I would like to compare Dynatrace and AppDynamics. On what basis should I decide?
Hi. I hear great things about both Dynatrace and AppDynamics. What is the advantage of Dynatrace over AppDynamics and vice versa? For an enterprise, how do I decide which one is better for my needs?
Senior Middleware Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
User
Jan 9, 2018
First thought.... Do not go with CA. CA is horrible with just about everything with the exception of maybe Autosys and that is not even great. Why CA continues to show up as highly rated only means to me they pay out a ton of money. We have a saying where I work... "CA is where software goes to die."
To answer your question... They both are really are good. I have looked at DynaTrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic. We have used CA Wily (stay away, trust me) and Foglight which is now out of the APM game.
I tend to lean more towards DynaTrace.
This is why....
#1. Adoption
One of the things that I often see with APM tools is a struggle with adoption once it is purchased. An APM tool can provide all the information you want but if you need to have worked at NASA before in order to use it, then people are not going to use it. DynaTrace really has done a nice job with the GUI. Its very easy to understand and navigate. It's been very well thought out and it shows.
#2 One Agent Technology
All you really need to know is what OS and that's it with the exception of Solaris. Solaris is still painful and does things in the way most of the legacy tools do. If you are using Linux and/or Windows, its gold! Administration is very easy with DynaTrace.
#3 Mature AI (machine learning)
The other area that I think they have a leg up on all others is the AI. Tons of vendors claim AI technology but they really have a matured AI. As soon as that agent goes on, its amazing how many things are detected, mapped, technologies identified, and no false alarms. The AI for us has been spot on every time. We have taken the approach of let AI do its job and it does. You have the option to tweak things.
#4 Designed for today's needs from the ground up
DynaTrace is the ONLY company that decided not to try to patch and upgrade their way to get there. They went back 5 years ago or so and wrote DynaTrace from the ground up. I sit and I watch these other vendors such as CA or IBM try to keep adding more and more to the technology that they acquired in the first place and their products have become a complete mess with their support teams failing more and more to provide support as even they are confused.
Manager IT, Scalability & Performance at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Mar 15, 2018
Dynatrace has a forte for providing all the data points that a developer could ever want. In essence, it is reasonable to believe that with Dynatrace and an aware dev group, 100% monitoring and tracing coverage could be achieved. However, all of this data comes with a significant cost burden, which is why Dynatrace is also the most expensive in the market.
When it comes to AppDynamics, you will reduce coverage by some small percentage (realized over a bell curve, truly), with some associated cost savings.
Both platforms offer very similar capabilities and indeed leverage some of the same technology to drive their solution. Both UIs are comprehensive and complex, likely requiring a seasoned monitoring professional to drive value out of the analytics.
If your needs are 100% coverage and money grows on trees, go for Dynatrace.
Partner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
I am in the process of reviewing Dynatrace and AppDynamics. For one, I had trouble installing AppDynamics on my Windows machine (Windows 2012 - 2016) and on Linux. When I gave it my credentials and port information, once that was done at the Linux level, it continued to ask for the same passwords that were already typed in during my Windows and Linux experience.
Space - /dev/mapper/fedora-root xfs 30G 16G 15G 51% /
Mem - KiB Mem : 4046104 total, 1428488 free, 384264 used, 2233352 buff/cache
From a Windows Standpoint I entered my credentials three different times as indicated after the installation, I went to the browser and had to enter my credentials again (three different passwords), during this session it asks the user to enter passwords for "MySQL root user", "Enterprise User", and "Admin Web console". I did this 4 times during the install (problems with this process). Went back and did it again (This was on the Windows side):
Name : basesystem
Version : 11
Release : 3.fc26
Architecture: noarch
Install Date: Thu 20 Apr 2017 08:42:18 AM EDT
Group : System Environment/Base
Size : 0
License : Public Domain
Signature : RSA/SHA256, Mon 13 Feb 2017 02:48:12 PM EST, Key ID 812a6b4b64dab85d
Source RPM : basesystem-11-3.fc26.src.rpm
Build Date : Fri 10 Feb 2017 01:56:41 AM EST
Build Host : arm02-builder10.arm.fedoraproject.org
Relocations : (not relocatable)
Packager : Fedora Project
Vendor : Fedora Project
Summary : The skeleton package which defines a simple Fedora system
Dynatrace went through pretty smoothly, I had no problems, I installed it on GCP (Ubuntu), AWS (Ubuntu), Fedora2 (that same machine) and on my VMware Vcenter (6.5 Up1). I am having no problems.
One thing I noticed, there are a number of agents that look for specific items on the servers (Cloud, VMware, Databases, Docker, network and cloud environments). I would like to see if they could combine all of the items mentioned into one agent (give us the ability to see what we want), because this could be cumbersome if the end-users had a number of servers to deploy specific agents (especially if we are referencing specific applications like Nginx, Apache, Tomcat, MSSQL, Postgres, Mysql, MSSQL, etc).
But I do think Dynatrace is the way to go in my experience. We are going to try AppDynamics again and we will work with their technical staff to make sure things go accordingly but I did not have to do that with Dynatrac, just an FYI.
Also, for environments that are highly secure, I would like to see an onsite version to help capture and identify problem metrics just in case they (clients) don't allow information to leave the premises.
By the way, I just installed the application and the files you are seeing are from a few minutes ago, so I am impressed and I don't work for either company, have not sold the product nor have used their product until today.
Founder and Solution Architect at The APM Practice, LLC
Real User
Top 20
Jan 10, 2018
For the enterprise, you have to look at what applications and technology you have, and what visibility you need. Many large enterprises have multiple vendors simply because each vendor has a niche application area that they are very good at - and as for other apps - your mileage may vary.
When you understand what applications you have, and what technology is most appropriate - this puts you in a much better negotiating position. You priority has to be what issues you are addressing - rather that what tools you have on the shelf. So when you design your pilot, make sure you start from "what you need", instead of "what cool stuff they have".
If you have to take the chickens to market, a Cadillac does just as well as a pickup truck - but you've picked up a lot of features (and maintenance) that you really don't need.
Global Technical Solutions Architect & Business Development for End User Computing at World Wide Technology
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
Both are quality Enterprise scale products. They are both comprehensive APM platforms for monitoring and troubleshooting. They both are easy to get up-to-speed with. Both platforms offer easy to understand dashboards and navigation elements. Both platforms offer REST APIs for building custom integrations. Both Dynatrace and AppDynamics have similar application architecture modeling capabilities. Both solutions capture the response time of every transaction execution across distributed environments.
Both vendors profile business transactions, but in different ways. Dynatrace agents capture stack traces for every transaction execution, whereas AppDynamics only captures stack traces when a threshold has been breached. Each approach has its pros and cons depending on your monitoring use cases and requirements. It comes down to the ability to see everything vs seeing only the things you want to see. I explain it as the difference between fishing with a net or fishing with a line.
AppDynamics has a larger, out of the box selection of ecosystem , big data, notification-related plugins. Both companies have an open platform for developers, allowing them to add their own plug-ins. Following into the cost aspect, AppDynamics is the more affordable of the two, being slightly easier and cheaper to scale for larger environments.
At the end of the day, technically they are both quality products and you should compare each in your environment. You may find your specific use case and workloads are a better fit for one product over he other.
There are major differences in the last year that you should check out. Dynatrace's new offer doesn't compare with AppDynamics, since it's full stack, complete from the user experience down to almost the bare metal (being able to even monitor down to the virtualization hosts). Dynatrace's OneAgent technology is very important if you have a lot of servers & services in them. In Dynatrace, installation and configuration is fully automated. With AppDynamics, you or someone will be struggling to deploy and maintain it. AI in Dynatrace is very mature. And since it's a solution that has been developed very recently, it is here for the future. And don't forget that you will probably not be interested in getting samples... As several have pointed out, doing a POC, even simple, will get you a better idea.
APM Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Consultant
Jan 10, 2018
Coming back on the original question. Why is Dynatrace better than AppDynamics or vice versa. Last year I would have answered: Try it for yourself. Compare. The Gap-Free approach of Dynatrace (AppMon) vs sampling (AppD) was for us the biggest difference. That's why we choose Dynatrace (AppMon) a few years ago.
Currently the new Dynatrace (Saas / Managed) doesn't compare with AppD anymore. It deals with the latest technologies running within containers on top of PAAS solutions, delivering a full stack approach. I know a bit of what's out there (not all off course) and in my (limited) opinion, it does not compare anymore.
You could try it for yourself: bit.ly/2Dd911T
The answer is "It Depends" as you can imagine. Our team supports both technologies for the simple reason that there are use cases that work well with each of the tools. I would start with the following checklist.
1) Compatibility of subject technologies.
2) Ability to coexist with the current tools used and trusted by your staff.
3) Level of maturity of your staff.
4) Level of access / understanding of the monitored application.
You should have a strategy for implementing any tool. Understand how it will be consumed by your staff and build well documented processes around the entire toolset. This will assure that the tool you select will be successful and fully utilized.
Finally, most failed implementations stem from the fact that the tool is underfunded or under deployed. Make sure you dedicate staff and purchase licenses to cover the entire application. These tools depend on the fact that all tiers of the application are instrumented, any missing tier will greatly hinder the tools success and may delay or block the ROI that your management expects.
Disclaimer:As long time ago Dynatrace developer, and recent user of AppDynamics (at different company) I would suggest the former. dynaTrace among others can instrument automatically and easily, when at AppDynamics you have to set up many things on your own and this is cumbersome. Moreover dynatrace offers much better diagnostics and intuitive UI, and concept is pretty advanced I mean Pure paths. Next thing that they have agentless, sampling solution in their portfolio.
The other responses have suggested the same thing - specifically, it will be difficult to narrow down your choices based on the respective companies sales literature or from other implementers experiences. A detailed POC is necessary, which can be time-consuming.
I would recommend that your POC look very carefully at your technologies to ensure that they are covered by the agents, to test that the desired level of visibility of your traffic is actually captured and that the agents don't produce issues with your stack.
We were happy with the end results of an implementation of AppD (and probably would have been happy with Dynatrace, as well), but we did get a few surprises in the areas I mention above.
Good luck - the value of one of these quality APM implementations can't be overstated, IMO.
Enterprise Systems Management Engineer at a individual & family service with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
Both Dynatrace and AppDynamics are great product lines. To identify which one is best for your company will depend a bit on how your organization is run and how the solutions are to be implemented.
In our review, we found that Dynatrace will provide technically all the data desired, but didn’t quite meet our presentation needs. AppDynamics on the other hand showed excellent data presentation and ease of use. If an organization intends to use an APM solution just within a technical silo, that may not be important. If it intends to use it front and center across multiple departments, the need for intuitive design and great presentation will become more important.
Cheers,
Udo
President/CEO at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
User
Jan 10, 2018
Hi There,
If you guys want to see whole transaction code level in mid sized JVM environment and Test/Dev stage, I recommand Dynatrace with proper custom built. I mean Mid Size are less than 100 JVMs.
If you really want to see enterprise layer transaction level even multi tier Application architecture in Real production environment, you can see the differences very easily after deployed.
It depends on your project team between Product base deployment and Product with manual custom based.
The answer is very simple, if your environment is based on shrink wrap applications and deep dive into code levels is not really needed. Then either player will work making cost the differentiating player.
if you develop applications for internal use and the following KPI’s start to become the key issues that you need to answer.
Do you need to know if every single transaction is stepping through the code layer and application processes and is not deviating from the norm, in other words, if every method is measured for all transactions and is captured and you want to investigate to the layer of detail then Dynatrace is the tool of choice .
If you need to only to know once a failure has happened or a transaction is starting to slow down and it is not that important to you that you know how many and want to see the full granular, then AppD will do the job, as it works on sampling and trending.
They are both easy to use once installed and you don’t need to use development teams to drive the tools and investigate issues.
So it all about how granular do you really need to go for the amount of money you are willing to spend.
Senior Analyst at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
Both products are good but at the time I did the evaluation, AppDynamics did not support Apache web servers on Windows environment, which is a down side to us as we use Windows servers. By not supporting the web servers meaning that all the web tracking and JS monitoring tools cannot be used. This is one of the reason that we chose Dynatrace over AppDynamics at that time. Dynatrace also provides all transactions visibility which is a good thing as we used it to diagnose a problem with hidden circular dependencies and causing application deadlock in much higher level.
Hello Janet,
I don't believe such questions are actually viable and you won't receive enough relevant feedback this way; you'd need to give way too much context.
Being in your shoes a couple of years ago, the only sensible thing was to run very extensive POC's on our staging (and some production - don't judge please) environments, while keeping an eye on several aspects: reliability, scalability, TOC, off the shelf features/integrations, empowerment capabilities, operations, support, etc. Both solution are fairly similar (I didn't run any POC's in the past year so maybe things have changed a bit), however, for our use-case, dynatrace proved more on point.
I'd also like to say that, depending on your use-case and a lot on the monitored service/system, these two are not the only options. We've even had success on some projects with open source community-driven tools as well, where empowerment was key and licensing was constricting.
One last thing I should mention is that with dynatrace we were able to leverage our SAP partnership into getting (significantly) extended trials and support for our POC's, before deciding to go with them.
Application Performance Management Platform Architect at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
Hi Janet!
1. I would recommend clearly formulating your criteria of evaluation by category (Administration - ease of deployment, Administration - ease of maintenance, Features - Ability to track every single transaction, Features - Ability to chart performance of key user actions, etc.).
2. Once you have the basic idea I would recommend setting up an excel with weighted scores and evaluating vendors by capability and their importance to your organization.
3. Regarding Dynatrace vs. AppD - we use Dynatrace primarily because:
- it is capturing every single transaction (from what I understand AppD "decides" what needs to be captured 100%, the rest is sampled)
- it is a very mature vendor with a holistic approach to APM (covers all aspects with one tool, especially since they released the new Dynatrace SaaS a.k.a. Ruxit)
- we are finding that more and more of our partners/vendors know and support Dynatrace natively and many of the application teams that we offer it to have developers that have worked with Dynatrace in their previous jobs and they all love it.
If you need more details, feel free to connect on LinkedIn and message me. Good luck!
IT Manager, Portal Technologies at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jan 9, 2018
Hello Janet. Our choice was based on the other platforms in our enterprise in addition to the primary reason we purchased the software. Dynatrace managed to support one platform specifically that AppD did not.
Other contributing factors to our decision was the knowledgebase we already had in house to support it. Yes, we did need to train people on it's usage, but some key members of the group had worked with Dynatrace in the past.
To be honest, both tools could have met our immediate need but only Dynatrace filled in all of the bubbles of our requirements for the enterprise.
Hello Janet, Having used both the products you mention in my team's current scope of work I can say the features/functions of these tools are very similar, as one would expect from the two APM vendors leading in this market space.
We evaluate tools in three areas - Capability, Support/Scalability, and Financials. AppD & Dynatrace are well matched in the first two areas, and any difference will be specific to UI design preferences and/or your company's internal provisioning/deploy challenges. If selecting purely on technicals, both are fantastic at app deep dive and business transaction decomposition. Either will help your teams isolate faster and visualize trends for different audiences.
The financials are where they differ but mostly on license schema. One counts by Host systems and the other will count by # of JVMs or AppPools. There are other tools each will offer to sweeten the pot (license for real-user & synthetic-user measurements), and we have seen things like Professional Services and tickets to annual software conferences get thrown in too.
Without know your specific use-cases & requirements, your hosting environments, or your company's existing monitoring investments, it is difficult to recommend one over the other. I can say from real-user experience, I would not consider CA's offering as capable. Most Analysts (Gartner/Forrester/etc.) will agree. I hope this helps
Senior Middleware Administrator at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jun 26, 2018
My 2 cents... When it comes to anything from CA - RUN! Run as fast as you can!
In terms of Dynatrace vs Appdynamics, both are very good products but I have to say that Dynatrace is the leader. The OneAgent technology is HUGE and I have found that their AI is extremely mature.
From the short research I conducted on both tools,
I will say AppDynamics are the more relevant, up-to-date choice while Dynatrace is the legacy system, albeit that both tools have been around for quite some time.
Network Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
Both are good tools. You need to POC both tools with your specific requirements and select the one which suits you best. Do your due diligence as thoroughly as possible, because these are expensive tools.
Hi Janet,
You're question is quite valid, i work with both tools in multiple clients which ask me the same question every day.
Im not going to drag my response through technical details, although both vendors are very similar in their offerings , they both have different approaches, using an analogy (carpet bomb (DT) vs surgical strike AppD)
Application Monitoring features are divided into several sections (Code Analysis (BCI), Synthetic Transaction, End-User Experience), although both tools offer this functionalities they approach them differently
What is your Business Driver for this requirement ?
Which Technologies comprise the majority of your application estate.
(java ? .Net?, C++)
SaaS or On-Premises ?
The first stage is to get an answer to this questions, because if you ask for POC these are the questions you are going to be asked.
Senior IT Monitoring Specialist - DevOps at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
Janet-
I think most everyone here has covered most everything I would respond with. The only other thing I would add that I didn't see mentioned was the fact that Dynatrace is the only platform I'm aware of that has Mainframe agents. Given that you are with a financial organization, I would guess that those types of transactions might be critical measurements your business would like to capture.
Global Head of Performance and Service Metrics at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Jan 10, 2018
I haven't seen either for a while yet so can't give a 100% up to date answer and I actually retired from the market last August which means I am even more out of date.
However, from my understanding of the two products last time I saw them, the main difference is that Dynatrace reports information from a transaction viewpoint, whereas AppDynamics will show similar transaction data, but from more of a User orientation. Otherwise there is not much to choose between them IMHO (though you may find Dynatrace to be more ofa toolkit as opposed to a set of vendor-supplied reports so offers flexibility versus out of the box functionality). Also note that AppDynamics is (or was) limited to the management of ecommerce transactions, so would not, for example, be able to monitor transaction flow in a STP environment - which Dynatrace can do.
If you are looking at products in ths space you should also consider New Relic, which has the advantage of being a SaaS product, making it very quick and simple to implement.Â
Good luck
Service Coordinator / Associate Lead at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
I have used Dynatrace Appmon and Dynatrace SaaS. They both are amazing tools and bring in alot of depth in terms of root cause analysis and pointing out where the real problem is.
You can use these tools for evaluation and analyzing performance of a particular page as well.
I've not used AppDynamics as of now l, so won't be able to comment on it.
Every organization or team has different requirement. I would suggest to have a PIC if both these tools and then you can decide which one to use.
Digital Performance Optimization Director at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
Hi Janet,
as someone already said, it depends. The best suggestion we can give you is to try in a PoC both of them. In terms of roadmap and vision I think Dynatrace is better, the community (and skilled people) is greater and also you can capture 100% of transaction. If you are planning to support also performance testing activity, you should defintively go for Dynatrace. Bye!
Global Technical Solutions Architect & Business Development for End User Computing at World Wide Technology
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
Both are quality Enterprise scale products. They are both comprehensive APM platforms for monitoring and troubleshooting. They both are easy to get up-to-speed with. Both platforms offer easy to understand dashboards and navigation elements. Both platforms offer REST APIs for building custom integrations. Both Dynatrace and AppDynamics have similar application architecture modeling capabilities. Both solutions capture the response time of every transaction execution across distributed environments.
Both vendors profile business transactions, but in different ways. Dynatrace agents capture stack traces for every transaction execution, whereas AppDynamics only captures stack traces when a threshold has been breached. Each approach has its pros and cons depending on your monitoring use cases and requirements. It comes down to the ability to see everything vs seeing only the things you want to see. I explain it as the difference between fishing with a net or fishing with a line.
AppDynamics has a larger, out of the box selection of ecosystem , big data, notification-related plugins. Both companies have an open platform for developers, allowing them to add their own plug-ins. Following into the cost aspect, AppDynamics is the more affordable of the two, being slightly easier and cheaper to scale for larger environments.
At the end of the day, technically they are both quality products and you should compare each in your environment. You may find your specific use case and workloads are a better fit for one product over he other.
Application Manager at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
First of all I should mention I have almost no experience with AppDynamics. However I experience as the only option to choose between two understand you are not searching for miss performance management but you are trying to find solution best fitting to your needs, your IT processes, your IT culture and experience......To be able to make it you need to start within your company and set goals you want to reach with APM solution, define if you want to start with quick wins to resolve biggest pains, if you would like to grow to cover all application life cycle. Those basic questions and answers would give you basic picture how your APM solution would looks and will allow you to go to further details - and to APM solution which fits best to your company
The best options is to invest enough time to perform a proper evaluation of both the tools in an environment and under load conditions similar to the one you are targeting to monitor.
E.g. Pre-production.
I recommend that you do direct evaluation, even if supported by the vendor engineering resources. So to move further deep in the discovery of the features, their level of actual maturity for production usage and the issues and limitations. Yes, each tool has a lot of features. But when you actually start using it and want to get the best out of your (high or very-high) investment, then you may face real issues (e.g. practical unusability of some advertised features) or limitations (feature works but not for your specific application or set-up). The risk is that for quite long time, you will use your internal resources to identify tool's problems and troubleshoot them with the Vendor. Instead than using them for analyzing, troubleshooting and address your application performance issues.
Reality is that no single tool is perfect and you may even be better off by implementing an hybrid solution.
That is what hopefully you will assess and discover, before you invest significant amount of resources (engineers, budget).
Network Management Development and Support at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
Hi...
I would certainly invest in time to evaluate each taking into consideration your exact requirements. Below is a link to a blog which you may have seen. It provides a good overview on both.
Software Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2018
Still I stand for my word, try CA APM cloud.ca.com/admin/maa/ and work with sales if you have any questions then you decide anything :) As a developer what I can say is, it's not JUST about UI with some nice images. It's about the amount of data you have to IDENTIFY the actual problem with in few seconds providing insights/ analytics on top of it. APM 107 best candidate for it while comparing with any other apm products in market currently we have.
Again their are no competitors for NextGen CA APM roapmap currently we are developing/working. You have to come back, I can share only this :)
President/CEO at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
User
Jan 9, 2018
Hi,
Regarding Choice of APM, you have to consider scalability and easy maintenance without customization process again.
Simple is the best scenario after APM deployed.
As far as I know APPD is target large production environment versus Dynatrace.
Dynatrace was target mid size market and manual customized environment versus APPD.
Because It must require internal data collectors for releasing overheads.
But both tools even New Relic are good and enough for general requirement.
With my experience, I would like to choice easy way without custom development.
I highly recommend doing a trial with both. In my experience, Dynatrace is much easier to set up and manage. It gives a much broader overview of your environment. I can’t speak to current costs but when I did my evaluation, Dynatrace was also cheaper. Hands down, the best tool out there in my opinion.
VP Network Operations at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Real User
Jan 9, 2018
Hi, Janet!
Both solutions are fully functional except for a few nuances: they do not allow you to make an observation point within a corporate structure; turn on additional browser-based analytics tools and use non-standard python libraries :-)
Sales Development Representative at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jan 9, 2018
Janet,
My suggestion would be to try out Both in a POC, but do not limit the POC to a small sample size 5 or 10, try 50 or 100 servers. You want to see how they scale and deal with configuration. The other question as a financial services organization: how important is every transaction. You will need a solution that can support, drill down to and trouble shoot every transaction. I have my biases, but also know how do they support legacy applications, a 10,000 person financial services firm might have a dinosaur app that may be a challenge keep that in mind.
Both achieve APM very good. We've had Dynatrace for a few years and recently implemented ApD for POC. I fully agree with Eric's post. Neither tool is going to solve world hunger by installing the binaries alone. You will be happy with either of them. Sorry for fence sitting. Good Luck!
We have implemented both solutions for our clients. Before you take a call on which solution is the right, it's important to review the applications / integrations and underlying infra. Also, the skills your team has or plans to acquire. Would love to help...Darshan.Kapadia@niit-tech.com
Software Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jan 9, 2018
Disclaimer : Working as developer at APM domain having good experience
I suggest CA APM which provides unique features like experience view, assisted triage, differential analysis. I strongly recommend you to use CA APM 107 upcoming release. Try CA APM cloud cloud.ca.com/admin/maa/ and work with sales if you have any questions then you decide anything :)
Dynatrace and Splunk AppDynamics compete in the application performance management category. Dynatrace seems to have the upper hand due to its AI-driven insights and ease of deployment, whereas Splunk AppDynamics is notable for its business-centric approach and integration capabilities.Features: Dynatrace offers AI-powered anomaly detection, automatic root cause analysis, and real-time user behavior monitoring. Splunk AppDynamics provides business transaction monitoring, end-user experience...
First thought.... Do not go with CA. CA is horrible with just about everything with the exception of maybe Autosys and that is not even great. Why CA continues to show up as highly rated only means to me they pay out a ton of money. We have a saying where I work... "CA is where software goes to die."
To answer your question... They both are really are good. I have looked at DynaTrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic. We have used CA Wily (stay away, trust me) and Foglight which is now out of the APM game.
I tend to lean more towards DynaTrace.
This is why....
#1. Adoption
One of the things that I often see with APM tools is a struggle with adoption once it is purchased. An APM tool can provide all the information you want but if you need to have worked at NASA before in order to use it, then people are not going to use it. DynaTrace really has done a nice job with the GUI. Its very easy to understand and navigate. It's been very well thought out and it shows.
#2 One Agent Technology
All you really need to know is what OS and that's it with the exception of Solaris. Solaris is still painful and does things in the way most of the legacy tools do. If you are using Linux and/or Windows, its gold! Administration is very easy with DynaTrace.
#3 Mature AI (machine learning)
The other area that I think they have a leg up on all others is the AI. Tons of vendors claim AI technology but they really have a matured AI. As soon as that agent goes on, its amazing how many things are detected, mapped, technologies identified, and no false alarms. The AI for us has been spot on every time. We have taken the approach of let AI do its job and it does. You have the option to tweak things.
#4 Designed for today's needs from the ground up
DynaTrace is the ONLY company that decided not to try to patch and upgrade their way to get there. They went back 5 years ago or so and wrote DynaTrace from the ground up. I sit and I watch these other vendors such as CA or IBM try to keep adding more and more to the technology that they acquired in the first place and their products have become a complete mess with their support teams failing more and more to provide support as even they are confused.
Hope that helps!
Dynatrace has a forte for providing all the data points that a developer could ever want. In essence, it is reasonable to believe that with Dynatrace and an aware dev group, 100% monitoring and tracing coverage could be achieved. However, all of this data comes with a significant cost burden, which is why Dynatrace is also the most expensive in the market.
When it comes to AppDynamics, you will reduce coverage by some small percentage (realized over a bell curve, truly), with some associated cost savings.
Both platforms offer very similar capabilities and indeed leverage some of the same technology to drive their solution. Both UIs are comprehensive and complex, likely requiring a seasoned monitoring professional to drive value out of the analytics.
If your needs are 100% coverage and money grows on trees, go for Dynatrace.
Disclaimer - I work for Dynatrace. I will let the community and the customers explain the differences between Dynatrace and AppD.
To avoid any confusion, I would like to clarify that Dynatrace has two different solutions.
1. AppMon was our lead solution for many years. Often times, when people say they use Dynatrace, they are referring to the AppMon product.
2. Today our lead solution is Dynatrace. This is completely separate and different from AppMon.
Some replies in this thread are referring to AppMon and some (most) are referring to the newer Dynatrace offering.
When comparing to AppD, it is more relevant to compare with Dynatrace (not AppMon).
Thank you.
I am in the process of reviewing Dynatrace and AppDynamics. For one, I had trouble installing AppDynamics on my Windows machine (Windows 2012 - 2016) and on Linux. When I gave it my credentials and port information, once that was done at the Linux level, it continued to ask for the same passwords that were already typed in during my Windows and Linux experience.
Space - /dev/mapper/fedora-root xfs 30G 16G 15G 51% /
Mem - KiB Mem : 4046104 total, 1428488 free, 384264 used, 2233352 buff/cache
From a Windows Standpoint I entered my credentials three different times as indicated after the installation, I went to the browser and had to enter my credentials again (three different passwords), during this session it asks the user to enter passwords for "MySQL root user", "Enterprise User", and "Admin Web console". I did this 4 times during the install (problems with this process). Went back and did it again (This was on the Windows side):
Name : basesystem
Version : 11
Release : 3.fc26
Architecture: noarch
Install Date: Thu 20 Apr 2017 08:42:18 AM EDT
Group : System Environment/Base
Size : 0
License : Public Domain
Signature : RSA/SHA256, Mon 13 Feb 2017 02:48:12 PM EST, Key ID 812a6b4b64dab85d
Source RPM : basesystem-11-3.fc26.src.rpm
Build Date : Fri 10 Feb 2017 01:56:41 AM EST
Build Host : arm02-builder10.arm.fedoraproject.org
Relocations : (not relocatable)
Packager : Fedora Project
Vendor : Fedora Project
Summary : The skeleton package which defines a simple Fedora system
Dynatrace went through pretty smoothly, I had no problems, I installed it on GCP (Ubuntu), AWS (Ubuntu), Fedora2 (that same machine) and on my VMware Vcenter (6.5 Up1). I am having no problems.
So for me, the choice is relatively clear. There are storage and memory requirements that need to be addressed from AppDynamics, but from Dynatrace, I found no problems with any of my systems and with the installation went pretty well (I actually just did it). I put up some screenshots
-> itotsnetworks.com/dynatrace/Dynatrace_vc_cpu_oversaturation.pdf (Identified Problem)
-> itotsnetworks.com/dynatrace/dynatrace_techoverview.png (Tech Overview)
-> itotsnetworks.com/dynatrace/dynatrace_screenshot2.png (Dashboard View)
-> itotsnetworks.com/dynatrace/dynatrace_diagnostics.png (Diag View)
-> itotsnetworks.com/dynatrace/dynatrace_apps.png (apps)
One thing I noticed, there are a number of agents that look for specific items on the servers (Cloud, VMware, Databases, Docker, network and cloud environments). I would like to see if they could combine all of the items mentioned into one agent (give us the ability to see what we want), because this could be cumbersome if the end-users had a number of servers to deploy specific agents (especially if we are referencing specific applications like Nginx, Apache, Tomcat, MSSQL, Postgres, Mysql, MSSQL, etc).
But I do think Dynatrace is the way to go in my experience. We are going to try AppDynamics again and we will work with their technical staff to make sure things go accordingly but I did not have to do that with Dynatrac, just an FYI.
Also, for environments that are highly secure, I would like to see an onsite version to help capture and identify problem metrics just in case they (clients) don't allow information to leave the premises.
By the way, I just installed the application and the files you are seeing are from a few minutes ago, so I am impressed and I don't work for either company, have not sold the product nor have used their product until today.
Todd
For the enterprise, you have to look at what applications and technology you have, and what visibility you need. Many large enterprises have multiple vendors simply because each vendor has a niche application area that they are very good at - and as for other apps - your mileage may vary.
When you understand what applications you have, and what technology is most appropriate - this puts you in a much better negotiating position. You priority has to be what issues you are addressing - rather that what tools you have on the shelf. So when you design your pilot, make sure you start from "what you need", instead of "what cool stuff they have".
If you have to take the chickens to market, a Cadillac does just as well as a pickup truck - but you've picked up a lot of features (and maintenance) that you really don't need.
Both are quality Enterprise scale products. They are both comprehensive APM platforms for monitoring and troubleshooting. They both are easy to get up-to-speed with. Both platforms offer easy to understand dashboards and navigation elements. Both platforms offer REST APIs for building custom integrations. Both Dynatrace and AppDynamics have similar application architecture modeling capabilities. Both solutions capture the response time of every transaction execution across distributed environments.
Both vendors profile business transactions, but in different ways. Dynatrace agents capture stack traces for every transaction execution, whereas AppDynamics only captures stack traces when a threshold has been breached. Each approach has its pros and cons depending on your monitoring use cases and requirements. It comes down to the ability to see everything vs seeing only the things you want to see. I explain it as the difference between fishing with a net or fishing with a line.
AppDynamics has a larger, out of the box selection of ecosystem , big data, notification-related plugins. Both companies have an open platform for developers, allowing them to add their own plug-ins. Following into the cost aspect, AppDynamics is the more affordable of the two, being slightly easier and cheaper to scale for larger environments.
At the end of the day, technically they are both quality products and you should compare each in your environment. You may find your specific use case and workloads are a better fit for one product over he other.
There are major differences in the last year that you should check out. Dynatrace's new offer doesn't compare with AppDynamics, since it's full stack, complete from the user experience down to almost the bare metal (being able to even monitor down to the virtualization hosts). Dynatrace's OneAgent technology is very important if you have a lot of servers & services in them. In Dynatrace, installation and configuration is fully automated. With AppDynamics, you or someone will be struggling to deploy and maintain it. AI in Dynatrace is very mature. And since it's a solution that has been developed very recently, it is here for the future. And don't forget that you will probably not be interested in getting samples... As several have pointed out, doing a POC, even simple, will get you a better idea.
Coming back on the original question. Why is Dynatrace better than AppDynamics or vice versa. Last year I would have answered: Try it for yourself. Compare. The Gap-Free approach of Dynatrace (AppMon) vs sampling (AppD) was for us the biggest difference. That's why we choose Dynatrace (AppMon) a few years ago.
Currently the new Dynatrace (Saas / Managed) doesn't compare with AppD anymore. It deals with the latest technologies running within containers on top of PAAS solutions, delivering a full stack approach. I know a bit of what's out there (not all off course) and in my (limited) opinion, it does not compare anymore.
You could try it for yourself: bit.ly/2Dd911T
www.realdolmen.com/en/solution/application-performance-management-leads-to-satisfied-customers
The answer is "It Depends" as you can imagine. Our team supports both technologies for the simple reason that there are use cases that work well with each of the tools. I would start with the following checklist.
1) Compatibility of subject technologies.
2) Ability to coexist with the current tools used and trusted by your staff.
3) Level of maturity of your staff.
4) Level of access / understanding of the monitored application.
You should have a strategy for implementing any tool. Understand how it will be consumed by your staff and build well documented processes around the entire toolset. This will assure that the tool you select will be successful and fully utilized.
Finally, most failed implementations stem from the fact that the tool is underfunded or under deployed. Make sure you dedicate staff and purchase licenses to cover the entire application. These tools depend on the fact that all tiers of the application are instrumented, any missing tier will greatly hinder the tools success and may delay or block the ROI that your management expects.
Thanks
Eric Repec
Disclaimer:As long time ago Dynatrace developer, and recent user of AppDynamics (at different company) I would suggest the former. dynaTrace among others can instrument automatically and easily, when at AppDynamics you have to set up many things on your own and this is cumbersome. Moreover dynatrace offers much better diagnostics and intuitive UI, and concept is pretty advanced I mean Pure paths. Next thing that they have agentless, sampling solution in their portfolio.
The other responses have suggested the same thing - specifically, it will be difficult to narrow down your choices based on the respective companies sales literature or from other implementers experiences. A detailed POC is necessary, which can be time-consuming.
I would recommend that your POC look very carefully at your technologies to ensure that they are covered by the agents, to test that the desired level of visibility of your traffic is actually captured and that the agents don't produce issues with your stack.
We were happy with the end results of an implementation of AppD (and probably would have been happy with Dynatrace, as well), but we did get a few surprises in the areas I mention above.
Good luck - the value of one of these quality APM implementations can't be overstated, IMO.
Regards,
Ben
Both Dynatrace and AppDynamics are great product lines. To identify which one is best for your company will depend a bit on how your organization is run and how the solutions are to be implemented.
In our review, we found that Dynatrace will provide technically all the data desired, but didn’t quite meet our presentation needs. AppDynamics on the other hand showed excellent data presentation and ease of use. If an organization intends to use an APM solution just within a technical silo, that may not be important. If it intends to use it front and center across multiple departments, the need for intuitive design and great presentation will become more important.
Cheers,
Udo
Hi There,
If you guys want to see whole transaction code level in mid sized JVM environment and Test/Dev stage, I recommand Dynatrace with proper custom built. I mean Mid Size are less than 100 JVMs.
If you really want to see enterprise layer transaction level even multi tier Application architecture in Real production environment, you can see the differences very easily after deployed.
It depends on your project team between Product base deployment and Product with manual custom based.
Think about .
.
The answer is very simple, if your environment is based on shrink wrap applications and deep dive into code levels is not really needed. Then either player will work making cost the differentiating player.
if you develop applications for internal use and the following KPI’s start to become the key issues that you need to answer.
Do you need to know if every single transaction is stepping through the code layer and application processes and is not deviating from the norm, in other words, if every method is measured for all transactions and is captured and you want to investigate to the layer of detail then Dynatrace is the tool of choice .
If you need to only to know once a failure has happened or a transaction is starting to slow down and it is not that important to you that you know how many and want to see the full granular, then AppD will do the job, as it works on sampling and trending.
They are both easy to use once installed and you don’t need to use development teams to drive the tools and investigate issues.
So it all about how granular do you really need to go for the amount of money you are willing to spend.
Both products are good but at the time I did the evaluation, AppDynamics did not support Apache web servers on Windows environment, which is a down side to us as we use Windows servers. By not supporting the web servers meaning that all the web tracking and JS monitoring tools cannot be used. This is one of the reason that we chose Dynatrace over AppDynamics at that time. Dynatrace also provides all transactions visibility which is a good thing as we used it to diagnose a problem with hidden circular dependencies and causing application deadlock in much higher level.
Hello Janet,
I don't believe such questions are actually viable and you won't receive enough relevant feedback this way; you'd need to give way too much context.
Being in your shoes a couple of years ago, the only sensible thing was to run very extensive POC's on our staging (and some production - don't judge please) environments, while keeping an eye on several aspects: reliability, scalability, TOC, off the shelf features/integrations, empowerment capabilities, operations, support, etc. Both solution are fairly similar (I didn't run any POC's in the past year so maybe things have changed a bit), however, for our use-case, dynatrace proved more on point.
I'd also like to say that, depending on your use-case and a lot on the monitored service/system, these two are not the only options. We've even had success on some projects with open source community-driven tools as well, where empowerment was key and licensing was constricting.
One last thing I should mention is that with dynatrace we were able to leverage our SAP partnership into getting (significantly) extended trials and support for our POC's, before deciding to go with them.
Cheers,
Bogdan
Hi Janet!
1. I would recommend clearly formulating your criteria of evaluation by category (Administration - ease of deployment, Administration - ease of maintenance, Features - Ability to track every single transaction, Features - Ability to chart performance of key user actions, etc.).
2. Once you have the basic idea I would recommend setting up an excel with weighted scores and evaluating vendors by capability and their importance to your organization.
3. Regarding Dynatrace vs. AppD - we use Dynatrace primarily because:
- it is capturing every single transaction (from what I understand AppD "decides" what needs to be captured 100%, the rest is sampled)
- it is a very mature vendor with a holistic approach to APM (covers all aspects with one tool, especially since they released the new Dynatrace SaaS a.k.a. Ruxit)
- we are finding that more and more of our partners/vendors know and support Dynatrace natively and many of the application teams that we offer it to have developers that have worked with Dynatrace in their previous jobs and they all love it.
If you need more details, feel free to connect on LinkedIn and message me. Good luck!
-Robert
Hello Janet. Our choice was based on the other platforms in our enterprise in addition to the primary reason we purchased the software. Dynatrace managed to support one platform specifically that AppD did not.
Other contributing factors to our decision was the knowledgebase we already had in house to support it. Yes, we did need to train people on it's usage, but some key members of the group had worked with Dynatrace in the past.
To be honest, both tools could have met our immediate need but only Dynatrace filled in all of the bubbles of our requirements for the enterprise.
Hello Janet, Having used both the products you mention in my team's current scope of work I can say the features/functions of these tools are very similar, as one would expect from the two APM vendors leading in this market space.
We evaluate tools in three areas - Capability, Support/Scalability, and Financials. AppD & Dynatrace are well matched in the first two areas, and any difference will be specific to UI design preferences and/or your company's internal provisioning/deploy challenges. If selecting purely on technicals, both are fantastic at app deep dive and business transaction decomposition. Either will help your teams isolate faster and visualize trends for different audiences.
The financials are where they differ but mostly on license schema. One counts by Host systems and the other will count by # of JVMs or AppPools. There are other tools each will offer to sweeten the pot (license for real-user & synthetic-user measurements), and we have seen things like Professional Services and tickets to annual software conferences get thrown in too.
Without know your specific use-cases & requirements, your hosting environments, or your company's existing monitoring investments, it is difficult to recommend one over the other. I can say from real-user experience, I would not consider CA's offering as capable. Most Analysts (Gartner/Forrester/etc.) will agree. I hope this helps
Regards,
Randall Hinds
My 2 cents... When it comes to anything from CA - RUN! Run as fast as you can!
In terms of Dynatrace vs Appdynamics, both are very good products but I have to say that Dynatrace is the leader. The OneAgent technology is HUGE and I have found that their AI is extremely mature.
From the short research I conducted on both tools,
I will say AppDynamics are the more relevant, up-to-date choice while Dynatrace is the legacy system, albeit that both tools have been around for quite some time.
Both are good tools. You need to POC both tools with your specific requirements and select the one which suits you best. Do your due diligence as thoroughly as possible, because these are expensive tools.
Hi Janet,
You're question is quite valid, i work with both tools in multiple clients which ask me the same question every day.
Im not going to drag my response through technical details, although both vendors are very similar in their offerings , they both have different approaches, using an analogy (carpet bomb (DT) vs surgical strike AppD)
Application Monitoring features are divided into several sections (Code Analysis (BCI), Synthetic Transaction, End-User Experience), although both tools offer this functionalities they approach them differently
What is your Business Driver for this requirement ?
Which Technologies comprise the majority of your application estate.
(java ? .Net?, C++)
SaaS or On-Premises ?
The first stage is to get an answer to this questions, because if you ask for POC these are the questions you are going to be asked.
More than happy help you further in your pursuit.
Best Regards
Janet-
I think most everyone here has covered most everything I would respond with. The only other thing I would add that I didn't see mentioned was the fact that Dynatrace is the only platform I'm aware of that has Mainframe agents. Given that you are with a financial organization, I would guess that those types of transactions might be critical measurements your business would like to capture.
I haven't seen either for a while yet so can't give a 100% up to date answer and I actually retired from the market last August which means I am even more out of date.
However, from my understanding of the two products last time I saw them, the main difference is that Dynatrace reports information from a transaction viewpoint, whereas AppDynamics will show similar transaction data, but from more of a User orientation. Otherwise there is not much to choose between them IMHO (though you may find Dynatrace to be more ofa toolkit as opposed to a set of vendor-supplied reports so offers flexibility versus out of the box functionality). Also note that AppDynamics is (or was) limited to the management of ecommerce transactions, so would not, for example, be able to monitor transaction flow in a STP environment - which Dynatrace can do.
If you are looking at products in ths space you should also consider New Relic, which has the advantage of being a SaaS product, making it very quick and simple to implement.Â
Good luck
www.dynatrace.com/platform/comparison/apm-dynatrace-vs-appdynamics-vs-newrelic/
This will give you the clear picture about the capabilities
These might help –
1. www.dynatrace.com/platform/comparison/apm-dynatrace-vs-appdynamics-vs-newrelic/
2. www.gartner.com/reviews/market/apm/compare/appdynamics-vs-dynatrace
3. blog.takipi.com/appdynamics-vs-dynatrace-battle-of-the-enterprise-monitoring-giants/
I have used Dynatrace Appmon and Dynatrace SaaS. They both are amazing tools and bring in alot of depth in terms of root cause analysis and pointing out where the real problem is.
You can use these tools for evaluation and analyzing performance of a particular page as well.
I've not used AppDynamics as of now l, so won't be able to comment on it.
Every organization or team has different requirement. I would suggest to have a PIC if both these tools and then you can decide which one to use.
Kunal
Hi Janet,
as someone already said, it depends. The best suggestion we can give you is to try in a PoC both of them. In terms of roadmap and vision I think Dynatrace is better, the community (and skilled people) is greater and also you can capture 100% of transaction. If you are planning to support also performance testing activity, you should defintively go for Dynatrace. Bye!
Both are quality Enterprise scale products. They are both comprehensive APM platforms for monitoring and troubleshooting. They both are easy to get up-to-speed with. Both platforms offer easy to understand dashboards and navigation elements. Both platforms offer REST APIs for building custom integrations. Both Dynatrace and AppDynamics have similar application architecture modeling capabilities. Both solutions capture the response time of every transaction execution across distributed environments.
Both vendors profile business transactions, but in different ways. Dynatrace agents capture stack traces for every transaction execution, whereas AppDynamics only captures stack traces when a threshold has been breached. Each approach has its pros and cons depending on your monitoring use cases and requirements. It comes down to the ability to see everything vs seeing only the things you want to see. I explain it as the difference between fishing with a net or fishing with a line.
AppDynamics has a larger, out of the box selection of ecosystem , big data, notification-related plugins. Both companies have an open platform for developers, allowing them to add their own plug-ins. Following into the cost aspect, AppDynamics is the more affordable of the two, being slightly easier and cheaper to scale for larger environments.
At the end of the day, technically they are both quality products and you should compare each in your environment. You may find your specific use case and workloads are a better fit for one product over he other.
Hope this was helpful,
First of all I should mention I have almost no experience with AppDynamics. However I experience as the only option to choose between two understand you are not searching for miss performance management but you are trying to find solution best fitting to your needs, your IT processes, your IT culture and experience......To be able to make it you need to start within your company and set goals you want to reach with APM solution, define if you want to start with quick wins to resolve biggest pains, if you would like to grow to cover all application life cycle. Those basic questions and answers would give you basic picture how your APM solution would looks and will allow you to go to further details - and to APM solution which fits best to your company
We love AppDynamics. there is a significant difference between AppDynamics and others.
It depends.
The best options is to invest enough time to perform a proper evaluation of both the tools in an environment and under load conditions similar to the one you are targeting to monitor.
E.g. Pre-production.
I recommend that you do direct evaluation, even if supported by the vendor engineering resources. So to move further deep in the discovery of the features, their level of actual maturity for production usage and the issues and limitations. Yes, each tool has a lot of features. But when you actually start using it and want to get the best out of your (high or very-high) investment, then you may face real issues (e.g. practical unusability of some advertised features) or limitations (feature works but not for your specific application or set-up). The risk is that for quite long time, you will use your internal resources to identify tool's problems and troubleshoot them with the Vendor. Instead than using them for analyzing, troubleshooting and address your application performance issues.
Reality is that no single tool is perfect and you may even be better off by implementing an hybrid solution.
That is what hopefully you will assess and discover, before you invest significant amount of resources (engineers, budget).
Hi...
I would certainly invest in time to evaluate each taking into consideration your exact requirements. Below is a link to a blog which you may have seen. It provides a good overview on both.
blog.takipi.com/appdynamics-vs-dynatrace-battle-of-the-enterprise-monitoring-giants/
Still I stand for my word, try CA APM cloud.ca.com/admin/maa/ and work with sales if you have any questions then you decide anything :) As a developer what I can say is, it's not JUST about UI with some nice images. It's about the amount of data you have to IDENTIFY the actual problem with in few seconds providing insights/ analytics on top of it. APM 107 best candidate for it while comparing with any other apm products in market currently we have.
Again their are no competitors for NextGen CA APM roapmap currently we are developing/working. You have to come back, I can share only this :)
I would say all the APM solutions are good bundled with its own features.
Having said that, you have to map the top 5 requirement or issues that you want to address with the APM solution.
If you identify multiple APM fulfilling your "Must Have" list then check the UI which is most suitable & appealing for users & technical team.
Hi,
Regarding Choice of APM, you have to consider scalability and easy maintenance without customization process again.
Simple is the best scenario after APM deployed.
As far as I know APPD is target large production environment versus Dynatrace.
Dynatrace was target mid size market and manual customized environment versus APPD.
Because It must require internal data collectors for releasing overheads.
But both tools even New Relic are good and enough for general requirement.
With my experience, I would like to choice easy way without custom development.
Regards,
heesoo
Well said and fully agreed.
I highly recommend doing a trial with both. In my experience, Dynatrace is much easier to set up and manage. It gives a much broader overview of your environment. I can’t speak to current costs but when I did my evaluation, Dynatrace was also cheaper. Hands down, the best tool out there in my opinion.
Hi, Janet!
Both solutions are fully functional except for a few nuances: they do not allow you to make an observation point within a corporate structure; turn on additional browser-based analytics tools and use non-standard python libraries :-)
Janet,
My suggestion would be to try out Both in a POC, but do not limit the POC to a small sample size 5 or 10, try 50 or 100 servers. You want to see how they scale and deal with configuration. The other question as a financial services organization: how important is every transaction. You will need a solution that can support, drill down to and trouble shoot every transaction. I have my biases, but also know how do they support legacy applications, a 10,000 person financial services firm might have a dinosaur app that may be a challenge keep that in mind.
I have noticed alot of comments on Dynatrace, maybe on their AppMon Platform not on Dynatrace managed. see blog below
www.dynatrace.com/blog/from-0-to-devops-in-80-days-the-dynatrace-transformation-story/
Both achieve APM very good. We've had Dynatrace for a few years and recently implemented ApD for POC. I fully agree with Eric's post. Neither tool is going to solve world hunger by installing the binaries alone. You will be happy with either of them. Sorry for fence sitting. Good Luck!
We have implemented both solutions for our clients. Before you take a call on which solution is the right, it's important to review the applications / integrations and underlying infra. Also, the skills your team has or plans to acquire. Would love to help...Darshan.Kapadia@niit-tech.com
Disclaimer : Working as developer at APM domain having good experience
I suggest CA APM which provides unique features like experience view, assisted triage, differential analysis. I strongly recommend you to use CA APM 107 upcoming release. Try CA APM cloud cloud.ca.com/admin/maa/ and work with sales if you have any questions then you decide anything :)