April 2018 Summaries

In 2014, Dynatrace launched a certification program to validate users' competencies in their product, beginning with an exam for AppMon, which quickly exceeded expectations in uptake. The program includes three levels: Associate, Professional, and Master, each building on the previous, with the highest level requiring demonstration of mastery through practical application. Following a shift in the Digital Performance Management space and the introduction of Dynatrace as its flagship product in 2017, the company saw a significant increase in certification uptake, reflecting the product's innovation and appeal. Dynatrace Education supports this growth with regular releases and updates to its training materials, offering both online and virtual instructor-led training to meet the demand for knowledge, evidenced by over 5,000 certifications issued and a robust online learning platform. This emphasis on education helps users apply a proactive approach to digital performance management, as highlighted by a testimonial from a VP in a large financial organization.

Dynatrace has introduced a new diagnostic tool called Exception Analysis, allowing users to view and analyze exceptions occurring within a selected time frame in their environment. This feature is accessible via the Diagnostic tools menu and provides an overview chart of exception occurrences along with a detailed list of top exceptions and impacted services. Users can filter data by specific exception classes and time frames, focusing on trends and impacts. Further analysis is possible by drilling down into exception details, examining stack traces, and identifying commonalities in exception occurrences, which aids in pinpointing code areas for improvement. The tool also offers the ability to view related requests and messages, enhancing its utility for users seeking to optimize their systems. Feedback on the new feature can be shared via the Dynatrace community platform.

Mean Time to Instrumentation (MTTI) is highlighted as a crucial factor in selecting modern Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, as articulated by an Enterprise Performance Engineer named Dustin. He underscores the need for MTTI to be reduced to two minutes due to the complexities of monitoring new-generation applications, such as cloud platforms and microservices, which demand rapid and efficient instrumentation. While second-generation APM tools like AppDynamics, NewRelic, and Dynatrace AppMon have reduced MTTI significantly from weeks to hours, they often require extensive knowledge of application environments, posing challenges in dynamic and diverse technological landscapes. Dustin advocates for automated configuration and enhanced default instrumentation to address these challenges, a sentiment echoed by Dynatrace's approach with its OneAgent, Smartscape, and PurePath technologies. These solutions offer seamless installation, full-stack visibility, and automated updates, leveraging AI to enhance monitoring efficiency and problem-solving, thereby aligning with modern DevOps and SRE team requirements.

The Site Reliability Guardian in Dynatrace offers automated change impact analysis to help DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers (SREs) ensure service availability and performance, facilitating informed release decisions and the application of Service-Level Objectives (SLOs). Emphasizing the need for resilience throughout the continuous delivery pipeline, Dynatrace advocates for a comprehensive approach that integrates monitoring from development to operations to prevent production issues. An "Unbreakable Delivery Pipeline" tutorial, first presented at Dynatrace's PERFORM 2018 User Conference, demonstrates this integration using AWS CodePipeline and Dynatrace's REST API for monitoring, self-healing, and quality gates. The tutorial's success prompted a global workshop tour, incorporating feedback to improve resources and extend compatibility with other CI/CD tools like Jenkins and Concourse. Attendees are required to have basic AWS skills, and the workshop emphasizes hands-on learning with AWS services, encouraging participants to engage with the Dynatrace community, contribute feedback, and explore additional resources and tutorials.

Dynatrace utilizes AI to detect and manage problems by identifying anomalies in applications, services, and infrastructure, creating a single problem ticket that includes all related events and impacted entities through its live dependency model Smartscape. This approach minimizes multiple alerts and provides a comprehensive view of the issue, including root causes and business impacts. Dynatrace offers integration options with various incident management, collaboration, and auto-remediation tools, as well as the ability for users to create custom integrations using webhooks. The custom integration process involves configuring HTTP POST payloads and headers, ensuring compatibility with the user's system, and validating notifications. Additionally, Dynatrace's Problem API allows users to query further details about detected issues and automate remediation actions, exemplified by an AWS Lambda function implementation for automatic rollbacks. The platform supports continuous monitoring and updating of problem details, enabling smarter remediation actions and maintaining an audit trail through comments on problem tickets. Users are encouraged to build their own integrations and can start a free trial of Dynatrace to explore its capabilities.

Self-driving IT is increasingly being adopted by companies seeking autonomous IT operations, with key components including AI-driven orchestration, openness, automation, cloud technology, breaking down silos, and fostering a BizDevOps culture. Dynatrace, in conjunction with ServiceNow, significantly enhances these components, particularly in openness and automation, and breaking down organizational silos. The integration of these tools is seamless and provides comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities, such as defining auto-remediation workflows and ensuring smooth release processes with automated success control. Key performance metrics are tracked by Dynatrace and reported via ServiceNow, facilitating real-time decision-making by providing accurate data to the right stakeholders. This partnership also consolidates data and business processes, enabling data-driven decisions and optimizing performance and error management in the IT environment.

Neiman Marcus has embraced cloud technology to enhance its eCommerce operations, shifting from traditional application performance monitoring (APM) tools to a more dynamic and automated solution using Dynatrace. This transformation involves leveraging Amazon ECS for running Spring Boot microservices in dockerized containers, which has necessitated a change in their monitoring strategy due to the limitations of traditional APMs. Dynatrace's OneAgent technology offers a comprehensive monitoring solution that integrates with AWS CloudWatch to provide live and historical insights into resource consumption and service health across Neiman Marcus's cloud infrastructure. By utilizing Dynatrace's AI-driven problem detection and automatic dependency mapping, Neiman Marcus can reduce false positives and streamline incident management, thus enhancing their ability to respond to and remediate issues in real time. The transition to this cloud-based monitoring strategy has allowed Neiman Marcus to automate and scale their operations more effectively, benefiting from features like auto-remediation and smart endpoint scaling, which are crucial in managing the complexities of a microservices architecture.