DATA CENTER MONITORING MARKET: COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

DYNATRACE

Product Overview

• Dynatrace offers a single software platform that integrates all of its service offerings including;
•  Application performance: Microservices, code-level tracing, hybrid cloud, and SQL/NoSQL databases.
•  Digital experience: Mobile web & IoT, real-user monitoring, session replay, and synthetic.
•  Services: mission control, Dynatrace ONE, marketplace, and insight.
•  AI Ops: precision root cause, open ingestion, orchestration, and topology dependencies.
•  Cloud Infrastructure: hosts/VMs/containers, continuous discoveries, networks, and events & logs.

Solutions Overview

• Cloud operations : Dynatrace simplifies cloud operations using automation and AI to help develop and facilitate cloud native applications quicker.
• Its cloud operations span through cloud native environment, hybrid monster, and effective cloud migration.
• Microservices and containers : Its microservices and container monitoring solutions helps with real-time monitoring of dynamic environments.
• Dynatrace always maps the dependencies of a companies entire environment automatically, regardless of the complexity.
• DevOps : Dynatrace's DevOps solution utilizes both AI and automation for steady delivery.
• DevOps help build a self-healing delivery pipeline that permits more innovation and less troubleshooting.
• IoT monitoring : Dynatrace helps users overcome the intricacy of IoT, administer AI for acceptable IoT performance, and provide an incomparable user experience.
• Digital experience : Dynatrace's digital experience monitoring offers business-critical evaluation and insight of the application's performance operation user experience.
• Autonomous cloud management (ACM): ACM is Dynatrace's vision of the best means to build and manage applications. ACM enables clients to deliver software adequately and quicker through automation.

Differentiation strategy

• Dynatrace stands out from its competitors through some unique features of its product/service solutions, which include zero touch automation configuration, full stack understanding of inter dependencies and relations, an exceptional open AI engine, and a web-scale cloud native architecture.

Use of AI

• Dynatrace AI is known as Davis which analyzes 368 billion dependencies per second, decreased overall system health outage by 100,000 minutes, and have processed about 8 billion application topology alterations.
• Dynatrace utilizes artificial intelligence in its DevOps solutions, which help build a continuous delivery pipeline that can self-heal for more innovation and less troubleshooting.

Weaknesses

• Need for a vast area of infrastructure, including SAN and telecom
• No in-depth integration between SaaS and on-prem 
• Need for improved technical document  
• Need for additional data export choices 
•  Services are too expensive 

PRTG (PAESSLER)

Product/services Overview

•  PRTG Network Monitor: With the PRTG network monitor, clients can observe the traffic, systems, devices, and IT infrastructure applications with no requirement for added extensions or downloads and is appropriate for all businesses sizes.
• PRTG Network Monitor include Bandwidth Monitoring : It makes it simple to check and track bandwidth usage in networks.
•  Cloud Monitoring : PRTG cloud monitoring software is compatible with Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, and helps save effort, money, and time.
•  Database Monitoring : With database monitoring, clients are supplied with a more comprehensive and terse overview, provide individual reports, variety of manufactures offered, and global monitoring.
•  Network Mapping : PRTG links monitoring and mapping and has the capacity to produce custom network diagrams for different audiences.
•  Port Monitoring : It helps with observing the ports in networks with respect to bandwidth usage and security.
•  Server Monitoring : PRTG offers database server monitoring, file server monitoring, web server monitoring, and mail server monitoring.
•  SNMP Monitoring : SNMP is made up of three different components, namely network-management systems (NMSs), managed devices, and agents.

Differentiation strategy

• Flexible alerting: PRTG is integrated with 10 built-in technologies, including play alarm audio files, triggering HTTP requests push, email.
• Multiple user interfaces: PRTG has a full featured web interface that operates on AJAX with extreme security requirements.
• Cluster failover solution: Failover tolerant monitoring is permitted by the PRTG Network Monitor.
• Maps and dashboards: PRTG helps visualize networks by employing real time maps featuring live status data.
• Distributed monitoring: It is capable of overseeing numerous networks in several locations and different networks.
• In-depth reporting: PRTG helps clients obtain the graphs and statistics for distinct monitoring data as well as configuration.

Use of AI

• PRTG does not use artificial intelligence in any of its product/services.

Weaknesses

•  Not user-friendly for new users
•  Lack of software support 
•  Software randomly failing 
•  Insufficient application structure 

SPLUNK

Product/services Overview

•  Splunk Cloud: It offers an adaptable, cost-effective, and secure data platform service.
•  Splunk Enterprise: It empowers users by delivering insights without being confined to their work area.
•  Splunk IT Service Intelligence : This helps businesses foresee and thwart, manage massive volumes of data, and offers 360-degree insights.
• Splunk Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring : This helps clients monitor their Amazon Web Services deployments with operational and cost-management insights, along with end-to-end security.
•  Splunk App for Infrastructure : Offers incorporated and equated metrics and logs within a single solution.
•  VictorOps : It diminishes on-call missteps by mending issues quicker with evidence-based and precise incident response routing.
•  Splunk Enterprise Security : It helps restrict network breaches via analytics-driven SIEM solution.
•  Splunk Phantom : It helps organize security functions in a short time via case management abilities and playbook automation.
•  Splunk User Behavior Analysis : This aids with securing against threats from unknown user and entity behavior analytics.
•  Splunk for Industrial IoT : Assists with the creation of predictive and real-time insights through industrial operational information.
•  Splunk Business Flow: Clients are able to improve transparency through the visualization and exploration business proceedings.

Differentiation strategy

• Offers intermittent insights: Through quick research, clients can decrease resolution mean time by 90%.
• Scale Reliability: The software develops along with the client's requirements with no compromise to performance.
• Robust Capabilities/Machine Learning: Utilizing advanced machine learning, the software can perceive noise signal.
• Expansive Ecosystem: Attends to any type of data.

Use of AI

• Splunk applies its AI Ops in performance monitoring, event correlation and analysis, IT service management, and automation to help achieve data-driven insight and recommended actions.

Weaknesses

•  High pricing
•  Inefficient access to saved queries and hardware resources
•  Barriers with decentralized working model 
•  Slow response time to queries
•  Hard to master query language 

Research Strategy:

CA TECHNOLOGIES (DX SPECTRUM)

•  CA Technologies has wide coverage in the US and North American DCMS (Data Center Management Systems) industry.
• Through its DX Spectrum (formerly known as CA Spectrum) software, the company provides network fault management solutions to silence network alarm noise, identify issues, and fix problems using root-cause analysis. It provides services such as symptomatic alarm suppression and speed resolution, wide area network monitoring and management, as well as fault and event management integration.
• DX Spectrum provides a "comprehensive topology view of the VMware hosts and virtual machine for both systems management and software-defined data center environments".
• Its data center solutions can suppress any "unnecessary or symptomatic alarms." Through observation of a field and the creation of a topological map, the solution identifies real data.

SITE24X7

• Headquartered in Pleasanton, California, Site24x7 provides website monitoring, server monitoring, application monitoring, network monitoring, and real user monitoring solutions.
• Through its website monitoring solution, for instance, the company helps SysAdmin (system administrators) and DevOps (development & operations) teams to "gain visibility into critical website performance metrics through powerful dashboards and alerts, enabling them to take instant decisions."
• Once Site24x7's "server monitoring agent" has been "successfully installed in the user machine," it uses a "one-way HTTPS connection" to initiate communication to the PDC (Primary Data Center). The data gathered is then presented as simplified "charts in customizable dashboards."

NAGIOS

•  Nagios, headquartered in Saint Paul, Minnesota, provides "monitoring and alerting solutions for servers, applications, switches, and services. Through its IT management system, the company enables organizations to "identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems".
• Besides its IT infrastructure monitoring and alerting solutions, the company also provides tools for downtime scheduling and problem acknowledgment from smartphones or mobile devices. The company's open-source tools provide automated visibility into the health of a data center.
• Nagios' solutions enable its customers to view their data center statistics in order to monitor the disk, RAM (Random Access Memory), CPU (Central Processing Unit), and bandwidth usage.
• The Nagios XL provides heartbeat monitoring, bandwidth reports, email reports, custom action URL, and remote machine monitoring. Upon upgrading to the enterprise package, it also provides users with "web-based server console access, business process monitoring, audit logging, and automated decommissioning."
• Notifications are usually "tiered based on severity to reduce alarm fatigue." Also, upon detection of failures, e-mails are sent only "for non-service impacting alerts". Production issues, on the other hand, are alerted through text messages.

MANAGEENGINE

•  ManageEngine is a subsidiary of Zoho, headquartered in Pleasanton, California. Through its ManageEngine OpManager software, the company provides "data center performance management" solutions.
• Besides data center management, the company also provides solutions in network performance, server and virtualization, network fault management, storage management and report. Some of its products include OpManager Plus, NetFlow Analyzer, and Firewall Analyzer.
• In addressing network failures, OpManager carries out "physical and virtual server monitoring" by using dedicated dashboards to provide "the worst performing Hosts and VMs that need immediate attention". It also carries out "in-depth application monitoring" by observing the performance of critical applications like Oracle, Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic, SilverStream, WebSphere, and GlassFish.
• Also, its NetFlow Plug-in uses "flow-based network traffic analysis" to provide information on bandwidth usage. Finally, ManageEngine OpManager monitors the "temperature of servers and routers." Users can "configure thresholds and monitor them proactively."

CA TECHNOLOGIES (DX SPECTRUM)

• CA Technologies provides data center monitoring solutions through its DX Spectrum (formerly known as CA Spectrum) software. Compared to its competitors, DX Spectrum differentiates itself by leveraging "affordability and effectiveness". In terms of effectiveness, it has established itself as a brand with one of "the best root cause" solutions in the data center monitoring market. The company's "internal causal engine" has also been described as one of its most valuable functions.
• In addition, when it comes to integration and deployment, DX Spectrum's "scalability, reliability, and tolerance to failures" has earned it a reputation as "the benchmark for all tools to mimic."
• The company uses artificial intelligence. Recently, CA Technologies, in order to improve its IT monitoring and analytics services, has created "CA Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps)". This platform enables "IT teams to automate and eliminate key tasks and make self-healing applications a reality."
• Major weaknesses of CA Technologies' data center monitoring solutions include poor historical report generation and the inconvenience of setting a "manual maintenance mode" on devices.

SITE24X7

• Site24X7 focuses on differentiating itself through price advantages. In delivering its monitoring solutions for servers and websites, the brand is known to offer "far more free tools than its competitors." Users recommend it as a reasonably priced tool that provides in-depth monitoring of "on-premise and cloud-based platforms".
• Besides application management, cloud management, and dashboard displays, Site24x7 also uses artificial intelligence in providing chatbots, multi-language, and natural language processing.
• Recently, the company introduced an "artificial intelligence powered Azure monitoring solution, right alongside its chatbot integration with Microsoft Teams. " The new "Site24x7 Azure monitoring service" helps "organizations to manage over 100+ Azure products in real-time using Azure Insights API."
• The most common weakness of this company's data center monitoring solution is the inability to set thresholds. Other weaknesses include a complex setup procedure and the absence of a hierarchical setup for failure alerts.

NAGIOS

• Multiple reviews by administrators, systems engineers, and consultants reveal that Nagios provides the best monitoring tools for environments where low-cost solutions are desired. Its most frequent recommendations indicate that Nagios' tools are well-suited for small businesses who have "less experienced and/or more time-constrained admin[s]."
• Nagios uses artificial intelligence. Its data center monitoring solutions are "integrated with an artificial intelligence framework which makes use of machine learning and natural language ". This technology enables proactive planning by monitoring network devices, hardware infrastructure, and connections.
• Some weaknesses of Nagios include poor scalability, use of threads for performance recommendations, and poor compatibility of plugins with different environments.

MANAGEENGINE (OpManager)

• Based on reviews from senior network and system engineers, infrastructure supervisors, administrators, and IT consultants, ManageEngine OpManager differentiates itself by focusing on "technical excellence that makes it stand out from the competition".
• Through its high-quality 3D visualization of server rooms, simplified IT workflow, great interface, and object segmentation, the company has been able to provide a pleasant experience for its users.
• On ManageEngine's web page dedicated to promoting its network monitoring and diagnostic tools, the company indicates that it uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to provide load sharing, "smarter notification profiles", network adaptation, and automatic corrective actions. Its AI-driven network monitoring tools also enable forecasting and automation.
• Major weaknesses identified by ManageEngine's users include expensive pricing, insufficient integration with MIB (management information base) library, and a complicated user interface that sometimes requires users to watch training videos or call customer support.