Dynatrace vs. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

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.

Incentivized

Well suited for IT Departments that can budget the funds and time needed for setup and maintenance of SCOM. The end product is well suited for medium to large environments that have 100's of resources that require monitoring and reporting. Enterprise level statistics are at your fingertips with a few clicks of a mouse after the product has been configured and agents have been deployed. As I said previously, we are a small business and I was fortunate enough to be able to budget this product into our environment. It did take us a while to configure and fully deploy, but as a result, we are well-informed and are able to extract detailed information as it pertains to usage/consumption of our workstation and server resources to include performance metrics and any errors that may arise.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• SCOM can manage Windows OS systems from desktops to servers very well.
• SCOM is platform agnostic in that we manage physical and virtual machines with no differentiation.
• SCOM can quickly deploy emergency security patches and the best part is it can provide detailed results of success and failure rate of patch deployment.

Incentivized

• Dynatrace does not monitor easily on AIX OS.
• 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.

Incentivized

• It is a monster of a system and really needs a person managing the system full time
• Options are a bit clunky especially when you need to set overrides.
• Takes a lot of time and effort to setup alerts as you want them, don't rely on the out of the box options you need to invest time into the system to get what you want out of it.
• Make sure you size the underlying database server/s correctly (Microsoft provide a tool to calculate based on number of objects you plan to collect data on), it is a datawarehouse underneath after all.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is tightly integrated to Microsoft Windows servers os monitoring with great product support.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Ease of Use and user friendly dashboard

Incentivized

Our environment, it never goes down therefore is always available.

Incentivized

We have not seen where it does slow down an application.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Hard to get support. The product is not being actively developed anymore, so it is hard to get new features for the product.

Incentivized

We did both online and in house training - they used our system so it made more sense.

Incentivized

The training was done on our time and with our system.

Incentivized

Using Dynatrace support services to assist (and lead) the implementation was extremely important.

Incentivized

Easy to install with intuitive interactive interface during the installation process a and integration to MS SQL was smooth

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

SolarWinds stacks well on the ease of use with an easily installable version and highly modular (products can be added to the basic installation and are easily managed from a single endpoint. System Center Operations Manager was selected because the majority of the environment is based on Windows products and it was part of the licensing agreement. It offered an easy way to consolidate the monitoring tools to provide a single point of management.

Incentivized

Dynatrace can be used to monitor may software tools

Incentivized

• Thanks to Dynatrace we have been able to effectively challenge and collaborate with service providers and outsourced IT teams.
• Thanks to Dynatrace we have reduced MTTR on troubleshooting by a magnitude of four.
• The performance analyses our team has done with Dynatrace earned us trust among management, business teams, and IT teams.

• Since we are at the tail end of our POC, we have no immediate ROI to report.
• That said, during the POC, we immediately identified several issues within TFS that we immediately addressed and will potentially save us hours of lost time and troubleshooting.

Incentivized