Dynatrace Perform: Day Two

The second day of Dynatrace Perform kicked off with a great discussion between Kelsey Hightower, distinguished developer advocate at Google Cloud Platform, and Andi Grabner, DevOps evangelist at Dynatrace. The theme of their discussion was redefining the boundaries of people, processes, and platforms. There were so many great insights in this discussion; I will cover it in much greater detail in a separate article. 

My key takeaways from their discussion:

• Computers don’t have an emotional connection to the real world. Ultimately, everything is people to people.
• Humans have been practicing observability to survive for thousands of years. It’s time we build observability into the IT stack.
• AI should raise the bar for humanity. We will find a new appreciation for talking to others and seeing their emotions.

New Product Initiatives

Steve Tack, SVP of Products at Dynatrace, and his team talked about more new initiatives from Dynatrace.

There is an increased need for unified observability. Kubernetes (K8s) is emerging as the operating system of the cloud. We’ve seen a 30% increase in application workloads, while there has been a 211% increase in auxiliary workloads.

Things are moving fast. How do you keep an overview of what’s going on? Use the AppEngine and the increased ability to collect all types of performance data in Grail.

Smartscape

One of the creations is Smartscape Health Views, which enables teams to visualize applications’ vital signs, including the security posture. AppEngine can provide insights from logs, metrics, traces, and events through enrichment, visualization, and analytics.

A unified experience is achieved with one agent, open telemetry, and open tracing on Micrometer, Prometheus, StatsD, and many other application and infrastructure metrics.

This addresses the key challenges of monitoring infrastructure, such as fragmented tools—cloud consoles, network tools, DB tools, and metric tools that provide great depth but zero context.

Organizational silos, which cause duplicate effort and conflicting information, and recurring issues with scales with 100,000+ pods.

To ensure all services are up and running, Davis understands K8s natively and integrates with Smartscape-powered configuration for host services. The solution provides unified multi-cloud visibility for AWS, Azure, GCP, and VMware. With network observability into cloud flows, device health, host-to-host, process-to-process, and all in context.

Unified Insights

There is unified tech coverage with embedded knowledge for more than 625 technologies with extensibility. This addresses the challenge of monitoring digital experience with automated AI and scalability on an enterprise-grade platform.

Unified insights across audiences enable developers, operations, and business owners to proactively address issues more quickly. Problems are prioritized, analyzed, and presented for collaboration with aggregate errors in one list, AI providing causation across the environment, blind spots uncovered, and assigned to the relevant team.

This results in improved user experiences with teams aligned on the issues to be addressed and the responsibility with enriched observability data aligned with business intelligence.

To address the needs for business analytics today, whereby 96% of IT leaders want to tie observability to business outcomes, Dynatrace introduced business flow. It enables users to see a real-time business impact to prioritize what matters most. It’s also great for release validation, enabling developers and engineers to see the real-time business impact of code and application releases. 

Application Security

Security shouldn’t have silos. Everyone involved needs to understand better, collaborate more efficiently, and respond quicker to threats. You achieve this by observing and automating as much as possible.

Security is all about coverage. During day two of Perform, Dynatrace announced DevSecOps lifecycle coverage in conjunction with Snyk to mitigate security risks across pre-production and production environments. This connects Snyk container scans in pre-production environments with Dynatrace production runtime insights. The platform automatically analyzes these scans to identify vulnerabilities and prioritizes them for resolution based on business impact.

77% of CIOs say their IT environment changes once every minute or less. The challenge when autonomous teams start adopting K8s and GitOps is that GitOps lacks orchestration with observability built in and validation of SLOs and dependencies. The site reliability guardian provides automated change impact analysis and release validation to proactively maintain SLOs.

Carbon Impact

Sustainability is a top priority for business leaders today. However, the task of reporting and following related regulations can be difficult for organizations with existing tools. Dynatrace’s Carbon Impact app, which is built on AppEngine, can provide real-time details about the carbon footprint of a company’s hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure. The app offers accurate information about what is causing the footprint, as well as how to lessen it, so firms can fulfill their sustainability objectives.

Key Takeaways

My key takeaways from day two are:

• Dynatrace is helping customers unleash the power of big data in context.
• Grail facilitates this by enabling the collection of all types of data.
• Collaborated analytics is helping companies shift left and shift right.
• Security and observability go together.
• Developers see the impact their code is having throughout the development, release, and everyday use process to know the effectiveness of what they have developed.
• All of this gives more time back to developers and enables them to create apps for anything they can imagine.

Conclusion

I hope you have taken away some helpful information from my day two experience at Dynatrace Perform. Stay tuned for more articles related to my time at Dynatrace.