Dynatrace Reviews

We are monitoring around 200 applications. We use Dynatrace for that. 

Dynatrace is great. With Dynatrace, we have a solution for every sector. Sometimes, there are a lot of problems to maintain every aspect of every software. So, when we found Dynatrace with its one solution in one unique place to monitor for other problems. We are using Dynatrace for prediction and staging for every step of our development cycle. So, we love Dynatrace

We moved to Dynatrace, because we were looking for one solution that could provide the real answers, not just data. That is what we wanted: One solution that would give back our reporting and a lot of benefits that we can find with Dynatrace. The benefit for our company is that we have one direction and one main solution.

This is more consideration to the performance issue with Dynatrace mainly because we have no dodgeball with jobs reporting and you can easily see performance on this application of this sector.

Dynatrace came up with a solution for everyone. It helps us to streamline fixes by easily showing bugs and what needs to be improved in a big system. We have seen overall improvement due to Dynatrace.

Mainly navigation needs improvement. It is easier to follow a flow. Following the flow of the admin now is not easy.

The UX/UI needs improvement. It is not easy to learn. 

I really want to use the new Dynatrace dashboard.

I know the IT team, who installed Dynatrace, maintains it. They sometimes have had small problems in which Dynatrace is not available because the server is overloading, but they are working on it. 

We are moving our application and our server to the cloud.

I have not used technical support.

We used Admon.

At the beginning, when we started to use Dynatrace, we had Dynatrace and we stayed with the other solution. Naturally, Dynatrace took its place in the workplace, in the app. and in every other sort of solution.

Use Dynatrace now.

AI could be the most beautiful part of Dynatrace's future. We really want to use it. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Have a good solution.
2. Have good support.

There are a lot of solutions on the market, but Dynatrace brings an application suite that is very good. So, for now, we will stick with Dynatrace for a long time.

We are mainly using Dynatrace right now to monitor what we call our customer-facing applications and our middle layer applications. We have Hybris Commerce and Sitecore, and our middle layer is made up of BizTalk. Therefore, we are using Dynatrace to monitor Hybris, as Dynatrace is a gold partner for Hybris. That is how we picked Dynatrace.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what the benefits are yet because we are not live with our Dynatrace monitored software applications yet. Our go-live date is in October. 

Right now, even before the go-live, I see the value because our ecosystem is pretty complex. We have applications above our middleware layer and then applications that are below the middleware layer, which are all 30 to 40 year old ERP applications, which are not Oracle nor SAP. Then, we have other custom applications that we have built which we need to connect. When there is a performance problem that comes up visibly to the customer above the middleware layer, most often the reason is not in these applications. It is in what we call the enterprise applications. Judging that, knowing that, and where to go to fix what has been very valuable even without going live. I am waiting to go live and see where the value is. 

I love how Dynatrace can hook on at the code level, then tell me all the details that I need. For example:

• Which query to the HANA database is executing, and how many times?
• Where exactly is the bottleneck when it comes to Hybris Commerce?

They need better infrastructure monitoring. New Relic is beating them for infrastructure monitoring. Come on! They have to pick up the pace for infrastructure. I do not need to have Microsoft SCOM, Dynatrace, and Splunk. Now, I have Microsoft SCOM for infrastructure, Dynatrace for application monitoring and performance monitoring, and Splunk for log monitoring.

Why? Why do I need Splunk? Why can't Dynatrace get into machine data? 

They can either go buy Splunk, or at least get into the log monitoring side of things as effective as Splunk does it. 

The siloed monitoring tools that we use and we have still in place for monitoring basic infrastructure. They do not monitor an application at the code level for the software side of it. Therefore, it is more, "My server is out," or "My virtual memory is running out or not," or "Is my call to my DNS working?" or "Is my load balancer up and running?" 

For basic infrastructure, we have been using Microsoft SCOM to monitor infrastructure. 

Our customer-facing ecosystem has been moved to SAP Hybris Commerce-based solutions and Dynatrace was a natural partner for SAP Hybris Commerce. I love how detailed Dynatrace agents can hook into the code level and tell me exactly where the problem is, if there is a problem in the customer application side of things. What we were using before was just a infrastructure monitoring tool, not a software code level monitoring tool. So, it was not existing before.

The vendor team who did the setup was very good. They sent a very skillful resource for the setup. However, with the BizTalk side of it, they were less effective as they were with Hybris Commerce.

We have had problems with our implementation. 

The SAP Hybris Commerce side of things has been very smooth, but not the BizTalk side. Microsoft BizTalk is our enterprise middleware and the implementation has not been smooth with it. We purchased a professional services package from Dynatrace, but then the customer rep who was assigned to it was not very skilled in helping us overcome the challenges. She was a very nice person, and she was very resourceful when it came to Hybris Commerce, but not the other applications. Therefore, the engagement was not effective and I don't believe that I got the entire value that I thought I would from the professional service package, or from using Dynatrace with BizTalk. As a result, my BizTalk team has a huge resistance to implementing Dynatrace completely, and I have to convince them. 

As of now, we no longer have the professional services package.

I evaluated New Relics application performance monitoring tool as well. They were good in certain aspects that Dynatrace is not good in yet, but they were not able to do it at the code level for Hybris Commerce. Therefore, they are not as detailed as Dynatrace can be. 

The role of AI is very important, but it is the future. Thus, I am counting on more innovations in the AI space to monitor, not just applications, but an ecosystem from hardware to software. 

If I had one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be more valuable customer engagement. Especially since I am on the customer-facing side of the organization, it would be like if Facebook was down for five minutes, the perception created is exactly the same as the perception created when websites are down, or not performing. It is quite frustrating for customers who do not plan to be there for such a long time but would like their work done faster. Therefore, the solution's immediate benefit should be about customer engagement. 

I actually support Dynatrace a lot. I am a champion inside the organization. 

For Dynatrace, there are other ERP systems other than SAP and Oracle that many companies are struggling to get out of (like mine) but Dynatrace treats them as a black box. Some more details than we usually get with Hybris Commerce, but though maybe not at my level, but a little higher up we need something. Right now, it is just a black box. So, I have been pushing for people whenever I see a Java application or a Darknet application by saying, "Guys, use this."

However, if it is not a Java or Darknet application than there is a huge resistance. They all just default to an infrastructure monitoring application. That is about it, not a software side. That space seems to be unconquered. 

I'm using it for our websites. We're a company that owns numerous stores and numerous sites and I track the site performance, to see things like load time. That's the primary use. I have a lot of page loads of home pages, and then there's the check-out process, so it's been great for that.

It's working well.

Customers are looking at our site, every second, constantly. They're able to do that because, if for some reason it goes down, I can instantly get it back up, because I know what needs to be fixed.

In the past, before having the tool, we were being notified by the brand, or the brand manager, "Hey, customers are complaining that our site is down." And then there was me, as a developer, trying to track down what was causing this issue. With Dynatrace, it's right there in front of me, it's a JavaScript error, or something I can narrow down.

I get valuable information like, for example, if a site is down. That's the key. I'm instantly getting a message, or even on the app, I can see if something overnight went down a few times, or it's not performing at 100%. Those are the key things.

I'm excited about the big announcement: session replay. That's going to be pretty awesome. I don't think the solution was lacking without this, but I do think now, that we're going to be able to get that view of an actual user, with the actual problem... The example that I saw was, a person is tapping through, and then all of a sudden it's not working, right there. Now, as a developer, I'm saying that's fabulous for me because I know there's a problem with that field. That's perfect. Otherwise, I'd be spending a couple of hours, at least, trying to figure it out, and also do my own testing. So I'm happy that it's here. I'm glad they introduced it and bought the company.

Honestly, I've heard this asked of others, and for me, I'm thinking, "Can there be anything else?" I just haven't even thought about it because I feel that Dynatrace thinks of everything before I can even think of the need for anything else. For me, we already have everything I need.

No stability issues at all, it's always been up.

We had to reduce our usage but then we were going over, so now we're back up again. But it definitely scales well.

I have not used technical support but I think my coworker has. He has recommended it to me. He's like, "If you have issues, totally call them."

We didn't have performance monitoring until we picked up this product. I wasn't involved in the process of tracking down a solution, but my thought is we had no idea how our sites were performing, except with our own internal testing. So we were visiting our own sites, and would say, "Yeah, it's fast enough." But that wasn't covering things. We have Adobe Analytics, but that was a different type of monitoring.

In terms of AI for monitoring the performance and management in the cloud, I don't know that piece because we're not really involved with AI, as far as I know.

As for one solution that can provide real answers, and not just data surrounding it, to tell you "this problem is right here," we already have that with Dynatrace. The immediate benefit, obviously, is getting the answers immediately.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include that the product has to be what we need it to be. But then, also, the support and training would be important, because you could get this fabulous product and then not know how to use it. And then you're throwing money away.

The primary use case for the solution is our application performance and the stability of our application. It really helps provide stable customer-facing applications and we use it continuously monitor our performance.

It is really working well for us and we are negotiating an extended contract right now for the next three years.

Once we started adopting this tool, it become an integral part of our business goals. As an industrial manufacturing company, the big investment and the interest area for us is to have our presence in the e-commerce platform, with stable and performing applications. This is a very critical business goal. 

A monitoring solution like Dynatrace is becoming a very integral part of that particular solution chain. Be it the CDN platform, or commerce platform, application performance monitoring is becoming a very critical piece.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the visibility. It creates visibility - from when the user starts interacting with our application - all the way back to our database calls, our network path, everything. 

The triaging is amazing. And at the same time, it provides depth, all the way to what kind of a method, what variables are inside those methods. Without getting too into the technical, the depth it gets to, pinpointing the problematic area - where exactly the problem is happening - is amazing. That's the best you can get from this tool.

From the Dynatrace SaaS platform, they talk about the APIs. The approach they take is, "We create the APIs, you use them however you want." I like it, that gives us flexibility. But at the same time, if your company does not have a huge number of APM specialists, or it does not have the time and resources available to spend on these kind of technology developments, it would be helpful if there were out-of-the-box solutions available from the platform. I would certainly consider that, because that would make us go to market much faster, rather than redeveloping our own solutions based on those APIs. 

So I would like to see more out-of-the-box solutions developed on those APIs.

And then, we would still have the flexibility to use the APIs if we needed to extend.

What we have right now, is fairly stable because it's not like we're getting an update every year, or every two weeks. When we evaluated the SaaS/Managed services, that's a big question we asked, because if your run-data is going to update you every two weeks, it means worrying about my performance monitoring solution now, rather than worrying about my application. That was a real concern we had. 

The first question we asked is, "Is there an option for us to turn it off? Can decide when we want to update our solutions?" That's an insurance policy for me. If it does not work out for us, we would always have an option. That's a real concern for us, even now. But since we have that insurance, we have an option to turn it off, if we don't want to have it updated every two weeks, I think we are ready to take that risk now.

It does scale really well. We started with monitoring a very limited number of applications, and then we started expanding our scope, and we have kept on adding more and more applications under this portfolio.

We actively use the Expert Services from the vendor. They are certainly very knowledgeable on the solution. The challenge is how do we map our business requirements and business challenges with the solution. Obviously, they do not understand our business challenges, so if we are able to provide the proper feedback to them about our business challenges, they can really map the solution to our problems.

They have solved our problems most of the time, as quickly as possible. Some of the time they solved the problem, but it took some time to solve it. That's the reason I give the solution an eight out of 10. The Expert Services is really helpful for us.

We were referred by one of our vendors. It was more like an architectural review service that we had engaged. When they came out and reviewed our architecture, they made a lot of recommendations on the architectural changes, and the way we need to adapt our commerce platform. 

One of the major recommendations we got from them is, "You really need to start investing in your APM strategy, because that's going to benefit you in the long run." And then we started investing in a very limited amount, to see the return on investment. We saw the value, and then we started increasing every investment on this area.

I was involved in the initial proof of concept, and setting up of the solution. The solution is very straightforward. Setting it up, and then getting it implemented, and then adoption are really complex.

We had our own shortcomings on the technology side. At the same time, I also felt like even Dynatrace has to mature in its offering. They are in the industry as an APM leader, so they should be able to come and say, "Hey, if you are in this vertical, these are the industry best practices. If you follow this, this would be the right path." 

I think that's something Dynatrace has to evolve. Rather than just concentrating on the solution side, they should focus more on the business side. For example, they should say, "For your retail, this is how your application performance monitoring happens. If you're in the manufacturing industrial segment, this is how the application performance monitoring happens, these are the key metrics you should look for."

We went automatically with the referral to Dynatrace. We already had enterprise APM solutions available, so they started competing with the Dynatrace. From time to time, we still evaluate other vendors, but we are still sticking with Dynatrace for two reasons. 

First, they have always been ahead of the market. When we started thinking, "Okay, we want to do a DevOps strategy, and continuous deployment, continuous integration. Dynatrace has an offering which will fit into those particular requirements." 

And the second one is, they have already spent three years with us, so they know our business, they know our business strategies, and our business goals. I've not really had appetite to go back and start investing my time and energy with a new vendor to bring them on board and then teach then everything that I have already taught to the Dynatrace guys.

Regarding the role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale into the cloud, and monitor performance management issues, the way I look at AI is this. When we started this journey three years back, it was more like problem-solving. We have a problem, and we need to identify the root causes and how do we solve it? That's what it was three years back. 

In three years, a lot of things have changed. Now it's all about, how do you proactively monitor it, and how do you solve it, and then the self-healing techniques and the like. So even without a developer looking into it, how do you solve the problem? That's the big thing I'm seeing from our organization's point of view on AI. The second point is, we are also starting our DevOps initiatives, and then the continuous integration platforms, and continuous delivery platforms. The AI platform, and the new Dynatrace, is becoming a critical value in that as well.

In terms of siloed monitoring tools, our team has not used them, but our enterprise had other application monitoring tools. The challenge with those are that some of them are really concentrating on your networking site, some of them are concentrating on your specific application-oriented issues. You are not able to get one big picture, or a single pane of visibility into every application or every service that's involved in that application. That's where I think this particular solution helped us a lot.

If there is one solution, it reduces the complexity. If you bring one solution, there would be some learning curve to adopting the solution, but in the long run it's going to really help to reduce the complexity. From my team's point of view, they would be able to go much deeper, picture a "T" shape, rather than a horizontal. Otherwise, you would need to learn one tool for this particular technology, or for this application, and another tool to support another application. So if there is one tool, they could go all the way, and there would be a lot of productivity improvement because of that.

As far as selecting a vendor goes, what's important to us are two things. First, are they stable enough. Is the company stable enough to do business with them, because we are a 100-year-old company, so we value the continuity of the business. Second, how visionary are they in their market, in that industry? We don't take too much risk on any evolving technology. We wait until the technology evolves and matures. That's a very critical thing. 

We always look for how strong they are in that industry, how long they are in this industry, what their track record is, and what their future looks like.

My advice is, involve all the stakeholders from day one. Bringing everyone on board from day one, and get everybody onto the same page, what they want from the solution. That is very critical. It takes some time to get it to a maturity level, and then adoption. That means you start adopting it, and then six months down the line, if your business or a different team comes back and says, "This is good, but it's not really making any sense to me," then the whole six months, whatever you invested, has really gone to waste. Or you need to redo things one more time for them.

So I would say, identify all the stakeholders who will be consuming this solution, and then start engaging with them on day one. Even if they are not going to be part of the solution, or consuming these services, from day one, identify all of them and keep them engaged from day one. That will be very critical. We made that mistake and we learned from that.

The primary use case is that we need to monitor our portfolio of applications. We need to pick out which ones are most important to us. Therefore, we use Dynatrace to help us understand how applications perform in different platforms.

We used to have a software perspective. Now, we will probably have more of a business perspective, as well. I am pretty sure we will be able to spread the use of monitoring information throughout the organization.

• Provides insights into the internal performance on parts of the application. 
• Various technologies
• Identifies problem areas and performance issues.

We might have a couple of technologies that we would like to see supported. I noticed a fairly new integration for Slack, I might want to see integrations into Microsoft Teams, or something like that, similar to what is there for Slack. Not sure what is already there.

I still need to learn is how to share information. There are lots of features to share information, but we need to learn to leverage that, both on the web browser and on the mobile app. How do I create the curiosity, not only technical people, but from the product owner's perspectives into their applications?

It is still new to us, but the stability is good. We have not experienced anything, both with the solution, but also with the support and the organization behind it. It works well for us.

It is very new to us, so we have not needed to scalability that badly. However, being cloud-based, I would suspect it scales as we need it to.

I have not personally used it, but a my colleague has used it. Our company gets quick response times and qualified responses, so that is good.

Dynatrace is still very new to us. We just switched from Admon to Dynatrace. We were having some technical difficulties with Admon. We had systems that were not supported, and they are supported in Dynatrace. That is one reason.

Also, Dynatrace, the new solution, is basically the future of what we need. Basically, our contract ran out (with Admon). We had to decide to extend the old contract or get a new one, so we decided to buy Dynatrace instead.

A colleague of mine did the initial setup. Compared to Admon, it is much easier to get some of the information. The challenge now is that we have a lot information with Dynatrace. The main task will be to sort through all the information and make sense of it. That is the major difference.

We actually looked at a couple of other competitors, but we know Dynatrace, the organization, supports us. 

We looked at the features of other tools, and Dynatrace's features fit us best. We also have good support in places, like Scandinavia. We use Red Ocean, a Dynatrace partner, to support us and that has worked out well.

Take a close look at what you need. Do you need a technical perspective or a business perspective? What do you actually expect to get from your solution? Then, pick your solution based on that.

AI is still new to many, so we have to learn to use it, to navigate, perhaps even to trust it. With a product like Dynatrace, we will start learning to use it and get experience in how it works for us, then we will probably start trusting it. It is something we can't look into, but we will see that it does what we think it should do.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, that could provide an immediate benefit for my team, it would be to save time. We would save time debugging things ourselves. We would save minutes and hours of precious time until we are back up and running again.

We primarily use it to monitor application performance and end-user experience. 

We are happy with the solution.

It has given visibility to how an end user utilizes and experiences our service offerings.

There are different solutions and I have used many of the different solutions. However, I would say the ease of deployment and use.

Since things are getting more complicated, it is nice to have artificial intelligence to correlate issues and events to come up with root cause.

I would like to see internal synthetic tests in the next release, which is already on the roadmap.

Not with Dynatrace SaaS or managed product. 

We did have some scaling issues with the DC RUM or Data Center Real User Monitoring. Just with the overall volume that we monitor in a company that I used to work at. We had a hard time being able to scale DC RUM to it, but the Dynatrace product by itself seems to scale pretty well.

I use technical support all the time, generally by email. I would say they are very responsive and generally give us the correct solutions.

We have used the silo monitoring tools in the past, the challenges we faced were correlating the metrics across different silos.

We were using other tools that Compuware and Dynatrace have had in the past. This just led us to using the more updated Dynatrace product solution now.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

In-house (myself).

Do a PoC and see if you like it.

We looked at IBM Tealeaf for the replay functionality, most recently. That is about it.

Dynatrace has more end-to-end performance monitoring metrics than we found with other tools.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit for my team would be to solve problems quicker, and maybe, prevent problems before they happen.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Their ability to support the product.
• Their ability to keep up on new technology which needs to be monitored.

The primary use is for both corporate and manufacturing plants' applications.

Performance has been great. We started out with application monitoring and now we're in the process of switching over to Dynatrace. So far it's yielding great results. It's getting people to think more, and it's easier to deploy.

The old generation tool from Dynatrace, the application monitoring, has been our defacto solution, and it was very successful. Switching over to Dynatrace it 

1. reduces complexity
2. increases the speed to market
3. reduces the amount of knowledge that is needed by applications consuming this data.

There are two main features that we're very interested in. Number one is, when the tool ingests data from other tools, being able to correlate those with the existing topology, so that the AI engine can draw more conclusions in case Dynatrace does not monitor those instances. 

Also, more dashboards like AppMon.

Stability is great, and it's constantly improving. We haven't had any issues with it. There hasn't been any downtime since I've been working on it.

We haven't scaled the Dynatrace solution at this point.

Technical support is really great, and they're very quick. If they cannot fix it, they're very good about escalating right away to product development.

Our issues were mostly around Synthetic, some incompatibilities with the JavaScript frameworks. For Dynatrace specifically, it was for the browser RUM.

When I joined our company, they were already using a little bit of Dynatrace. The concept of APM was there. And then, the company that I had joined split from the initial company. It was pretty much a new, clean slate, but there was the awareness of APM already there.

It was very straightforward. We deployed it on our own.

We evaluated ManageEngine because we already have their infrastructure monitoring. We did evaluate their APM solution, but it was no where near as good as this solution.

I think our complexity is increased by the fact that we use a lot of custom, off the shelf, or COTS, applications, as well as in-house applications. So that introduces a high complexity of different technologies. Having a tool that can be self-injected into all of these is one thing. And the second thing is the fact that it gets deployed at the host level, without having to go tweak application containers. That reduces complexity and the time to value a lot.

We still have some siloed monitoring tools but they don't have any awareness of other components that might make up that application's delivery chain.

If we had just one solution that could provide a real answer and not just data, at the company level it would definitely reduce a lot of the downtime. That would be key for our company, especially since we're in the manufacturing environment and deal with very strict SLAs with our customers.

Our most important criteria when working with a vendor are 

• their willingness to understand the needs of our company
• the responsiveness to technical questions
• the availability during a PoC, so that we can address outstanding items.

I definitely rate this solution a 10 out of 10, because it's a very mature product, and due to the quality of support.

Make sure they understand what you're going to use the tool for, and do a PoC and you will be amazed at how fast you get value from it. 

We have multiple use cases for it. We use it for performance testing; it performs very well for that. We also use it for production monitoring. We use both AppMon and Dynatrace Managed in that situation. And it's an invaluable tool.

It has been transformational. We started out with DCRUM, it's ingrained in our business and we've got executives that look at that. Now, the same thing is happening with tools like AppMon and Dynatrace.

The speed and problem resolution.

We're still on 6.5, so we've haven't upgraded completely to 7, 7.1. I think most of the things that we're looking for are already addressed in the new product.

One thing that would help would be tighter integration with DCRUM. It's somewhat difficult to drill down and see everything, but I think that's in the future versions. We just haven't seen that yet.

There have been stability issues but they were not really frequent or too significant.

The system as a whole scales fairly well. It's intensive, but it's not such a big footprint that it can't be handled. I think with Managed, or the SaaS product, things become a little easier. With AppMon you need a pretty good amount of inputting of data, but I think things get easier when you move over to Managed.

Tech support is great. You're able to get through the levels pretty fast, so it has been pretty good.

We had a previous solution, but nothing that's around any more.

It's a pretty straightforward setup. Once you've got your build out, you don't have to move things around too much, it's pretty straightforward. We did it on our own and then, for our first upgrades, we had support in there.

We evaluated all the different tools, and this is the best of the best.

With siloed monitoring, which we have used, you don't get a holistic picture of what's going on, so analysis is very intensive.

If there was just one tool, obviously there would be a lot of benefit there. We would only need to learn one thing, everybody would be looking at the same data. Everything becomes more streamlined.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is that their product does what it says it's going to do. Gives us visibility.

If I were to advise a colleague at another company who is researching this or a similar solution, I would tell them to do their due diligence, look at the product hard, and make sure they size the product.