Dynatrace Reviews

We are monitoring business critical applications which provide prepaid vouchers for different customers.

We can see all the degradation of services in real-time, then we know exactly what the root cause of degradation is.

Service discovery with artificial intelligence automatic anomaly root cause detection, and problems replay.

• Custom reporting is still missing. 
• PurePath exports was a great feature in AppMon, but it is sometimes missing in Dynatrace.

• Application performance monitoring
• Alerting on infrastructure and application problems, includes user experience.

Dynatrace provides visibility into the application and its performance from the user to back-end services.

• Root cause analysis
• OneAgent automatic updates
• Managing Dynatrace Managed is a breeze compared to AppMon.

• Include network monitoring in more detail for deep dive analytics of network components. 
• Needs more compatibility of platforms out-of-the-box.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Custom, home-brew.

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

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

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

Primary use case would be problem solving and remediation, and it's working very well.

It has dramatically reduced the time it takes to problem solve webpages and coding problems.

Being able to drill down into the PurePaths, to get to a solution.

We have a couple of one page apps that it has a problem with because it doesn't call to the server all the time. I believe part of that is taken care of in the next version. That was the biggest thing for me. That's one of the reasons we haven't really siloed up too, because of that.

I can't think of any issues we've had with stability.

I love it, I've always been a big fan of the scalability. We haven't scaled up yet but we hope to.

We used a guardian to begin with. He trained us and helped us quite a bit. I think we had him for about six months. He was wonderful.

As for siloed monitoring tools, I don't believe we used any. We did use an alert site, but nothing other than that.

We actually had a production issue on our catalog website. Dynatrace came in and helped us install and problem solve that issue right off the bat. That was our initial outing.

During the initial implementation I was just there as a bystander. We had our infrastructure guys taking care of the implementation. I was just there afterwards to learn how to run it. And if there are upgrades, we hand that off to infrastructure.

When it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud in order to monitor performance management, I can't really comment on the role of AI in that. I'm not involved in that as yet. We are just starting to have a cloud footprint now.

If we had just one solution that would not only provide data, but real answers, the immediate benefit for our team would, of course, be helping the code to be error free, but also speeding it up a bit.

What I appreciate most in a vendor, personally, would be performance in the product, and knowledge; product knowledge.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10, because it's easy to use. I use it everyday now.

Implement it and put it on every server. You have to have it all the way across with the network.

We are using this to find and troubleshoot issues with our applications, whether there are application issues with IIS or Tomcat, database or network issues. We also use Dynatrace to chart errors and monitor server health (memory/CPU/disk).

As we have grown, we have increased our licenses to be able to use this across most of our products to help troubleshoot problems in production. We have also used Dynatrace in our performance testing environments to get ahead of issues before they make it into production.

The ability to take each individual request and dive in to inspect what methods and calls are being made is extremely helpful. We can tell which application is serving the error, where the errors and performance issues lie, whether those are on the application server, database server, network, etc.

I would like to see the Business Transactions made easier, so you can distinguish users and companies (this can get very hairy for a large multi-tenant application). 

We should be able to easily simplify both the charting and slicing-and-dicing of user metrics with cookies that contain customer/user information.

We have used Dynatrace since they were their own company (before Compuware bought Gomez and spun both off into the company now known as Dynatrace) and the earliest version that I remember was version 2. We first got Dynatrace as a fire-fighting tool when we were having issues with one of our products. It helped us solve those problems, and has helped many times since.

Dynatrace facilitates great live performance monitoring, allowing us to easily and visually detect problems before they become a large impact issue to the business. It is not uncommon to detect and quickly use various drill down options such as PurePath to quickly identify and provide initial analysis on problems.

• Creating different dashboards
• Sharing dashboards with edit permissions
• Simple classic but effective UI (unlike some modern UI's out there that have too much white-space)
• Wide variety of dashlets available to monitor various services/components

• Either use less system resources and be faster or use more resources to pre-compute the PurePath on recent X minutes of data
• More flexibility with refresh times
• More UI options

Overall, it's quite stable.

We haven't had a chance to change the scale much and will probably not scale up by any meaningful factor.

Customer Service:

It's great.

Technical Support:

I haven't had to use it a lot.

Overall, it's very easy to setup on the client side.

We currently use Dynatrace in conjunction with another APM tool as well as a synthetic monitoring tool.

I would highly recommend it.

All the capabilities to create dashboards and business transactions has eliminated the gap between the technical stuff and business correlation.

Reduced the impact to critical operation systems. Identified any major impact before getting into production. No down-time after using Dynatrace as APM for PRD.

Solid PRD deployments.

For about 2 years.

No issues.

No issues so far.

Working with an infrastructure team that has given me VM and is not dedicated has delayed the performance of the tool.

Getting better, still working to tune to their eyes.

Excellent, a correct answer every time. Prompt support.

The most important features are the ability to see trends in performance and also to aid in diagnose any performance degradation in the web applications and utilize the tool to provide a faster solution and faster root cause analysis to the problem.

While monitoring our site, I noticed over a period of time that our west coast users would see degraded service every night around 10pm. Ultimately, I was able to use the tool to prove to our CDN provider that they had an issue with their routers in the west coast that had to be corrected to solve our performance issues. Without the Compuware tool, we would not have been aware of the issue nor been able to prove the issue to our service provider.

One are that I could see improvement is a better data collection and management. At times I saw that there was a ton of data available, but that also meant a ton of data to cipher through and analyze to evaluate. I often had to utilize Compuware engineers that specialize in data analysis to help gather and diagnose the data that we collected.

I've used their products for four years.

I don't recall ever having issues with stability. It is a very stable SaaS solution.

I've never had any issues with scalability, but scalability comes with a cost directly associated to how much you scale out your solution.

At times customer service could be really good, but most of the times I thought that this is a huge area where a lot of improvement could be made. They offer a great way to open service tickets online, but if you want to call in and get a live person to diagnose issues it is very hit and miss.

It's the same as customer service.

I did not use a different solution, but most companies I have worked at have instituted a number of different monitoring solutions and so there isn't a one size fits all solution for all monitoring and reporting needs.

Deployment was usually straightforward, but at times it could be complicated by whether or not to add additional data base servers and configuration of making sure that everything talked to each other through firewalls, etc.

Initially getting set up and configured was some what complex and took a bit of a learning curve. Once you set everything up, the software runs itself practically, but takes continual monitoring and tweaking to ensure that you are getting the most out of the product.

We utilized account managers and expertise through Compuware to aid in any questions we had regarding implementation.

The return on investment is the cost savings in developer's time in troubleshooting, analyzing, and finding the root cause of application issues and coming to a resolution. Unfortunately the business often found it hard to equate savings to something that they couldn't see. But having a major issue right before renewal helped keep the software in the short term as there was not another solution that offered what Compuware did for root cause analysis of the web applications.

The product was already in place when I started my position. I had looked at other products later and most of them were cheaper, but they lacked the full end to end solution and were not as robust.

Their products are fantastic, but the issue isn't the product, but the price for the product and also getting developers and business to value the importance of the data that is collected. Some businesses run their web ecommerce around metrics gathered on performance where other companies fall behind and don't give it as high of a priority.

I would recommend that you understand the business requirements for performance, uptime, consumer experience, and what is ultimately the most important thing you want to deliver.