Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics Comparison

Who should you choose and why?

🤔 Strongly consider Dynatrace over AppDynamics if

You run an environment that is either serverless or mostly made up of microservices.
You are a mid-sized to large enterprise with a typical enterprise procurement process for SaaS and cloud services and potentially want to deploy your APM or Observability solution on-premises.
You want to correlate log analytics data to your metrics and traces easily.

🤔 Slightly consider AppDynamics over Dynatrace if

You want better to understand the overall user experience through your application.
You want to combine your APM and code profiling needs with Cisco’s broader portfolio of networking products.

📝Other Notes

Both AppDynamics and Dynatrace lead the field for on-premises and hybrid enterprise environments.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace provides an APM that supports multiple languages, application architectures, cloud, on-premises or hybrid, enterprise applications, SaaS monitoring, etc. It provides real-time visibility into microservice-based environments and automatically discovers and monitors microservice workloads running inside containers on Kubernetes. It also provides monolith and mainframe monitoring, database monitoring, application monitoring, and many other services for end-to-end visibility.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics stands out with its tight integration of automation (AIOps) features with its Application Performance Management (APM) offering. The platform provides the ability to monitor and manage the performance of complex, distributed applications with a focus on ensuring optimal user experiences. With its solid marriage of AIOps and APM, AppDynamics provides businesses with automated insights and anomaly detection, leading to more efficient problem resolution and optimized application performance.

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“Gotchas”

AppDynamics stores its log analytics data in a separate database, which limits some analytics capabilities.
Dynatrace’s list pricing is based upon the amount of memory that is in the monitored servers. The quoted pricing assumes 8 GB of RAM per server, which is low by many standards – which means that your actual starting point could be considerably higher.

Feature Comparison

Feature

Use Case Fit

Problem Resolution

Pricing

Observability

Instrumentation

Integration With Other Services

Not all observability providers have the integrations or compatibility with tools and languages like Rancher, AlertOps, or Rust.

Compliance Requirements

Compliance with standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, FedRAMP and more have been tracked and recorded.

Helpful Links

Product Information

Pricing Pages

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About the Author

Louis-Victor Jadavji

Louis-Victor Jadavji (or "LV") is a recognized leader in the cloud services industry. He's helped 50+ digital native companies like ModusBox, Later, and NS1 choose the right cloud stack for their applications. His work has been featured in Forbes (30 Under 30 All-Star), HuffPost, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Inc. Magazine.

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