Dynatrace vs. Retrace vs. StackState

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

If I need to change a logo design on the invoice, the new logo is slightly larger or smaller so the type below the logo is in a different area than before. In this case, you would need to load the new version of the document into APM Plus and redo the mapping of the field areas to properly grab the information needed to process the document. Without doing this, the document could fail or go to the wrong archive based on the fields.

Incentivized

StackState is suitable for 1000+ hosts. Sometimes specific applications can take higher development time. Well suited for hybrid platforms to build end to end service alarms and service views. Advanced UI navigation might require some training. It is not a simple download and deploy software. It will require development in an agile model. Where newer versions are deployed to suit exact client requirements. Support contract with the StackState Engineer for development of use-cases is required and very useful.

• 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

• Integration of performance management with log management so you get the parameters sent
• In-line log and error data in trace
• Integration of error and log data, so in one click you can see all the logs recorded when an error was thrown
• Very reasonably priced

• Giving observability of the entire IT stack
• Custom alerting options.
• Ingesting many different types of data.
• Requesting new features is encouraged and they often add them quite quickly.

• 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

• To set up the fields that APM Plus monitors, you need to map each field area on each document.
• APM Plus could use a way to link the documents back into the finance or business software so you can find the document under the PO, Sales Order, Invoice, etc.
• APM Plus setup is only for the professionals. There are many areas that need tweaking on setup, having a better default setup would lessen the learning curve to set it up for use.

Incentivized

• Can't think of anything yet.

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

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

Some elements of the product haven't had the usability upgrade yet and can be a bit technical. This is to be expected as they are trying to solve complex problems. I am sure that in the future, steps will be made to simplify this as well for the users / administrators / developers of the platform.

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

Incentivized

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

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

It's swift, they're thinking along with us. It's a "collaboration approach" rather than a (traditional) customer-supplier relation. Out new ideas are taken in concern and often ends up in enhancements of StackState

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

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

It is a very impressive tool which doesn't overwhelm you with unnecessary data. They have combination of tools that haven't seen by any other company which makes it a very powerful tool

Dynatrace can be used to monitor may software tools

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.

• APM Plus has freed up users from having to manually attach documents to each place they are sending it. APM Plus will do it automatically.
• APM Plus provides a searchable archive to re-visit sent documents with customers and vendors. Having to reprint a document you risk the potential that something has changed since it was last printed.
• APM Plus does need IT staff for adjustments and to review sending problems. Not for an average user.

Incentivized

• Increased visibility of all resources in cloud to 100%.
• Deviated stages are able to detect problems before their occurrence. However, [it] needs tunings for false alarms.