Dynatrace Reviews

We have a critical enterprise-level project where we have seen a lot of performance issues. We tried to figure out what tool might help us solve some of those performance issues. Then we heard about Dynatrace, so we engaged Dynatrace. It's basically about solving performance issues.

In terms of performance, we're still a work in progress. I think we have made good progress identifying the areas where the problems are, and now it's a matter of just working with the different teams trying to figure out what the roadmap is going to be.

We're learning the tool. At the same time, it's also about educating folks within our organization in terms of what Dynatrace can do. And also how do we apply it? How do we make use of Dynatrace and what do we do with the information we get? How do we take that and go to the next step of implementing the changes?

At least we're able to pinpoint where the problems are instead of just saying, "Here's the results and here are the failures." At least we're able to tell them which calls, which methods were the problem, which interface. That was a huge step for us, to be able to do that. 

We are not the DevOps or the application team. We're coming from the testing side and, generally, it's challenging when you are working with an application built by a different team. When you run a test and say, "Hey! Here's your problem," unless you show the proof, you show the information, they're not going to be able to take it and make some changes to it. So the big first step for us was to identify where the problem was within the application. 

Now, it's mostly about, "What do we do about it?" You have these problems. What are we doing about making some changes and getting into the roadmap.

PurePath. We just started using it, it's been less than a year. PurePath is really helpful. 

And I'm learning now about the dashboards, and the session replay is another that was really fascinating to see. I guess AppMon probably doesn't have those things yet.

The features I'm most excited about are the AI piece, the session playback, and the fact that the deployment is even easier with the new version. Not only deployment, but the setup piece of it, I'm hearing, it's easy. I haven't tried it out but that's really encouraging.

To be honest with you, I think they have a great roadmap. And the fact that they are using the feedback from the customers to build into the roadmap, is a great feature. I have nothing in particular that I want to see.

From what I've seen, from what I've experienced, absolutely no problem with stability. Especially the ease with which it gets deployed, and also the support we typically get has been amazing. We have no regrets using Dynatrace. It's been a good experience so far.

So far we've implemented this for a couple of different applications. It scaled pretty well for us. We're about 2,000 or 3,000 users, but we'll have a better answer as we start rolling it out to more applications. So far, no issues with scaling.

From what I've seen, they're very knowledgeable and easy to work with.

We've used a variety of tools, not so much in the APM space. It was mostly about SiteScope and Wiley, those kind of things.

With Dynatrace we were able to pinpoint where the problems were with PurePath, which was something we did not have. Obviously, we didn't work with an APM solution so I'm only comparing this with a non-APM solution like SiteScope. There, it's mostly about, "Hey, here's your CPU, here's your memory," rather than pinpointing where the actual problems are, which is something that PurePath gives us.

I think it was really, really straightforward. It's the second time around. Some of the things, we did them ourselves.

In terms of AI, when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, we don't have a cloud implementation yet. But, in general, what I've seen with AI, I think they're learning. The self-healing thing was really impressive in terms of, if you have a problem, what do you do about it? You get notified automatically. Then how do you fix it? Those are some of the things with AI that I thought were pretty cool.

If there was one solution that could not only provide data but real answers, the immediate benefit of that for our team would be huge. Not just telling us, "Here's the data" - there's so much data out there - but what do you make of it? What's the critical data? I guess that's where Dynatrace is headed with AI and the self-healing. That would be huge. If they can say, "Hey, here's your problem. Here's what you need to do to fix the problem." That would be significant. 

I think the solution meets our needs where it is, so from that perspective, it's a nine out of 10.

The most important criteria when working with a vendor or selecting a vendor are customer service and what type of product offerings they have. Do they see the vision of the future in terms of cloud and those kinds of things? Those are some of the things we consider very important.

To a colleague who is looking into this type of solution, I would say we have had a really good experience. If they're in a similar situation, try it out. Do a proof concept. Try it out and see if it's good for you. It may or may not be a good fit. Everybody's different. Try it out.

Primarily, we use it for monitoring our end user performance experience, as well as diagnosing root cause analysis for one of our core applications. 

It is performing quite well. We are able to see globally our end user response time tracing down to the user ID. If there is an issue, we are able to diagnose it very quickly. This is the key to diagnosing quickly the root cause, then fixing it. 

In the past, we would go into war rooms and contact each vendor fighting over what the issue was, as each vendor would blame the other vendor: infrastructure would blame middleware, middleware would blame server, and so on. Therefore, the issues were not visible. 

The app shows you where the problem is, so you can go to the correct person. While there was initial resistance, now they has accepted the tool because they actually see the data is correct (tangible proof).

There are two components. One is the DC RUM, which provides me with the visibility for end-user experience down to user ID. This is one of the key features that we use it for. AppMon gives me the key feature, PurePath, which gives me access to basically the root cause of my issue, JWC. Thus, PurePath for AppMon and DC RUM provides end user experience monitoring. 

Dynatrace has a bit of a AI component in one agent. Prior to that, using AppMon, the user needed to be quite skillful to understand where to troubleshoot and what was the root cause. With the add-on of AI, at least upfront it tells you it analyzed all the logs, and it actually gives you a first level analysis instead of having you spending a lot of time trying to understanding the logs. AI is very useful, especially in the modern age to just speed up your diagnosis for finding the trouble/issues. 

The mobile app provided by Dynatrace could be improved, especially the DCR mobile app because it does not have some of the basic functions, like push notifications or even customized reports. It is very basic. I can't use it. I have to use the full app version. Whereas if you have a good mobile app, it actually gives you all of the notifications and you can drill down, which would help.

Stability is not an issue.

I have only used it for two applications, so I have not really scaled up. I do not use the cloud version, so I do not have that experienced. So far, in my environment, it works fine and has low overhead against my applications. So, that is the key thing. 

Technical support normally goes through our partner. The partner will then contact Dynatrace if they have an issue who will then come in with our partner and consult. When Dynatrace has come in, I have felt they have been knowledgeable.

We were all siloed. The challenge associated with siloed monitoring tools is it only gives you one perspective. It is a web server log, so you need a lot of human intervention to piece things together to find a root cause.

The key driving force towards Dynatrace was we were doing application transformation, so we were running the application and we had performance issues. We immediately needed help troubleshooting. For this case, we actually moved Dynatrace straight into production and it was able to detect the core issues, then we were able to resolve them very fast. Thus, this was the immediate selling point for Dynatrace and we procured it. 

We deployed it quite fast. Managing to install AppMon was quite straightforward, but for the DC RUM, building the reports is a bit complex. It needs a lot of training and a partner to actually help out.

A Dynatrace partner will always be willing to give you a trial. Go through the trial to see if there is a benefit for your company. Just try it out, implement it into production, and you will see the benefit.

Not really.

It was delivered when we wanted it and has performed exceptionally well. However, we have had to resolve a lot of things and had a lot of issues with the tool.

If I had just one solution that could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit would be time saved (streamlined) instead of analyzing so many different tools.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: You need a good business partner to work with and help you implement the solution, thus it is the implementation and the support. These are the key things that I would look at in a vendor.

We had Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring in place, and we had Gomez. The whole point of that was to really check for system availability, to make sure we knew if the site was going down, etc. Since then, we've put in the full Dynatrace solution to prevent customer impact, some kind of site outage. That's the whole point of having it, so we can identify problems sooner, fix them, and stop the site going down.

We have had a few instances where we found small problems. They may or may not have been a full site-outage, but they certainly would have had some kind of customer impact. We only put the tool in a year ago but we've already got quite a number of things. We've found the product has helped us to identify an issue and we fixed it before there was  any customer impact. So we're seeing the benefit already, which is great.

To use an example, the savings in terms of cost and time. We use it for live monitoring, but we also use it in our performance testing. So that alone, that issue I just talked about, was a performance testing issue, and we would have put that change live without Dynatrace.

Finding that problem in "live", that would have been three or four days of investigation, whereas we found the issue, fixed the issue, reran the tests, all same day. That was days and days and days of cost-savings, in terms of resources, and allowing them to actually do other things that they're there to do.

Being able to identify the blind spots. Before, we had lots of monitoring, but it was all very manual. It was literally taking server logs and dumping them somewhere and someone had to manually go through things. You only monitor what you know about. As soon as we put Dynatrace in, it sprung to life, and we identified problems instantly. The team's reaction was, "Wow, look at that." So finding different parts of the system.

Sometimes you focus on the area where you see the issue, but not necessarily where the root cause is coming from, so you have to go through the full stack and help to identify the problem areas. We've found problems and fixed them in half an hour when it would've taken days before.

I think the one that's coming soon, the customer playback and the session replay. Notwithstanding the challenge we might have around GDPR, and the collection of data - which worries me - what we have quite a lot is, a very specific customer situation or customer problem. Of course, we can see problems in Dynatrace, but we might have a customer call in trying to donate, or trying to create a fundraising page, and we can never recreate the issue.

You don't want to have to go to the customer, "What browser were you using, and what were you doing, what day was it, was it cold outside?" To be able to see exactly what has happened, for us to be able to understand that, gives us extra power really to understand the issue and to fix it. Nine times out of 10, it's probably a really simple thing, that we just need a bit of JavaScript or something to fix.

Also the thing that's really powerful is being able to recognize what the customer's trying to do and contact that customer. And for us again, customer is key. For our Help desk to actually be able to help that customer and say, "We see you were trying to donate," or "We can see this happened to you, we're really sorry, we fixed that issue, please come back, or let us help you on that journey." That's really powerful. In terms of NPS, that's really important to us.

I think that would help with those situations, stop the problem in the first place. But also, if there is a problem, being able to deal with it directly with the customer is fantastic.

It's been stable, I haven't had any problems with it at all.

It absolutely suits us. In terms of the wider bank, within Virgin Money, we can absolutely look to spread it across other applications, which we will be doing. But I think we've probably got the critical ones covered. We can obviously see the benefit, we just need to fight the right battles at the right time to get those things put in.

The team used tech support during the original implementation to make sure that it was going well. And it went very smoothly. 

I don't think we've had any problems with it from a Virgin Money Giving perspective. Having said that, we had experts using it who were already within Virgin Money. So we were able to use that internal expertise to help us to implement it into our solutions, which was helpful. So we haven't needed to call tech support.

This is our first APM tool. We haven't been around that long. I look after a system called Virgin Money Giving, and we haven't been around that long - seven or eight years. It's a really successful business, and as that business has grown and grown, you then see the value in these kind of tools. We managed successfully, we didn't really have many system outages and the like, but we saw the benefit as it has been rolling out across the rest of the bank. It's the first tool we've used.

I was only pointing at people to do the initial setup. I don't come from the technical side, I just run the teams that do the stuff, the proper work. So I was involved in terms of helping to make sure it happens, but not at the level of touching it.

We did look at other tooling, but Dynatrace suits us as a solution.

It was the simplicity. Obviously we had heard lots about AppMon, but we went straight into the full Dynatrace solution. The simplicity of the implementation. We literally switched it on and we could see benefit almost instantly. 

Also it's the full-stack, one solution that can allow you to track and monitor across the whole of our infrastructure. We haven't got a huge, complicated infrastructure, so its probably quite simple for us, versus people who've got huge amounts of different cloud hosting and all that kind of stuff.

Actually having had conversations with Dynatrace, as part of the proof of concept, it feels like they're constantly looking to innovate. Coming here, to the Performance 2018 conference, there are things about which I'm saying, "I can't wait for that to come." And that's really nice for us as a customer, to be waiting for the next thing to come to help our business.

We we haven't really gotten anywhere near the area of AI and IT's ability to scale up the cloud and monitor performance management issues. Having been through sessions here, at the Perform 2018 conference, that's definitely something we need to be focusing on. We're not using cloud in any way, as an organization, other than things like Dynatrace. AI is definitely on our roadmap, but we're not there yet. It's something that's coming up a lot, and you can actually see the benefit.

Regarding a solution that could provide real answers, and not just the data, the immediate benefit for our team would be time and cost. We're running a website that needs to be there 24/7, and because we're Virgin Money Giving, we deal with quite personal things. People are raising money for good causes, things that are personal to them. So if our website isn't available for any point in time, it can be really quite heartbreaking for people, people can't donate to their cause, or give money to the charity they want to. The whole customer experience is really important, so anything that allows us to prevent problems sooner, and prevent system problems, is right for the customer. And that's important to our brand.

In terms of selecting a vendor, for us, because Virgin Money as an organization has important values, we need to find a vendor that has the same kind of values. I think there needs to be a synergy around what we're wanting to do. 

Also the key thing is support. Sometimes you can have third-party relationships, or vendors that sell you a product and then you don't see them again, and you don't really get the best out of that product. So it needs to be an ongoing relationship, and a genuine partnership. It can't just be a "drop the product over the fence then run off with your money," it needs to be an ongoing relationship.

Also important for us is to help, perhaps, influence the future of the product as well, a genuine partnership.

At the moment I'd say Dynatrace is a 10 out of 10 because I can see the benefit. It's early on in the lifecycle of the product for us, but I can absolutely see the benefit already. I think the thing we do need to do is understand more about the potential. I think we've just scratched the surface. As soon as you switch it on, there is so much information that comes to you, that you're all excited about, all that data. But it's just making sure that you're looking in the right places and doing the right things. At the moment, it's a 10 for me, I absolutely love the product, a year in.

My advice is try it. I think we put it onto an application and, within hours, we had really good powerful data, and we could see problems in the data that needed to be fixed. Trial it on an application and see what happens.

We do release testing. Every month, we have a release where these are the two factors in which we usually use Dynatrace:

1. Release testing purposes.
2. Measure the product for any production-related issues. 

Our organization basically runs on demand in production, but it is always enabled in pre-production environment. When we do release testing, we do at least one round of testing using the product.

Dynatrace provide us the in-depth details to know what is wrong in the application and what are performance issues, then really quickly we are able to debug any performance issues or any other performance-related issues. It has helped the developers to find the root cause and a faster deployment process with a quicker release process.

Right now, the whole analysis part that we are doing is manually. Therefore, if we can implement the analysis part in an AI, it would definitely help to find the root cause quickly and retrieve customers' problem within minutes.

What I would like to see is an AI implemented sensor. Because all analysis that we are doing is basically manual, I want an AI to do it for me. Already some of them features are there, but we need more AI in the product, so if instantly something happens in production, it can alert me by saying, "Hey, this is the problem. You should involve this particular module level." Then, alert the developers to fix the problem, so we can stage it immediately. We want that quick solution with expertise and we want in Dynatrace.

AppDynamics and Dynatrace do not always well together. We have noticed if we run both APM tools in the same server, it gives us sometimes the wrong information, and sometimes it gives us problems. Therefore, we are neither AppDynamics nor Dynatrace in products, server, or pre-prod servers.

Stability is good. It is stable and that can definitely help.

I would rate scalability at a seven out of 10. With any particular problem, it is hard to detect in any of the other APM tools. However, in Dynatrace, we can very quickly find the root cause. It physically gives us the in-depth solution and in-depth view of the root cause. None of the other products gives us that in-depth analysis of the problem.

Customer support is pretty helpful. Two or three days back, we had some issues.  We logged a p zero defect and they resolved the problem within half a day. 

We are also using AppDynamics, before we used to use another solution, but recently we changed to AppDynamics. 

AppDynamics is deployed for all products and services. We use Dynatrace predominantly for deep dive analysis purposes.

The initial setup went smoothly and it was straightforward. Though, my colleagues did the setup.

• AppD: It is lightweight and high level. You can see all the problems.
• Dynatrace: People need to learn a lot to do the analysis. Developers need some knowledge to identify the root cause using the Dynatrace product.

I would definitely recommend Dynatrace. Based on my experience, you can do deep dive analysis and find root cause quickly. That is our primary reason for using Dynatrace.

If I had one solution that could provide real answers opposed to just providing data, the immediate benefit would be to find any root cause quickly, such as any application-related issues.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• We do not have many licenses, so whenever there is a problem, then only we can enable those agents.
• User-related issues. We want to be able to see, like users, how they are impacted, if there are any problems or issues.

To look at the full transaction flow, from the customer all the way through back-end systems, for problem analysis, triage, performance optimization.

It does it really well. The more visibility you have through the agent implementations, the deeper you can get down through the stack and identify what you're looking for and how to fix it, find it, tune it.

The Managed SaaS is going to simplify things a lot and allow us to consolidate a lot of tool sets. We are going to be able to get rid of some of the old Legacy monitoring tools and replace them with something much better that puts everything in one place.

The stuff that's coming with the new pieces around the Dynatrace Managed SaaS implementation. The ease of implementation there is significant. We've spent a lot of time with AppMon and DC RUM - that's a lot of time to set up, configure. With Managed solution, you just drop it in and everything pretty much auto-instruments, which makes life a lot easier.

One of the things that I was talking about with Simon earlier was getting mobile native replay. They don't have a timeline on it yet, but that's one of the key things we're looking at, to get rid of one of our incumbent products that does replay. 

Also, extended support for some of the agents, the one-agent technologies under Managed. We've got some old legacy platforms that don't have one-agent support yet.

The Managed solution is much more stable. We've been running that environment for about six months now and it hasn't had hiccup yet. We had problems with AppMon before. We've taken AppMon beyond it's stated capabilities. We are running 2,400 agents off of a single server in a single system profile, which is well beyond the stated capacity. I think the stated agent cutoff limits are 1,200. We passed that like a year ago. We measure the internal workings of AppMon to make sure it's not going to fall over, but we hit those thresholds almost daily now. So we are throwing data out just because it's over capacity.

Managed, we can scale it out massively. AppMon doesn't scale well. That's the other piece, why we're looking at Managed, because we're already over capacity there. We've got to move stuff to the other platform, to Managed, so that we can get the horizontal and the vertical scale ability, and get away from our "problem child" on the other side.

We use tech support. How I would rate them depends. So some of our problems are quite complex, because of how we've stressed the system to the extent that we have. So, we've had some stuff on the AppMon side that's because we're well beyond the usable limits. They help where they can, but in some instances it just is what it is.

On the Managed side it's been pretty good. Stuff gets turned around pretty quickly. With them being able to do the remote management from the back-end, they are able to fix stuff up if they need to.

In terms of response time, relative to the complexity of the problem, I think it's reasonable. Some of our problems have been not normal. But the normal stuff, they turn it around fairly quickly. We don't pay for Premium support either, so you get what you pay for. They are usually quite responsive, and we've got really good connections into most of the folks back in the labs, so it works out well.

With the company I'm consulting with now, they had Dynatrace before there was a desire internally to look at some AppDynamics stuff. They did a bit of a bake-off and decided that it wasn't the right way to go just because of the capabilities and features. So it's always been on that side of the Dynatrace stuff. 

But I've used New Relic and AppD and the IBM Application Performance Monitoring solutions, so I've seen lots of them, and Dynatrace is definitely the better of them all, by a long shot.

Set it up myself. It took 20 minutes. Put a piece of hardware in, run two scripts, done.

We ran into a bit of a technical issue where we had to engage the support guys. They identified the issue, fixed the scripts, and then the people after us didn't have to deal with it. I think we were one of the first Managed on-prem implementations; maybe, not the first, but one of the few. So we weren't doing a normal implantation I guess, so little hiccups, but they were quickly resolved.

I think is role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems is a big game changer. That's one of the reasons that we're looking at moving a lot of our stuff from the legacy AppMon over to the Managed platforms, so we can take advantage of that and get rid of some of our more archaic event management, event lifecycle, alerting-type platforms. A lot of that stuff doesn't add the value that it should. So we are looking at the AI engine and the anomaly detection to basically replace a lot of that manual effort.

These archaic solutions are all siloed monitoring tools. That's one of the things I presented on here at the Perform 2018 conference yesterday, about all the data silos across all the old platforms, and being able to pull them together into Dynatrace so you can get that single pane of glass. The siloed solutions all had their own purposes, but the data was not inter-relatable. You'd have OS monitoring tools, and even AppMon, DC RUM, Synthetics; they all have great data, but they're not tied together.

The immediate benefit of just one solution that could provide real answers, and not just data, would be you could look at it in one spot. Even one of our groups that came to us a couple weeks ago said, "Oh yeah, we are going to do a new native mobile app and we're going to use this piece of freeware from Google and this piece of freeware from there." And I said, "Okay, so how are you going to pull that all together?" And they said, "Well, you can look here, and then look it up there..."  And when I said, "Why? We already have a solution that does that," they said, "But, they're free tools", and I said, "Yeah, free necessarily isn't always the best option."

In terms of vendor selection, I think one of the key things with Dynatrace is that they are very open to influence on product development side. So, we've influenced them fairly heavily on development and capabilities for Citrix and DC RUM. They've given us integration and support components around some odd technologies that we've got, and they have always been very open and accommodating to going after and developing capabilities around the stuff that we are looking for, which has been good.

I rate it an eight out of 10. I don't know if it could ever get to a 10 because there are always going be anomalies and idiosyncrasies that, commercially, it doesn't make sense for them to cater to everything. There is stuff that I'd like it to be able to do but commercially it just doesn't make sense. But, at the same time, they are evolving into things that need to happen as technology advances.

In terms of advice to someone who is research this type of solution, I get pulled on from the Dynatrace Accounts team regularly to do those sorts of conversations. I'm a pretty firm believer in the products and what they can do. I highly recommend them to anyone who is looking at them. I've used the competitive - or non-competitive - products that are out there, so it's pretty clear for me as far as why it's the right choice. I'm happy to have those conversations with them to take them down that path and let them understand the why's and what decisions they should make.

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.