Data Center Real-User Monitoring (DCRUM), discontinued vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

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

I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients

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 alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
• The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
• Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down

Incentivized

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

• The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.

Incentivized

Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.

Best of breed.

Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

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

Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.

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.

1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem

Incentivized

• 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

• Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
• In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
• Its time to explore other alternatives.