Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS)

In my daily work, I use Dynatrace  to check any DT alert that appears. It is mostly used to check any impact that has occurred and the alert which was situated in our environment. I generally receive these alerts through email, and the email contains a hyperlink. When I click on it and open it in a browser, it redirects me directly to Dynatrace . I open it and try to backtrace all the steps and try to find endpoints on what caused the error. If I am part of a claims center team, I can see where the memory saturation was or a high number of users threshold limit.

Recently, about one week ago, I received a DT alert. The DT alert indicates that I have to go directly and search using the DT specific number. An incident gets raised in the ServiceNow  dashboard and I just copy that DT alert and go to Dynatrace and search it with that specific DT key as a primary key. When I search with that, I will find what is the root cause of it. The recent occurrence was memory saturation where the memory limit was hit as I was trying to scale up storage, but users exceeded the demand. I received this alert, but it was resolved automatically. I could see why it was happening. I backtraced a few steps and saw at which time the influx was more and why it was more. I could also see the service flow where I could see which batch gets executed at which time and after which batch what the workflow is. There are some jobs that run with reactivity in production. With reactivity means all the sequence of jobs get executed at the same time. Without reactivity means only that specific job gets executed. I could see the service flow that is all the reactivity process in production, including which batch is running after that in Dynatrace. Finding out endpoints is also what I find very intriguing because it is really good. I searched that and I solved that issue.

I have integrated Dynatrace into my Guidewire application. Guidewire is an insurance product which I use.

I mostly use Dynatrace to find the root cause and perform certain analysis and provide users why this sort of issue is occurring. The start and end points are mandatory and I also check the service flow, which enables me to know where the job is running and at which point it is and when will the next job be executed. Everything happens in a sequence. The visualization is what I find most interesting because having a visualization graph will enhance reading capacity and readability.

When I was solving a recent incident about memory saturation, what I found the best is the visualizations. Every particular reason, when and where it was impacted, suppose a part of memory was impacted, I can view it in any sort of format, a pie chart or a bar chart or a histogram. I can choose any type of graph based on my better readability. It is really convenient and it is easy to visualize where things have gone wrong and why things have gone wrong, why the influx was high, why the influx was low. I can analyze whether my scaling capacity increased or not. I get to analyze everything. The visualization is the best feature.

I have never faced any sort of downtime issues when working with Dynatrace. The visualizations are the next best feature. If I did not have any visualizations and got a DT alert, just looking through clustered information would take a considerable amount of time and energy. Having graphs and charts enables me to know where and at which time the saturation point was high or at which point the saturation time was low. I could compare that specific graph with the same day or perform a weekly analysis or a monthly analysis, and it will be crystal clear. Humans can remember more what we see than what we read. Visualization helps me a lot. It saves a lot of time. If I were spending around five hours on a Dynatrace task, it saves around one to two hours easily. It makes me faster and I get to give accurate solutions.

One of the features that I find intriguing is I can go through business analytics dashboards. That concatenated dashboard enables me to see which processes and which jobs are running parallelly, simultaneously. One job will not be running singularly in my specific environment. At the same time, multiple jobs might be running. In case an incident pops up and I need to check the service flow, I just go to that specific job ID and search the workflow, service flow of that particular branch and know where it is. It helps me in segregating most of the information which is clustered generally.

One big thing is the learning curve. It can feel overwhelming at first, especially for new users. When I started as a fresher, it felt a huge hurdle for me to cross. Simplifying  the onboarding experience or adding more guided walkthroughs would be appreciated. The UI also can sometimes feel more clustered, especially when navigating across multiple services or dashboards. I want it to be more intuitive. I want it to be more customizable so that I could improve the usability of it. Of course, the licensing and setup cost are also slightly expensive.

I have been working for around 1.4 years in my current field and I have been using Dynatrace for around eight months.

I would say Dynatrace is very stable because till now I have never faced any sort of downtime issues. If any downtime issue were to be faced in production, I would probably have a global outage. Dynatrace is very stable.

Dynatrace's scalability is one of the best features. Whenever there is a huge number of users and when I am expecting at a certain time, suppose at 6:00 to 7:00, that would be a huge rush hours where a lot of users try to log in and try to do many changes in their respective profile. I scale up storage and Dynatrace tries to adapt pretty well to my growing needs. I am switching to version 10, moving to cloud, and it is scaling pretty well.

I reached out initially because the UI was pretty complex. For a beginner who has to use Dynatrace, I would say they would face considerable challenges. I reached out to customer support and they were really helpful. I reached out to them ten to fifteen times and they did provide proper documentation. That documentation was huge, so they helped me pinpoint using certain keywords. They literally taught me what to do.

I did not use any other solution prior to Dynatrace. This was the first product that I ever used as soon as I entered the market and I am continuously using it till now.

At the beginning, I did face a considerable amount of challenges because the UI was not that customizable. I had to reread the entire documentation that Dynatrace provided. Bit by bit, it took me a little bit of time in setting up, but once I got used to it, it is pretty straightforward.

Everything was pretty smooth. My managing team did not face any difficulties when they were trying to set up everything and licensing related activities, but the cost is slightly more expensive and is on the expensive side. I would appreciate it if they could reduce the cost or make it more customizable.

This is a great return of investment because it saved me a lot of time. My team tends to face Dynatrace issues every week, around twelve to fifteen of them. Whenever an incident pops up, I try to spend less time on working on incidents and more time working on enhancement. If I were to work five hours on a Dynatrace incident, I think I would save one or two hours because of its visualization capabilities and its workflow which shows me everything. I saved a lot of money as well because I did not recruit any new developers as soon as I started this product. I saved time and money.

Everything was pretty smooth. My managing team did not face any difficulties when they were trying to set up everything and licensing related activities, but the cost is slightly more expensive and is on the expensive side. I would appreciate it if they could reduce the cost or make it more customizable.

My team did try to review other options, but I felt Dynatrace was the best in the market. After carefully reviewing, I read comments from others and visited other projects and other project members showed me the flow and how it improved it. I just moved on with it.

I would not recommend this to a small project team or any other small teams because this is slightly a costlier product. Of course, the readability and visualizations are pretty noticeable features that anyone would want, but the pricing is not worth it for small teams because I would try to evaluate more options. Dynatrace is the best product in the market. It might be difficult to learn at first, but when you try to spend more time on it, reading everything, the analysis is very top of the line. The ability to backtrace is important because I will know where things have gone wrong. Similar products in the market, similar to Dynatrace, do not provide the ability to backtrace. Backtracing is one of the important steps. I give this product a review rating of nine out of ten.

The main use case for using Dynatrace  is to check the CPU utilization and the performance stats of my load test, stress test, or endurance test.

During one of my tests, when I perform a load test, I parallelly open or configure the server of that application in Dynatrace , creating a new dashboard so that during my load test, I can easily observe what is happening, what the error stats are, what my pass percentage is, what my CPU utilization is, or the garbage collection, and other metrics.

I can even check my alerts and exceptions as well.

For me, the best feature Dynatrace offers is full-stack observability, which allows me to check my infrastructure or the containers because most of my applications are cloud-based, and with Dynatrace, I can check the database or the network path, or which are on-premises or cloud, making full-stack observability more suitable for me.

Dynatrace is our APM  tool, which provides deep code-level visibility, allowing us to check the methods or exceptions, database calls, or external services, and we can easily trace them out.

Dynatrace has positively impacted my organization because usually when I do a load test, our API SLA is only one second, but it crosses more than three seconds or five seconds, and by using this APM  tool, we can figure out what is causing it, what kind of error it is throwing, and how we can optimize it, making it very useful for my organization as well as for me while doing load testing.

For the metrics or numbers, our error rate should be less than three percent, and achieving less than three percent, even if it is one percent, is very good, and the reduction of the error rate by using Dynatrace was quite good.

Dynatrace itself is a very good platform where the UI interface is very simple and usable, but I would say if it were made even more simple, similar to our Splunk dashboard, that could help users or newer users understand it more easily, especially since sometimes I have seen when using Dynatrace, we are not able to add the time frame properly.

If you add some more fields with simple words or simple terms instead of the complex terms used for a resource, that might be helpful.

Dynatrace can be better and more user-friendly, and that is my advice, but overall, it is a good application and APM tool for a performance tester.

I have been using Dynatrace for four to five years.

Dynatrace is stable.

The scalability of Dynatrace is good, and we can easily figure out what is happening.

The customer support is responsive because when I logged some defects to the developer teams, they worked with Dynatrace team, and I think we have received much support.

Before using Dynatrace, I used AppDynamics and Splunk.

By using the APM tool for resource management and time management, we have saved a lot of time, so I would say this is a good investment that the organization has made.

I have not switched from AppDynamics as well as Splunk because I am using Dynatrace as well as those other two APM tools, depending on my project level, what the project is configured with, and which is better.

I would advise others to use Dynatrace because it is very good in terms of scalability and reliability, and the stats it shows, including the perfection and the graph, are very good, so I would suggest they use Dynatrace. I gave this review a rating of nine.