Apica is an observability cost optimization provider helping IT teams gain complete control over their telemetry data economics. Apica Ascent processes all observability data types including metrics, logs, traces, and events while optimizing observability costs.
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Dynatrace
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Dynatrace is an APM scaled for enterprises with cloud, on-premise, and hybrid application and SaaS monitoring. Dynatrace uses AI-supported algorithms to provide continual APM self-learning and predictive alerts for proactive issue resolution.
As I use this for only my area, it is very well suited to what I need it to do. Apica Synthetic monitors two different web applications in a time interval that is easily customizable for uptime and latency. These are critical indicators for a cloud-based point-of-sale system. We need solid uptime and limited latency across the enterprise.
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.
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.
It's very clunky. Infrastructure is large and very difficult to upgrade.
SaaS and On-premise versions are different. There is an LDAP integration but users can only be assigned to one group (i.e. department). If you are in 2 departments, you need 2 separate logins.
Update: they now offer federated logins
It filled a gap in monitoring for us, but we're looking to move on.
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.
We trust the results that Apica Synthetic has achieved. Real-time alerting is critical to our clients and with limited resources, we can't handle many false positives; Apica Synthetic is the only solution that provides both of those features.
We have got tremendous support and response from the dynatrace support team as well as the larger community. We still have issues like the lack of role based administration, but we are told that it may be coming in a future release. The team is very supportive and has assisted us in several tough situations.
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.
I wish I could have given the ten points but based on my experience in past I am reducing by two points as the penalty. But I am sure that it will have improved in the past few months. They need some improvement on ticket handling. Overall I appreciate some of the support folks who responded quickly and also were ready to jump on the Webex and get the problem understood to fix it.
Apica Synthetic is more efficient than other competitors; our main priority is gain in the effort, time, and customer satisfaction, which Apica Synthetic definitely guarantees. Real-time alerts are just perfect which is exactly what we need, I can't say the same about other tools that may be less expensive but also less efficient.
Like I mentioned earlier, Dynatrace is a great tool but comes with a heavy price tag. On the other hand, Foglight offers a slightly lower level of expertise in application monitoring but fulfils almost all the requirements you would commonly have. The only major feature lacking in Foglight is the predictive monitoring feature. If you are an SME struggling with budgets, then predictive monitoring is something you can certainly live without.
My department is not charged for Apica Synthetic so no ROI, but from a customer service perspective, we can react to an outage and repair it faster than our customers can report the outage.
Our vendor's own monitoring tools are not as accurate nor as timely as ours. They rely on us telling them, from Apica Synthetic, that they have an issue.
