Broadcom DX Unified Infrastructure Manager, formerly from CA Technologies, is a unified tool for systems monitoring and analytics. It offers multiple deployment options for IT teams and MSPs .
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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.
I've been really happy with the amount of performance data and reporting options that I've been able to get out of UIM. Performance hardware statistics take no more than a few mouse clicks. Also, as mentioned in the pros section, deployment and configuration is very intuitive and easy.
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.
Server performance can be done exceptionally well with UIM. It monitors various OS flavors: POSIX (Aix, HPUX, Linux, Solaris, zLinux), and Windows.
With just a handful of probe s(CDM, NTevl, NTservices, NTperf, processes, logmon) your dashboards can be populated within minutes after installation of the product and discovering servers. One particular feature I like is MCS which allows you to perform template based monitoring which allows for implementing standards and including exceptions.
The SNMP collector monitors anything that is SNMP capable. With the ability to build a template out of templates here as well, you can standardize monitoring by device, vendor, or model regardless of device type: routers, switches, storage, load balancers, etc.
The UMP is the presentation layer. Without OOTB dashboards, you see quickly how your environment is performing. And with true multi-tenancy, you can separate data by customer.
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.
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 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.
Basically, these other tools were easy to setup, I think sometimes even more that Nimsoft in some scenarios. But after you need to expand the size of the environment, or in big environments, for me, Nimsoft is the tool that allows you to grow with them. All of the other tools start to present problems in the database. When you need to think in bigger machines or start to "code inside the tool" to solve some performance problems, and other problems that appear. Nimsoft comes with a big set of documentation, and the support really works, as fast as you need, even as higher as you pay.
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.
