September 2019 Summaries

Dynatrace has reformed its development processes to ensure rapid deployment of new features and updates, while also integrating robust security measures into these workflows. Central to this integration is the use of Jira for tracking security vulnerabilities, which are categorized by severity and managed with a defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) for remediation. The security team has implemented dashboards for real-time tracking and management of security issues, allowing developers and team leads to address vulnerabilities efficiently. By leveraging data-driven approaches, Dynatrace has successfully prioritized efforts and investments towards high-risk areas, leading to significant reductions in certain types of vulnerabilities, such as Cross-Site Scripting. The company emphasizes the importance of embedding security within the development culture and aims to share its practices to help other organizations enhance their security processes. Dynatrace also plans to further streamline its security workflow by automating the creation of Jira tickets from various scanning tools, facilitating faster feedback and integration of security into development practices.

Andreas Grabner discusses how Dynatrace provides Monitoring as a Self-Service (MaaSS) capabilities for developers, operators, DevOps, and business teams at a SaaS-based eCommerce platform, enabling more effective use of Kubernetes (k8s) as a cloud-native platform. While Kubernetes offers basic monitoring, Dynatrace enhances this with comprehensive features like full-stack observability, end-to-end code-level tracing, and service mesh insights, integrating data automatically for better context and understanding. The article highlights how different teams utilize Dynatrace: business teams use it to monitor SaaS tenant-specific data, cloud architects leverage it for deployment and architecture validations, k8s administrators benefit from its cluster and node health monitoring, and developers gain insights into code performance and optimization. Additionally, Dynatrace's AI engine, Davis®, assists in detecting anomalies and providing automatic problem detection. This MaaSS approach fosters greater engineering autonomy and is seen as a step toward Autonomous Cloud Management, with further goals of automating quality, delivery, and operations.

The OneAgent and ActiveGate release version 1.175, announced on September 5, 2019, introduces several enhancements and new features across multiple platforms, including expanded support for AIX and non-privileged mode on Linux, along with updates in Java, Node.js, and Go technologies. Notable improvements include the general availability of automatic code module injection for AIX, enhanced security settings for Linux, and updated support for Java's CompletableFuture, gRPC, and Reactor Netty. The release also brings various resolved issues and feature adjustments across several technologies, such as improved Kubernetes configuration, ActiveGate integration, and synthetic monitoring capabilities. Additionally, the release outlines future de-support plans for certain technologies and operating systems, emphasizing the need for users to upgrade to newer versions to maintain compatibility and performance.

Dynatrace Managed's version 1.176 release introduces several new features and enhancements, including the integration of Davis AI for custom time-series events and more flexible SAML configuration options, which now provide advanced Single Sign-on settings. The release also improves user productivity by encouraging the activation of Dynatrace Community accounts, allowing users to engage more deeply with the platform through various interactive channels. Notably, the update simplifies cluster management by enabling single-click scaling down without disabling OneAgent traffic and enhances system backup processes while optimizing network bandwidth usage. Additionally, the release resolves numerous issues across different components, such as fixing errors related to installation, configuration, and user interface inconsistencies. Furthermore, security improvements have been made to the Dynatrace Cluster Management API, and the release notes now include direct links to facilitate quicker access to information on recent and upcoming changes.