Item: Dynatrace
Rating: 8
Author: Ryan Smith

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dynatrace is used throughout our organization to provide APM including visibility, monitoring, and alerting for our products and services. We provide many different SaaS-based products and need to ensure that they're available to customers all the time. We want to ensure that we're providing an excellent experience for our users.

Pros and Cons

Setup, deployment, and updates
AI engine actually works--bubbles problems up proactively

Price point--it's extremely expensive
Support offering--in-app chat works, but takes a long time to solve problems that are even somewhat complex

Return on Investment

It's expensive, but so are outages. We'll continue investing in it.
Had our best uptime year ever, last year.

Alternatives Considered

AppDynamics and New Relic

Dynatrace was the easiest to use. AppDynamics was a close second. The Dynatrace AI agent was extremely impressive. Others are working on it but don't seem to be there yet. The Dynatrace roadmap and vision (coupled with execution to this point) matched where we were going the best with cloud and kubernetes playing the most key roles. New Relic required far too much code instrumentation and changes to get the detail we got out-of-the-box with both AppDynamics and Dynatrace. New Relic and AppDynamics were both more competitively priced though--Dynatrace is pricey.

Support Rating

Dynatrace has paid support offerings, but considering the size of our investment, I would have expected more of a premium offering being available as part of the purchase where we really only have in-app chat. Both other competitors offered this. Luckily it's pretty easy to use so generally we don't need a ton of help.

Key Insights

Do you think Dynatrace delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Dynatrace's feature set?

Yes

Did Dynatrace live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Dynatrace go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Dynatrace again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Dynatrace is well suited to complex infrastructures--hybrid cloud and on-premises. We use Dynatrace across seven different data centers in three global regions, and it was extremely simple to roll all of that out. It did take some time to get used to the different ways in which Dynatrace presents information as opposed to prior tools like New Relic and AppDynamics, but once you get used to it, Dynatrace makes a lot of sense.

Great product, but pricey

Overall Satisfaction with Dynatrace