Dynatrace Reviews

The main use of Dynatrace is development assistance through to live deployment, then proactive monitoring. Afterwards, monitoring of the infrastructure and live site.

Being able to track issues found in live back through environments is particularly useful. 

The obvious benefits are proactive monitoring, but there were the unexpected results we gained from it that brought additional value out of the product:

• Security analysis, i.e., being able to detect when there was malicious activity on the site. 
• DNS poisoning when incorrect traffic was hitting the site.
• Multiple hits to API calls when only one should happen.
• Helping to reduce license costs by reducing calls to specific services.
• Being able to ingest data from other sources and display them alongside, an example being in a third party system that does not allow monitoring, but does have an open API to pull monitoring stats from.

• Memory analysis: The ability to tune an application and stop memory leaks has been invaluable, especially in ATG where sizing is crucial. 
• Dynatrace allows real-time visualisation of what is happening instead of making changes, running a command to pull stats every hour or so. This enables us to make changes in an environment and instantly see the impact.
• Some systems can run low over a period of time. It allows us to predict when the server is going to struggle and proactively stop that from happening.

This is not a simple product. You cannot fire and forget. Maybe not a specific function issue that needs resolving, but certainly an area for consideration upon adoption of the product.

Training is required for all of the people who will be using it, and this should not be overlooked. I would even recommend nominating an SME in each of the three areas covered: user behaviour analysis, development, and infrastructure/operations support.

We have had some issues, mainly in the JS embedded in the page.

None.

We have used them extensively. They are very eager to help.

Reviewed other products, but never switched.

Fairly complicated, but it is an in-depth product.

In-house.

As a user, I can testify that we found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost.

Do not ignore the training!

Yes, AppDynamics, New Relic, and one other.

Monitoring of the hybrid solution, having application components spread over various datacenters. Having the insight from any channel, whether it is mobile apps or a website, we have everything covered. This gives us the capability to proactively monitor performance, but also give valuable insights to the user behaviour. 

The alerting mechanism where you get millions of dependencies analyzed, in one alert or "problem" as Dynatrace calls it. We are getting focused answers to issues in production, and moved away from the ops concept of "alert suppression", which historically has ignored seriously business impact due to over alerting. 

In short: The IT Ops game has been lifted, and silos have been broken down between traditional dev and ops.

The one agent technology and autodetection. 

That it made it possible to get the monitoring up and running fast. Therefore, we could focus on the value that Dynatrace provide. First, you harvest the low hanging fruits of failures and performance issues. Then, you have the foundation of implementing Dynatrace in your ITSM. 

In short: Time to realizing the value is short, maybe hours.

The thing with Dynatrace is the speed of releasing new capabilities and features. The one thing I am really missing is the final Azure dashboard. Further, I hope Dynatrace will release an on-prem API synthetic test soon, as that is really desired.

No issues.

No issues.

I used SCOM. I left due to moving to a cloud strategy.

I did not do the calculation.

Evaluate all the corners of the data Dynatrace provides, including outside dev and ops. The hole ITSM space can be ignited with Dynatrace integration, like CMDB synchronization.

I did not evaluate anything but Dynatrace.

Try it out. This is literally one tool to rule and distance any other.

My organization has leveraged Dynatrace for improving the quality of apps and streamlining in implementation.

Of the entire stack, DC RUM and DT SaaS are definitely the most asked for in our offering catalog.

Enterprise Synthetic of DC RUM can be made more robust.

Not much, but problem in stability of Enterprise Synthetic.

No.

Very good support.

No.

Yes, it is simple and straightforward.

Licensing is a bit complicated for Dynatrace, and pricing is dependent on how much your organization invests.

AppDynamics.

Before moving to production, go through the training on community sites/boards and try to build internal capabilities.

Dynatrace has significantly increased a lot of our troubleshooting capability. As IT support team spends less time, they can focus more on other things.

The most valuable feature is that we can see every database call executed from Java applications. Since most of the workload of applications are database-based, it is important to see and analyze SQL statements. Dynatrace provides the ability to drill down to different dashlets and see what is going clearly, which is extremely useful.

The second valuable feature is that we can catch every transaction in our applications. It is important to see all requests end-to-end and have the visibility into performance that we needed.

If you have many distributed servers, you will need to install or migrate every agent. This can be a problem if you have too many, and it takes time.

Customer service is good but I got answers late for some tickets opened recently.

PurePaths that start from method sensors (method entry points) cannot be grouped in any application and displayed under DefaultApplication.

The product runs perfectly with our application servers and collects data that we needed.

It is flexible enough to add desired measures and method level sensors into application code. We can see method-level details.

At the moment, we are focusing on internal IT processes covering the entire application lifecycle. Later, we would like to work on EUE.

• Deep insight to code
• Quick root cause analysis
• Quick bug fixing

Dynatrace provides a clear view to application code; it reviews code to decide where to place check points to collect information. Based on that, it is able to specifically identify where in the code it is experiencing either an error, issue or performance trap. This also provides third-level support with a clearly specified place for resolution without needing to re-create the error. It reduces the amount of time required for communication between all of the support layers, as they can share the same info - what has happened, what was result, where it happened - so in the end, it leads to quicker issue resolution.

Technical support is well-skilled and competitive.

Dynatrace was chosen as our first solution.

Initial setup was quite easy and straightforward. The solution by itself assigns a place for sensors. You just need to properly set ports and IPs.

We implemented it almost entirely in-house, with some remote vendor support.

Pricing is based on the number of servers monitored, so for big applications, it is a bit expensive.

First, make a detailed analysis of the purpose for such a tool, and then define detailed requirements they plan to achieve.

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.

• Ability to see issues as they’re happening for our users. We can see problems from the user’s perspective.
• The ability to set dynamic, non-static thresholds.
• Ability to use the browser capture app allows someone non-tech savvy to get something up and running quickly.
• Being able to test from multiple locations.

Within IT, we know that if there’s an alert, there’s a real problem. It’s a rallying call and people are responsive when that happens. It tends to be accurate so people are willing to respond to it.

They need to improve the browser interface. I can’t get it to work visually for some of the things I want to do, and that’s frustrating.

I haven’t had issues, but one of our secondary teams say they get an alert, but when log in don’t see a problem. However, this could be their own reading of the issue. Sometimes users who don’t understand platform don’t quite understand what they’re seeing.

No issues scaling up and out.

I haven’t had to use it because there have been no problems.

I was not involved, but did a comprehensive overhaul, and it was complex. The relationship between tests you create and those that you run is hazy. It’s not very apparent and there’s a disconnect. The configuration components are unclear.

It loses points in value because we’re not getting our money’s worth. I think New Relic Synthetics will be significantly less. I also feel like it’s an older company and isn't as forward-leaning. For example, New Relic has more capabilities that Dynatrace doesn’t cover. Because once on New Relic, I can use other products.

I'd advise that you think about your use cases and who you’d be notifying. If you think about those two pieces, then you can determine which product to get. Look at some of the other vendors that offer synthetics and see if they might be a better fit.

User Experience Monitoring (UEM) helped identify customer segments, which were creating a frustrating experience on our website. With revenue being driven primarily from the digital channel, it was imperative that we focused on improving performance. However, UEM helped us to triage the issues, and gradually lay down a plan of action. With greater visibility over customer behaviour and experience, it helps drive revenue streams.

When we started with Dynatrace, there was a lot of data available. However, the challenge was looking at the right ones at the right time. Our organization was reeling with issues on a particular set of variables, which were recurring and correlated. The need of the hour, was customized dashboards. Custom dashboards are easy and quick to develop in Dynatrace, and we could, therefore, easily get started with regular monitoring of key issues with these quick customizations. I rate it highly because as an end user, it is important that I get data in the way I want to see, comprehend and analyse. The ease of doing that was what won us over. On top of this, incident alarms helped automate incident management mechanism to a large extent, thereby reducing human intervention.

We have been able to customize incident alarms.

Better intelligence in terms of identifying business transactions, would be appreciated. Also useful, would be pointers to recurring issues and auto incident management.

I've used it for two months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's high.

This is the first solution like this that we've used.

It was quite straightforward to implement.

We used a vendor team to implement it, who had a high level of expertise.

• New Relic
• AppDynamics