Dynatrace Network Application Monitoring (Discontinued) vs. GitLab

Dynatrace Network Application Monitoring (NAM), formerly DCRUM, has improved greatly compared to when it was DCRUM; however, it still needs a lot of improvement in end-to-end flow capture with regards to network monitoring. Its alerting and integration capabilities are very good and easy to use. But it still needs a lot of tweaking in usability.

Incentivized

Initial team collaboration was very difficult before the Gitlab integration. There is no code version maintained by the developer leading to problematic situations when actual deployment needs to be done. The initial setup was a learning curve, but the overall integration helped to work with the team. The CI/CD pipeline also helped to easy deployment.

Incentivized

• Dynatrace DCRUM can monitor legacy application protocols that are still used in a lot of organizations worldwide who still trust in those technologies.
• DCRUM monitors client-server architectures very well and can pinpoint issues along an infrastructure stack.
• Dynatrace DCRUM can analyze a wide spectre of protocols: Corba, DNS, DB2, Exchange, TCP, HTTP, IBM MQ, Citrix, ICMP, Informix, Tuxedo, SMB, LDAP, MSRPC, MySQL, NetFlow, Net8, Oracle Forms, RMI, SAP GUI, SAP HANA, SAP RFC, SMB, SOAP, XML.

• The way they have managed to provide the version management aspect using git with project setup and users is mesmerising cause there's no product out there that gives this freely.
• Continuous updates and hearing what users need is what the product engineers at GitLab are doing best. They come back to you with exactly what you need every while.
• Quality features, Latest tech integrations have made the end-to-end solution very flexible and agile.
• CI/CD tools implementation with pipelines and deployment strategies is just making the job for Infra teams smoother.

Incentivized

• Major upgrades process is sometimes unpredictable.
• The use of SQL Server should be evaluated for something else.
• Easier SSL key handling.

• Documentation of CI features have room for improvement, in particular in cases where own runners with pre-deployed images are used
• Project management features, such as milestones etc. seem un-intuitive, and we struggle to get developers to actually use them
• Settings for having GitLab send email notifications ought to be more fine-grained. Seems like it is a choice between emails for everything, and no emails at all

Incentivized

Gitlab is the best in its segment. They have a free version, they have open-source software, they provide a good service with their SaaS product, they are a fully-remote company since the beginning (which means they are fully distributed and have forward-thinking IMO). I would certainly recommend them to everyone.

Incentivized

Best of breed.

The web console management is superior and I would have given Gitlab a 10, but sometimes it is hard to find documentation about a configuration setting in the gitlab.rb configuration file. As we move everything to code that means moving our CVS tools to code as well - and Gitlab to code. The usability of Gitlab from the end user's perspective is superior and the usability from the operations team is very good and getting better but there could be a little improvement in the gitlab.rb config file layout and documentation.

Incentivized

The only thing missing for a 10, would be if they texted or called you back.

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft

Incentivized

Nagios can't trace real user transactions from a front-end tier through a backend-tier,;with Nagios you only can monitor server availability and hardware issues. Riverbed is commonly used to determine networking issues without considering real user transactions impact on an application stack.

We have a small custom code development group. We only needed a basic entry-level code management repository. Gitlab meets our needs and is very price advantageous compared to others on the market. We also needed a system that is easy to administer and easy to grant access to our limited-size user base. Gitlab does what we need and gives the necessary flexibility for application support, user administration, and code/version control needs to be required.

• Dynatrace Network Application Monitoring (NAM), formerly DCRUM, helped us get a lot of info on an ongoing issue.
• It helped us figure out network bottlenecks in our environment.
• It is a very costly tool and a lot of other cheaper tools give same kind of info.

Incentivized

• We are moving towards Gitlab only as our SCM & CI tool. So it would be an alternative to Jenkins. Saving our licensing cost there.
• We have also stopped using Confluence & using Gitlab for our documentation purposes. Reducing cost there as well.

Incentivized