We performed a comparison between Apica and Dynatrace based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Log Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"I like the transcript download feature. And with UI scripting, it's helpful that Apica handles a lot of the backend work automatically. I don't have to tag everything manually, though I can tag elements later if needed. It's really good at recording the steps."
"As always, within the IT industry, everybody's always looking to upgrade and update everything else like that. Apica has been one of those things but it's really hard to replace because it offers us the unique capability to see what the customer is seeing. A lot of other ones can do Selenium script and things like that, but there's a lot in Apica that we use right now. We utilize a lot of the scenario options in Apica right now, and there's a lot of other ones that do parts of it, but it doesn't do everything that Apica does."
"With the ZebraTester, the ability to have and store dynamic variables, when setting up the monitors, means you can extract that value and use it in a subsequent service call. This is something that has made our lives easier... This is one of the features that I like the most because it helps us in configuring these services, in a certain flow, without the need to re-record the whole thing."
"Our application SREs do script checks in such a way that closely mimic our customers' actions using the platform. Because there are so many different ways and options to be able to configure checks to closely mirror your applications' capabilities, it provides a lot of optionality for teams to create the right type of check that can notify when there are any issues. At the end of the day, we want our monitoring tools to be able to catch any outage before our customers do. This is where Apica Synthetic does a great job."
"It helps with releases because we monitor them in staging. We can tell if something is critically wrong before it gets into production, e.g., if it was load related or function related and also what was different in the dev stage. It then alerts us straightaway inside of our production monitors once it has been released. Therefore, it has improved how we run our systems since we monitor multiple environments."
"From our standpoint, there are a number of valuable features. The WebHooks are obviously really great. The alert framework is really good and then the reporting and visualizations that you get from the dashboards is good. Those three areas are primarily what my team's focused on in terms of usage from day to day."
"There are several features that are really good. The first one is the flexibility and the advanced configuration that Apica offers when it comes to configuring synthetic checks. It provides the ability to customize how the check should be performed and it is very flexible in the number of synthetic locations that it can use. It allows us to run scripts from different locations all over the world, and they have a really good number of these locations."
"It uses a basic scripting language, which is easy to learn and customize as needed. Compared to LoadRunner, I found writing and customizing code much easier in Apica."
"This tool helps us gather information from all hosts and services, then cross reference the information."
"Dynatrace has great training available. It is easy for everybody to use. Anybody can go out to YouTube, watch a video, and figure out how to use the piece that they need."
"It allows you to better utilize and focus your talent, and tell management that you are not only looking at problems, but how you can ultimately make the product better for the end user."
"We are not blind anymore with our digital services performance; no more fire fighting."
"We enabled UEM for all of our applications. This allows us to see exactly what the client is experiencing."
"The product installs quickly and immediately. It begins to learn the architecture of the systems which need to be monitored. It then learns what “normal” looks like, so there really is no need for manual configuration."
"Reduced MTTR, thanks to smart problem detection and automated root cause analysis."
"The Session Replay not only allows us to watch the user in 4K video, but to see the individual steps happening behind the scenes, from a developer perspective. It gives us every single step that a user takes in a session, along with the ability to watch it as a video playback. We can see each call to every server as the user goes through the site. If something is broken or not running optimally, it's going to come up in the Session Replay."
"We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement."
"The accuracy of alerts can be improved a little bit. Right now, it's pretty good in terms of alerting pretty quickly about failures or changes in response times. However, what we have seen happen is the number of alerts that we are getting is very frequent, and we would like to tone down the number of alerts. That's the only trouble we have. Apica could tone down those settings because there is no option for us to tone it down to a level that would reduce the alerts to a minimum. As a platform, it does send us good alerts, but it could be improved a bit."
"The initial screen on their dashboard could have a bit more data, but this is a small thing. It could have more data, so we do not need to drill down to a screen behind that initial information. I would like them to get a little better on the user interfaces that we need to go into."
"Learning the tool has always been a little difficult from a scripting perspective because the framework is proprietary and unique. Once we became used to what it does and how to perform it, then it became easier for my team and me. I would like to see some of the testing steps be part of a more well-known language, like Java or Python. That would be a big improvement."
"Alerting needs improvement. It's a little noisy. It needs some better options. Currently, they have an issue, when you set up a synthetic monitor, you can set up where it's monitoring from, a data center that Apica owns."
"The having to install an application on your desktop to utilize something like ZebraTester is a little cumbersome. It would be nice to see that become a web-based application. Having the documentation a little more accessible, and easier to digest by people who are just learning how to use the framework, especially when it comes to more complex or more edge-based cases would be really helpful to have."
"Apica should add more features and integrations with different tools and certain ticketing systems, like ServiceNow."
"There are some components of the user interface that are not up to date. Just to give you an idea, today we have web applications that are called single-page applications that are much faster than the old style of web application. If we can move faster into the flow of the graphic user interface, and in a more effective way, it will save us a lot of time."
"Needs support for more technologies."
"Where we are struggling is being able to pull that information out and combine it with other contextual information that we have in other sources. Mining that data in a big-data environment, and joining it together and coming up with larger types of analysis on it."
"The thread traceability is something that needs improvement."
"Improve Dynatrace for the following industries: telco, eCommerce, and banking."
"I would like more flexible data export functions and APIs. The end user experience data is very useful to the solutions team to determine actual system usage and misuse. Flexible, easier data APIs would allow us to export the data more easily to other analytics platforms to enable this analysis as well as enable storage of this data for longer term analysis since DynaTrace only holds user data for 35 days."
"On the one hand we have Dynatrace, on the other hand, we have AppMon. We know Dynatrace is more powerful, with a lot of functions, but there are some core functions AppMon has that Dynatrace needs. Our main use is AppMon and we have not gone to Dynatrace because we don't have those specific functions that we need."
"Support for cloud-based environments needs to be improved."
"I would like Dynatrace to be more flexible and user-friendly."
Apica is ranked 45th in Log Management with 4 reviews while Dynatrace is ranked 4th in Log Management with 340 reviews. Apica is rated 8.4, while Dynatrace is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Apica writes "Offers transcript download feature and easy to set up and configure tests but not very user friendly". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dynatrace writes "AI identifies all the components of a response-time issue or failure, hugely benefiting our triage efforts". Apica is most compared with Datadog, AppDynamics, Apache JMeter and OpenText LoadRunner Cloud, whereas Dynatrace is most compared with Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, Splunk Enterprise Security and Azure Monitor. See our Apica vs. Dynatrace report.
See our list of best Log Management vendors and best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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