The Better Dynatrace Alternative
Full-Stack Observability with an SRE Agent Built In

Tired of DPS invoices you can't forecast, OneAgent lock-in, and a Davis AI that stops at the diagnosis? Switch to Middleware, a unified, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform with predictable pricing, one-minute setup that comes with OpsAI, an SRE Agent that ships the fix as a pull request.

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Why You Should Replace Dynatrace with Middleware

Full-Stack Observability

APM, Infrastructure, Logs, Distributed Tracing, RUM, Synthetic Monitoring, Databases, Containers, Kubernetes, Serverless, and LLM Observability. If you can monitor it in Dynatrace, you can monitor it here.

  • Every pillar included, one plan
  • OpenTelemetry-native, not bolted-on
  • OpsAI included, not a per-host add-on
APM, Infrastructure, Logs, Distributed Tracing, RUM, Synthetic Monitoring, Databases, Containers, Kubernetes, Serverless, and LLM Observability. If you can monitor it in Dynatrace, you can monitor it here.

Full-Stack Monitoring, Log Management, RUM, Synthetic, Application Security, and Kubernetes each consume separate DPS capability units. You build the bundle; DPS bills it dimension by dimension.

  • Per-capability DPS units
  • Davis AI billed on top (~$3.60/host/month)
  • Grail lakehouse for logs, priced per GiB-day
Full-Stack Monitoring, Log Management, RUM, Synthetic, Application Security, and Kubernetes each consume separate DPS capability units. You build the bundle; DPS bills it dimension by dimension.

No vendor lock-in

Middleware built on OpenTelemetry from day one. Portable instrumentation, no proprietary agent, and one timeline where logs, metrics, traces, and events correlate automatically.

  • Standard OTel collectors, no fork
  • Cloud, on-prem, BYOC, or hybrid
  • Switch vendors without re-instrumenting
Middleware built on OpenTelemetry from day one. Portable instrumentation, no proprietary agent, and one timeline where logs, metrics, traces, and events correlate automatically.

Davis AI's causal analysis runs on Smartscape, which is built from OneAgent data. Moving off means uninstalling OneAgent everywhere and re-instrumenting your fleet.

  • OneAgent required for full functionality
  • Davis reasons only over OneAgent data
  • Migration means agent rip-and-replace
Davis AI's causal analysis runs on Smartscape, which is built from OneAgent data. Moving off means uninstalling OneAgent everywhere and re-instrumenting your fleet.

Better support and experience

Every Middleware customer gets responsive, hands-on support, including a 1-hour SLA for critical issues. Dedicated shared Slack and Teams channels connect you directly with the engineers who built the product.

  • 1-hour critical-issue response SLA
  • Direct Slack / Teams channels
  • Self-serve signup, no mandatory sales motion

After the 15-day trial, customers typically transition to a sales-led process with a required annual commitment of 1โ€“3 years. Access to support tiers is based on the contract value.

  • 15-day trial, no permanent free tier
  • Median enterprise contract ~$182K/year
  • Support tied to contract tier

Honest Pricing

Simple, transparent pricing based on the data you actually send. There are no surprise charges for monthly traffic spikes, and OpsAI is bundled into the platform instead of being billed per host.

  • Pay per GB of data sent
  • OpsAI included with token-based price
  • 180-day log retention bundled

DPS bills across seven+ dimensions at once: memory-GiB-hours, host-hours, pod-hours, log ingest, log retention, RUM sessions, plus Davis AI. 15-minute rounding inflates ephemeral workload costs 2โ€“4x.

  • 7+ overlapping meters
  • 15-min rounding, 4-GiB memory minimum
  • Davis AI billed separately

Zero Configuration

One install script, a lightweight OpenTelemetry Collector, and full-stack visibility in under a minute. Auto-instrumentation, service discovery, and Ingestion Control to drop noise in two clicks.

  • One-line install, no implementation engineer
  • Auto service + dependency discovery
  • No proprietary query language to learn
One install script, a lightweight OpenTelemetry Collector, and full-stack visibility in under a minute. Auto-instrumentation, service discovery, and Ingestion Control to drop noise in two clicks.

OneAgent rollouts run multi-day to multi-week. Grail queries use DQL, Dynatrace's proprietary language. DPS budgeting per capability, per environment, is required to keep costs sane.

  • Multi-day to multi-week OneAgent rollouts
  • DQL learning curve for Grail
  • Manual DPS budgeting per capability
OneAgent rollouts run multi-day to multi-week. Grail queries use DQL, Dynatrace's proprietary language. DPS budgeting per capability, per environment, is required to keep costs sane.

Telemetry Patterns

Service-level alerting on real metrics. Search every span you have sent. Click any log, jump to the trace. Slice by any high-cardinality dimension without watching a DDU meter climb.

  • Service-level RED metrics on every operation
  • Full-history span search, not last 15 minutes
  • Logs-to-traces correlation for OTel data

Powerful once fully configured, but getting there often requires careful tuning. Analysis is further constrained, making it harder to investigate data freely without considering cost and retention limits.

  • Capability-unit consumption on every query
  • Hot/warm/cold Grail tiers for logs
  • OneAgent scope limits AI coverage

Point your Dynatrace agents at Middleware and switch incrementally

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The first observability platform built around AI,
not bolted onto it

AI Dashboards

Describe what you want in plain English. Middleware builds the dashboard, selects the charts, and writes the queries. No PromQL, no custom query language, and no template gallery to comb through.

AI Alerts

Alerts that learn what 'normal' looks like for each service and surface only the deviations that matter. Anomaly detection that doesn't drown your on-call team in noise.

OpsAI ยท SRE Agent

An AI SRE that pinpoints root cause, identifies the offending line of code, and opens a pull request with the fix while you're still reading the alert. Auto-resolves issues with 80% accuracy.

AI K8s Root Cause Finder

Auto-structuring, severity detection, and pattern recognition built into log ingestion. No manual regular expressions, no parsing pipelines to maintain.

Auto-Fix ยท 60% Time Saved

Auto-fix issues across infrastructure and application layers with 80% accuracy. Engineers spend 60% less time resolving issues โ€” and more time shipping products.

Testimonials

Customer Stories

Aceturtle

Middleware has played a very good role in transforming our observability and application performance. For instance, we reduced our total observability costs by 50%.

Read the story

Vivek Gupta

Founder & CEO

Hotplate

We're heavy users of RUM and have tried many tools before discovering Middleware. We've been using OpsAI for the past few weeks, and it has automatically resolved about 60% of our production issues.

Read the story

Rangaraj Tirumala

Founding Engineer at Hotplate

Clear Comparison

Feature-by-Feature Comparison: Middleware vs Dynatrace

Evaluate on your own. Here's how Middleware stacks up against Dynatrace, capability by capability.

Bottom line

Who each tool is really built for

Cost-conscious, OTel-native, cloud-native teams

Enterprises deep in the Dynatrace + OneAgent ecosystem

SRE Agent

(detect โ†’ fix โ†’ PR)

OpsAI

Davis AI RCA only

Auto-remediation

(code + K8s)

Supported

AI on third-party data

Datadog, Grafana, Dynatrace

OneAgent data only

BYOC / on-prem

Filter and shape metrics at ingest to control spend.

Grail-managed

Value for money

3โ€“5ร— more cost-effective

~$182K/yr median enterprise contract

Instrumentation

OpenTelemetry-native

OneAgent (proprietary)

Query language

Unified, no proprietary DSL

DQL

Ingestion pipeline

One alert covers the service, not a pile of endpoints.

Can't alert representatively at the service level.

Custom / high-cardinality metrics

Bundled

Consume DPS units

AI pricing

Included

Billed differently

Davis AI ~$3.60/host/month add-on

Log retention

180 days included

Hot/warm/cold, per-GiB-day

Annual commitment

None

Mandatory 1โ€“3 years

Free trial

14 days, no credit card

15 days

Dedicated technical support

All plans

Tied to contract tier

What customers get

The numbers after the switch

Averages across customers who migrated from Dynatrace to Middleware.

4ร—

Troubleshooting

Faster mean-time-to-detect with unified signals on one timeline.

60%

Cost Reduction

Reduction in observability spend versus DPS enterprise contracts

1hr

Issue response SLA

Critical-issue response SLA on every plan

80%

Auto fixes with accuracy

OpsAI resolves issues end-to-end, saving 60% of engineer time.

You Don't Have to Rip Out Dynatrace on Day One

Already running OneAgent? Forward it to OpsAI and let it investigate & fix incidents against your existing stack without re-instrumentation

Zero Re-instrumentation

Incremental Adoption

100% Data Continuity

Read the Migration Docs

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FAQs

Everything you want to know about Middleware v/s Dynatrace

What's the main difference between Middleware and Dynatrace's pricing models?

Middleware charges per GB of data ingested. Dynatrace's DPS bills across memory-GiB-hours, host-hours, pod-hours, logs, sessions, and Davis AI capability units against a mandatory annual commit.

Does Middleware offer a free trial?

Yes, 14 days, unlimited data ingestion across every feature including OpsAI. No credit card required.

How does OpsAI compare to Davis AI?

Davis diagnoses; OpsAI fixes. OpsAI opens a pull request with the code change in Auto Fix mode and applies Kubernetes remediation directly. Auto-resolves 80% of production issues on Middleware's own stack.

Do I need to uninstall OneAgent to use Middleware?

No. OpsAI ingests Dynatrace alerts natively. Run both in parallel, prove ROI, migrate on your schedule.

Can I save money by switching from Dynatrace?

Yes. Customers regularly see 40โ€“60% reductions versus DPS enterprise contracts. Send us your Dynatrace invoice for a line-by-line model.

Is Middleware OpenTelemetry-native?

Yes. OTel is the foundation, not an afterthought. Your instrumentation stays portable.

Optimize More. Worry Less. With Middleware.

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