March 2019 Summaries

Dynatrace has announced its support for IBM App Connect Enterprise and IBM Integration Bus (IIB), enhancing visibility and monitoring capabilities for enterprise integration solutions. This support enables organizations to gain a unified perspective on their systems by deploying OneAgent on IIB nodes, which allows for automatic monitoring of message flows triggered by web requests, web services, or IBM MQ messages. Dynatrace's AI engine, Davis, leverages detected service connections to provide insights into the service and infrastructure topology, identifying anomalies and root causes of issues such as resource congestion or faulty services. The system auto-discovers dependencies and learns the behavior of the integration landscape, offering detailed analysis of message flows and service calls through PurePath. The support extends to IIB versions 9 and 10, with additional features for error detection and custom business errors already introduced in newer OneAgent versions. Dynatrace offers a 15-day free trial, allowing users to explore these capabilities without commitment.

The text discusses how a large US-based insurance company utilizes Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring to ensure the reliability and performance of its core applications, both for its staff and insured customers, while also gaining insights from competitors. Initially used for monitoring their own websites and user journeys, the company expanded the use of synthetic monitors to include their competitors' sites, enabling them to compare performance metrics and learn from the industry. By setting up synthetic tests for both their website and competitors, they can continuously optimize their web page performance and user experience. The detailed insights from these tests, including waterfall analysis, help the company maintain a competitive edge by understanding how different resources load and perform across various geographical regions and conditions. This strategic approach not only aids in improving their own services but also allows them to celebrate benchmarks where they outperform competitors.

Dynatrace has enhanced its platform to allow users to register and monitor custom network devices via both the Dynatrace API and a more user-friendly web UI, which simplifies the integration and management of devices that cannot have the OneAgent installed. This functionality enables automatic integration into Smartscape, allowing Dynatrace AI to incorporate custom devices into its root-cause analysis by mapping calls to these devices as dedicated services. External dependencies are categorized based on IP address resolution, and internal calls, often critical within the same company, can be managed by creating a custom device through a series of intuitive steps on the platform. Users can define unique IDs for devices, categorize them by technology, and use custom icons for easy identification, while grouping allows for logical monitoring of devices sharing services. Metrics can be reported using the Dynatrace Timeseries API, and custom devices, whether created via the UI or API, can be deleted if necessary, ensuring efficient management of network resources.

In 2019, the migration of workloads from on-premises to cloud environments was increasingly prevalent, with cloud vendors encouraging enterprises to adopt cloud services and build new cloud-native solutions. A common inquiry among businesses was the necessity of dedicated cloud monitoring solutions like Dynatrace, beyond what cloud vendors offer. The text highlights several reasons for using Dynatrace, including its ability to handle technology diversity in hybrid-cloud architectures, provide comprehensive full-stack metrics rather than isolated service metrics, and deliver detailed deployment context and topology data. Additionally, Dynatrace's AI-driven AIOps capabilities enable automated problem analysis and self-healing actions, thus enhancing operational efficiency. Real-world examples from Dynatrace customers illustrate how these features support effective cloud migration and ongoing operations, emphasizing the limitations of metrics-based monitoring alone in delivering the insights needed for scaling operations efficiently in a hybrid-cloud landscape.

Organizations are increasingly migrating workloads to the cloud for modernization, cost savings, and elasticity, exemplified by StepStone's transition of Microsoft-related workloads to AWS Cloud, as discussed in a presentation by Jacek Jaworski at the AWS Summit in Berlin. Utilizing Dynatrace Davis and its deterministic AI, StepStone enhances IT operations by automating problem detection and root cause analysis, avoiding the limitations of simple metric threshold alerting. This approach was demonstrated with a case where a slow disk on a Windows host impacted service-level agreements (SLAs), triggering notifications through PagerDuty and Slack, which facilitated team response via a BlueJeans meeting. Dynatrace's integration with AWS metadata and its advanced monitoring capabilities, like Smartscape and PurePath, allow for comprehensive application stack analysis, thereby focusing on issues that affect service performance and end-user experience. The Dynatrace ServiceFlow tool aids enterprise architects in identifying architectural vulnerabilities and improving fault tolerance, with further blog posts planned to detail StepStone’s architectural evolution and integration of monitoring data into continuous delivery pipelines.

A Dynatrace customer at a major U.S.-based insurance company faced sporadic website crashes on Windows desktops, impacting user experience with their internal web portals and a custom application called PACE. The issue, which the help desk couldn't initially resolve due to its sporadic nature, was addressed by deploying Dynatrace OneAgent on these desktops. Organized into a special host group named "End-User-PCs," the OneAgent gathered detailed metadata and monitored processes, revealing that the crashes were due to exhausted process memory in the PaceExplorer.exe application. This data allowed the customer to pinpoint the root cause and provided developers with crash details and traffic patterns for resolution. The case highlights the effectiveness of Dynatrace OneAgent in supporting IT help desks by automatically detecting issues and providing actionable insights, thus demonstrating its value in enterprise settings beyond microservices in hybrid-cloud environments.