Dynatrace Platform Subscription (Contracts)

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)

What do you like best about the product?

1) It provides end to end observability capabilities of applications to discover the issues quickly.
2) Automated configurations which reduces the error possibilities that can come during manual setup.
3) It offers great support for cloud native applications such as AWS, Azure and GCP cloud.

What do you dislike about the product?

1) Highly costly that small companies may not afford to implement.
2) Less option to customize dashboards as per the requirements.
3) Data center or on-premise support are limited.

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

Dynatrace is a popular platform which offers complete visibility of applications running on cloud to effectively monitor them at the real-time and it is helping our DevOps and Cloud teams to monitor the applications running on multiple environments to get better insights to maintain the health of systems.

Whenever we do any kind of performance or load testing with Dynatrace , we monitor the environment using service dashboards, deep distribution tracing, analyzing response time hotspots, method hotspots, and understanding the service flow while correlating all this with our load testing results and sharing the feedback with the stakeholders.

We don't use anything related to CI/CD on Dynatrace , but we use it through LoadRunner  Enterprise.

I find the classic service analysis, service analysis, distribution tracing, and the technology stack that it shows most valuable about Dynatrace, along with the Scape View. I'm unable to pronounce the exact name, but there is a Scaped View, Scaled View, or Scape View where I can see all the environments and how they are configured.

We use AI-powered anomaly detection from Dynatrace, specifically Davis AI log analysis.

The effectiveness of Dynatrace's user experience monitoring is very useful.

I'm using Dynatrace for full-stack monitoring.

I think Dynatrace almost looks good, but I believe we should improve how we can integrate with AI. I'm specifically looking at AIOps  and how we can monitor AIOps-related things, considering we have LLMs and all that stuff. I don't see those monitoring capabilities for NVIDIA chips, NPUs, GPUs, or anything similar, and maybe it has them, but unfortunately, I lack the knowledge to understand where I can view all those things.

I've been working with Dynatrace for nearly five years.

I would rate the stability of Dynatrace approximately between nine and ten.

The ability to scale and expand in Dynatrace rates around nine to ten altogether.

For Dynatrace tech support, we have a dedicated team here, which is easily reachable, so I rate it around nine to ten.

Positive

I'm not using AppDynamics currently. We used to use it, but now we are using Dynatrace. I moved to Dynatrace completely from AppDynamics.

Dynatrace is basically set up by a Dynatrace admin. OneAgent is installed on one machine, and the entire thing gets monitored through Dynatrace.

JMeter  and BlazeMeter  are the other vendors I'm working with. I'm only using JMeter  from Apache, not using Tomcat  or something similar.

The main benefit of Dynatrace is that it's easy to understand where exactly the issue is. When you see the PurePath, you know which particular machine or hop the application is having an issue with, allowing us to easily drill down to what is happening with the application. If something is happening on the UI, you want to understand what's wrong with the request, and to do that, you need to analyze Dynatrace to easily understand the root cause and where exactly you're seeing the issue.

The Dynatrace license is at the client's location; the client has purchased it, and we just use it.

Without any doubt, Dynatrace is preferable compared to AppDynamics. The main reason why Dynatrace is better is that you can see everything in one go; it includes log analysis, AWS  analysis, component level analysis, PurePaths, distribution tracing, real user metrics, mobile metrics, all in one particular tool, one solution.

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

On-premises

Amazon Web Services  (AWS)

What do you like best about the product?

Honestly, Dynatrace kinda blew my mind with how simple it is to get rolling, considering the beast it is under the hood. Setup? Barely broke a sweat—super clear docs, and the UI’s not a labyrinth, which is rare for stuff this technical. I’m in there all the time, poking around because, let’s be real, it’s loaded. Full-stack monitoring, peeking at user experience, whatever—I can pretty much do it all.

Plugging it into other tools? Piece of cake. Cloud stuff, CI/CD pipelines, Slack or whatever you’re using—it just clicks together. I haven’t needed support much (thankfully), but the couple times I did, they actually answered fast and knew what they were talking about. Wild.

The real user monitoring? Total game-changer. You get to see what actual people are doing, live—not just boring stats. And session replay? It’s like CSI for user journeys. I can finally figure out what made someone rage-quit.

The metrics are super detailed, too. Response times, error rates, Apdex—so you can keep tabs on whether things are cruising or crashing. Plus, if you’re into synthetic checks, custom dashboards, or just wanna nerd out over deep-dive data from the infrastructure all the way up to the front-end, it’s all there. No joke, it’s like peeking under the hood of the whole operation.

What do you dislike about the product?

Man, jumping into this thing? Kinda feels like being tossed into the deep end without floaties. The learning curve’s no joke, especially if you’re brand new. And don’t even get me started on the price—it’s kinda steep, honestly. Not really friendly if you’re running on a shoestring budget or if your team’s tiny. Oh, and those dashboards? They throw so much info at you, it’s like staring at a Where’s Waldo page, but with graphs. If you don’t tweak ‘em, you’ll drown in the chaos. Plus, sometimes they take forever to load. Like, go-make-a-coffee slow. Not exactly a vibe.

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

Let me tell ya, Dynatrace is kind of a lifesaver. Seriously, it untangles so many headaches across our tech mess—it keeps tabs on basically everything. When it comes to our websites and apps, it’s like having x-ray vision: we see load times, errors, the whole user experience in real time. No more waiting for angry customer emails; we can squash problems before they blow up.

Now, session replay? Total game changer. Sometimes I swear users find new ways to break things, but with replay, we can actually watch what happened—like “oh, THAT’S why the button didn’t work.” No more wild guessing on the front-end stuff.

And then, on the infrastructure side, it doesn’t just stop at the basics. It’s got its hooks in our containers, networks, even the big enterprise machines. We get this bird’s-eye view of how everything connects and runs. Dependencies, bottlenecks, weird blips—you name it, we spot it.

The alerting and log stuff is slick too. We don’t have to bounce between a million tools to figure out what’s on fire. It just lets us know, “Hey, go fix this right now.” So yeah, everything’s in one spot, and it just makes keeping our digital world running a whole lot less stressful. If something goes sideways, we’re on it before anyone even notices.

What do you like best about the product?

Perform a thorough granular analysis and monitoring of the application

What do you dislike about the product?

Being so granular delivers many results and options that ultimately prove counterproductive as it confuses the user.

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

the problem is that it is too granular and causes the analyst to become confused and draw ambiguous conclusions