Dynatrace Platform Subscription (Contracts)

What do you like best about the product?

The level of details Dynatrace provides is too good. You can dig in down and down and get to the root of the issue.
Pretty easy to implement.
Their customer support is also top notch. While on a dashboard or any page you can connect with support and then work with them to understand the feature or more.
Integration with other tools is also pretty straight.

What do you dislike about the product?

Quite tough to learn and understand how to use the tool. Basically learning curve is high.
Pretty expensive. If not configured correctly, you will bleed money.
Just due to learning curve, we found frequency of users using app going down

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Dynatrace helps us address several critical challenges in our infrastructure, Kubernetes, and application environments
1. End-to-End Observability Across Hybrid Environments - Dynatrace provides a unified observability platform across servers, containers, applications, and network dependencies. We can trace a single user transaction end-to-end, from front-end to database
2.Kubernetes and Microservices Visibility - Dynatrace automatically maps and monitors Kubernetes workloads, namespaces, and services, showing real-time health and performance metrics
3. Improved Application Performance and User Experience - With Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetic tests, we monitor real-world user interactions and simulate business-critical transactions.

What do you like best about the product?

The implementation process is simple, and the user interface is highly intuitive, which makes it easy to use even for newcomers to the platform. The product keeps up with market trends by consistently adding new features and offering frequent updates. Customer support is very responsive when it comes to addressing critical issues. Additionally, it integrates well with various third-party platforms, including ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and Microsoft Teams for alert notifications.

What do you dislike about the product?

So far, in my work experience, I haven't encountered anything noteworthy.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The AI analysis of Davis is very good and almost accurate to find the root cause entities which helps to reduce the MTTR for the incident for most of the cases, also the Dashboards are now user interactive with new features like Notebook and Davis AI forecasting.

What do you like best about the product?

Dynatrace’s Davis AI engine automatically pinpoints the root cause of issues, which saves huge time compared to manual troubleshooting.
Dynatrace continuously monitors without gaps, so performance bottlenecks and anomalies are detected instantly.

What do you dislike about the product?

Licensing can get expensive and sometimes confusing when scaling across multiple environments.
Some advanced customization and integrations require extra effort or external tools.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

To trace application requests end-to-end and quickly identify bottlenecks.
For centralized log monitoring, correlation with issues, and root cause analysis.

What do you like best about the product?

Dynatrace is a great solution for monitoring applications and infrastructure. The dashboard is very good, shows a lot of different data in one place, so we not need go different tools. I like how it show real-time performance and alerting is also fast.

What do you dislike about the product?

Setup for some custom metric is little confusing, need more simple steps. Documentation is big but not always easy to understand.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Dynatrace helps us with a lot of different functions, from user clicks to backend server. It help us find root cause fast, no need guess or wait long time. Great application and infrastructure monitoring software.

My main use cases with Dynatrace  include a plethora of functionalities. Real user monitoring (RUM) is being used extensively. Synthetic monitoring is used extensively. We use Kafka monitoring. I have awareness of how AWS  metrics are being sent, whether it's a direct integration or only account-level integration. We use it significantly.

Some of the best features I appreciate about Dynatrace  include synthetic monitoring, where you can get into HTTP level monitoring and click browser monitoring, which is available in both Splunk and Dynatrace. This is very useful in our environment. Apart from that, mobile-based monitoring, which we have embedded in some cases with the apps that are connected, is also beneficial for monitoring APIs.

Synthetic monitoring has had a significant impact on my ability to track performance proactively. It has been very useful. It serves two aspects: synthetic monitoring is primarily for the front-end side where availability and tracking whether the website is running, and we can verify if users are able to log in and see things running.

From the infrastructure point of view, the availability of the infrastructure at AWS  level with Kafka, EC2  instances, and Lambda functions is covered for the monitoring system and infrastructure team. We are catering to both audiences.

Dynatrace's AI-driven Davis engine absolutely helps identify performance issues by showing root cause analysis for us up to 200%; whatever is integrated, if it is visible, it can stitch and show.

The comprehensive application topology visualization in Dynatrace, called Smartscape, has benefited my understanding of system dependencies. Even though Splunk has something similar, since we are using Dynatrace primarily for observability, we can get top-to-bottom visibility, from infrastructure to network to application front end. When integrated based on application requirements, we get a good grasp of what's happening during issues.

Dynatrace could be improved primarily with regards to pricing. These tools are expensive. They have been the pioneers from inception, and they remain at the top of the Gartner chart. The quicker we learn, the better we can serve is what the team believes.

Learning is another aspect that needs improvement, specifically how the tools can educate users. Education needs to be tailored differently for front-end user monitoring, infrastructure-based monitoring, and centralized monitoring teams. The segregation of educating how to use the tool is something we have recommended to all tools teams and product owners.

They could help with more learning capabilities. A monitoring tool will be used by different types of users. One is from the infrastructure point of view. Another is an application developer who wants to see if strings are getting attached and code-based applications are being stitched together. A front-end monitoring person or business wants to know about website and infrastructure availability, and what kinds of dashboards they can create for their comfort. That's how a tool gains visibility and inclusiveness. It depends on the owner of the tool to address these different aspects and let users choose their preferred way to use the tool.

I have nearly six years of experience with Dynatrace.

Regarding the initial setup, while I can't speak for how my company implemented it overall, I can say that the Dynatrace setup is good enough, not an issue. Integration with the cloud is straightforward. In cases of new aspects of cloud, some drilling is needed to determine installation possibilities. That's a challenge in the cloud - whether to integrate with the cloud directly or opt for agent installation. These issues arise when new features or services are enabled in AWS; parallelly, Dynatrace and Splunk and these tools need to adapt to see if these services can be monitored. Users start asking if we can enable new AWS features in our tools. This synchronization should happen at the back end; users should not be involved in that process.

I think Dynatrace's customer service and technical support for this product is good. Out of five, it rates nearly four. This is good enough to expect.

Positive

The monitoring team is able to work without any user intervention, which is appreciable. Comparing to other tools such as Splunk, CloudWatch, or other tools which I have researched for RFPs, I feel DataDog is good enough. However, based on the experience from my users, Dynatrace is more flexible for them.

We deal with APM  solutions and monitoring or logging solutions by having Splunk already in place in my environment, along with Dynatrace. We have other tools such as CloudWatch.

I have dealt with Splunk on-call and have all kinds of experience. I have used the PeerSpot platform extensively, and it does help significantly. I will be happy to provide individual product reviews.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Dynatrace an 8 out of 10.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS)