AppDynamics > Dynatrace

If you are looking for an observability tool to monitor your applications and infrastructure, you might be wondering which one is better: AppDynamics or Dynatrace. Both of these platforms offer a range of features and capabilities to help you optimise performance, user experience and business outcomes. However, there are some key differences that make AppDynamics a superior choice over Dynatrace. Here are some of them:

- AppDynamics provides advanced observability that goes beyond the three pillars of metrics, traces and logs. It also captures user experience data, auto-instruments your code, and adapts to dynamic workloads across every cloud platform, container, microservice and Kubernetes cluster. Dynatrace, on the other hand, requires manual configuration and instrumentation for data collection and dynamic workloads, which wastes time and resources on redundant work. It also has limited support for Kubernetes, OpenShift, Cloud Foundry and other modern technologies, resulting in big blind spots.

- AppDynamics leverages machine learning to provide continuous automation throughout your observability journey. It automatically deploys agents, discovers dependencies, baselines performance, updates entity maps and alerts you when something goes wrong. Dynatrace also claims to offer automation, but it still requires manual agent deployment, dependency mapping and troubleshooting, which consumes limited time and resources.

- AppDynamics uses AI-assistance to provide real-time answers and actions for your performance issues. Its AI-engine, called Cognition Engine, analyses billions of data points per minute to identify the precise root cause of any problem, prioritise it by business impact, and suggest remediation steps. Dynatrace also has an AI-engine, called Davis, but it only correlates data points without providing root cause analysis or actionable insights. This means you have to waste time and resources to comb through the data and manually find issues and their causes.

- AppDynamics enables cross-team collaboration by providing a single source of truth across APM, infrastructure monitoring, digital experience, and business analytics . It breaks down silos and allows BizDevOps teams to work together through a unified dashboard that shows how performance impacts user behavior and business outcomes. Dynatrace offers siloed tools with a separate platform layered on top of an old platform. This means your teams are not on the same page, and you have to waste time and resources to stitch across disparate tools to get anything done.

- AppDynamics offers omni-channel user experience & business analytics that tie together full-stack performance, user experience, and business metrics . It creates an outside-in perspective that helps you optimise every digital channel and deliver exceptional experiences to your customers. Dynatrace also monitors user experience, but it does not provide business analytics or insights into how performance affects customer behavior or satisfaction.

As you can see, AppDynamics has many advantages over Dynatrace when it comes to application performance monitoring. AppDynamics offers more flexibility, more features, more visibility, more intelligence, and more value for your money. If you want to take your observability game to the next level, choose AppDynamics, get in touch for a demo today

Wayne Howard - Account Manager, Cisco | JDS Australia

wayne.howard@jds.net.au | +61 433 830 055