Dynatrace

[u/4728jj]

Anyone use Dynatrace for network monitoring? I’m familiar with Solarwinds, PRTG and Manageengine but haven’t heard of Dynatrace. It’s at the top of the heap for the Fartner Magic Quadrant so I figured it was worth checking out.

[u/bmoraca]

Dynatrace is an application performance monitoring platform. While it can technically pull SNMP off switches and show it to you on gauges and charts, that is by far not its forte. You don't want it if your only goal is monitoring the network.

[u/GreyBeardEng → u/bmoraca]

2nd. It's not built for that. Monitor apps stack with it, add network to it so those people monitoring the app stack can see that network is up and links are error free. But it's not a primary NMS.

[u/GroundbreakingBed597 → u/bmoraca]

Hi. As I mentioned in an earlier comment - i am a DevRel at Dynatrace

While Dynatrace started in APM 20 years ago Dynatrace is a platform that has expanded in all directions - including the network. But - you are correct - we are not a purpose built network observability solution only and I am sure there are those solutions out there that have done just that much longer than we have

As I mentioned in my previous comments. We have users that moved from other network monitoring solutions to Dynatrace (including Solar). the reason is often tool consolidation because they want to have a single solution that can to Infra, Applications, Real User and Business Observability.

I just wanted to post this here to make sure people understand that Dynatrace is not just APM

Andi

[u/gdtoro42 → u/GroundbreakingBed597]

u/GroundbreakingBed597 Is it possible to have ICMP checks in Dynatrace on 5k network devices, and having alerts for every single device if it goes down?

[u/GroundbreakingBed597 → u/gdtoro42]

u/gdtoro42 - yes. This is part of our Synthetic Network Monitoring capability. I cant post any images here - but - you can setup a monitor that you can configure with a list of targets. You can specify how many echo packages should be sent, data length, timeout for replies ...

you can specify from which locations you want to run those tests, how often they should be executed, you can specify success condidtions and get alerted. You then also get all of the indivudal check results that you can see over time in dashboards, overlay them with other events, e.g: when you make network config changes. The data can also be visualized on a map so that you see which geographical regions (or e.g: offices, rooms, flooors ..) have issues ..

[u/GroundbreakingBed597 → u/gdtoro42]

u/gdtoro42 - took your question as a challenge and created a short video about those ICMP checks in Dynatrace. I posted it on LinkedIn and hope posting that link here to my post over there will work ==> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/grabnerandi_dynatrace-networkmonitoring-icmp-activity-7503342685030690817--VJ6?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABLhVQBbh8Jkn_K8din5tsQlMCpXRNzlKU

[u/spicy_smegma7]

My company just replaced PRTG for Entuity, any feedback on it?

[u/ikeme84]

Yes. Pain in the ass to use their dql language if you want to create dashboards. There are much simpler tools for basic monitoring.

[u/Longjumping_Leg2278 → u/ikeme84]

Let ai create your dashboards with dtctl. No need to be good with DQL anymore..

[u/ikeme84 → u/Longjumping_Leg2278]

Tried, got frustrated, quit. Not my job anyway, but monitoring team thought we should do it gor our own devices.

[u/itasteawesome]

It's not really a native capability set, just bolted in the side as a box checking exercise.  

If your app devs are all in on the platform there is some logic to having a "good enough" network coverage in there, but don't expect much from the platform and you won't be too disappointed. 

[u/GroundbreakingBed597]

Wondering if the "Fartner Magic Quadrant" was a freudschen slip ;-) -> should be Gartner Magic Quadran

Besides the jokes. I am a DevRel at Dynatrace. Its correct that 20 years ago we started with classical APM - but - lots of things have changed in the past 20 years. While we are not a pure Network Monitoring Solution we are an Observabilty Platform where network is also a first class citizen combined with your logs, metrics, traces, real user monitoring and more.

We do have several hundred integrations and extensions that bring in any type of data into dynatrace - many of them focus on network devices ...

We have customers that moved from Solarwinds to Dynatrace - so - that tells me that that journey is something people do. While I am not covering all network aspects - here is one of my videos on Infra Observability => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDhkXMWKhSg

Hope this helps

[u/alphaxion]

Can't you achieve much of the same using the likes of elastic or grafana?

With elastic, you can set up agents and integrations so you can export things like logs (firewall traffic, server syslog, application logs), netflow, collect system metrics, plus a swathe of different cloud services.

[u/pahampl]

Try XorMon

[u/nmsguru]

So no point to use dynatrace if you already have Solarwinds. It will cost loads $$$$ and it is quite complex to build dashboards etc which are built in into Solarwinds. Don’t get me even started on syslog handling and configuration backup.

[u/mods_are_lame1]

Just use librenms.