Dynatrace Classic

My main use case for Dynatrace  is logs and tracking metrics, mostly API latencies, to find API latency metrics and monitor whole services and microservices.

About my main use case with Dynatrace , I will add a few things: first is that we create a custom dashboard, which is very helpful for us to monitor multiple microservices, since the application relies on multiple services. Then we have a few features including error detection, such as how many 4xx error rates are coming, what 5xx error rates are coming, and what are the client-side and server-side problems. Those kinds of built-in Dynatrace alert systems we can use for latency and error classification. We can link those things into channels such as Slack, email, or mostly PagerDuty, so the on-call person will receive these alerts.

The best features Dynatrace offers include AI-based metrics collection, which impresses me a lot because it is very helpful to quickly check all the issues that come up. The first thing is end-to-end visibility across all the services. That is one thing where we can know the infrastructures, hosts, containers, VMs, and what is happening with the application. Then this automatic discovery and mapping helps a lot. Distributed tracing, which is the PurePath thing, is a very helpful feature. For root cause analysis, the recent Davis AI is something game-changing and is helping a lot, saving a lot of time. That is the main feature right now. The remaining things are the foundational features and making access to all the features so quick. Davis AI makes use of the features that exist, and now I am using those features. So that is a good thing.

The root cause analysis feature specifically helps my team save time or solve issues by providing detailed timings and external APIs and cache whenever the PurePath thing comes, to trace every subsequent call. We are not only working with our own microservices; we are working along with multiple vendors. Sometimes the latency is not from our system but from a vendor system. During those times, we see why this service is taking a lot of time because this service is waiting for a call. These small details on timings and the DB cache add so much value to the PurePath thing. The AI powered Davis detects anomalies and root cause issues across the stack, which is also a valuable feature. Application topology and network flows are also very helpful. These things are primarily helping us.

Before moving on, I would appreciate the custom dashboard and visualization part of Dynatrace, where I did not talk much about those things. The real-time charts are very helpful to monitor the health of the application. Heat maps are really cool to see, and service flow maps are really required to understand the things. The key performance indicators are very good. These are the key standpoints of my application metrics. Whenever I am the on-call person in PagerDuty, these are the things I am fundamentally looking for. This is a lookup book for me to make sure this application is in good health.

Dynatrace has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to see very quick action whenever there is an issue with production. We can quickly open the dashboard, see the error rates where it is happening, and perform a quick analysis to find the root cause. That is a huge part. The second part is improvisation; whenever we come to a stable state and have some technical debt to take, we can check what APIs are causing latency and work on those issues, asking why it is happening. Sometimes it leads to redesigning the domain, coming from the dashboards. Every time we do not know how many services exist or why a particular service is working for this domain while we are in some centralized stage. But while coming to this Dynatrace dashboard, seeing all services in one place helps us think why this service is talking to this service. We can classify domain-level and regroup the domain. This way, it is helping us by giving a mental model and a mental map to track everything. That is a huge win for us.

I think Dynatrace can be improved in dashboard creation, as this is the face of a product. Although Dynatrace may have many things, new users typically do not know the whole power of the product. To onboard new people, it would be beneficial to provide template dashboards or suggested dashboards. Organizations working with microservice architecture will follow some templates, so suggesting simple, hand-picked features that are really helpful could make a difference. Quick configurable and customizable templates would be very useful. Whenever they come into the product, they can use this template and feel that their product is applied to it. Immediately, they will think everything is online and can improve easily. This base can be provided in template form. Since Dynatrace has a lot of features now, the AI integration makes it simple, but the product itself is very huge. To understand and utilize it, maybe it would be good to index the essential features.

Previously, we used Grafana  as a different solution. We switched because Dynatrace provides better overall metrics, but switching the solution is not my decision; it is an organization-wide decision, so I do not have much influence there or comment on it.

There is definitely a return on investment; I see time saving. Also, the employees working with operations do not require that level anymore, so we can reduce a few.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that it is a bit pricey, but it is very much worth it. We can maintain licenses as a product that we must own because this is an alerting system and metric system. The product I am working with is critical, having millions of users coming and going; it is the health monitor part of that product. It is essential, and it is okay to spend that money.

Before choosing Dynatrace, we evaluated Grafana , and we considered moving from Grafana to Dynatrace because of specific benefits. We had our own trade-offs, and ultimately, we chose Dynatrace.

I would advise others looking into using Dynatrace to set up as many metrics for the product they are using as possible, and I ask them to create dashboards to monitor.

Overall, Dynatrace is a good product; I will definitely suggest it. It offers strong usage while addressing production issues and health monitoring. It is a very good product. I rate this product an eight out of ten.

My main use case for Dynatrace  is for observability monitoring, specifically to know performance, end-to-end monitoring, and root cause analysis.

From the application side, we need monitoring for the latency, error rate, and request count for the transaction, and also for the digital experience; we want to monitor the analytics of user application. Additionally, for the infrastructure, we want to monitor the utilization of CPU, memory, disk, and network.

For monitoring transactional, it means how many transactions come to our customers in banking.

The best feature Dynatrace  offers is APM . When I mention APM , I am referring to Application Behavior Monitoring, and database monitoring is what makes that feature stand out for me.

Database monitoring is very helpful to know the performance of query performance, meaning how much latency there is for the query once called from the application side, and if there is an error from the query, it indicates issues such as ORA errors from Oracle or other errors from PostgreSQL  and MySQL  or any DBMS .

Dynatrace positively impacts our organization because it is a unified monitoring solution that centralizes the performance of infrastructure, application, and database.

Dynatrace can be improved from the security side because other observability products are enhancing security features, while Dynatrace has room for improvement in this area.

For integration, Dynatrace can improve with WebMethod because it is quite common among our customers using that platform, and they want to monitor their transactions for ESB, which is middleware.

Dynatrace could improve its recommendations, which are not only for cause analysis but also for application performance, infrastructure, and database, including database tuning for the query. I would rate Dynatrace an eight for these reasons.

I have been using Dynatrace for around six to seven years.

Dynatrace is stable.

The scalability of Dynatrace is very significant, especially considering the current improvements in their features, and there is a big opportunity from Indonesia with many use cases for Dynatrace.

The customer support from Dynatrace is very helpful, as they assist our customers effectively when there are problems on the platform side.

I have previously used different solutions such as Datadog  and Instana because our customers are selling three products of observability.

For the investment, Dynatrace is very helpful for our customers because they can see the transactions through Dynatrace and save money by identifying problems, thereby reducing monetary losses on their application side.

For pricing, we use the Classic model, specifically DPS , which stands for platform subscription. The cost can be controlled from our side, and it is very transparent with Dynatrace regarding DPS  and licensing.

The first time we used Dynatrace, we did not evaluate other options, but later considered Datadog , Instana, and Elastic APM.

My advice for others looking into using Dynatrace is that recommendations are very helpful for our customers, as many products provide numerous recommendations. However, Dynatrace focuses mainly on monitoring operations and providing root cause analysis without offering much in the way of recommendations, which I believe is important for observability products.

Our company has a business relationship with Dynatrace beyond being just a customer; we are both a partner for local support and a reseller for licensing. I rate this product an eight out of ten.

Dynatrace 's main use case for our organization is incident management, primarily driving alerts, traces, and incident management for production servers on both Linux and Windows 2016 servers.

A specific example of how I use Dynatrace  for incident management is that it provides our support team members with alerts if a certain service on a server is not working, there is a failure of a particular service, or the server is not performing as needed. We receive an incident for that and trace the server's services uptime using Dynatrace, which helps us diagnose the issue for both Linux and Windows servers.

Our main focus is maintaining the servers' uptime, and Dynatrace helps us minimize server downtime while providing applications and other services to our end user team.

Dynatrace's best features include alerts and the ability to monitor server health, such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, disk space utilization, as well as network services, and it also helps with application performance monitoring (APM ).

I find server health check resources utilization, network monitoring, and APM  most valuable for our team, as it helps our other cross-functional teams that require that data to track network health and application health. Dynatrace helps all of us in development and operations support, which makes it a really valuable tool.

Dynatrace has positively impacted our organization by helping us reduce downtime, as it was much higher before using Dynatrace. We are now able to minimize downtime for the servers and applications and easily trace and diagnose issues at the infrastructure level using Dynatrace, which is definitely helpful for enterprises using IT systems.

I give it a nine because the one percent improvement is required in itself, since if I provide a ten, then there is no room for improvement.

Dynatrace provides regular upgrades as a software used to provide server health checks, network monitoring, and application performance monitoring, so the team looking into Dynatrace's development provides regular updates. I don't think I can provide any improvements to Dynatrace as an end user.

I have been using Dynatrace for the last two plus years.

In my experience, Dynatrace is very stable and we don't need to do much additional work once it is installed and set up along with its configuration. There is nothing additional to manage about Dynatrace.

Dynatrace is scalable.

Customer support for Dynatrace is well-equipped, and they try to resolve queries if we contact them with any particular issue. They provide quick resolutions.

When I joined my client project work, they were already using Dynatrace, so I don't have any idea of what they were using before that.

Time is definitely saved with Dynatrace, as without it, it is very difficult for support team members to find out where the exact fault has occurred. With Dynatrace, we receive direct alerts on our Dynatrace console, allowing for much faster resolutions, so it definitely saves cost, efforts, and time.

Downtime has been reduced by almost thirty to forty percent in tracking and resolving issues, as Dynatrace logs, alerts, and traces help us go straight to the issue and try to fix it. Regarding cost savings, it has resulted in cost savings of mostly around twenty to twenty-five percent.

I don't have any idea about whether my organization evaluated other options before choosing Dynatrace.

I will definitely recommend Dynatrace as an APM, server health check, and network performance monitoring tool to be used by large-scale or mid-range organizations. I have no additional thoughts about Dynatrace. My review rating for Dynatrace is nine.