Take the Surprise Challenge! ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌❤️‍

[Michal_Gebacki]

Welcome back in another Community Challenge! 

Special "Dynatrace lover" badgeThis time we'd like to challenge your memory. We can differ in many areas, but the one that is totally universal and brings us all here is the Dynatrace platform. Stop for a while and think: what are the features or aspects of using Dynatrace that surprised you or simply made you love Dynatrace? ❤️

Share your insights below, in any form you prefer, about any great surprises with Dynatrace you can recollect! Every participant gets 100 bonus points, a dedicated "Dynatrace lover" badge you can see on the left, and something really exciting – a 1:1 session with the Dynatrace Community Team to ask about anything!

Can't wait for your answers! 😃

[pahofmann]

Coming from DynaTrace/AppMon the first thing I really appreciated about the new Dynatrace/Ruxit was the ease of installation updates.

Especially when doing Presales, no longer having hour long setup sessions for servers/collectors and then manually finding the correct config files or wrapper script to add the agents is a big time saver.

With Dynatrace now you can setup a cluster in well under an hour and have a few hundred or thousands of hosts deployed with e.g. ansible on the same day. An after that operation is a lot smoother, no more manual updates for each customer on every major version.

( What the didn't appreciate where the many name changes of products, luckily all of that is in the past now. 😜 )

[Karolina_Linda]

Haha 😂 Wanna get back to the Vantage times? 🤣

[andre_vdveen]

Heck, noooooooo!!!! 😓😂

[AgataWlodarczyk]

An automation and AI rules! 😉 

[dannemca]

I have worked with others APM tools before know Dynatrace... I will not mention those, because it is pointless and you will know why.

The huge struggling point with all of these others tools are: You need to check the technology present on the hosts, then look for the specific agent to install/deploy , and some of these agents are really painful to deploy, need to change app start up manually, etc.

In the end you will have more Agents than app process running on the host to manage.

And what Dynatrace does?? It gives you ONE SINGLE AGENT THAT DOES EVERYTHING!!! (sorry, not sorry)

I was happy with my job, since I was paid to manage the many agents health check (lie).

Now I am even happier because I have time to do what I need to do, since Dynatrace OneAgent is smart enough to keep it healthy by it self.

This make me focus on what really matter, the monitoring strategy.

So thank you, Dynatrace, for bring us the OneAgent.

...

and Oh, yes!!! It does also instrument your frontend with the ruxit too. 

[Karolina_Linda]

Danne, I feel like you described our experience as well - maybe not necessarily with monitoring platforms (of course we use Dynatrace! 🙂), but with the tools that waste time for maintenance and keep away from innovating. I wish you many nice Dynatrace surprises moving forward! 🙂

[AgataWlodarczyk]

We are happy that you are happy!  😊
Wish you further success with the monitoring strategy! 🔝 

[AntonioSousa]

Coming from a Synthetic background (Keynote Systems partner) and End User perspective, I remember quite clearly the first meeting when we were integrated with Dynatrace. At the time I was explained how APM worked, and I quickly figured that I had been loosing a lot of time without the correct tool. It was one of the few WOW moments that I experienced in my career.

Of course, I fell in love with the ease of the Ruxit and then Dynatrace platform. So, and given Valentine's day, I went looking for an adequate quote for my love with Dynatrace, and got one that seems appropriate for me:

"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." – Carl Sagan

[Karolina_Linda]

  

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thank you for your kind words! 

[ChadTurner]

For me, I'd say the ability to achieve any goal/idea possible. Over the course my Dynatrace journey I've been faces with multiple questions mainly centering on the basic question "How can Dynatrace make my job easier?" 

We solved many of those questions from a "Who you gonna call" mark down tile or the Disaster Recovery Dashboard for our Leadership Team members to a method that allows you to map and test the journey of a customer on a competitors site. 

While all these solutions are great, the cherry on top I'd say is not just the usage of the UFOs around the organization, but how we also formulated a way to have Dynatrace Davis in your car to give you real time updates on your organizations infrastructure during your commute. 

I highlight these ideas and methods to all of our customers, because Dynatrace might not offer an immediate solution to your question/ask. Rather, you can leverage your own creativity to further expand the functionality and use of the product beyond what other organizations might be using it for. 

Ohh, and of course, the ability to have a Dynatrace One Representative just a click away inside the platform to help you with any and all questions a user may have.  

[Karolina_Linda]

"Dynatrace has no limits, but your imagination" 🙂 You've proven that many times, Chad!

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Oh @ChadTurner , we know that you are a huge fan of Dynatrace UFO  😍  💚

[ChadTurner]

Ohhh you know it @AgataWlodarczyk 

[PedroDeodato]

What I love about Dynatrace is the gorgeously short time and effort needed to deliver!

Professionally, Dynatrace was the first complete tool that I used.

However, my Master Thesis' main subject was Observability, and the main technology used was OpenTelemetry , which required A LOT of manual instrumentation and configuring.

Do not get me wrong: I loved working with OT, and I'm all about supporting the new open-source standards!

The only comparison I can find is between cooking your own meal or going to the nicest restaurant in town: both are heartwarming, but you gotta love having it all without the work! 😁

Auto-instrumentation, AI-powered auto analysis, dynamic thresholds... I just love how Dynatrace empowers this auto-results!

We enjoy the meal, without having to cook it! 🍽 👨‍🍳

[Karolina_Linda]

These are also the meals I enjoy the most, although I like cooking very much! 😃

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Enjoy your meal @PedroDeodato!  😊

[Shirai]

I was surprised that Dynatrace is easy to build. We needed a lot of steps and preparations when we introduced Appmon.

Since Dynatrace tenants can be accessed from anywhere, we can respond smoothly to customer inquiries. It was okay if COVID-19 was widespread and it became difficult to visit the customer office.

[Karolina_Linda]

This is indeed a great advantage 🙂

[AgataWlodarczyk]

We are very happy that no matter what happened Dynatrace was able to support you and your customers. 😊

[Yosi_Neuman]

Hi guys, 

My surprise is with the contiguous evolving of the UI.

Will keep a side for a moment the new UI outlook that we get with every other version, that make me wonder again and again "How moved my cheese this time" and where the hack I will find what I'm looking for now ..... 

If we will think for a moment on DCRUM , AppMon and Gomez UI  and where we are today in terms of unify UI, it is a great and welcome change.

Another surprise for me is to find out where is the save button in each page located, some times it is in the bottom some times it is in the top, sometime it in both and on other times there is no button at all  some kind of quiz 🤗

Keep on send those surprises to us, we are definitely love them !!!

All the best and stay safe

Yos 

[dannemca]

The Save button saga!!! Hahaha!!! Same feeling here. Dynatrace should add a little Waldo emoji on it. 
 

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

In DCRUM we not only had UI changes, but whole brand, colors and even a product name change in almost every major release update 🤣

[DanielS]

I agree with many of the previous comments. But for me, it's definitely the following:

After a customer is using the product and I need to help him with a problem, the mood of the customer is never ‌😠‌angry or upset. They know that  delivers. I know, I know, part of this is from the person on the other side of the desk, but the tool and the flexibility to be able to solve problems is very important. I love working with a tool where the "fabric" takes care of their product, in part this is important because it is the only product and not another in their stack. A great community like this one helps too.

Thanks to everyone for your help!!!!

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thank you for your feedback @DanielS ! We do our best to solve problems and support users who work with Dynatrace. 

[abraham_ormsby]

The massive scope of Dynatrace surprised me, I've never used software so wide and deep. The capabilities are so comprehensive, it makes you love the product when the answer to almost all of the questions my clients have (no matter how imaginative) is "yes, we can do that". 

It's neat to see some of the solutions I regularly use mentioned in this very topic by @ChadTurner. Specifically the "Who you gonna call" mark down tile and testing the journey of a customer on a competitors site!

Lastly, I'd mention the super helpful community, thank you all! 

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thank you for your feedback @abraham_ormsby 😊
I can only confirm, that Dynatrace Community is so great because of its users. 😍 🔝

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

To me, the biggest surprise at the beginning was the easiest I could ever imagine a drill down from a problem down to the line of code. After exploring hard to understand charts and metrics in tables in previous products, this was a rocket science! 

Now, I'm being surprised by various options to automate and include Dynatrace in Software Development Lifecycle - automatable OneAgent installation, Cloud automation, auto-remediation with Ansible Tower, Appsec .... just to name a few ... that all in all lead to more time to do other innovations and ... feel better as Dynatrace Davis never sleeps so I can sleep 😛 

[Michal_Gebacki]

Thank you Radek for those great insights, good to hear how automatisation brings some easily noticeable improvements 😎

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Simplicity is the key and automatic is fuel for fostering development. 😎

[emachuma]

I have a better dashboard experience. The ability to add images on the dashboard is really exciting and has expanded the scope of capturing various metrics. Having a company logo on the dashboard makes it feel wow! The improved chart visualization capabilities are also amazing and distinct. 

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thank you for so many good words!  We are happy to see that improvement in this area has a WOW effect on you. 😍

[Jenifer]

7 years ago, I discovered the tool that would change my mind, love at first sight for smartscape Topology, painting the complexity of a system through a defined graph, see on real time all the software components interacting in one place was visionary, also pure paths were my favorites for a long time during troubleshooting activities, not to mention that AI never ceases to amaze me! Love ‌😍‌ Dynatrace vision !

[AgataWlodarczyk]

"love at first sight" 😍
Thanks, Jenifer for the feedback captured in such a beautiful way.

[Mike_L]

Coming from eco tools to vantage, gomez, Compuware APM, Dynatrace, AppMon to Dynatrace again I must say that the best time is now. While many of the old tools had the potential to be great, they were extremely dependent on whoever interpreted the data.

Dynatrace is different, the bar to excellence is a lot lower. Also, everyone is pulling in the same direction, which is great.

When did I realize that Dynatrace was amazing? I think during my first assignment giving a set of trainings to a UK customer many years ago. The fact that I could talk to so many teams and show relevant data for each was an eye opener.

[Michal_Gebacki]

Great to have your insights here, Mike! 

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thank you for your feedback, Mike. Great to see 👀 that you are so passionate about your work! 

[VenkataSainath]

Hailing from APM back ground, I astonished😯

Dynatrace has Capable of ingestion of metrics from multiple sources(3rd party tools) and also we can develop custom plugins which are ACTIVE gate and OneAgent plugin.

Dynatrace Davis has capable of analyzing those metrics in Problem⚠️ detection, which is visualized in Smarts cape and Custom dashboards.

Regards,

Venkat

[Michal_Gebacki]

Davis gains recognition once again! 👀

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thank you for your feedback, @VenkataSainath! 
It's great to hear from an experienced, hailing from an APM background 🔝 that you see so much value in Dynatrace. 

[andre_vdveen]

It was love at first sight for me, the first time I saw Dynatrace and the ease of deployment, compared to tools I worked with before e.g. Vantage, DCRUM, etc.

I think the real kicker for me though was how easy it was to upgrade not only agents but the Managed Cluster nodes! In AppMon, that was probably the biggest gripe with clients and my team: upgrades, and the licensing around it, was painful if you didn't follow the steps to the tee.

The latest WOW factor was when I realized that the Image tile is available for dashboards (in SaaS, for now at least)

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Oh, one more person who fell in love at first sight! 😍 Lovely!

[joeistyping]

I'm so surprised on how Dynatrace has evolved.  Coming from a background of AppMon, I remember the first time deploying OneAgent at scale and how fast I can get data. 

Not only that but to use Dynatrace to give answers to why a process, service is experiencing trouble with context! 

As a fan of automation and making development easier there isn't a better fit! 

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Nice to hear that you see Dynatrace as an "automatic problem solver". And we are happy that the group of automation fans is growing here. 😃 🔝 

[theharithsa]

There are lot of things in Dynatrace to talk about and love for. Dynatrace is the only tool I have learnt so far and feels like I don't need to learn other tools after seeing what Dynatrace can do. I can concentrate on learning actual application's underlying technology. One good thing about Dynatrace is that it is very easy to install and the analysis to gives is fast and accurate. This saves lot of dollars to our customers in fact in millions every year. 

Ability to build charts, create metrics, Ingest logs and ability to view the traces of each request (PurePath) are the features that no other tool can match and replace Dynatrace with. It is one stop solution for Observability needs in one's infrastructure. Not to forget real user monitoring as well. List simply goes on and on. 

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thank you for your insights, Vishruth! Great to have on the Community a person who is so passionate about technology. 😊

[Malaik]

Hellloooooooo

Yes for me the big change (I used AppMon just before switching to One agent) and one of the big change is the facility and ability to built the instrumentation easier with the autodiscovery (with only one simple agent)...

Also we are now using a full web version instead of desktop version, so the collaboration with teams is now very easy and quit, with a simple link sharing we can have the same view with the others to make troubleshooting.

Also, the introduction of the API is a big enhancement, to retrieve data, to connect with other thirds party, to ingest data... VERY BIG ACHIEVMENT.

Till now some other things are missing, but the most one that can help me a lot (And much other people I guess) is to retrieve the old option from (AppMon / DCRUM) which i duplicate any configuration and edit existing configuration in HTML OR TEXT format.

Thanks for everything and have an excellent day.

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thank you for your feedback! "Sharing is caring" and Dynatrace knows how important teamwork is. 😉 

About an idea "to retrieve the old option from (AppMon / DCRUM) which you can duplicate any configuration and edit the existing configuration in HTML OR TEXT format." recommend you to submit Product Idea 💡📈

[Malaik]

Hi Both,

Yes idea already submitted for that.

Hope this can help.

[Michal_Gebacki]

I was waiting for your reply, Malaik, I knew your feedback would be precious! 😄

[Sujit]

Dynatrace means in simple word life become easy to find any RCA, monitor any complex arch, to understand any architecture at a glance...

Every month adding new features which make Dynatrace becomes more powerfull day by day....... sometime I feel what would be the next change in terms of the cLOUD, OCP, K8S which makes me more excited.

Thanks,

Sujit Singh

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thanks for sharing, @Sujit !

These days we have so much data that simplifying complicated processes is a must. And the world needs software to work perfectly like never before. Hope that with every new release you will be even more excited.  

[RajeshG]

@Michal_Gebacki 

Thanks for the cool initiative that you brought it here to the community. And its just a WOW moment for me after seeing such huge responses! Giving away each kudo point from myside to every individual participated here. 😊

I wasn't much acquainted with Appmon though with an experience of various APM tools, I could see lot better options and more visibility in Dynatrace. First of all thanks to have no manual reports. Analysis and reports are some regular tasks for monitoring people in calculations and forecast. With APIs and Dashboards the reporting work gets simple every time.

Much more enhancements to talk about;
ruxit, slos, maintenance, request attributes, rca, web vitals, not to forget Dashboard powerups ❤️ and much more...

However, the limitation on settings/configurations in Dynatrace always leaves a confusion. One such experience is; Host got decomm and agent removed from host. but detection rules for the decomm host are still get calculated in Dynatrace, so every time when there is a removal OneAgent, one should disable all the monitoring settings for that host so that limit gets freed/reduced and you can create new rules/settings again. This situation happened to me for Custom events for Alerting in Anomaly detection. Hope we will get possible enhancements in this too in future. 

many thanks,

Rajesh

[Michal_Gebacki]

Indeed, the scale of feedback is fantastic! Happy to see the group of inspiring answers keeps on growing, especially of the ones like yours - thank you Rajesh for your insights 💡 Hopefully incoming constant improvements of the Dynatrace will make you stay with us for good and raise your satisfaction level!

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thank you for your feedback, Rajesh! A lot of great thoughts! 

[mhlamine]

Hi,

For me the surprise was Monitoring As Code (monaco) and the wide range of APIs that make Dynatrace easily configurable and manageable in an automated way --> time saving,
human error avoidance

MHL.

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Less time for troubleshooting is more time for innovation. 😉

[dlb]

For me the eureka moment was seeing how easy it is to turn information that is just a data point in another application into an interactive graph in Dynatrace. 

But the most fun for me has been hearing those Ah-ha moments from our application support teams. Every demo I have done has had at least one moment were someone sees some bit of their application that they either didn't have a way to expose before or that they used custom scripts to get similar results. The ability to translate that to their dashboard or into an actionable alert has been critical for getting those teams to embrace a new tool. 

[Michal_Gebacki]

Fantastically described, thank you for your story @dlb! 😄

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Visualization can be a key to understanding 👌
Thanks for sharing!

[Breno]

My big surprises with Dynatrace was the User Session Queries Language (USQL). Wow... I see we were into the next generation of user and business analytics.

[Michal_Gebacki]

Great to know how any software improvements gain so significant attention, Breno! 

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Oh yes, user and business analytics is an area worth special attention to. 👀 Examining an organization's data and performance as a way to gain insights and make data-driven decisions in the future is a focus of many companies.

[ViniciusR]

Undoubtedly, dynatrace today is the best monitoring tool on the market, in the environment in which I perform the administration

Today dynatrace is the basis of everything, mapping the entire environment, we use backtrace and purepaths to create specific flows for some environments where we do not have this vision.

We use specific custom alerts to inform us before the board about serious cases that could occur, but with the right sensitivity we can avoid it.

And our great Davis always helping in the most complex analyses, today more than ever in the stacktrace views of mobile transactions that help us to identify failures that occur every day, map and end them.
Thank you all, I'm talking about São Paulo, Brazil.

[AgataWlodarczyk]

Thank you for the kind words!  Great to see how Dyntrace simplifies your everyday work with data!  😊

[ben_wrightson]

I occasionally get to give trainings to new users.
I show them the Smartscape and explain how the OneAgent starts on the host, then automatically detects processes and services, then I explain how the dependencies to other services are discovered, how the services are baselined, problems detected automatically and how DAVIS will try to find the root cause.

And by the time I get there first-time users are usually blown away.

Once I show the service flow and the PurePaths, even more so. It's a quantum leap forward for many first-time users, and observing the moment when the jaws drop always reminds you how cool Dynatrace is.

[AgataWlodarczyk]

These jaw-dropping moments are beautiful moments when the new journey begins. Not only with Dynatrace - in a business meaning but as well in terms of amazing relationships that are forming as part of this cooperation. 🤝 🤗

[techean]

I started using Dyantrace 4 years back as an end user. I dint knew much about the backend functionality of Dynatrace earlier, was only aware it requires some package component to be deployed on host server (oneagent) that's it and restart my jboss services to track all the service path flow and even backtrace request as we have oneagent SDK enabled on our mobile client app.

I was so much surprised to see a agent service which is not even consuming 200 mb of my resource on server but able to provide me a complete insights of all my service call interactions. I was simply amaze to see Dynatrce  Purepath patent technology. It made my life simpler to debug and issue for finding the quick RCA , instead of spending hours on the application logs to find any kind of errors or warnings.