It’s time to upgrade the PTC System Monitor (PSM)!

As a PSM system administrator, you’ve relied on AppMon as a preconfigured APM tool for detecting, diagnosing, and repairing problems that impact the operational health of your Windchill application suite.

Since the discontinuation of PSM, we’ve expanded our support and released a starter set for Windchill which was developed with PTC, partners, and current customers to help users accelerate their performance insights. This will allow you to move to the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform with ease and get automatic, intelligent observability at scale. You can read more in our latest blog.

The Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform provides you with so much more monitoring functionality. It covers the whole range of technologies, from bleeding-edge cloud platforms down to the mainframe. This means that your entire IT infrastructure can be monitored within minutes. The all-in-one Dynatrace platform delivers precise answers about the performance of your applications, their underlying infrastructure, and the experience of your end users. This enables organizations to innovate faster, collaborate more efficiently, and deliver more value with dramatically less effort.

Read below to see what you get with the Dynatrace platform. If you have any questions about how to upgrade, the PTC Windchill starter-kit, we’re here to help you—just email us at ptc@dynatrace.com.

“But we’re happy with AppMon and we don’t want to change anything”

Most of our AppMon customers have already upgraded from AppMon to the Dynatrace platform. For those of you who are still investigating the tremendous value that the Dynatrace software intelligence platform provides, consider the following quotes from customers who’ve already made the switch from AppMon to Dynatrace:

“As a large traditional bank, we have a real convoluted IT infrastructure. You name it, and we have it! We choose AppMon back then, not only because of the unique code-level visibility in production into each transaction but also because of the broadest technology coverage in the market. As soon as we learned that the new Dynatrace platform covers all that, plus the bleeding-edge cloud technologies, it was a no-brainer to upgrade sooner than later!”

“My team loved AppMon and pushed back on moving to a new solution. It took me a while to convince them to give the Dynatrace platform a chance. After three days of playing with the free trial, they suddenly pushed me to make this switch possible imminently. Now we have a new colleague called Davis, whom everyone loves!”

It’s time to make your move

While change is a prerequisite for mastering digital transformation, you need compelling reasons before considering leaving a well-known comfort zone and trying out something new (even when that “something new” provides groundbreaking, AI-driven monitoring, across all modern technology stacks at web scale). So please have a look through the Dynatrace platform capabilities listed below—these are the excellent reasons why it’s time for you to make your move from AppMon to Dynatrace. 

OneAgent monitors the full technology stack of each host

AppMon is still the best-in-class second-generation APM solution, but it requires you to instrument each process manually and pick the corresponding agent technology. There’s a more efficient way with Dynatrace. Just use the three OneAgent commands shown below (download, verify, and install) on your target host—that’s it!

There’s no need to worry about things like agent groups, picking the right sensors, configuring sensors, or figuring out which measure to subscribe to. These concepts either don’t exist in Dynatrace or they’re taken care of for you automatically.

Under the hood, OneAgent is comprised of several code modules that enable OneAgent to monitor all supported technologies out of the box—you don’t even need to configure them.

Automate and save time!

We’ve already covered the automated instrumentation of OneAgent, but the Dynatrace platform also automatically takes care of many other time-consuming tasks.

• Davis®, the Dynatrace AI causation engine, continuously analyzes billions of dependencies and automatically surfaces problems, including their root causes and business impact.
• Smartscape, our real-time topology visualization tool, provides a holistic view of your environment, showing all dependencies in your infrastructure, processes, and services.
• The easy-to-use Dynatrace web UI shows full-stack dependencies vertically across all tiers, along with all incoming and outgoing call relationships within each horizontal tier.

All of this is provided to you out-of-the-box with zero configuration for 100,000+ hosts, allowing for single-pane-of-glass visibility into extra-large production environments.

All-in-one (and not just APM)

Imagine a situation where an automated synthetic test uncovers a significant problem during the night following the deployment of a new “non-critical” service. Somehow the change breaks login access to a critical application. Davis tells you where and why this problem has occurred and triggers a remediation action before any real users even encounter the problem, all without any interaction on your part. The next day, your engineering team can have a detailed look at the underlying data, including Session Replay, from the user’s perspective.

And there’s much more:

• Infrastructure monitoring with integrations to all leading cloud providers
• AIOps for automating the identification and resolution of problems
• Digital Experience Monitoring (Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring including Session Replay)
• And even Business Analytics

From mainframe to mobile, Dynatrace has the broadest technology coverage, including supported languages, application architectures, cloud, on-premise or hybrid, enterprise apps, SaaS monitoring, and more.

Stop searching, find answers

Application Performance Management is still a valid discipline in hybrid cloud environments, covering monolithic applications that hit ESBs like TIBCO, IBM Integration Bus, MQ, and down to the mainframe.

Even in such cases, it still makes sense to use the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform, analyze causal relationships among thousands of events, and get a single problem notification that surfaces the root cause of any detected problems. Davis eliminates complexity while providing proactive, precise answers. As a bonus, you’ll be “future ready” to move more and more of your organization’s services to dynamic, multi-cloud environments where such monitoring capabilities are a must.

“I think there’s a world market for maybe five computers”

— Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

If we’ve learned anything, it’s that software is getting more powerful, faster, and also more complex and dynamic with each passing day. You can’t keep pace by simply upgrading to the latest hardware and updating to the latest software releases twice a year.

The Dynatrace scalable grid architecture provides easy and limitless horizontal scalability for both SaaS and on-premise Managed deployments. Dynatrace scales up as your monitoring environment grows by adding nodes that feature built-in failover and automatic load balancing to ensure optimal resource usage.

Besides the needed horsepower, an easy way to govern access and visibility is critical. With management zones, Dynatrace provides you with a powerful way to partition monitoring data based on specific applications, hosts, process groups, services, or other monitored entities. Management zones enable the definition of fine-grained access rights, thereby promoting collaboration and sharing while also helping teams maintain focus and ensuring secure access control.

All things come to those who wait (however, not in this case)

While patience and persistence might be good advice for some scenarios in life, it’s most likely not applicable to IT. On the other hand, hasty changes can negatively affect your applications and services if they’re not managed and controlled using the latest and greatest solutions. With 25 releases per year, the Dynatrace platform provides the perfect cadence for you to remain up-to-date with the latest innovations, technology support, and resolved issues. The good news is that you don’t need to take care of these updates yourself (though you can control the timing of updates if you wish).

If you haven’t done so already, it’s time to take a closer look at the Dynatrace software intelligence platform and give Dynatrace Davis a chance to make your life easier.