February 2022 Summaries

Dynatrace offers a sophisticated monitoring solution for enterprises through its SaaS and Managed deployment models, enabling critical business insights powered by AI and automation across diverse IT environments. While the SaaS model alleviates concerns about scaling and infrastructure, the Managed model caters to organizations needing to comply with privacy regulations, offering control over data environments. The recent enhancements in Dynatrace Managed include a proactive self-monitoring feature that provides out-of-the-box insights, custom alerting, and a detailed dashboard for managing cluster utilization and preventing overloads. This environment, enabled by default on all Managed Clusters, captures comprehensive self-monitoring metrics, ensuring high data fidelity and facilitating observability across heterogeneous environments. By tracking cluster utilization and data capture rates, organizations can make informed decisions about scaling and resource management, thereby optimizing performance and maintaining service quality. The system's robust monitoring capabilities extend to real user sessions, business analytics, and digital experience investigations, ensuring comprehensive coverage and proactive insights.

In 2022, DevSecOps trends such as Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, serverless architecture, and the evolution of Kubernetes are key enablers for teams to automate and streamline their CI/CD pipelines, balancing the need for speed with maintaining high-quality and secure software development. As organizations strive to innovate faster, they face the challenge of deploying code quickly without compromising security, with 60% of developers releasing code twice as quickly and nearly half deploying vulnerable code under time pressures. DevSecOps teams can mitigate these risks by automating processes throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and using observability platforms to detect code-quality lapses and security gaps. The adoption of DevSecOps practices is increasing, with a notable rise from 27% in 2020 to 36% in 2021, largely driven by the integration of automation tools that improve application deployment efficiency and reduce human error. As cyberattacks via vulnerable third-party code increase, methods like AIOps for real-time root-cause analysis become critical. The integration of AI and machine learning in operations is set to enhance DevSecOps practices further, enabling strategic focus by automating routine tasks, thus facilitating the deployment of secure, high-quality code without slowing innovation.

Simone Biles, the renowned gymnast and advocate, shared her journey and insights during a fireside chat with Debbie Umbach at Dynatrace Perform 2022, highlighting her path to becoming the most decorated gymnast, her battles with mental health, and her future aspirations. Biles spoke candidly about her beginnings in gymnastics, being inspired by older gymnasts, and how a serendipitous visit to a gymnastics studio led to her enrollment in lessons. She emphasized the importance of her support system in overcoming challenges and changing the game, noting that innovation in gymnastics, such as her eponymous moves, often arose from adversity. Biles also discussed the mental block known as "the twisties" that led to her withdrawal from the Tokyo Olympics, catapulting her into the spotlight as a mental health advocate. Despite the pressure and expectations, she remains committed to using her platform to support others in their mental health journeys while maintaining her involvement in gymnastics. At just 24, Biles continues to explore her identity beyond her athletic achievements, valuing the shift in public perception that now recognizes her as an individual beyond her medals.

At Dynatrace Perform 2022, Kelsey Hightower and Andreas Grabner discussed the complexities of Kubernetes and the broader context of cloud-native technologies, emphasizing the importance of simplicity and automation in managing these systems. Hightower, a principal engineer at Google and co-founder of KubeCon, uses relatable analogies to explain Kubernetes, comparing it to a postal service that abstracts complexities while ensuring delivery. He stresses that Kubernetes is a foundational platform rather than a complete solution, requiring additional tools for observability and optimization. Grabner highlights how Dynatrace's platform, with its advanced monitoring capabilities, can enhance real-time awareness of complex environments at scale, providing insights into infrastructure and application performance. Hightower recalls past challenges with system troubleshooting, underscoring the real-world impact of service outages on users, such as those relying on electronic benefits transfer systems. The conversation also touched on the transition from infrastructure as code to infrastructure as data, advocating for a declarative approach that simplifies user interactions with complex systems.

At the annual Dynatrace Perform conference, the company celebrated organizations that have excelled in digital transformation through the effective use of observability, automation, and intelligence to manage cloud complexities. The event featured an awards ceremony honoring notable achievements in three categories: Community Rock Stars, Most Innovative Development Partner, and Software Intelligence Awards. These awards recognized contributions in areas such as Digital Business Excellence, DevOps, Automated and Intelligent Observability, and Digital Transformation Leadership. Among the winners were Chad Turner from Geico, António Sousa from Marketware, ADP, loanDepot, The NAIC, BCLC, and Dell Technologies, whose efforts have been pivotal in advancing software intelligence. The conference highlighted the significance of modern observability and AIOps, encouraging innovation and empowering organizations to accelerate their digital transformations.

MIT physics professor and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, Max Tegmark, explores the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to shape human progress over the next billions of years. In his keynote at Dynatrace Perform, Tegmark emphasizes AI as a powerful technology that, if managed wisely, can drive life-saving innovations like cancer diagnosis and protein-folding solutions. He highlights the necessity of aligning AI's goals with human values to prevent it from pursuing objectives that might not benefit humanity. Tegmark advocates for proactive safety measures and ethical guidelines, as exemplified by the 23 Asilomar AI Principles, which aim to guide the responsible development of AI technologies. He encourages envisioning an inspiring future facilitated by AI, rather than a dystopian one, suggesting that AI can help achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. Tegmark calls for a proactive approach in directing AI advancements to ensure they align with human aspirations, urging individuals and companies like Dynatrace to take an active role in shaping the future of AI.

Dynatrace has expanded its capabilities to enable the creation of extensions based on Prometheus metrics, enhancing its intelligent observability for technologies using Prometheus exporters without requiring any coding. This development allows teams to ingest data, tailor analysis views, and receive zero-config alerts from various technologies, such as app gateways, databases, and storage systems. The new feature provides global visibility and reduces alert noise, offering a seamless way to collect and analyze Prometheus metrics within the full context of application and infrastructure ecosystems. Users can define metrics, add topology dependencies, dashboards, and alerts in a human-readable YAML format through the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Hub. The RabbitMQ Prometheus Extension serves as a template to monitor and analyze specific nodes, showcasing the ability to adapt to various use cases. Dynatrace continues to expand its extension support for additional protocols and technologies, simplifying the integration of monitoring data across diverse platforms.

Dynatrace Managed release version 1.236 introduces various updates, enhancements, and resolved issues specific to its platform. This release addresses endpoint documentation for creating and restoring Premium High Availability Elasticsearch sections, introduces improved filtering options for environment roles, and outlines future operating system support changes, including the discontinuation of support for certain Linux distributions by 2026. The release resolves numerous issues across components such as Application Security, Cloud automation solutions, and Cluster Management, with notable fixes including the handling of security problems, improvements in database metric wording, and corrections to Kubernetes event date/time issues. Additionally, cumulative updates address browser and HTTP monitor creation challenges, high CPU utilization in Elasticsearch, and enhancements in metric selector filtering on entity names. The updates also encompass improved behavior for the synthetic monitoring opt-in panel and adjustments to USQL query support for custom applications.

Dynatrace has enhanced its Application Security module with real-time attack protection, leveraging code-level insights and transaction analysis to detect and block attacks without configuration, achieving a perfect OWASP benchmark score for injection attacks with 100% accuracy and zero false positives. This development addresses the limitations of traditional security measures like Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and web application firewalls (WAFs), which often struggle with dynamic environments and generate significant configuration overhead and false positives. Unlike existing Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) solutions, which can introduce performance issues and deployment challenges, Dynatrace's platform uses OneAgent technology for automatic deployments with minimal overhead, offering real-time identification and blocking of attacks such as Log4Shell. This advancement allows organizations to secure their applications effectively as they continue to innovate using cloud-native technologies, without relying on vulnerability databases. Dynatrace's real-time protection for Java applications will be available in 120 days, with further enhancements planned to broaden its detection capabilities.

The text discusses how disparate toolchains and manual tasks hinder DevOps teams' efficiency in releasing software quickly and safely. The Dynatrace Cloud Automation module, along with integrations and collaborations with DevSecOps partners, offers a comprehensive solution by providing deep observability, runtime application security, and advanced AIOps to automate toolchains for delivery and remediation. As digital transformation initiatives increase complexity, many teams struggle to unify tools and reduce manual tasks, sometimes affecting their ability to meet service-level objectives. Dynatrace's platform supports developers, security, DevOps, and SRE teams by offering integrated observability and application security, significantly reducing the time for production and outage resolution. The platform's out-of-the-box integrations enable seamless connections with various DevSecOps solutions, aiding automation across the software development lifecycle. The module is available for Dynatrace customers as a SaaS instance, with support from the Autonomous Cloud Enablement team to help with digital transformation efforts.

At the Perform 2022 conference, Dynatrace CEO Rick McConnell and CMO Mike Maciag highlighted the necessity of modern observability and AIOps in managing the complexities of digital transformation as organizations move towards hybrid and multicloud architectures. The shift, accelerated by COVID-19, has led to increased IT complexity due to a surge in applications and cloud infrastructure, making traditional manual methods insufficient. Modern observability, enhanced by AI-driven operations (AIOps), offers real-time, contextual insights into the root causes of application issues without the need for extensive machine learning training, akin to the real-time decision-making of a self-driving car. This approach involves three key components: sensing through automated data collection by Dynatrace's OneAgent, thinking with data analysis via PurePath and Smartscape technologies, and acting by providing actionable insights for swift issue resolution. These capabilities enable organizations to innovate rapidly and securely, optimizing user experiences and business outcomes while minimizing disruptions. McConnell emphasized the importance of intelligent observability solutions that provide precise answers and continuous optimization across complex IT environments.

Dynatrace is enhancing its platform to offer software intelligence as code, integrating observability, AIOps, and application security to streamline application development and improve software quality. By offering advanced API endpoints and an open-source command line interface, Dynatrace allows developers to embed observability and service-level objectives into their applications' lifecycle, significantly reducing application onboarding time. This approach aligns with DevOps and GitOps frameworks, promoting infrastructure automation and enabling developers to manage configurations centrally, thus facilitating faster feature deployment and improved cross-functional collaboration. The enhancements support customization of observability and security metrics, providing a secure, self-service approach that empowers development and SRE teams to maintain organizational standards at scale. With new API endpoints and integrations, Dynatrace extends its capabilities to allow granular observability customization and automatic vulnerability management, further optimizing the orchestration and automation of DevOps toolchains. These updates aim to simplify the implementation of observability and security as code, ensuring effective collaboration and automation across DevOps, SRE, and application security teams. All enhancements will be available within 90 days, with resources for getting started available on GitHub and through a free trial for new users.

Dynatrace has enhanced its observability and AIOps capabilities for serverless applications across major cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, addressing the challenges of managing the complexity and ensuring real-time insights in multicloud environments. The expanded support now includes services like AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions, alongside managed Kubernetes environments and cloud databases, enabling DevOps and SRE teams to analyze, troubleshoot, and optimize serverless applications more effectively. Dynatrace leverages AI-powered automation and tools like PurePath distributed tracing and the Davis AI engine to provide end-to-end visibility and root-cause analysis, simplifying tracing and troubleshooting of serverless scenarios and enhancing service-to-service communication monitoring. With the integration of open observability standards such as OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace introduces FaaS libraries that minimize the setup effort by allowing developers to add a single line of code for tracing, thus enhancing the developer experience and enabling a comprehensive analysis of serverless application impacts. All these enhancements will be available to Dynatrace customers within the next 90 days, offering a holistic and proactive approach to managing serverless environments.

The Log4Shell vulnerability, which emerged in December 2021, underscored the critical need for secure digital transformation strategies, as it exposed millions of organizations to potential exploitation through certain versions of the Log4j 2 Java library. Avisi, a Netherlands-based software development and cloud services company, utilized Dynatrace's modern observability and application security features to swiftly and automatically identify and remediate vulnerabilities in their systems, enabling them to maintain operations without disruption. This proactive approach allowed Avisi to demonstrate compliance with strict regulations, such as GDPR, and meet the high-security demands of clients in industries like financial services. The efficacy of Dynatrace's continuous scanning and code-level visibility helped Avisi prioritize high-risk vulnerabilities, facilitating rapid resolution and underscoring the importance of embracing change for secure digital transformation. Avisi's experience illustrates that transformation involves not just adopting new technologies, but also accepting constant change as the norm, which requires dynamic observability and intelligent response systems to ensure both performance and security in today's fast-paced business environment.

Dynatrace's OneAgent version 1.233 release, rolled out on February 7, 2022, introduces various enhancements and support changes across multiple platforms and technologies. Key updates include added tracing support for Java and Golang, improved diagnostics for the Java code module on z/OS, and new support for technologies like Reactor Core and Jedis Redis. The release also marks the end of support for certain technologies and operating systems, with future de-support dates announced for others. Several resolved issues enhance system stability across components such as Java, .NET, NGINX, and mainframe systems, including addressing vulnerabilities like CVE-2022-23990. Additionally, the release features improvements in Docker container detection, SQL normalization, and reduced CPU load in JavaScript applications. Updates also ensure better error handling and session management for mobile platforms, enhancing both Android and iOS agent performance.

Dynatrace has announced the general availability of its Software Intelligence Platform as a SaaS solution on Microsoft Azure, which is now accessible to the public through Dynatrace sales channels. This development aids organizations in accelerating cloud adoption and digital transformation by providing deep observability, advanced AIOps capabilities, and application security out-of-the-box. The platform eliminates the need for infrastructure investment and operational duties, as Dynatrace manages infrastructure, automatic updates, and proactive issue prevention. Security is ensured through data encryption and masking, while scalability is achieved with horizontal scaling and automatic load balancing. The SaaS model offers reduced time-to-benefit, as it simplifies deployment compared to traditional on-premise setups. Initially available in Azure US East and Azure EU West regions, the service will expand to more regions based on customer demand. This offering strengthens the strategic partnership between Dynatrace and Microsoft, highlighting their collaborative technology integrations and ongoing innovations.

Maintaining near 100% uptime for online services has increased the importance of service-level objectives (SLOs) to evaluate and measure software performance, but several pitfalls can hinder their effectiveness. These include misalignment with business goals, lack of ownership and accountability, reactive instead of proactive usage, inappropriate thresholds, and manual evaluation methods. Ensuring SLOs are aligned with critical business objectives, establishing ownership, integrating them into the CI/CD pipeline, setting realistic thresholds, and automating their evaluation are essential strategies for avoiding these pitfalls. Tools like Dynatrace can aid in automating the SLO process, providing observability, and enabling continuous release validation, thus helping businesses reduce service outages, improve software reliability, and enhance collaboration among teams.

Incorporating a vulnerability management strategy into DevSecOps practices is crucial for addressing threats like Log4Shell, as highlighted at the Dynatrace Perform 2022 conference. The Log4Shell vulnerability, found in the widely-used Log4j 2 software, has affected millions of systems by making networks susceptible to data theft and malware attacks. Ajay Gandhi, VP of product marketing at Dynatrace, emphasizes the need for real-time observability platforms that provide code-level insights and context about IT environments, enabling teams to prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities effectively. This approach allows IT teams to quickly identify critical vulnerabilities, enhancing the overall security posture by combining observability with security intelligence. Additionally, the conference underscores the importance of both "shifting left" to identify vulnerabilities early in development and "shifting right" to ensure continuous testing in production, ultimately strengthening DevSecOps practices through comprehensive observability across the software development cycle.