May 2021 Summaries

Dynatrace has enhanced its capabilities for seamless end-to-end distributed tracing of AWS Lambda functions, offering automatic observability without code modifications, through its integration with the newly released AWS Lambda Extensions. This development allows users to leverage the latest AWS improvements from the moment they are available, providing full visibility into Lambda functions regardless of whether they are deployed as container images or through traditional methods. The Dynatrace extension ensures that users can monitor their serverless environments efficiently, with performance enhancements that particularly benefit Java functions, enabling telemetry data processing and transmission after function execution. Furthermore, Dynatrace's API-first approach facilitates automation by allowing users to easily integrate the latest extension versions into their CI/CD pipelines, ensuring continuous monitoring updates with minimal effort. AWS resource tags are utilized for effective resource management and secure data access, enhancing collaboration and analytics. The improvements are available with OneAgent version 1.217 onwards, and Dynatrace continues to strengthen its partnership with AWS to provide comprehensive observability solutions for serverless applications.

A recent virtual breakfast hosted by Dynatrace explored the complexities of maintaining an optimal digital experience for customers, particularly within a financial services company that saw a significant increase in platform traffic during the pandemic. The discussion highlighted the importance of putting customers first and ensuring seamless digital interactions, even as teams worked remotely. Key strategies included using dashboards for system performance visibility and employing Dynatrace for identifying and resolving bottlenecks, thereby enhancing the alignment between business and IT. The conversation also focused on the introduction of Google's Core Web Vitals as new KPIs and the potential of AIOps and chaos engineering to preemptively address issues. The company's success was attributed to a cultural shift towards prioritizing performance and user experience, with ongoing collaboration across technical and executive teams to ensure a cohesive, data-driven approach to digital service delivery.

Dynatrace Managed version 1.218 introduces several changes and enhancements, including the implementation of a Master Subscription Agreement for new users and the discontinuation of local disk storage for cluster backups, necessitating a new backup strategy for older installations. The update allows for up to 30 nodes per cluster, enhancing scalability for large deployments, and introduces remote access approval for improved support. Privacy improvements mean that user data is now directly sent to Dynatrace for self-monitoring, avoiding third-party involvement. The release also resolves numerous issues across different components, such as ActiveGate, Autonomous Cloud, and the Cluster Management Console, fixing problems related to REST requests, AWS tag ingestion, and dashboard data display. Additionally, the release addresses operating system support changes, with certain Linux distributions losing support in future updates, and incorporates numerous bug fixes to improve functionality and reliability across the platform.

Automating quality gates in the software delivery process enhances reliability and accelerates releases by minimizing manual intervention, a necessity as organizations strive to deliver superior software more swiftly. At Perform 2021, Dynatrace's Kristof Renders and Intuit’s Sumit Nagal demonstrated how service-level objectives (SLOs) and business-level objectives (BLOs) can be integrated earlier in the development lifecycle to prevent minor issues from escalating into major problems in production. Quality gates, which serve as checkpoints defining success criteria, are crucial for continuous evaluation of software quality, ensuring it meets the needs of all stakeholders in BizDevOps processes. Despite the known benefits, only a small percentage of organizations have fully embraced automated quality gates, with many still relying on manual checks. Keptn, Dynatrace’s autonomous cloud control plane, facilitates the automation of quality gates, integrating effortlessly with tools like Jenkins to provide actionable insights and prevent issues from reaching end-users. By adopting a "shift-left" strategy, organizations can detect and resolve issues earlier, ultimately saving costs associated with defective software. Intuit exemplifies this approach by utilizing Dynatrace and Keptn to maintain the quality of its extensive build processes, ensuring robust service performance.

The Dynatrace Operator has been introduced to simplify the deployment and management of observability in Kubernetes environments, building on the earlier OneAgent Operator. This new development facilitates the seamless activation of end-to-end Kubernetes observability, allowing teams to manage their workloads autonomously without external dependencies, which is particularly beneficial for large organizations like SAP. The Dynatrace Operator manages the lifecycle of OneAgent and integrates Kubernetes API monitoring and traffic routing, enhancing the capabilities of existing Dynatrace components such as ActiveGate. This transition enables migration from VM-based ActiveGates to Kubernetes pods and offers a streamlined approach to observability with a simplified custom resource definition. It promises enhanced observability for applications running on Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, and Golang containers, offering a comprehensive solution that supports both DevOps and application teams. Looking forward, Dynatrace plans to introduce new features like webhook injection mechanisms and infrastructure monitoring by summer 2021, aiming to further enhance Kubernetes observability.

IT organizations are increasingly focused on understanding the business impact of IT service quality by tying application performance to business outcomes, which requires expanding observability to encompass business metrics. The narrative highlights the challenges of observability silos, illustrated by a story of delayed problem identification and miscommunication between business and IT teams, leading to ineffective prioritization and action. Business Observability offers a solution by providing real-time insights into how user experience, app performance, errors, and new features affect key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversions and purchases, facilitated by tools like Dynatrace's AI engine, Davis. Effective BizOps collaboration begins with Business Observability, enabling IT to align resources and investments with desired business outcomes, as evidenced by a survey from the Perform 2021 event which found that effective collaborations often incorporate business analytics into IT operations. Practical approaches to BizOps collaboration are explored in a video, offering guidance on use case design and metric sources to improve organizational benefits.

Infrastructure complexity is increasingly challenging for enterprises, resulting in substantial costs and limited visibility into IT systems, despite the use of multiple monitoring tools. Advanced AIOps offers a solution by providing end-to-end observability and automation, which enhances IT operations through a single, coherent platform. At the Perform 2021 event, experts discussed the benefits of adopting AIOps, such as automating operations to free up time for innovation, improving quality by reducing the need for manual data collection, and fostering better collaboration with a unified source of truth. The rise in container usage has added complexity to monitoring, and Dynatrace has developed an AIOps solution for Kubernetes to address this issue, providing unified visibility across environments. AIOps, powered by Dynatrace’s Davis AI, enables 360-degree visibility by mapping observability data to system topology, offering actionable insights and root-cause analysis to improve infrastructure performance and align it with business outcomes. This approach helps organizations transition from merely maintaining operations to optimizing them, ensuring better customer experiences and streamlined digital transformation efforts.

Many organizations are recognizing that their DevOps practices often overlook security, prompting a shift towards a "security as code" approach, where systematic security measures are integrated throughout the software development life cycle. This proactive strategy is discussed by industry experts such as Rick Stewart and Willie Hicks, who emphasize the importance of adopting DevSecOps practices to embed security into the development process, thereby avoiding last-minute vulnerability fixes and ensuring faster, safer software delivery. The challenges of integrating security into DevOps are highlighted, including the need for efficient resource management, effective collaboration, vulnerability management, and maintaining speed without compromising security. Automation is deemed crucial, with tools like Dynatrace facilitating the seamless integration of security measures by automating processes and reducing the risk of oversight. This approach allows developers to focus on their work without constant context switching, thereby enhancing productivity and minimizing disruptions. By implementing these measures, organizations can better manage security risks, comply with regulations, and meet user expectations, ultimately saving time and resources.