Dynatrace Reviews

When we started with Dynatrace we were an on-prem organization. We used it in the early days as an APM, the way most people used it.

Our usage of Dynatrace has grown over the years, not as much in terms of capacity as in usability. It is now used by three departments within our organization. It originally started with just my group, which is IT, and then we rolled it out to development because they saw the advantages of being able to identify code bottlenecks in existing code. We've rolled it out to operations and they use Session Replay to troubleshoot customer-specific issues. And the sales department also uses it to gauge productivity and how many visits we get to a particular page, how many times people watch a particular video, how many take a certain practice exam, etc. 

Those use cases are all in addition to its core use, which is to help us keep our infrastructure running. 

We're currently using the Dynatrace SaaS, the Dynatrace ONE product. We're not using anything in the old, modular product. It fits very well for us. We are a cloud organization. We're all Azure now. We migrated from on-prem to cloud about three years ago.

The automated discovery and analysis definitely help us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint underlying root cause, both from a code perspective as well as an infrastructure perspective. When we get an alert, or we're seeing a degradation in performance, Dynatrace will lead us down the path: Where do we need to look first? It will tell us that it has analyzed so many trillions of dependencies and that it thinks that the problem is "here," and it will point to a query or a line of code or perhaps to a system or to a container that is not functioning properly. Depending on what the problem is, it saves us an enormous amount of time in troubleshooting and identifying problems.

I estimate it has cut our mean time to identification at least in half, if not more. Before, we were relegated to combing through logs. We would take Splunk, look for the error, find out where it was occurring, how many times it was occurring — do all that type of investigation that you normally need to do. We don't have to do that anymore because it's all automated. 

And as far as decreasing our mean time to repair goes, it's closer to 60 to 70 percent. The reason is that we don't need to take such drastic troubleshooting time. We take its recommendation, and the time that we spend is checking that Dynatrace was right. We'll test out a quick fix in dev and then take it to QA and then push it to production. In some instances, it does reduce our MTTR by anywhere from 60 to 70 percent, although it really depends on the problem.

I operate an entire stack on four people, and the only way I'm able to do that is by automating as much as I can and having tools that I can rely on to reduce time-dependent tasks. Dynatrace has allowed me to function and keep my people productive without working them 24/7. Dynatrace works 24/7 for me.

Another thing that Dynatrace gives us is very deep visibility, not only into user actions but systems interactions. How are the systems relating to each other? Are the right systems talking to the right systems? When we first deployed Dynatrace five years ago, it showed us, through its Smartscape tool, that we had servers talking to servers they shouldn't be talking to. That was quite an eye-opener. I've noticed that a lot of companies are trying to copy what Dynatrace came out with in its Smartscape, but to me, it is the best visualization tool of your app stack and network that you'll ever put together, and you don't have to do anything. The system puts all that together. You deploy your one agent, it maps out the system, and you can see everything from application to network to infrastructure connectivity. It depends what you want to see, but it's all Smartscape'd out. You can tell what traffic is going in which direction and where it's going.

In addition, when I first started using Dynatrace, I had a routine. I would come into the office early and go through all of the night's activities. I would check for any problems we had: Was anything broken, were there any active alerts? With Dynatrace Davis, I started getting those reports automatically, through Amazon Alexa, and I do that on my drive to work. Instead of having to go in early and spend time in the office, I'm able to stay at home a little later, have breakfast with the family. Then, when I'm in the car, I invoke Alexa to give me my Dynatrace morning report, which will include my Apdex rating, any open problems, and a summary of closed problems. It's probably one of the least advertised aspects of Dynatrace, and one which I think is among the most highly efficient tools that they offer.

The amount of time we have to devote to maintaining Dynatrace is next to nothing. The time that we spend in Dynatrace is actually using it. We're using it to look at what's happening, what's going on, is something broken, or do we have an alert? We go in to find out what's wrong. Maintaining it is really almost nonexistent.

Another advantage is that it is much more of a proactive tool than it is one for putting out fires. Of course, it helps us tremendously if we have to put out a fire, but our goal is to never have a fire. We want to make sure that any deployments that we put out are fully tested in all aspects of use, so that when things are fully deployed, there isn't any need for a rollback. In the last three years, we've had to roll back a production deployment once. I don't attribute that all to Dynatrace, but I attribute a large part of it to it.

It has increased our uptime because we find out about problems before they're problems. The one goal that my team has, above anything else, is to know about problems before the customer does. If the customer is telling us there's a problem, we have failed. We are so redundant and so HA-built, that there is absolutely no reason for us not to be able to circumvent an issue that is under our control, and to prevent any type of a work stoppage or outage. We can't help it if the internet goes down or if Microsoft has a core problem, but we can certainly help by making sure that it's not our application stack or our infrastructure. I would estimate our uptime is better by at least 20 percent.

In the end, it has decreased our time to market with new innovations and capabilities, because anything that reduces time-to-produce decreases time to market. Once the code has actually been developed, it's in testing and deployment and that's where my window of efficiency is. I can't control how long it takes to build something, but I can control how long it takes to fully test it and deploy it. And there, it has saved us time.

Before we had Dynatrace, and a lot of the processes that Dynatrace has helped us put into place, everything was manual. And the more manual work you have, the more margin for human error you have.

The most valuable features really depend on what I'm doing. The most unique feature that Dynatrace offers, in my opinion, is Davis. It's an AI engine and it's heavily integrated into the core product.

The Session Replay not only allows us to watch the user in 4K video, but to see the individual steps happening behind the scenes, from a developer perspective. It gives us every single step that a user takes in a session, along with the ability to watch it as a video playback. We can see each call to every server as the user goes through the site. If something is broken or not running optimally, it's going to come up in the Session Replay. 

We also use the solution for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. We are in the process of converting from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, but that is in its infancy for us and will grow as our Kubernetes deployments grow. Dynatrace's functionality in this is really good. 

We use JIRA as well as Jenkins. We have a big DevOps push right now and Dynatrace is an integral part of that push. We're using Azure DevOps, and tying in Dynatrace, Jenkins, and JIRA and trying to automate that whole process. So Dynatrace plays a role in that as well.

In terms of the self-healing, we use the recommendations that it provides. I'd say the Davis engine runs at about 90 percent accuracy in its recommendations. We have yet to allow automated remediation, which is our ultimate goal. It's going to be a bit before we get comfortable with anything doing that type of automated work in production. But I feel that we're as close as we've ever been and we're getting closer.

User management is extremely — and I hate to use the word "easy" — but it really is. And it's a lot easier today than it was when we first started with Dynatrace. We create a lot of customized dashboards both for the executive teams and management teams. These dashboards are central to their areas of oversight. It used to take quite a bit of time to create dashboards. Now it even has an automated tool that takes care of that. You just tell it what you want it to present and everything falls together. It has templated dashboards that you can customize.

The single agent does all of it. Once you deploy the one agent to your environment, it's going to propagate itself throughout the environment, unless you specifically tell it not to. It is the easiest thing that we've ever owned, because we don't have to do anything to it. It self-maintains. Every once in a while we'll have to reinstall the agent on something or a new version will come out and we'll want to deploy it, but for the most part, it's set-it-and-forget-it.

I would love to see Dynatrace get more involved in the security realm. I get badgered by so many endpoint protection companies. It seems like a natural fit to me, that Dynatrace should be playing in that space.

I'd also like to see some deeper metrics in network troubleshooting. That's another area that it's not really into.

We're in our fifth year of using Dynatrace. We were the very first paying customer for the new platform, Dynatrace ONE. We used it right at launch.

The stability has been phenomenal. I'm not going to say that Dynatrace has never had an outage, but I've never had an outage where Dynatrace wasn't available for me. It's always been there. It's always there when I need it. It's always on. Our uptime is five-nines, and we do attribute a large portion of our ability to maintain that figure to Dynatrace.

In terms of scalability, we don't have anything that it can't do. As we add to our infrastructure, it scales. Yes, every time we add a node, we're going to spend more. But it's up to me to decide if I want to monitor everything or a set of everything. My philosophy is to monitor all of production. Anything that is deployed to production is being monitored by Dynatrace. 

From a dev and test perspective we don't monitor like that. We keep a secondary Dynatrace instance that we use in the event that we need to troubleshoot something in development, but for the most part, our Dynatrace usage is relegated to production. And that's for cost reasons.

We have four environments in our builds. We have production, where we cover everything. We have a development environment, which is a subset of production, with different copies. We have QA, which is where everything goes from development for final testing. And then we have staging, which is the final step before it's pushed to the production clusters.

As we add to production, we add to Dynatrace. That is always going to be the plan. We will not deploy anything to production that doesn't have Dynatrace on it.

I don't get involved in the minutiae, but from what the guys tell me, with Linux servers you don't even blink. They have to watch Windows servers a little bit more because it's more intensive. Windows itself doesn't tend to perform very well when you first build. You've got to massage it and get it to where you want it to be. Dynatrace helps us with that, but Windows is more finicky.

We have about 50 users of Dynatrace between infrastructure, development, operations, and sales.

Their technical support is the best ever. I know I sound like a broken record, but we get chat support on the Dynatrace site, not from some guy in India, but from a high-level tech in the US who has all the answers to the questions. That person is not like some first-level guy who's going to ask you if your machine's booted up. The techs can answer our questions and, if they can't, they open the ticket and get back to us later. It's the best support model I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

We were using New Relic at the time. We were having a lot of frustrations with that in terms of its dashboarding capabilities, and the amount of time that my people had to spend keeping it updated and running correctly. We started looking at other products and we ended up settling on Dynatrace. Aside from its major capabilities, what Dynatrace ended up doing for us was to assist us in our migration to the cloud, because it gave us the sizing recommendations and the baselines that we needed to formulate what we were going to start with in Azure.

New Relic was the primary APM at the time and we were just very frustrated with it. We started looking at other products and really didn't see much of a difference in the competition, differences that would warrant going through the change, until we came upon what was then called Ruxit and is now called Dynatrace.

The biggest difference was that the other solutions required overhead. My biggest complaint was the amount of time we had to spend with these tools, because they're supposed to save you time, not take up more of your time. Dynatrace was the first one to actually complete that promise.

We ran hybrid for a year, collecting data on both ends, using Dynatrace both on-prem and in the cloud, and now it's all cloud.

The setup is really not much different, whether you're an on-prem organization or a cloud or even a hybrid. It's still the one agent. I have no experience with their AppMon product, so I can't tell you how much easier the new product is versus the old. But I can tell you that this product that we have been using is the easiest thing we've ever had. The only comment I got from my systems team is, "Why didn't we get this sooner?"

I am not the norm when it comes to policy and procedure. I tend to buck the trends a little bit. If I have a new product that I feel is going to be advantageous to the company and my team as a whole, then once we've done our due diligence, we will just deploy it. I know that larger companies with different criteria and regulations have to follow different channels and paths, through security and infrastructure and storage, etc. But ultimately, as long as you have "air-cover," and by that I mean an executive sponsor who believes in what you're doing, then you really should be able to get it done with minimal effort.

We were fully up and running in a week. It took me longer to remove New Relic than it did to deploy Dynatrace. We only needed one person to deploy Dynatrace. One of my systems people took care of it. I took care of the administrative stuff, creating the initial dashboards and getting the payments set up and so forth, but my systems people took care of the actual deployment of the one agent.

I didn't hire any contractors or deployment services. I signed up for Dynatrace's free trial and we went to town.

From a monitoring-tool perspective, Dynatrace has saved us money through consolidation of tools. We used to use a number of tools: PRTG, Pingdom, and we used to pay for an additional Azure service that we don't pay for anymore. And we used to use Splunk for log mining and now we don't. Just in the tools that we eliminated it has saved us $30,000, but there are more soft dollars that I could add to that.

I'm not sure how you come up with an ROI because it's pretty much all soft dollars. It's a line item in my budget that doesn't have to grow unless we grow. We have not experienced a base-price increase from Dynatrace.

Dynatrace is not the cheapest product out there and it's not the most expensive product out there. In our business, you get what you pay for. 

Dynatrace has a place for everybody. How you use it and what your budgetary limitations are will dictate what you do with it. But it's within everybody's reach. If you're a small organization and you have a large infrastructure, you may not be able to monitor the whole thing. You may have to pick and choose what you want to monitor, and you have the ability to do so. Your available funds are going to dictate that.

The only additional costs that I incur are for additional log storage space, which is like $100 a year.

My advice would be to compare and compare again. Everybody's offering free trials, and I know that they're a pain to do, but compare the products, apples for apples. Everybody's going to compare costs, but be sure to compare the functionality. Are you getting what you pay for? Are you getting the bang for your buck out of what the product is returning to you? If all you need to know is "my server's down," you can probably get by with the cheapest thing out there. But if you want to know why the server is down, or that the server is about to go down and you need to do something, then you want a product like Dynatrace.

I go to their Perform conference every year, and it's amazing to me to see the loyalty and dedication from the customer side. It's like a family reunion every year when we go to Perform. I hope we have it next year.

From a core-product perspective, Dynatrace is doing everything that we ever asked for. Everything that we've ever wanted to monitor, it has always been there first.

We are using the solution in the operations space.

Our primary use case is production monitoring of complex business critical systems. Another use case would be performance testing of critical releases.

The solution uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery, which helps our operations. It reduces the cost of ownership of managing Dynatrace as a tool set, ensuring that we're able to maximize the value from Dynatrace and monitoring is available. That's a big plus.

An example of how it helps is we are more proactive than we were previously, though we're not quite where we want to be. Engineers are talking more with the operations people, which is closing the loop. Our teams are becoming more customer centric.

The platform is very good at identifying potential issues, but each problem that surfaces in most cases still needs to be qualified and quantified by somebody who understands the system. Complex application problems, not infrastructure, surfaced by Dynatrace still need to be reviewed by somebody who understands the application logic or system architecture. For somebody who understands the platform though, issues can resolved in minutes as opposed to hours.

We have the ability to detect user action response time slow downs and their consequences, along with the back-end calls to third-parties. We are heavily dependent, for a number of products, on back-end service calls to other suppliers. Using Dynatrace, we are able to measure the performance of those third-parties. 

We are also using Dynatrace to right-size the infrastructure, especially on private cloud where we have to provision the resources upfront to save costs. Dynatrace helps us by finding how many resource we are utilizing and identifies how many resources we need to maintain for the level of performance and scalability that's required. This has helped us right-size in about 50 percent of our cases, leading to a reduction in cloud resources by 50 percent.

The solution helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. This helps with performance testing because our performance test teams are more aware of how product features are performing, which helps to prioritize our testing. It creates test cases so we're able to do more testing. Because Dynatrace helps us define the cause more quickly, this speeds up the time between test cycles.

The end-to-end trace is valuable for us to be able to assign responsibility to the right resolver group very quickly.

The user experience allows us to be able to gauge customer experience and understand the performance impact of our platform.

It has a very nice interface with an easy way to visualize the data that we need, making it quickly accessible. It is very easy to use.

As a platform consolidating tool, it covers 90 percent of the needs for most applications. In that respect, it presents a very high value for us.

We have used synthetic monitoring functionalities to poll. Mostly, it's around service availability and key functionality of a website from different geographic locations. 

The real-user monitoring is mostly used to gauge the difference in performance for multitenant applications, This is so we can discern if there are any local network or client-facing issues when we do a comparison between each customer. It is quite important for us to be able to identify a client-side issue, as opposed to a feature managed problem, because we're essentially providing managed services of business applications.

Dashboarding and having different templates available for more business reporting, or even other metrics, would be useful.

With Dynatrace, we use one tool where we would have used many, but we still have had gaps.

Three years.

It has very high availability.

When we started, we were measuring uptime in a different way, and then Dynatrace started measuring uptime based on services, as opposed to infrastructure. Initially, because we started using different metrics for availability, it showed us that we weren't available as much as we thought we were. This helped us to have better conversations with customers and improved availability from the customer perspective over time. 

We have 115 users, which includes Level 2 and 3 supports, service design, product management, cloud infrastructure management, software developers, software testers, and product architects.

We are only in an early phase at the moment regarding the use of Dynatrace. Currently, we are only using it on two critical platforms. Going forward, we're looking to expand to nine critical platforms.

Our adoption rate across the portfolio is low because we're still in a pilot phase trying to build out our business cases.

The technical support is excellent and very fast. Not only do I get a quick response, but they're also able to close the request off very quickly and satisfactorily with a fix.

Some of the feedback I get from our team, who are familiar with other tools: "Compared with other tools, Dynatrace support is excellent." 

The feedback that I get from people is that the initial setup was very straightforward and easy. It was amazing what information we got in such little time after deploying the agent.

In most cases, the deployment is quick. It takes a couple of hours.

For high-risk applications, which are business critical or high complexity, we would deploy Dynatrace. For medium-risk applications, we would consider using Dynatrace. It comes down to cost qualification for medium-risk applications.

The solution has decreased our mean time to identification. It has saved us from 10 minutes to a couple of hours.

Consider volume because that is where you will get the most benefit. Doing a point solution is not cost-effective.

There are additional Professional Services costs which ensure the solution is configured with meaningful names so you're getting the most money for your investment.

It is the easiest platform to manage in comparison to the competition, like Elastic Stack, New Relic, AppDynamic, Nagios, or Prometheus.

Without a doubt, I'd recommend Dynatrace for business critical applications and anything that's driving revenue.

Biggest lesson learnt: To recognize the most value from the information that Dynatrace provides, you need to make it available to everybody in the DevOps group. There is a wealth of data which can be exposed, manipulated, and consumed by other systems, not just what's visible in Dynatrace. This can also be used for inputs into other upstream platforms.  

Understand the demands within your environment and plan a pipeline, then discuss with Dynatrace. 

We're aware that there are use cases for notifications that can be used for triggering self-healing or autoscaling, but we are not using those yet.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

We have several uses for Dynatrace. Most of the time, we use Dynatrace for looking into potential site problems, investigating reported issues, and trying to replicate those problems in a test environment using the information provided by Dynatrace. 

We use Dynatrace for performance monitoring. Quarterly, we will specifically see if there's anything that we can optimize on the front-end of our website, so that's what you see and interact with on the web page. 

We also use it to get ahead of any potential problems in our stack. E.g., if Dynatrace is indicating a problem, we will look into it and determine if it's affecting users. Depending on its impact, and usually if it's impacting customers, we can use that information to decide on what we need to work on next to benefit the customer experience.

I use the tool as more of an analyst. I will use Dynatrace to show where systems need to be fixed, etc.

This solution is SaaS. We use Google Cloud Platform, where we just use their compute engines as far as our hosts. We also have a few services that are on-prem. Dynatrace works fine with both of them. 

The solution helps our DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. We recently got a staging environment implemented with Dynatrace. We are mainly using it for load testing at the moment. Dynatrace has been detecting failures, letting us know immediately what types of failures are occurring so we can catch them before releases. Our developers have been able to identify bottlenecks and other types of problems that they would not have been able to before by just using standard logging and analytics tools.

The solution give us 360-degree visibility of the user experience across channels, which is a great benefit. We're in eCommerce as a retailer. We are selling across multiple channels and platforms. We have a mobile app and a website. We even have other services which we may instrument with Dynatrace in the future. As far as our website and mobile app that we have instrumented with Dynatrace, it has all been very positive. 

The solution has decreased our time to market with new innovations/capabilities because we have been able to quickly identify areas that we can improve for new features and gather that data from Dynatrace. Then, we have been able to verify that our new features and releases are working as expected.

The User Sessions Query language has definitely been the most helpful with its key user actions and user session properties. Using those together, that has completely transformed how we're able to identify customers and their problems on our site. It has made a very big impact over the year.

Using synthetic monitors, we monitor our websites. We have two main domains. There are several plain HTTP monitors, then there are actual browser based monitors that emulate browser behavior. We use both of those types. We have several mobile browsers emulated under synthetic monitors that we use. Those ping our website every 15 minutes. On some of these synthetic monitors, we use multiple data centers to get an idea of geographic availability. We also monitor some of our third-party providers using our synthetic monitors. We monitor our customer support live chat server, which is hosted by a third-party, where we are given alerts if that system were to go down. We are also monitoring an email capture API that's a part of our website.

With user session queries, the main thing that we use that for (and the most valuable), is when we get a problem. If we get some type of a report, obscure problem, or Dynatrace reports a problem, we go straight to using the User Sessions Query Language to find sessions with Session Replay, then we replay those sessions to figure out exactly what the customer did and what conditions may have caused the problem to gauge the impact of the problem itself.

We also save user sessions queries into dashboards, then create different dashboards based on different projects to try and gather data. E.g., last year, we redid a part of our website and used Dynatrace sessions queries and Session Replays to verify that our customers were not having any problems or being confused by their experience. We wanted to verify that, which is one way that we've used the User Sessions Query Language along with the dashboards. We've also created some other dashboards that return custom metrics for us, which goes along, in some cases, with user session properties and user action properties. In that way, we're able to get a very granular look at certain statistics where it would be more difficult to get those numbers from our traditional analytics suite. 

The solution’s ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is a bit off. I have found that even though Dynatrace detects a problem and gives you a count and estimate of impacted users, this number is usually much higher than is actually the case and not fully accurate. E.g., I recently noticed an error. Every time someone would experience this error, Dynatrace would create a new problem and it would say, "Several hundred people were impacted." However, using Dynatrace's own tools (user Session Replay), then going back and actually tracing through these requests, we found much fewer people were actually impacted. In some sessions that Dynatrace said were impacted, when you view the Session Replay videos, you could see that the customer was not impacted in any meaningful way.

The solution’s ability to visualize, understand our infrastructure, and to do triage is helpful. I wish that you could do user session queries with those host level metrics and be able to create custom graphs the same way you could with user session data. They're both part of Dynatrace, but they don't feel like they're integrated together well. E.g., we're having an issue that has to do with just HTTP codes and we would like to marry that up with a user session query turning that into a dashboard. We can't currently do that because the User Sessions Query Language does not have access to the HTTP errors or HTTP status code data that is part of the hosts and infrastructure package. Otherwise, if you're just focusing on the infrastructure part it, I think it does a good job.

I have been using Dynatrace since February 2019.

I have noticed a few times where data collection did get interrupted. It was two or three times within the past year. Obviously, it's our monitoring system and we don't want that to go down at all. However, three times for no more than 30 minutes each time is pretty good.

The scalability has been able to meet all of our needs. We have not encountered any limitations when scaling Dynatrace with the Google Cloud Platform.

In the past 365 days, we have two websites that we monitor with Dynatrace, including mobile apps. We've recorded over 23 million sessions for Rack Room Shoes and 8.1 million sessions for Off Broadway Shoes. 

There are three users who are active users of Dynatrace:

1. The user experience architect, who is designing new interactive features and studying customer behavior
2. The product owner, whose focus when using Dynatrace is on the metrics, dashboards, and the user experience as far as using user sessions, queries and Session Replay. They may troubleshoot or look into problems as well.
3. The back-end architect, who looks into certain problems and figures out with Dynatrace where they're coming from. They use information from Dynatrace for writing more detailed support tickets.

I have noticed a few problems with the service before. I reached out to support and the system did appear to resolve itself on its own (after there was a problem). Then, the support staff couldn't see any further issues. The solution’s self-healing functionality works.

We ran into a problem where the Dynatrace JavaScript agent is returning errors, and it's very apparent that there's a problem. However, the customer support will ask us for seemingly unnecessary details instead of looking at our dashboard through their account to see what the problem is. They ask us for a lot of details not really related to solving the problem. As a result, we still have a few issues that were never resolved. They're not major issues, but they're frustrating.

The technical support is below average. They've solved some of the problems that we had, but it took several weeks to resolve almost each problem we had when they probably should have been fixed within a day or two.

There was an initial implementation of AppMon (another Dynatrace offering) before the current Dynatrace SaaS offering.

Dynatrace has definitely made an impact. We were never able to get granular data with any of our other solutions. They were all very disconnected and separate, whereas Dynatrace seems to have good integrations with our entire stack. There haven't been any problems getting additional data now that we have Dynatrace,

It is very easy to use and set up. It did take some customization to get it working for our sites, but after that, it's been pretty easy and straightforward.

The initial setup is complicated, but it's much less complicated than similar systems that I have used in the past. For Dynatrace's setup, maybe there were problems with how our web application was initially developed before I joined Rack Room, because there were a lot of features related to error reporting. It would report errors for things that weren't actual problems, etc. You have to configure it to get around those types of problems, but it's usually fine afterwards.

Over the past year, we've been tweaking Dynatrace. It's been a slow phase-in rollout as far as how much we rely on the data it's giving us back. 

I was involved in the initial implementation.

The solution has decreased our mean time to identification by about three days.

The solution decreased our mean time to repair by around a week.

There has been a huge increase in uptime. It's hard to say by how much for certain because we've made other development practice changes.

It is a great platform. We found a lot of value in setting up user session properties and user action properties, then being able to use them to identify individual problems/customers. We use that to sort of streamline the whole process of finding and fixing problems.

Biggest lesson learnt: Customers do not always behave as expected.

I would rate Dynatrace as an eight (out of 10).

Our primary use cases are operational awareness, health of the systems, and impact on users. Other use cases include proactive performance management, system checkouts (as we investigate the ability to manage configuration and integration to the CMDB), some usage of it from a product perspective in terms of application usage, and I use it to manage and improve the user experience by understanding user behaviors.

We are in both Azure and AWS. We have both on-premise and cloud Kubernetes environments that we're running in. In fact, we have been using less efficient deployment methodologies. We haven't encountered any limitations in scaling to cloud-native environments. 

We have only used version 1.192 of the Dynatrace product. We have not used any previous versions.

It has improved our critical incident response, exposing critical issues impacting the environment and our ability to respond to those events prior to client impact as well as resolving those events more quickly. We have use cases where we have studied a 70 percent improvement for response times in an occurring event as well as future reoccurrences being improved.

The solution's use of a single agent for automated deployment and discovery helps our operations significantly. Oftentimes when you are looking at endpoint management, centralized monitoring teams need access to data across systems. They need to manage agents deployed throughout the organization. Remote polling of data can be helpful, but it's not deep enough, especially for APM capabilities. Having one agent significantly simplifies that functionality in such a way that it enables a very small team to manage a very large environment with very limited overhead. It provides the ability for external teams to manage it because they don't need any deeper knowledge of the application than installing the agent. They have the ability to integrate the agent into deployments and to do the work with very limited overhead.

The automated discovery and analysis helps us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint the underlying root cause. We have had scenarios where we can see end user impact. One of the use cases was where we had an individual system and a cluster of nine for a content management system that was having an issue. Through Dynatrace, we were able to quickly identify the one host that was having a problem, take that out of the active cluster, recycle that application instance, bring it back, and reintroduce it to the cluster in a very efficient manner. Historically, these processes take multiple hours in order to diagnose and identify the instance, then do the work. With Dynatrace, we are able to do the work in less than 20 minutes from when it first occurred to issue resolution. Thus, there have been scenarios where you can quickly identify infrastructure issues and back-end services. 

Out-of-the-box, it's the best product that I've seen. Its ability to associate application impact, as well as root cause from an infrastructure standpoint, is by far ahead of anything that I have seen due to its ability to associate infrastructure anomalies to applications. We are still on our journey of identifying the right business KPIs to see how we can associate this data.

Dynatrace is doing an excellent job of giving us 360-degree visibility of the user experience across channels in most technologies. We are working with Dynatrace to expose the full transparency to the mainframe, as we have transactions that call from the cloud onto the mainframe and back out to other services. This is a critical visibility that isn't there yet. Otherwise, with a lot of the cloud and historical systems, we do see a lot of transparency of transaction trace across the environment.

1. Automated discovery
2. Automated deployments
3. The AI

These are probably the most key, because it gets into the traceability from tracing transactions of the end user all the way through the back-end systems. We are still working through the mainframe integration, but the scenarios where we can integrate through the mainframe are very useful.

We can see issues that occur, sometimes before the clients do. Before we have client (or end user) calls for issues, we are able to start troubleshooting and even resolve those issues. We can quickly identify the root cause and impact of the issues as they occur, and this is very helpful for providing the best client experience.

We have found the self-management of the management cluster and Dynatrace processes to be highly reliable. There have been minimal issues with managing the infrastructure.

We've targeted deployment of the real-user monitoring to the most critical applications in the company to understand if there's something that's happening in the environment and the user impact. This is to be able to understand the blast radius of issues, helping us understand if an issue is impacting one app or multiple applications. We can then quickly diagnose where the common event is (the root cause), resolve it, and then leverage the product to validate healthy user traffic after completion by seeing transactions be processed again. 

From a synthetic standpoint, we use the synthetics in two ways: 

1. We do lower-level infrastructure pings (HP pings) primarily in order to validate individual, technology services on the back-end, i.e., the API endpoints. 
2. We use the front-end synthetics to validate user experience 24/7. When you have low usage periods, you are still able to validate the availability and performance of services to the organization. Oftentimes, changes may be implemented to reduce risk during lower usage times and the synthetics can be valuable to validate during that time.

It has been very easy to deploy and obtain basic information. 

It's very good from a problem troubleshooting perspective.

I find the value from the out-of-the-box features to be extremely valuable. However, there will be gaps and challenges as you go into a much broader set of infrastructure technologies to consume that necessary information. This will be a challenge for the company. The things that they need to focus on is the ease of integrating external data sources, which can then also contribute to the AI. There is a ton of value gotten out-of-the-box, but moving to the next steps will be an interesting journey. I know this is something they are focused on now. When bringing in other telemetry, whether it be network devices, databases, or other third-party products that all integrate into a larger ecosystem, there will also be a lot of successes, but there will also be some challenges on this journey.

There is some complexity in the alarm processing logic within the product between the alert policies and problem notifications.

Expand the user session query data to be inclusive and enable that for the application or other telemetry within the system. Currently, in order to analyze the data outside of dashboards, it requires exporting to other reporting systems. If you want to do higher level reporting, then this may make sense. However, there is a desire to be able to do some of that analysis within the product.

There continues to be some opportunity to expose the infrastructure from a broader reporting standpoint. Overall, the opportunity is in the reporting capability and the ability to more flexibly expose or pivot the data for deeper analysis. Oftentimes, the solution is good at looking narrowly at information, but when you want to broaden that perspective, that's where the challenges come in. At this point, it requires the export of data to external systems to do this.

Adoption lagged primarily due to:

1. The prioritization of monitoring as a functionality when teams do their work, as our teams are more focused on business functionality than nonfunctional requirements.
2. Getting familiar with the navigation of the product. With our implementation, we have a single node where people get access to all the data within the enterprise. They're able to see everything. It takes time working through the process and getting the correct set of tags and everything else in place to allow them to filter and limit data to what they need to see and can consume. It takes some time for them to understand the data, what's there, and how to consume it as we learn how to limit the data sets to what they really want to see.

About two years.

At this point, we have about 1700 host units. We're monitoring 2000 to 3000 systems. We have 300 to 500 users a month using the systems with approximately 700 users overall. 

Their Tier 0 is better than most companies that I have ever worked with. Normally, I'll get useful information even at that initial level/Tier 0. 

The in-app chat is extremely helpful. It helps not only with the ability for me to troubleshoot, but the ability for the rest of the organization to ask how-to questions. We have hundreds of those chats across the organization per month which are leveraged by end users.

Everything else is as expected when working through engineering and our product specialists, who have been helpful.

The initial setup and implementation are almost too easy. With real-user monitoring and all the application monitoring, you are introducing change into the environment. It is so easy to set up, configure, and implement that you can get way ahead of your organization technically from where they are from a usability standpoint. We have run into virtually no technical limitations in implementing the product. It has purely been from the ability to get users to adapt, understand, and leverage the value of the product.

We implemented and installed the Dynatrace platform (and everything) within a couple of days. We deployed the product in certain environments within overnight of instrumentation. Onboarding of teams and the training required, that took months. Even though we were able to technically implement the product from non-production into production within a month of deploying everything, having it there, and instrumented. It took us another eight to nine months to onboard individual teams into adopting and leveraging the product. From there, the rolling out is really limited more by organizational change, communication, and facilitating training with teams and their technical capabilities. Key teams have adopted the product and used it very quickly. Therefore, we are seeing value within four weeks of deployment from our centralized critical incident teams, but the product adoption from application and development teams has lagged.

If you are implementing Dynatrace, the first thing is to not underestimate your users and their experience, providing them personal service to onboard and consume the information, then leverage the product on the front-end. Technically the product makes it so easy to implement and deploy, this makes it difficult to stay in front of the rest of the organization when adopting the product. You need to ensure the data starts presenting itself before they are ready and able to consume it. You need to focus that into your implementation.

The solution has decreased both our MTTI and MTTR.

In 2018, we were having on average one issue per day. It is one of the reasons that we purchased the product in 2018. Last year, we significantly drilled those numbers down in outage time by 70 to 80 percent, as an organization. While Dynatrace is part of driving that avoidance as well as reduced outage time, it's impossible for us to have a direct correlation of its direct impact because there are so many other factors at play in an organization. I had to change management processes and everything else that could also influence that. However, we know that it was part of that increased uptime to where we've decided to invest significantly more in the product.

It's understandable to do a smaller scale initial evaluation. However, as you identify the product value, don't hesitant in your scope and scale to maximize the initial investment and your opportunity to do a bulk investment of the product.

We have other competitive products. The automation instrument will be extremely valuable as we look to consolidate our solution set. The insight to quickly gain information is interesting and good information that we can use. There will be a challenge internally with our teams since application teams were never exposed to infrastructure information and infrastructure teams have never been exposed to application nor end user information. Organizationally, we have to change where people are now going to see this insight and figure out how to leverage it for good, which will be helpful. It will be a game changer in terms of how we can identify and respond to events in the organization from the point of view of data and analysis, as opposed to tribal knowledge and fear.

Dynatrace was initially brought in to eliminate one competitive APM product. We are now on to eliminating the second, and we'll be consolidating all APM on the Dynatrace platform. We are also in the process of consolidating other infrastructure monitoring products on the platform. We expect there will be a small incremental investment from a purely licensing standpoint to consolidate the products, but we expect realization of a significant amount of benefit from the capabilities it provides from root cause analysis, impact analysis, transaction trace observability in the environment, the reduced administrative costs of disparate products, and the ability to integrate data. However, a lot of these were not measured previously because we had a lot of disparate tools across disparate teams managing things. Therefore, we can't measure the savings but we expect it will be significant.

We have CA APM Introscope, New Relic, and AppDynamics. We are users of all three of these products, though we are probably using AppDynamics the least. We have almost completely migrated away from Broadcom and are starting the replacement of New Relic.

Holistically, Dynatrace's traceability starts from the user endpoint, meaning the ability to trace a transaction from a user session all the way through other technologies. We've had more comprehensive traces than with other products. Other products do not offer an easy interface to see the trace of the user session in a comprehensive way. Dynatrace offers the ability to go from a mobile, microservices, or mainframe and be able to trace across all those platforms. It also has the ability to associate or automatically correlate user transactions to applications, then into the underlying infrastructure components. Another Dynatrace benefit is the whole function of the AI as well as bringing in other external data sources. E.g., we are looking at things like a DataPower and F5 data integrations, but also incorporating those into the trace. Finally, there is support of legacy technologies, because it really gets into traceability, AI, and the supportive legacy. Mainframe technologies are the big positive differentiators and kind of come to a conclusive root cause analysis.

CA APM Introscope and New Relic have simpler interfaces to consume data. With Dynatrace, you need to develop plugins to obtain easier API interfaces for pushing data into other products. This is a little easier with the other products. The New Relic Insights product is a stronger reporting feature than what Dynatrace provides.

There are also other products that we are looking at eliminating in other product suites, such as Broadcom UIM, Microsoft SCOM, and Zabbix. We have a lot open source solutions where we're looking to roll out infrastructure, then consolidate and centralized data. The primary function and capabilities gets into mobile to mainframe traceability in order to simplify or expedite impact and root cause analysis processes for the teams. The solution also has the ability to support our modern technologies running in AWS and Kubernetes cluster microservices as well as traceability all the way through the mainframe.

We have integrated our notification systems through PagerDuty, Slack, and our auto ticketing app. This is to generate incident records. The integrations with PagerDuty and Slack are effective. We're in the process of migrating some tools to ServiceNow. Thus, we are in the process of doing synchronization of both the events while also evaluating the CMDB integration with ServiceNow. There are some recent capabilities that make this look more attractive to automate discovery and relationship building that we're looking forward to, but we have not yet implemented. The integration to ServiceNow will be good.

The desire is to have Dynatrace help DevOps focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production. We are not there yet. The vision is there and it makes sense with the information that we see, but we have not had the opportunity. Even though we've been using the product now for two years, we're only now just starting an effort to roll the product out across the enterprise and replace competitive products for application infrastructure monitoring. We'll then have the opportunity for that full CI/CD integration or NoOps opportunity.

We will be rolling out to some highly dense environments in the near future. We haven't run into any performance issues yet. The only issue that we ran into previously is with the automated instrumentation of the product. We accidentally disabled the competitive products that teams were using as we were evaluating Dynatrace. You can get in front of yourself in rollout.

We don't have the solution’s self-healing functionality integrated into the automation product. Dynatrace doesn't have the self-healing capability of restarting services. Therefore, from a monitored application perspective, we haven't enjoyed that capability yet.

We are in the process of testing some parts of the session replay. We see value there and are working through understanding the auditory or compliance impacts to leverage this feature.

Based on my experience and history of the products, I would rate it at least a nine (out of 10). It's been far superior to other products in its capabilities and comprehensiveness, especially across both cloud and legacy technologies, such as older technologies (like mainframes and server-based monolithic applications).

We are using it to monitor our e-commerce applications and the full stack that our e-commerce applications run on. That includes both our Rack Room Shoes domain and our Off Broadway Shoes domain. We use it to monitor the overall health of the entire stack, from the hardware all the way to the user interface. And more specifically, we use it to monitor the real user's experience on the front-end.

What Dynatrace has really allowed our team to do is focus more on innovation, rather than on monitoring and bug-squashing. Now that we have a tool like Dynatrace, we can continue to do forward-thinking projects while Dynatrace is doing the monitoring and rooting out the root causes. We're spending a lot less time trying to find out what the problem is, versus letting Dynatrace pinpoint where the problem is. We can then validate and remediate much quicker. That's the impact it's had on our business.

The automated discovery and analysis helps us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint underlying root cause. We recently had some issues with database connections. Our database team was scratching their heads, not really knowing where to look. What we were able to do with Dynatrace, because we had some of the Oracle Insights tools built into the database, was to provide, down to the SQL statement, what queries were taking up the most resources on that machine. We provided that to the database team and that gave them a head-start in being able to refactor the data so it was quicker to query. That really helped us speed up the user experience for that specific issue.

Dynatrace helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and to shift quality issues to pre-production. We are just now starting to use it in that way. When we first launched Dynatrace, we only had monitoring in our production environment. At that point we were using it as an up-front, first-alert tool for any issues that were happening. Now what we're doing is instrumenting our lower environments with Dynatrace so that it will allow us to monitor our load-testing in those environments, to find out where our breaking points are. So it does allow us to push out products that are much more stable and much less buggy because we're able to find out where our breaking points are in the lower environments. What this is going to do is allow us to do is push out, at a faster rate, more solid, less buggy releases and customer features, and allow us to continue to innovate on the next idea. We're just starting that journey. We just got fully instrumented in our lower environments in the last couple of weeks.

In terms of 360-degree visibility into the user experience across channels, we're only monitoring our digital channels right now, specifically our e-commerce channels. But we do have ways, even within the channel, to dissect by the source they came from. Did a given customer come from a digital ad? Did they come from an email? Did they come to us direct? It does allow us to segment our customers and see how each segment of customer performs as well. This is important for us because we want to make sure that we're not driving specific segments of customers into a bad-performing experience or to a slow response time. It also allows us to adequately determine where to spend our marketing dollars.

Another benefit is that it has definitely decreased our mean time to identification, with the solution and the Davis AI engine bringing the most probable root cause to the top. And within that, it gives us the ability to drill down into the specific issue or query or line of code that is the issue. So it has saved us a lot of time — I would estimate it has saved us 10 hours a week — in remediating issues and trying to find the root cause.

It has also improved uptime, indirectly. Because it gives us alerts early, we're able to mitigate issues before they're actually bigger issues.

The alerting systems are definitely the most valuable feature. The AI engine, "Davis," has proved to be a game-changer for us, as it helps to alert us when there are anomalies found in our applications or in their performance. We find that very helpful. There's still a human element to the self-healing capabilities. I wish I could say, "Oh, it's magic. You just plug it in and it fixes all your problems." I wouldn't say that, but what I would say is that the Davis engine gives us that immediate insight and allows us to cater to our solution so that the next time that problem arises it can mitigate it without a lot of human involvement.

Dynatrace's ability to assess the severity of anomalies, based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs, is really good, out-of-the-box. But it does an even better job when, again, we as humans give more instruction and provide more custom metrics that we're trying to monitor that are key to our business. And then, letting the Davis engine find those anomalies and push them to the top, especially as they relate to business impact, is very valuable to us.

We find the solution's ability to provide the root cause of our major issues, down to the line of code that might be problematic, to be valuable.

And we get a lot of value out of the Session Replay feature that allows us to capture up to 100 percent of our customers' real user experiences. That's helped us a lot in being able to find obscure bugs or make fixes to our applications. 

We also use real-user monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring functionalities. We use real-user monitoring for load times, speed index, and overall application index. And we use Synthetic Monitors to make sure that even certain outside, third-party services are available to us at all times. In certain cases, we have been reliant on a third-party service, and our Dynatrace tool has let us know that that service isn't available. We were able to remove that service from our website and reach out to the service provider to find out why it wasn't available.

We also find it to be very easy to use, even for some of our business users. Most of the folks who use the Dynatrace tool do tend to be in the technical field, but use is spread across both the business side, what we call our omni-channel group, as well as our IT group. They all use it for different purposes. I'm beginning to use it on the business side to show the impact that performance has on revenue risk. I can then go back and show that when we have bad performance it affects revenue. And I can put a dollar amount on that. So the user interface is very easy to use, even for the business user.

Dynatrace continues to innovate, and that's especially true in the last couple of years. We have continued to provide our feedback, but the one area that we get value out of now, where we would love to see additional features, is the Session Replay. The ability to see how one individual uses a particular feature is great. But what we'd really like to be able to see is how a large group of people uses a particular feature. I believe Dynatrace has some things on its roadmap to add to Session Replay that would allow us those kinds of insights as well.

We started using Dynatrace in September of 2017. At that time it was an older product called AppMon. But we quickly upgraded to the current Dynatrace platform the following year. We've been using the SaaS platform ever since.

It's been very stable. We've had very little downtime. In the last four years there may have been one outage. Overall, it's been extremely stable. Many times, Dynatrace is our first alert that we have issues with other platforms.

It's extremely scalable. We're one of the small players. We're running with about 70 agents right now. We've been at Dynatrace's conferences and have heard of customers who can deploy 5,000 agents over a weekend and have no issues at all. For our small spec-of-sand space, it's extremely scalable.

We are hosted on Google cloud. That's where all of our VMs are currently set up. Our database is there, our tax server is there. All of our application and web servers are there, and Dynatrace is monitoring all of that for us. We haven't encountered any limitations at all in scaling to our cloud-native environment. We can spin up new auxiliary servers in a matter of minutes and have Dynatrace agents running on them within 15 minutes. We're starting to play a little bit with migrating a version of our application into a Kubernetes deployment and using Dynatrace to monitor the Kubernetes containers as well.

We have plans to increase our usage of Dynatrace. We just recently updated our hosts. We needed to increase the number of host units so that we could put Dynatrace on more servers, and we've already just about used up all of those. So next year, we'll likely have to increase those host units again. And we're going to start using more pieces of Dynatrace that we haven't used before, like management zones and custom metrics.

Technical support has been great. The first line of defense is their chat through the UI, which is really simple. They're super-responsive and usually get back to us within minutes. We have a solutions engineer that we can reach out to as well, and they have been very helpful, even with things like setting up training sessions and screen-sharing sessions to help enable our internal teams to be more productive using the tool.

We were using a tool called New Relic and we were really just using it as a synthetic monitor to make sure the application was up and running, but we really weren't getting a lot of insights. When we decided that we wanted a tool that could give us more insights and that we needed a tool that could give us the ability to monitor more of our customers' behaviors, there just wasn't another tool like Dynatrace that we felt could do things as well as Dynatrace, through a "single pane of glass." We chose Dynatrace over New Relic at the time because New Relic just didn't have any solutions like it.

We haven't found another tool that can help us visualize and understand our infrastructure, and do triage, like Dynatrace. We haven't found one that can give us that full visibility into the entire stack from VM all the way to the UI. That was really the reason we picked Dynatrace. There just wasn't another tool that we felt could do it like Dynatrace.

The fact that the solution uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery was the second reason that we chose Dynatrace. The ease of deployment, the fact that we could use the one agent and deploy it on the host and suddenly light up all of these metrics, and suddenly light up all of these dashboards with insights that we didn't have before, made it extremely attractive. It required a lot less on our part to try to do instrumentation. Now, as we add more Dynatrace agents to more of our back-end servers, we think we'll gain even more value out of it.

We started with AppMon, which was more of an on-premise version, where we were installing it, although it still was a one-agent. Then we moved to the SaaS solution, and it was very easy for us to migrate from AppMon to the SaaS solution, and it's been extremely easy to instrument new hosts with the agent.

We were up and running within 30 days when we were first engaged with AppMon. When we migrated to the SaaS solution, it maybe took another 30 days and might have even been less. I wasn't involved with that migration, but I worked closely with the guy who was. I don't remember it taking much longer than 30 days to migrate.

We had an implementation strategy. We knew specifically which application we wanted to monitor, and all of the hardware and services and APIs that that application was dependent on. We went in with a strategy to make sure that all of those things were monitored. And now we've progressed that strategy to start monitoring more of our internal back-end systems as well — the systems that support our stores, not just our e-commerce channel — to see if we can't get more value and maybe even realize more cost savings on our brick and mortar side using Dynatrace.

We have definitely seen return on our investment. It has come in the form of being able to produce more stable, less buggy applications and features, and in allowing our team to focus more on innovating new ideas that drive revenue and business, versus maintaining and troubleshooting the existing application.

It hasn't yet saved us money through consolidation of tools, but as we continue to find more value in Dynatrace, it does make us look at other tools and see if we are able to use Dynatrace to consolidate them. We have replaced other application monitoring tools with Dynatrace, but we've not yet consolidated tools.

Whatever your budget is, you can manage Dynatrace and get value out of it, but you need to manage it to what your needs are. That's the one thing we found. We did not budget the right amount to begin with. It has cost us more in the long run than if we would have been able to negotiate it upfront. But we didn't really know what we didn't know until we'd been using Dynatrace for awhile.

Your ability to catch your Session Replay is based on the number of what they call DEM units, digital experience monitoring units. That's where we were short to begin with. There is an additional expense to determining not just the platform subscription but also the number of hosts units that you want to run and the number of DEM units that you need to be able to capture all of the user experiences that you want. In our case, we wanted the ability to capture 100 percent. Maybe in another business someone would only be worried about capturing a sampling of the traffic.

We evaluated New Relic, AppDynamics, AppMon, which was the Dynatrace solution at the time, and we also looked at Rigor.

Dynatrace could do pretty much everything. It wasn't just the real-user monitoring piece of it. It was also the full stack health aspect. The Davis AI engine was probably the biggest differentiator among all of the tools. The Davis AI engine and its ability to surface the root cause was a game-changer.

My advice would be to jump all-in. There doesn't seem to be another tool that can do it like Dynatrace, and from what we've seen the last two times we've gone to their Dynatrace Perform conferences, they are dedicated to innovating and adding features to the platform.

We are not yet using Dynatrace for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. We are beginning to play in that arena. We're looking at tools that will help us migrate from our current VM architecture to a Kubernetes deployment architecture, to enable us to get more into a no-DevOps type of environment. But today, we're still on a virtual machine deployment architecture.

Similarly, we have not integrated the solution with our CI/CD and/or ITSM tools. That is on our roadmap. As we migrate and transition into a no-DevOps and continuous improvement/continuous deployment operation, we'll begin to use Dynatrace as part of our deployment processes.

The solution hasn't yet decreased our time to market for new innovations or capabilities, but we believe that we will realize that benefit going forward, since we'll be leveraging Dynatrace in our lower environments to find out where breaking points are of new features that we release.

We have half-a-dozen regular users who range from our e-commerce architect to DevOps engineers to front-end software developers. My role as a user is more of a senior-level executive or sponsor role. We also have some IT folks, some database administrators and some CI people, but most of our users are in the IT/technical realm.

We don't have a team dedicated to maintaining the solution. We do have a team responsible for it, though. That is the team that just helped instrument our lower environment with Dynatrace. We've got some shared responsibilities and some deployment instructions that are shared across three different groups. They're from IT, our omnichannel group, which is really our business side, and we leverage a third-party for staff augmentation and they use Dynatrace to help us monitor during our off-hours.

We use the product in application monitoring. 

The solution offers a better overview of applications. It offers end-to-end monitoring, and the user experience is real. 

Dynatrace needs to improve its configuration. 

I have been working with the product for two years. 

I rate the tool's scalability a ten out of ten. 

The tool's support is hard to reach. 

Neutral

I rate the product's deployment a ten out of ten. The installation and deployment process is brief, but configuring the entire environment, including the agent server and enterprise configuration, is more complex and time-consuming.

Our clients are enterprise businesses. Dynatrace's integration capabilities are good. I rate it a ten out of ten. 

We are using Dynatrace for application monitoring, elastic search, and problem analytics. 

The documentation of Dynatrace needs to be improved. There needs to be a more detailed description and additional examples for background understanding for beginners trying to use it.

There needs to be a better understanding of deep monitoring and complex investigations. Having better documentation would help.

I have been using Dynatrace for approximately two weeks.

Dynatrace is stable.

I have contacted the support from Dynatrace and they are very good. I had only one question from the support and I received a quick response.

I rate the support from Dynatrace a five out of five.

 The initial setup was difficult.

The company that implemented the solution did not finalize the configuration properly. The solution was not monitoring everything that we wanted it to.

The amount of people needed to maintain the solution depends on the size of the environment. However, at a minimum, I would suggest two people would be suited.

I rate Dynatrace a ten out of ten.

We are using it for user monitoring and service monitoring.

It is a very good APM tool. There is a lot of thorough scanning of services and applications. It has got great monitoring features.

PurePath helps us to identify minor glitches in applications and services. It collects everything from user sessions.

Its infra monitoring is not that good. They are mainly into the APM environment, such as network monitoring and other things. Strong end-to-end infrastructure monitoring is missing. SNMP monitoring is currently not very good in this solution.

It is a bit expensive. It could be cheaper.

I've been using this solution for the last one and half years.

Its stability is good. It does not break easily.

We have not scaled it yet. It is good enough to handle the bulk load. We never faced any performance issues with the tool. We have more than 150 users, and we never saw any issues with it.

Their support is very good.

It was straightforward. The full deployment probably took a week.

We have vendor support, and we collaborated with our vendor for its implementation.

Its license is a bit expensive. We renew it yearly.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

My primary use case is application performance monitoring.

The move valuable feature is the AI engine, which is amazing.

The reporting could be better.

I have been using Dynatrace for around three years.

Dynatrace is very stable.

This solution is definitely scalable.

I've had no issues with technical support.

It was very, very, very easy to set up.

The pricing is not bad, but it could be better.

Dynatrace is best-suited for large enterprises. I would advise those looking into implementing this solution to do the training because it's not easy to understand without it. I would give Dynatrace a score of nine out of ten.

The company uses it for a lot of things. Obviously, we're using it mostly for application monitoring, and that covers both application performance and availability. We're using it for checking how things are performing and making sure that they're running and running properly and there aren't errors or issues. That would be the main thing. 

We're also using it to monitor servers, do some infrastructure monitoring, make sure there're enough servers are running and that they've got available disc space for monitoring CPU and memory, et cetera. 

The solution is stable. 

I find that the AI on offer is useful, as it's good at identifying problems. You do need a bit of customizing, however, even in its sort of vanilla form, it's pretty good at identifying problems and the root causes of those problems and whatnot. 

The installation process is straightforward.

They're generally going in the right direction and they're quite responsive to feedback. You can vote on features and whatnot. If enough people vote for a feature, they'll get it put in. 

The solution could be more seamless. The user interface could be better and they could offer more integration. 

We'd like it to be more user-friendly, which, in our case, might be a big ask as we have a fairly complex environment. 

How long I've used the product depends on which version you would classify as the product. The current one, under this name, has only been out maybe three or four years. However, I also used the older version before that, and that was something called AppMon. Therefore, I've used it for a while at this point. 

The solution has been very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

I can't really comment on the scalability as we're in a relatively small environment. We don't have a massive number of servers on-site. I am aware of people that run it in massive environments, however, I can't make a comment on what it's like as our site is fairly small.

We might have ten or so active users. 

Technical support is very good and very responsive. We're quite satisfied with the level of service on offer.

Before Dynatrace there was another Dynatrace product called AppMon. Before that, we used to use the company's own solution.  

The initial setup is easy and pretty straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

The main issue is that, due to the fact that it covers so much space, the navigation can be long-winded. It can take a lot of clicks to get into where you want to go, however, it's covering a lot of information.

On the site that I'm on, on the Dynatrace site, there's really just me that's doing the technical side of Dynatrace. I'm the one that's keeping Dynatrace itself running and whatnot. That said, even in bigger environments, there's probably only one or two people that are looking after Dynatrace itself. It's really solid in that regard. 

I don't really get involved in the commercial side of things and therefore cannot speak to the aspect of licensing, such as pricing. We might be on a three-year contract that gets renewed.

While my organization is a reseller of Dynatrace, I actually also work on it myself. 

While the deployment model that we're using is on-premises, there is a cloud-based version of it as well.

We're always using the latest version of the solution. It gets updated automatically, and therefore it's pretty much the latest version.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall.

I would recommend Dynatrace to others who are looking into implementing it.