Amazon CloudWatch vs. Dynatrace

For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.

Incentivized

Dynatrace is well suited to a number of tasks. It is important to determine who the end users are and gather good information to tailor their experience accordingly. For instance, business/marketing should not have access to some of the more technical data, and business metrics can be a distraction for IT operations personnel.

Incentivized

• It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
• It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
• If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

Incentivized

• We loved Dynatrace's ability to show the data flow - from the front end points through the back end points straight to the database and various API's. It was advanced in its data visualization. This is useful for debugging - showing when/where the errors are. It can even enable non-technical individuals in the corporation to help debug
• Dynatrace has some great highly customizable integration options as well as monitoring. You can configure your layout & integration options to create custom monitoring alerts for your applications performance. Further you can increase the extensibility of using a REST API on your architecture.
• Some advanced dev-ops systems are utilizing Kubernetes/docker aswell as Node.JS - Dynatrace was able to log and help understand all of our dev-ops needs. It gave us native alerts based off of deviations from the baseline that we set during initial configuration. These metrics are priceless.

Incentivized

• Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
• Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
• By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.

Incentivized

• Dynatrace does not monitor easily on AIX OS.
• Dynatrace does not monitor easily on a C-based application.
• The way DPGR is addressed by Dynatrace is not very complete, and not clear. One thing is to mask the IP and request attributes but is not enough, the replay session feature is great but raises serious questions about user tracking.

Incentivized

We have already renewed our purchase with the company. They make it easy for us to get a temporary license for our contingency site that is only used for testing twice a year. We are expanding our license with for this tool. We find it very useful and will renew it again.

Incentivized

It's excellent at collecting logs. It's easy to set up. The viewing & querying part could be much better, though. The query syntax takes some time to get used to, & the examples are not helpful. Also, while being great, Log Insights requires manual picking of log streams to query across every time.

Incentivized

Dynatrace is great to use once you understand how to use it correctly and get used to the layout of it. While I do not actively use it every day, whenever I do use it, I do have to get refamiliarized with it. However, once you have your dashboards setup correctly with the data that you want to see when you first login to Dynatrace, it's amazing.

Incentivized

Our environment, it never goes down therefore is always available.

Incentivized

We have not seen where it does slow down an application.

Incentivized

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

Incentivized

Given that Dynatrace has become an informal industry standard, the plethora of information available on forums is massive. Most problems or roadblocks you come across are most likely (almost certainly, in fact) already solved and solutions available on these forums. The tech support at Dynatrace is also quite good, with prompt and knowledgeable people at their end.

Incentivized

We did both online and in house training - they used our system so it made more sense.

Incentivized

The training was done on our time and with our system.

Incentivized

Using Dynatrace support services to assist (and lead) the implementation was extremely important.

Incentivized

Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and cheaper way. Integrating Grafana with them will make it more capable Elasticsearch for log retention and querying will surpass cloudwatch log monitoring in both performance and speed

Incentivized

Synthetic Monitoring automatically does what other products do only through the use of other tools or through the development of user applications that still have a high cost of maintenance. The other products are not immediately usable and require many customizations. Through the use of configuration automatisms, you can be immediately operational and, in our case, we detected several imperfections in the applications.

Incentivized

Dynatrace can be used to monitor may software tools

Incentivized

• Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized.
• Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require.
• Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI.

Incentivized

• Thanks to Dynatrace we have been able to effectively challenge and collaborate with service providers and outsourced IT teams.
• Thanks to Dynatrace we have reduced MTTR on troubleshooting by a magnitude of four.
• The performance analyses our team has done with Dynatrace earned us trust among management, business teams, and IT teams.