Dynatrace Reviews

Our primary use case is to combine and transform a lot of metrics from our production environment and utilize Dynatrace to turn that data into knowledge which we can act on to prevent outages, increase application performance, and improve end user experience. This tool enables us to make intelligent, fact-based decisions faster.

With Dynatrace, we have identified and solved "mystery" issues that we have experienced for a long time, including sporadic latency issues on storage volumes and SQL databases not scaling properly when under certain loads. 

We are also monitoring web services and using synthetic web checks to actively monitor specific parts of our production website and production web applications. With the SaaS version of Dynatrace, we started monitoring our VMware hypervisors and that gave us valuable system specific metrics into our virtual environments. Therefore, we have built smart alerts to notify our team of potential problems before they manifest themselves to end users.

I really like how easy it is to deploy and use the SaaS version in our environment. We have a lot of other tools that have plenty of capability but they do not get a whole lot of use because they require a dedicated resource who is an expert to use them. With the SaaS version of Dynatrace, all the admin functions are taken care of by the Dynatrace team (updates, patches, new features, bugs, etc.), and our small shop can focus on getting valuable metrics, alerts, and issue resolution from the product. That is very important because despite how many features and how powerful a product is, it will only return value to an organization if it is being integrated and used regularly for its intended purpose; Dynatrace SaaS makes that easy for us.

As far as more technical features go, we are a small shop and wear many hats in the IT department, so the automatic baselining and AI engine take a big chunk of work off our hands. It collects, analyzes, and summarizes the application and host level metrics (including host log files and hypervisor host details) from VMware virtual environments as well as physical stand-alone servers, then presents that data to us in an easy enough format to help us make better decisions and tune accordingly before our end users inform us of problems. 

In addition, we use the synthetic web checks to emulate the end user experience and availability of our public website and internal web applications, which is a wonderful feature to have access to. 

If I had to pick something to improve, it would be the fact that it requires manual intervention to uninstall the cloud agent from servers you want it removed from. The installation part is the easiest of any Linux tool that I have ever installed, so I do not have a problem with that at all. What I have a problem with, is that in order to 100% remove the product, you will need to manually go to each machine and uninstall the cloud agent. I wish there was a feature that would allow a Dynatrace administrator to remotely uninstall/remove the cloud agent from the Dynatrace management console without having to physically logon to each server to achieve the task.

We use it for identifying issues in production.

We had an issue with Web Services going down in production, and we used Dynatrace to monitor the exceptions and alert the vendor to correct the service. This, in turn, helped minimize end-user impact.

• CPU utilization
• PurePath analysis
• Alerting mechanism
• Finding exceptions and errors
• Dashboards to generate the transactions count

Every time I want to see the PurePath, I have to launch the client. It would be helpful if they introduced this in the browser application. 

Also, configuring alerts is bit confusing.

We have about 150 servers to be monitored and manual monitoring is a pain. We use Dynatrace to help our team in monitoring server health, CPU utilization, application errors.

Previously, the team had to do manual monitoring but now we have Dynatrace to alert the support team for immediate assistance.

Alerting mechanism and drill down to the error details using PurePaths.

I like the auto email alerting feature the most, as it is set up based on the application error or condition.

Current issue is adding a new resource or removing an old resource. It would be helpful if we could include group distribution email IDs for alerting.

Dynatrace allows for my developers and administrators to dissect problems and performance impacts in our intranet/extranet environment and determine the root cause.

With the help of Dynatrace, we have improved performance by 50% and determined conflicts in the application to eliminate errors.

The user monitoring is probably the best part of the application. With it, we can go back to when a specific user had an issue and trace the entire transaction from the client to the database.

There are a couple gaps in the network reporting that we would like to see cleared up a bit. Other than that, it works like a charm.

Application needs to send alerts to the production team whenever there is an issue in any of the applications which are running in production.

Application monitoring is automated. Previously it was manual monitoring and having to check production servers, but using this solution we can configure the agents and look for alerts. It is very efficient and saves lot of manual effort.

By using Dynatrace, we can set up the agents to provide alerts at the JVM level.

Saves time, effort. It shows minute level errors. Node level configurations, application level configurations, JVM alerts are very flexible; you can drill down for specific errors.

• Configuring nodes and agents should be more like plug and play. 
• Transaction statistics should be more flexible to export and share with tje business side.

• End-to-end application monitoring and user experience management. 
• We use the error log management where we define the rules that constitute as an system error and/or failure. 
• The ability to monitor users' browser data.

Gives systems back-end visibility, allows for proactive monitoring, and improves the user's experience.

The level of dashboard granularity through the calendar features. This allows for a granular view of the data. 

Data streaming and dashboard loading can be improved to reduce dashboard latency. For example, it takes a significant amount of time to display aggregated data from the back-end to the dashboard. 

We use Dynatrace for its Synthetic Web Monitoring. This allows us to automatically react to any issues regarding site reliability.

The best example has been cost. We used Pingdom previously and Dynatrace proved to be a similar solution at a lower cost.

The Recorder for setting up a synthetic monitor is a really great tool for non-technical staff to be able to set up a monitor.

Adding people to alerts has not been very intuitive. That is really my only negative feedback.

We have a lot of very complex and very sensitive applications to monitor. Dynatrace's alert mechanism is helpful.

The alert mechanism has reduced hours of manual work.

Metrics for CPU, memory, network, and disk. Since it provides extensive end-user, application, and infrastructure platform and technology support that includes mobile, web browser, Java, .NET, PHP, servers, networks, and the mainframe

It's too early to comment on the features to be added/tuned.