August 2019 Summaries

Andi Grabner discusses how the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) leveraged Dynatrace to enhance their digital services, leading to significant improvements in user experience and operational efficiency. By implementing Visibility as a Service (VaaS), MAMPU achieved a 413% improvement in the Application Performance Index (APDEX) and a 99% reduction in response times for critical transactions, enhancing the digital experience for Malaysian citizens. These optimizations resulted in a 68% increase in user adoption within nine months and led to substantial cost savings by reducing resource consumption, such as a 66% reduction in memory utilization. MAMPU's efforts highlight the benefits of using Dynatrace's Real User Monitoring (RUM) data to optimize web performance, reduce JavaScript errors, and tackle infrastructure challenges like database connectivity and web-server thread management. The case study demonstrates that improving system performance not only boosts user engagement but also paves the way for more efficient cloud migration by minimizing resource usage.

In the realm of software, observability is crucial for understanding system behavior through telemetry, which encompasses metrics, logs, and distributed traces. Dynatrace leverages these 'three pillars of observability' to enhance automatic problem detection and root-cause analysis without requiring code changes. By installing a single agent, Dynatrace's OneAgent can discover and instrument processes automatically, collecting thousands of metrics and enabling distributed tracing across complex microservices environments. This approach integrates observability data to avoid siloed information, using real-time topology mapping and AI to identify dependencies and pinpoint root causes efficiently. Dynatrace collaborates with the OpenTelemetry initiative to further standardize data collection for cloud-native software, promising to enhance insights and problem-solving capabilities in large-scale environments.

As organizations increasingly adopt microservices and automation, the need for effective API testing has become essential, with many companies implementing or planning to implement an API testing process. Dynatrace Synthetic simplifies the creation of API tests through synthetic monitors and now supports testing for APIs secured by OAuth 2.0, an open standard for access delegation used by major companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook. OAuth is essential for RESTful APIs, ensuring that each request is individually validated for authorization, not authentication, which is crucial for API security. To monitor an OAuth-protected API using Dynatrace Synthetic, users can create a pre-populated OAuth 2.0 authorization request within the Dynatrace web UI, making it easier to execute and manage future requests. This development is part of a broader set of updates and features, including new synthetic public locations and credentials vaults, aimed at enhancing API security and monitoring capabilities.

Dynatrace's Session Replay feature offers a sophisticated tool for enhancing performance and user experience monitoring by capturing and visually replaying user interactions with applications. This functionality aids in addressing customer complaints, identifying usability issues, and supporting premium customers by allowing selective recording of user sessions tailored to specific business needs. Users can customize settings such as cost and traffic control, opt-in modes, and API calls to manage which sessions are recorded, ensuring that crucial interactions are captured without unnecessary data collection. By fine-tuning these settings, businesses can leverage Session Replay to improve application performance, enhance customer support, and maintain compliance with privacy regulations, all while gaining insights into user behavior.

The OneAgent and ActiveGate release notes for version 1.173, published in August 2019, highlight several key updates and improvements. Notably, the release introduces support for RHEL distributions on the IBM Z platform and enhances compatibility with various technologies such as Play Framework 2.7, Azul Platform Core (Zulu) 11 LTS, NGINX, Amazon Linux 2, and Docker. The internal structure of the OneAgent installer for Windows has been completely redesigned, phasing out the *.msi artifact while maintaining existing API endpoints. Oracle process recognition has been improved by identifying each Oracle SID as a unique process group, and adjustments have been made to better handle changes in Docker versions. Additionally, the release notes outline future de-support plans for certain operating systems and technologies, such as IBM WebSphere Application Server 8.0 and older versions of ActiveGate. Enhancements in monitoring and integration support for Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and VMware are also included, along with several resolved issues across components like Session Replay, Synthetic, and various agents.

Dynatrace introduces the UX score, a comprehensive metric designed to evaluate and report user experiences by categorizing user sessions as Satisfying, Frustrating, or Tolerable. This single metric considers performance, error, and usability metrics, along with user flow information, to deliver a consolidated view of user interactions across applications. The UX score allows for detailed session filtering and segmentation, enabling application owners to identify and address areas of user frustration efficiently. With configurable thresholds and the ability to exclude irrelevant errors, the UX score provides businesses with both out-of-the-box insights and customization options to suit specific needs. It serves as a bridge between IT and business by simplifying communication and prioritizing investments based on user experience data. Additionally, the UX score is accessible through APIs and integrates into dashboards for immediate analysis, contributing to the enhancement of digital applications and user satisfaction.

Dynatrace offers a comprehensive approach to cloud migration projects by leveraging its unique OneAgent technology, which combines both agent and agent-less data collection methods. This approach facilitates the detailed analysis of technology stacks, dependencies, resource consumption, and network traffic, thus enabling organizations to make informed migration decisions. Dynatrace aids in identifying which technologies and services can be migrated, understanding service dependencies, and optimizing database migrations for cost efficiency and performance. The platform also supports functional migration, allowing businesses to move only the essential components that provide significant benefits. Additionally, the Dynatrace API enables seamless integration of collected data into migration tools, enhancing planning and execution processes. The overall aim is to reduce risks, accelerate migration timelines, and improve business outcomes.

Integrating Dynatrace into Azure DevOps pipelines allows for enhanced context and efficiency in software delivery processes by adding Dynatrace information events such as deployment, annotation, configuration, and info to various stages of the pipeline. This integration helps development and operations teams quickly triage and analyze application performance and issues by providing real-time context during deployments, performance tests, and configuration changes. Dynatrace uses tags for organizing entities in monitoring environments, which can be automatically assigned through tagging rules that match detected metadata. The Dynatrace Event API, secured with API tokens, enables the automation of information event creation, and a PowerShell script can facilitate this process within Azure DevOps pipelines by leveraging DevOps variables and linking GitHub repositories. By utilizing these integrations, teams can streamline their workflows and gain deeper insights into their applications' performance, and they can further explore these capabilities through the Dynatrace Free Trial and Developer Program.