the microservices route. The challenge that we have of course with the OpenShift world is, we lose the visibility that we had in the standard virtual machine with Dynatrace AppMon. That's where we are looking to potentially use Dynatrace as a solution.

We are trying to maintain parity between what we were able to see earlier with AppMon, and that's what we are trying to see in the new world. It should give us at least the same level of experience, if not better. That's what we are looking for.

The most valuable feature of that solution would be the level of visibility that you get. I haven't seen anything that gives us that level of visibility yet. I've been speaking with Red Hat as well, they also recommended Dynatrace as a solution, so that's what we are looking at right now.

One piece that we think that's missing is, there were thread names that were missing in analytical information in the Dynatrace solution, versus the AppMon solution. The AppMon solution gives you that information, and it is very helpful for connecting dots and bringing all the pieces together.

There is another challenge, which is in case of the Managed solution. In our old solution we could simply export the data as session data, and that would be imported and seen. Now, if we are using the Managed solution, then giving someone access to that solution is a challenge. We can handle it, but it's different than taking screenshots and saving that information the way we used to. The copy/paste features that were there in old application - because it was a fat app - were nice, compared to browser-based app, because you cannot really use those features anymore. There are pluses and minuses that we see.

We have done PoCs. I don't know whether I can speak in an educated fashion about the stability of this solution. But when we did a PoC for over a month, we did not see any issues with stability. The PoC was more of a SaaS, but we are potentially looking at the Managed solution.

We haven't encountered any scalability issues so far, but we were operating on a very small scale, so scale was not a test. Rather, feature, functionality, and parity, that's what I was trying to pull up. But we are having those discussions on a regular basis from feature/functionality perspective that we would like to see in Dynatrace.

I'm working directly with sales and engineers from Dynatrace. They have been very supportive. They are very knowledgeable. They are always available. We have a very good relationship with them. Last Saturday, seriously, someone was with me on the phone at noon trying to help on one of the issues. So they're very helpful.

With the Dynatrace solution, as this is still in PoC, I'm the first person involved in this. For AppMon, somebody else was doing that earlier, and I took that on on.

Setup with Dynatrace is much more simplistic. We've made a comparison matrix of other products, older products, and this one. That was one of the first items we were comparing. Ease of setup, of course, is great.

We did have other vendors on our short list before eventually going with Dynatrace. What made Dynatrace stand out from the crowd was feature functionality. That and the level of information that we are getting.

The role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is one of the areas that we are looking into in 2018. We are definitely thinking about that, it's something that's on our radar. I believe that it is definitely important. I have seen some features presented by Dynatrace AI. But we are trying to do little more. I'm still exploring the AI option, to understand it much better from the Dynatrace perspective. But we are probably going to supplement that with some of our own analysis as well, at this point in time.

We have used siloed monitoring tools. Of course, the challenge is, when you're trying to put one single story together, it becomes extremely difficult. Importing and exporting data from one tool to the other, bringing everything together, trying to tell a story, the amount of time spent on that is humongous. You generally don't have that time. That's the main challenge.

If you had just one solution that provided real answers, and not just data it would definitely a great benefit - to have a solution rather than having data. Because then you're not relying on your best analyst, but you're going to present that to anybody who can read that information essentially and say, "Hey, here is the problem. This is how I go and fix it." Or, I would know which team to call, or which developer to call, because I could clearly see it on the screen. That visualization is very important. I think that would definitely help.

When it comes to selecting a vendor we have a lot of criteria. Vendor management within our company typically goes through those criteria. What I would say is, ability to understand our industry and resolve our problems, and understand what's critical to us and respond to that. Those are definitely important features that we are looking for from vendors.

I would rate Dynatrace, right now, about eight out of 10. There are a few features that we are really looking to get, and I'm having discussion with sales about that on a regular basis. Once we see those - those are our minimal set of requirements - I would be really happy.

It is part of our performance testing, where the team can run our workloads and can see the insights, where the bottlenecks are.

We had a very quick turnaround, and it solved our problems. We get more insights into what our code is doing, where the bottlenecks are. The tool helps us to find the root cause much faster than other tools in the market.

Our team can find bottlenecks quickly, and work with the engineering team to fix the problems at a much faster rate. So this is the quick turnaround, and they can go to production with better quality, and make the user experience much better than what previously they were experiencing.

The PurePaths can give us more insights, where the time is spent with the whole HTTP call. And we can clearly see where the bottlenecks are.

The business use case is that most people want to see how many orders came in. I'd like to be able to get data out of JavaScript tags, and capture more data. I think that would make it much more useful, rather than using Google Analytics. Instead, have one tool to capture all the stack, that would make it easy.

It's pretty good. It gives us what we need. We use the on-premise, with limited licenses, and we have never had any issues so far.

We've never seen any issue with the scalability.

We have never had an issue. We're pretty technical, so we can resolve things ourselves. I think, initially, we worked with them to help set up the on-premise, but afterwards, we didn't have any issues.

My previous client, the big pain points were, we had a lot of memory issues, upgrades not responding properly, and meeting SLAs, so that's why we were evaluating different APM tools. Finally, we picked Dynatrace for our own needs, for the use case.

We were using an IBM product which was not useful. Then we evaluated the APM space in the market and chose Dynatrace.

When we compared other APM tools, Dynatrace was the only one which could give us 100% visibility into the whole codebase. That's a key for us, because we can find the problem much faster.

Regarding the role of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, I haven't used the new Dynatrace tool, but as far as I know it can pinpoint the problem with AI. Based on the basin of data which they're collecting, it makes it much more that the developers can see where the problems are faster, rather than waiting for perf testing to be completed. I think it makes developers much more productive. They can see the problems right away, rather than waiting until they happen in production.

In terms of siloed monitoring tools, we used ITCAM before. We had a lot of pain points. It captured only 2% of the data, and we had to run a lot of workloads, change the config, and run the workloads. We spent a lot of time, wasting our human resources time. When we picked Dynatrace, it was a much faster turnaround.

If we had just one solution that would provide real answers, and not just data, the benefit would be - in most products, the tools are fragmented. If there were a tool which could give the full picture on the screen, the full stack, and give away the pain points, that would make it easier for any perf-engineer or developer to see easily. That's where I think Dynatrace is farther ahead in the game, in the APM space. There are other tools in the space, but I think Dynatrace is the only one that captures 100% of the data.

Also, I think they have good integration. Yesterday, here at the Perfrom 2018 conference, I saw xMatters integration where, when there's a problem, it can kick out a message to the whomever it is, with xMatters.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• product
• ease of use
• pricing
• features.

I give it a nine out of 10 because, as I said previously, I'm looking for more features, like getting data out of the JavaScript tags. That would make it much more usable.

But I would recommend the product.

We are using it essentially for health check monitoring on the application that I work on.

It saves your reputation once you have a product out there in the market and what you are doing to keep it up and running. You have to make sure it is out there and the key benefit would be to keep your reputation.

It gives you a great level of detail into whatever the issue is: Using troubleshooting and getting to the root cause.

We do not have any web monitoring with Dynatrace, so this is something we are looking at. At the moment, we are using another vendor products for most of our web solutions. We are looking at how well Dynatrace works with web solutions as we use Akamai for most of our web monitoring/solutions.

It has been a pretty stable product. 

It is pretty scalable. We are using it on most of our platforms, which are on a big scale and across the globe. The company that I work for is a global company, and the products that we use it on scale.

I have not used Dynatrace technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I was not there at the time.

If I had one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be to save time while troubleshooting.

The siloed monitoring compared to Dynatrace: Dynatrace is more widespread, so you get to have diversity in every aspect of what you are monitoring. Whereas, siloed is more of being concentrated in a particular area, then you have to put the puzzle back in versus a non-siloed approach where you can get to the root cause directly.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Scalability
• How accurate the troubleshooting and monitoring are.

The primary use case is infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring. It's performing really well, the OneAgent aspect of Dynatrace; we love it.

We spend less time in root-cause analysis. That way we are saving man-hours, and focusing more on fixing issues rather than trying to find the real cause of the issue.

Interrelating the logs and infrastructure issues, application issues, DC RUM, everything in one dashboard, saves us time in troubleshooting.

This is the constant evolution of the tools. The next release I would like to see is especially with external API monitoring. Right now, everything goes into one bucket, but if it were split into which API is failing, that way we wouldn't have to drill down to find out where the failures are. It would be quite evident on the dashboard, where the failures are. It would be easy for troubleshooting, and even on the executive dashboards, we could relay the message appropriately.

It's much nicer, it's lightweight compared to the previous versions. OneAgent is much nicer compared to Dynatrace AppMon.

We have not used it in a big environment yet, so I'm not quite sure how well it will perform. I hope it will perform well.

We used tech support just on the implementation side of it, initially, for a day. They were knowledgeable and helpful.

We had Dynatrace, the previous version. That's how we started. Now we have migrated from Dynatrace AppMon to Dynatrace Managed.

It was straightforward.

I think AI is the future when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, especially with the complexity of the systems and containerization of all the environments. Troubleshooting means increasing headcount or implementing AI solutions and being very smart with what we are doing. 

AI is learning things at this point. I don't know if it's the best. It took a while for AI to understand our applications. The first few weeks there were false positives, and now we are getting into the real issues, troubleshooting, etc.

I have used siloed monitoring tools in the past The challenges involved in them are interrelating outcomes of each tool with other tools; especially log monitoring with infrastructure analysis. That took a bit of time, double effort.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, we could focus on our strategy initiatives rather than our ops-type of activities, day-to-day. That would be the immediate benefit.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor, or working with a vendor,  are 

• stability
• technical knowledge
• industry expertise.

I would say Dynatrace is a nine out of 10. It's, again, the concept of evolution of the tool. What we have right now: fairly decent. There are always new things coming out.

You should at least consider this as a strong contender. The ease of implementing - we were up and running in less than a day, which is pretty impressive.

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.