Data Center Real-User Monitoring (DCRUM), discontinued

Score7.2 out of 10

27 Reviews and Ratings

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Reviews

3 Reviews

Much better than it used to be, but still in need of improvements

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

December 29, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dynatrace Network Application Monitoring (NAM), formerly DCRUM, is far better when it is integrated with Dynatrace. As DCRUM, it was a very difficult tool to manage and deploy. Once the architecture was changed, it provided a lot more value than before. It is mainly used to find network captures and where traffic is flowing and how. It's very helpful in finding packet flow.

Pros

Dynatrace Network Application Monitoring (NAM), formerly DCRUM, is very useful to find the network packet flow across applications
It shows the application behavior in terms of end-user performance
It integrates very well with other Dynatrace components

Cons

Dynatrace as a whole has a lot to improve in network management
While it provides a lot of data, it is not always comprehensive; it still needs some manual digging into the issues

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Kiran Yakkala

Tools Lead in Information Technology at Cognizant (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

DCRUM, legacy and traditional datacenter monitoring for enterprise applications.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 21, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dynatrace DCRUM today known as NAM has helped our customers for the past 7 years to discover application performance issues from a real user monitoring perspective. DCRUM can drive to the root cause across an application stack to find what tier issue is affecting real users. Today, DCRUM is a unified console to monitor application health in real time, for those legacy platforms not covered yet by Dynatrace's new approach oriented to web and mobile applications.

Pros

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.

Cons

Its configuration requires a lot of technical and business knowledge to drive monitoring expectations to dashboards.
DCRUM needs a robust monitoring architecture to store, analyze and visualize all collected data.
DCRUM can't monitor the latest Microsoft Exchange versions.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have an application service like SAP or Oracle Forms with a client-server architecture with clients across the country, with Dynatrace you can monitor real user transactions from clients to main servers in a central point. Then you can pinpoint whether you are experiencing regional networking issues, application performance degradation, or SQL queries latency.

Jose Adan Ortiz

Sales Engineer in Sales at Mainsoft S.A. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

2 years of experience

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DCRUM - Application insight into the darkest corners of your DC.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 16, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dynatrace Data Center Real-User Monitoring (DCRUM) enables quick insight into the status and performance of all transaction based applications and some others too, like Citrix and VoIP.

When things go wrong, a quick glance reveals what part of the application delivery chain isn't performing as it should. Automatic baselining of all traffic also helps separate out deviations from the norm, such as new releases of code going wrong or design flaws in the data flow. Many solutions are covered out of the box and the ability to support inhouse protocols for legacy applications is important.

Pros

The ability to correlate Citrix users and their performance to an actual backend application.
Full insight into SAP over all the protocols as well as the customized code makes DCRUM a nice augmention to Solution Manager.
The high capacity to decode 20 Gbps traffic on a single box/probe makes it easy to slot in even in high density populated DCs.
In an effort to help understand and decode unknown traffic the configuration wizard helps and suggests what things to use in the datastream, since hardly any customers have documentation that covers the network traffic/protocol.
It's also very handy to be able to define specific traffic to/from a node as Software Services when they are a shared resource, such as a database, web farm or a DNS. That enables you to cherry pick from as many software services as you want when building the application delivery chain which makes up what a user perceives as "an application".
High capacity netflow processing helps you to get insight into devices that might be out of reach for various reasons.
One very convenient thing is the self-monitoring/maintenance of the system. Often the installations are left running for a very long time and there is comfort in knowing that they will maintain themselves with data rollup and cleaning tasks so you won't be met by a blank screen due to a full HD or the inability to restart without user intervention.

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

It works really well on all things based on HTTP and the specific decodes it supports. There are guides for configuring but they are not "hard" as you can tweak and twist the decode with RegExs .

For the other decodes included, the same applies. You also have full freedom to draw reports backwards and forwards as all data is exposed in the DMI (Data Mining Interface).

It also sports a nifty Smartphone interface where you can control what is being published in a role-based setup, making sure your managers only get what they ask for and are spared the techie details.

Ulf Thornander

Senior APM Specialist in Information Technology at Red Ocean Software (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

18 years of experience

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DCRUM - Application insight into the darkest corners of your DC.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 16, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dynatrace Data Center Real-User Monitoring (DCRUM) enables quick insight into the status and performance of all transaction based applications and some others too, like Citrix and VoIP.

Pros

The ability to correlate Citrix users and their performance to an actual backend application.
Full insight into SAP over all the protocols as well as the customized code makes DCRUM a nice augmention to Solution Manager.
The high capacity to decode 20 Gbps traffic on a single box/probe makes it easy to slot in even in high density populated DCs.
In an effort to help understand and decode unknown traffic the configuration wizard helps and suggests what things to use in the datastream, since hardly any customers have documentation that covers the network traffic/protocol.
It's also very handy to be able to define specific traffic to/from a node as Software Services when they are a shared resource, such as a database, web farm or a DNS. That enables you to cherry pick from as many software services as you want when building the application delivery chain which makes up what a user perceives as "an application".
High capacity netflow processing helps you to get insight into devices that might be out of reach for various reasons.
One very convenient thing is the self-monitoring/maintenance of the system. Often the installations are left running for a very long time and there is comfort in knowing that they will maintain themselves with data rollup and cleaning tasks so you won't be met by a blank screen due to a full HD or the inability to restart without user intervention.

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

It works really well on all things based on HTTP and the specific decodes it supports. There are guides for configuring but they are not "hard" as you can tweak and twist the decode with RegExs .

For the other decodes included, the same applies. You also have full freedom to draw reports backwards and forwards as all data is exposed in the DMI (Data Mining Interface).

Ulf Thornander

Senior APM Specialist in Information Technology at Red Ocean Software (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

18 years of experience

View profile