The Leading Dynatrace Alternatives & Competitors

1. Solarwinds

Solarwinds provides a range of products and services that not only provide solutions for monitoring and managing networks and infrastructure but also for monitoring and managing IT systems in general. You may be familiar with Papertrail and Loggly, two of their other solutions.

As a result of the recent data breach at Solarwinds, users may flag this security service and monitoring provider negatively when comparing Solarwinds vs Dynatrace.

When comparing Dynatrace vs Solarwinds we found that Dynatrace is rated higher for its availability of 3rd-party resources and documentation and ease of deployment as well as the overall quality of help and support services. (scores sourced from Gartner).

Key Features:

• Monitoring and management of applications
• Managing storage resources
• Database management
• Platform for ITSM

2. Splunk

Among the most notable data analysis platforms on the market is Splunk. Splunk has many out-of-the-box integrations with tools such as PagerDuty, Wazuh, GuardDuty, OverOps, and Rsyslog.

When comparing Splunk with Dynatrace, it is pertinent to keep in mind that Splunk is well suited for enterprise use cases. For a single organisation that wishes to monitor more than 100,000 devices, Spunk would be more suitable to use in this instance.

If we look at feedback from real users across a range of criteria comparing Splunk vs Dynatrace we can see that Splunk is rated higher for its diagnostic features, ease of integration and vendor response time (scores sourced from Gartner).

Key Features:

• Compliance and auditing dashboards
• Identify and monitor issues
• Monitor your infrastructure
• Compile and index data

4. New Relic

In addition to AIops, New Relic offers distributed tracing, browser monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and synthetics monitoring to over 10,000 companies across the globe.

Whilst Dynatraces’s APM has many strengths, we noted that when comparing Dynatrace vs New Relic that both platforms are rated equally at 4.5 stars each (source: Gartner).

AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP are some of the cloud service providers that New Relic and Dynatrace integrate with. Due to New Relic's lack of onboarding support, some engineers have complained of burnout from onboarding the solution. According to one engineer, it took three engineers an entire year to fully integrate the solution.

Key Features:

• Monitor incidents and events
• Querying without limits
• Synthetics checking
• Anomaly detection

5. Logit.io

Logit.io provides a better value alternative to Dynatrace that provides easy-to-understand and fully transparent billing for log and metrics management, infrastructure monitoring, and application performance monitoring through a single centralised platform.

When compared as a Dynatrace alternative, Logit.io is currently rated 5 out of 5 stars on Software Advice and Gartner compared to Dynatrace’s 4.5 score.

Key Features:

• Unlimited users
• Protection against overuse
• Billing is simple to understand
• Fully managed upgrade paths
• Logging, Metrics and Tracing in a single centralised platform
• Global highly available data centres

6. AppDynamics

AppDynamics provides full-stack application performance management (APM). To help new users determine if AppDynamics would be a better choice over Dynatrace, we've listed some of the top features that AppDynamics has demonstrated to be particularly effective in below.

For third-party reviews comparing Dynatrace vs AppDynamics, we can see that both of these solutions are rated 4.5 out of a possible 5 stars. Between the two, AppDynamics takes the lead for being rated higher on ease of use, while Dynatrace was rated higher on ease of administration and overall quality of help and support.

It has also been mentioned previously across developer and devOps communities that AppDynamics has far fewer learning curves for new users to navigate in order to successfully onboard so these reviews align with that sentiment.

Key Features:

• Application performance monitoring
• Infrastructure monitoring
• End-user monitoring
• Database monitoring

7. Prometheus

Monitoring dynamic cloud environments is made easy with Prometheus, a popular metrics-based monitoring stack. Prometheus uses dynamic service discovery to find time-series metrics produced by containers, microservices, and virtual machines.

Both highly dynamic container environments and traditional bare server-based applications can be monitored seamlessly using Prometheus.

Whilst both solutions are rated 4.5 out of 5, when comparing Dynatrace vs Prometheus, it is worth considering that Dynatrace is more commonly used by enterprise organisations whereas Prometheus is more of a favourite among small business owners. This is well worth taking into account depending on your available operations budget.

Key Features:

• Support for time-series metrics
• Dedicated query language
• Rich data models
• Highly available

8. Datadog

In addition to its wide range of features, Datadog has a high amount of native integrations and is also able to support customised user settings. For effective parsing, users commonly refer to this solution's ability to decouple log ingestion from indexing.

If we take a look at feedback from real users across a range of criteria comparing Dynatrace vs Datadog, it is evident that Dynatrace is rated slightly higher at 4.5 vs 4.4 (Source: Capterra). Dynatrace is also rated higher for quality of end-user training and quality of both peer user and technical support.

Key Features:

• Map hosts and containers
• Detection of anomalies
• Forecast monitoring
• Notebooks
• Alerting

If you found this article informative then why not read our PromQL cheat sheet or all about OpenTracing next?