Dynatrace is one of the most comprehensive observability platforms in the enterprise market, known for transforming complex application and infrastructure monitoring through AI-powered automation. It provides end-to-end visibility across cloud-native, hybrid, and multicloud environments, making it a go-to solution for IT operations, DevOps teams, and SRE professionals who need to manage distributed systems at scale.
What Is Dynatrace?
Dynatrace is a unified observability and security platform that leverages artificial intelligence to monitor, analyze, optimize, and secure applications, infrastructure, microservices, and user experiences across complex IT environments. Originally evolved from traditional Application Performance Monitoring (APM) roots, Dynatrace now positions itself as "the observability company for the AI era," combining full-stack monitoring with AI-driven automation to help organizations manage cloud-native complexity.
The platform serves enterprises managing distributed systems, microservices architectures, and hybrid cloud deployments where manual monitoring becomes impractical. Its target users range from solo IT managers at growing companies to large enterprise teams managing thousands of hosts across multiple cloud providers.
What is Dynatrace used for?
Dynatrace addresses the observability challenges that arise in modern, distributed IT environments. Common use cases include:
- Application Performance Management: Code-level tracing identifies bottlenecks across microservices, APIs, and distributed transactions with AI-powered root cause analysis.
- Infrastructure Monitoring: Comprehensive visibility into cloud resources, containers, Kubernetes clusters, and on-premises infrastructure with automated discovery.
- Digital Experience Monitoring: Real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic testing track actual user interactions and simulate customer journeys across web, mobile, and IoT applications.
- Security Operations: Runtime application security detects vulnerabilities, blocks threats like SQL injection, and provides continuous security posture management.
- DevOps Automation: Integration with CI/CD pipelines enables automated quality gates, release validation, and deployment governance based on performance metrics.
- Business Analytics: Correlation between technical metrics and business KPIs like revenue, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction for executive reporting.
- AIOps Implementation: Predictive analytics and automated remediation reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and prevent issues before they impact users.
Key Features of Dynatrace
Dynatrace's comprehensive feature set centers around AI-powered automation and unified observability:
OneAgent Auto-Discovery provides automated instrumentation across the entire technology stack without manual configuration. This lightweight agent automatically discovers applications, services, infrastructure, and dependencies while collecting metrics, logs, and traces in real-time.
Davis AI Engine delivers automated root cause analysis, anomaly detection, and predictive insights across billions of dependencies. It correlates events across the entire stack to pinpoint issues and provides remediation guidance, reducing alert noise and troubleshooting time.
Smartscape Topology Mapping creates a real-time, dynamic visualization of environment relationships and dependencies. It automatically maps interactions between applications, microservices, infrastructure, and cloud services for better context during incident response.
Grail Data Lakehouse offers indexless, schema-on-read storage with massively parallel processing for observability, security, and business data at exabyte scale. It enables lightning-fast analytics using Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) for complex data operations.
PurePath Distributed Tracing provides code-level visibility into distributed transactions, tracking requests across services and microservices to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize application workflows.
Digital Experience Management combines real user monitoring with synthetic testing to track actual user behavior, session replays, and proactive availability monitoring across all digital channels.
Runtime Application Security continuously monitors for vulnerabilities and actively blocks threats during application execution, integrating security insights directly into observability workflows.
Dynatrace Pros & Cons
Dynatrace delivers powerful capabilities for enterprise environments while presenting some challenges for smaller teams.
Dynatrace Pros
- AI-Powered Automation: Davis AI engine provides precise root cause analysis and predictive insights that significantly reduce manual troubleshooting time.
- Comprehensive Coverage: Full-stack observability from infrastructure to user experience eliminates monitoring blind spots in complex environments.
- Automated Discovery: OneAgent requires minimal configuration while providing deep instrumentation across hundreds of technologies automatically.
- Enterprise Scalability: Handles 100,000+ hosts with a high availability architecture built for hyperscale cloud environments.
- Unified Platform: Consolidates APM, infrastructure monitoring, security, and business analytics to break down operational silos.
Dynatrace Cons
- Premium Pricing: High costs make it unsuitable for smaller teams or organizations with limited monitoring budgets.
- Steep Learning Curve: Feature-rich platform requires significant training investment, potentially overwhelming teams new to comprehensive observability.
- Network Monitoring Limitations: Process-level network visibility lacks depth compared to specialized network monitoring tools like SolarWinds NPM.
- Enterprise-Focused: Best value realized in complex, distributed environments; may be overkill for simple on-premises or small-scale deployments.
Dynatrace Pricing
Dynatrace uses a consumption-based Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) model with hourly billing and volume discounts. Pricing scales with monitored resources like hosts, data ingestion, sessions, and logs, targeting enterprises with minimum annual commitments.
Dynatrace requires 1-3 year agreements with annual minimum commitments. Rate cards provide transparent pricing, though final costs depend on actual usage volumes and enterprise negotiations. Alternative Classic Licensing uses predefined units (Host Units, Davis Data Units) for organizations preferring fixed allocation models.
Automate IT Service Management Workflows
Both platforms can work together as complementary tools to create a comprehensive IT operations ecosystem. Dynatrace excels at detecting and diagnosing infrastructure and application issues, while Siit automates the service management workflows that handle those incidents.
Here's how Dynatrace monitoring enhances Siit's cross-departmental automation:
- Proactive Issue Detection: Dynatrace's AI identifies performance degradations and system anomalies that can trigger automated service requests in Siit for faster resolution.
- Rich Context Integration: Performance metrics, topology data, and root cause analysis from Dynatrace can provide valuable context for Siit's incident routing and escalation workflows.
- Automated Remediation Workflows: When Dynatrace detects issues, integration platforms like ZigiOps can automatically create service tickets in Siit with full technical context and proper team assignment.
- Cross-Team Coordination: Dynatrace's technical insights combined with Siit's workflow automation enable seamless coordination between IT operations, development, and business teams during incident response.
This complementary approach means IT teams get comprehensive monitoring and intelligent service management without switching between disconnected tools or losing critical context during incident resolution.
Try It With Siit
Dynatrace's powerful observability, combined with Siit's workflow automation, creates a unified approach to IT operations, from detection through resolution across all departments.
Book a demo to see how automated service management workflows can enhance your monitoring investments.
Dynatrace Alternatives
Several alternatives offer different approaches to observability and monitoring:
- Datadog: Cloud-native monitoring platform with comprehensive integrations, though requiring more manual configuration than Dynatrace's automated approach.
- New Relic: Widely adopted APM platform with user-centric pricing and strong distributed tracing capabilities, rated equally with Dynatrace by Gartner.
- Splunk Observability Cloud: Powerful log analytics and search capabilities with NoSampleâ„¢ full-fidelity tracing, ideal for organizations already using the Splunk ecosystem.
- SigNoz: Open-source observability platform offering a cost-effective alternative with OpenTelemetry-native architecture for metrics, traces, and logs.
- Grafana Labs: Composable observability stack combining Loki, Grafana, Tempo, and Mimir for flexible, customizable monitoring solutions.
