What is Dynatrace?

Dynatrace is a software-intelligence monitoring platform that simplifies enterprise cloud complexity and accelerates digital transformation. With Davis (the Dynatrace AI causation engine) and complete automation, the Dynatrace all-in-one platform provides answers, not just data, about the performance of your applications, their underlying infrastructure, and the experience of your end users. Dynatrace is used to modernize and automate enterprise cloud operations, release higher-quality software faster, and deliver optimum digital experiences to your organization's customers.

Dynatrace seamlessly brings infrastructure and cloud, application performance, and digital experience monitoring into an all-in-one, automated solution that's powered by artificial intelligence. Dynatrace assists in driving performance results by providing development, operations, and business teams with a shared platform, metrics. In this way, Dynatrace can serve as your organization's single "source of truth."

Dynatrace capabilities

Dynatrace provides the following capabilities for monitoring and analyzing the performance of all aspects of your application environment.

Real User Monitoring

Real User Monitoring analyzes the performance of all user interactions with your applications, whether the interactions take place in a browser or on a mobile device. Real User Monitoring also enables application availability monitoring, verification of correct display of UI elements, third-party content provider performance analysis, backend service performance analysis (down to the code level), and performance analysis of all underlying infrastructure.

Mobile app monitoring

Dynatrace supports Real User Monitoring for mobile apps as well. The process of monitoring the user experience of your native mobile apps is fundamentally different from monitoring browser-based web applications. This is because mobile-app monitoring involves the compilation, packaging, and shipment of a monitoring library along with your own mobile app package. The process of instrumenting your mobile apps largely depends on the platform of your mobile app. Dynatrace supports both Android and iOS platforms.

Server-side service monitoring

Web applications consist of web pages that are served by web servers (for example, Apache Tomcat) and web containers (for example, Docker). The web requests that are sent to a specific Tomcat server are an example of a server-side service. Server-side services may be of various types like web services, web containers, database requests, and custom services. Dynatrace OneAgent can provide details about which applications or services interact with which other services and which services or databases a specific service calls.

Network, process, and host monitoring

Dynatrace enables monitoring of your entire infrastructure including your hosts, processes, and network. You can perform log monitoring and view information such as the total traffic of your network, the CPU usage of your hosts, the response time of your processes, and more. Dynatrace also provides detailed topological information so that you know, for example, which processes run on which hosts and how your processes are interconnected.

Cloud and virtual machine monitoring

Dynatrace OneAgent monitors your entire stack, including private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Whether you run on AWS, Azure, Cloud Foundry, or OpenStack, Dynatrace OneAgent auto-detects all virtualized components and keeps up with all changes. Dynatrace OneAgent can be integrated with your virtualized infrastructure, allowing you to connect the dots between the dependencies of the vCenters in your data center, the processes that run on them, and your applications.

Container monitoring

Dynatrace seamlessly integrates with existing Docker environments and automatically monitors your containerized applications and services. Dynatrace hooks into containers and provides code for injecting OneAgent into containerized processes.

There’s no need to modify your Docker images, modify run commands, or create additional containers to enable Docker monitoring. Simply install Dynatrace OneAgent on your hosts that serve containerized applications and services. Dynatrace automatically detects the creation and termination of containers and monitors the applications and services contained within those containers.

Root-cause analysis

A key feature of Dynatrace is Davis®, the Dynatrace AI-driven causation engine. Davis® relies on artificial intelligence to continuously monitor every aspect of your applications, services, and infrastructure to automatically learn the baseline performance metrics and dependencies of all these components. Dynatrace also automatically learns the baseline response times and failure rates of the key requests that are vital to the success of your business (customer newsletter signups, customers adding items to an online shopping cart, requesting a live demo, etc) so that you can track success toward your business' conversion goals. Problem detection and reporting is based on these baseline values. Dynatrace determines for example when a detected slowdown or error-rate increase justifies the generation of a new problem event.

How Dynatrace delivers its capabilities

Three patented technologies unique to Dynatrace dovetail with one another to enable automatic discovery, modeling, and analytics of each component and dependency across all tiers of your application. Dynatrace provides true full-stack monitoring.

OneAgent technology uses a single agent to collect and unify all operational and business performance metrics for all types of entities in your application environment—servers, applications, services, databases, and more—across each layer of your technology stack (including containers).

Smartscape visualization technology maps everything running in your environment and detects all causal dependencies between websites, applications, services, processes, hosts, networks, and cloud infrastructure.

Dynatrace patented PurePath® technology captures timings and code-level context for application transactions end to end, across all supported technologies, from cloud to mainframe.

Dynatrace is a Software Intelligence Platform that's purpose-built for the enterprise cloud.

Software intelligence – Dynatrace isn't just an application performance monitoring (APM) solution; it's a platform that provides software intelligence. This means that Dynatrace gives you visibility and, more importantly, precise, AI-backed answers across your entire digital ecosystem, including the digital experiences of your users, the performance of your applications and infrastructure, and your IT operations (AIOps).
Platform – Dynatrace is an all-in-one platform with a broad set of built-in capabilities. Dynatrace is also an open platform—you can extend the platform using our API, SDK, and plugins to ingest data and events from third-party solutions into Davis®, our AI causation engine. You can also drive automation by integrating Dynatrace with your ITSM and CI/CD tools.
Purpose-built for the enterprise cloud – Dynatrace was built specifically to handle today’s dynamic, hybrid, multi-cloud environments, which often include apps and microservices that are deployed in containers.

What can you do with Dynatrace?

Dynatrace is an all-in-one platform that's purpose-built for a wide range of use cases.

Infrastructure Monitoring. Dynatrace delivers simplified, automated infrastructure monitoring that provides broad visibility across your hosts, VMs, containers, network, events, and logs. Dynatrace continuously auto-discovers your dynamic environment and pulls infrastructure metrics into our Davis® AI engine, so you can consolidate tools and cut MTTI.
Applications and Microservices. Dynatrace provides automated, code-level visibility and root-cause answers for applications that span complex enterprise cloud environments. Dynatrace automatically captures timing and code-level context for transactions across every tier. It also detects and monitors microservices automatically across the entire hybrid cloud, from mobile to mainframe.
Application Security. Dynatrace enables you to deliver applications faster and more securely with automated runtime application vulnerability management, optimized for the cloud and Kubernetes.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). Dynatrace DEM provides Real User Monitoring (RUM) for every one of your customer's journeys, synthetic monitoring across a global network, and 4K movie-like Session Replay. This powerful combination helps you optimize your applications, improve user experience, and provide superior support across all digital channels.
Business Analytics. By tying business metrics and KPIs to data that's already flowing through our application performance and digital experience modules, you get real-time, AI-powered answers to your critical business questions.
Cloud Automation. Dynatrace AIOps gives you precise answers automatically. Dynatrace collects high-fidelity data and maps dependencies in real-time so that the Dynatrace explainable AI engine, Davis®, can show you the precise root causes of problems or anomalies, enabling quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.

How does Dynatrace work?

There are three concepts that are key to understanding how Dynatrace works:

OneAgent® services – automatically discovers, activates, and instruments applications, microservices, infrastructure, and any dependency in modern cloud environments.
PurePath® distributed tracing - captures and analyzes timing and code-level context for all distributed traces, end-to-end, across the full stack.
Smartscape® topology – dynamic environment-topology mapping that visualizes the dynamic relationships among all components across every tier.
Grail™ data lakehouse - a causational data lakehouse with a massively parallel processing (MPP) analytics engine that leverages Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) for instant, AI-powered, context-rich analytics.
Davis® causal AI engine – analyzes all relationships and dependencies within complex IT environments to deliver precise answers prioritized by business impact. Davis tells you when there is a problem, the business impact of the problem, and the root cause of the problem so that it can be resolved quickly.

How is Dynatrace different from other cloud monitoring solutions?

Dynatrace has a radically different approach compared to other monitoring tools. Here are the four key differences:

Automatic. From deployment to instrumentation, discovery, dependency mapping, baselining, problem identification, and root-cause, Dynatrace is completely automatic. Simply install Dynatrace OneAgent on your hosts. That's it.
Full stack. While other solutions monitor and report on numerous metrics, Dynatrace provides context. This includes understanding and mapping all the relationships and interdependencies, top to bottom, from end-user experience all the way down to the infrastructure.
AI at the core. AI is everywhere today. While other solutions have "bolted on" machine learning in an attempt to reduce alert noise, the Davis® AI engine is at the heart of our platform, processing billions of dependencies in milliseconds and serving up precise answers that go well beyond human capabilities.
Web scale. The Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform is built with a cloud-native architecture that scales without limits. With role-based governance for large global teams, automatic enterprise-wide deployment and full-stack coverage across infrastructure, cloud platforms and applications, Dynatrace is made for the most demanding enterprise cloud environments.

Part of your enterprise cloud ecosystem

Dynatrace is integrated with key components of your enterprise cloud ecosystem to support dynamic cloud orchestration, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, VMware Tanzu Application Service, Red Hat OpenShift, and Kubernetes. In these environments, Dynatrace automatically launches and monitors the full cloud stack and all the applications and containers running within the stack, including applications and workloads that may traverse multiple cloud and hybrid environments.

Our close integration with cloud platforms helps you simplify development and operations, increase visibility, and improve situational awareness across hybrid, multi-cloud environments.

Dynatrace deployment models

Dynatrace can be deployed either as a SaaS solution, with the option of retaining data in the cloud, or within an on-premises deployment. The on-premises version is called Dynatrace Managed. This allows customers to maintain control of where their data resides, whether in the cloud or on-premises, combining the simplicity of SaaS with the control of an on-premises deployment. With either SaaS or a Managed service, Dynatrace is automatically and effortlessly upgraded, so you always have our latest innovations .

Dynatrace SaaS customers only need to install OneAgent. Dynatrace Managed customers, prior to installing OneAgent, need to set up their Dynatrace cluster.

For both deployment models, it's highly recommended that you install the appropriate type of ActiveGate. ActiveGate offers a number of proxy-specific capabilities.

Dynatrace concepts

To get acquainted with the terms and concepts used within Dynatrace, visit Dynatrace glossary as well as: