February 2023 Summaries

Dynatrace's integration with Microsoft Sentinel enhances security insights by combining runtime vulnerability analysis, AI-assisted prioritization, and application protection with Sentinel's SIEM capabilities. This integration allows DevSecOps teams to rapidly identify and address threats, leveraging Dynatrace's real-time attack and vulnerability detection powered by Davis AI. The collaboration provides a continuous view of security events and automates threat detection and remediation, reducing the time and cost associated with addressing vulnerabilities. By integrating Sentinel's data connectors and analytics with Dynatrace's security features, teams can efficiently manage and mitigate common application attacks and runtime vulnerabilities. This partnership offers unparalleled visibility across cloud-native applications and hybrid environments, enabling comprehensive threat intelligence and streamlined security operations.

As organizations increasingly rely on distributed architectures, the distinction between observability and monitoring becomes crucial for maintaining application services. While monitoring focuses on tracking specific metrics to provide situational awareness, observability delves deeper, analyzing logs, metrics, and traces to understand a system's internal state and resolve underlying issues. The integration of both observability and monitoring is vital for comprehending complex microservices and ensuring system reliability, performance optimization, and efficient resource utilization. Modern observability extends beyond traditional pillars—logs, metrics, and distributed traces—to include user experience and security, offering a comprehensive view of application health. Advanced software intelligence solutions like Dynatrace leverage AI to process vast data streams across multicloud environments, breaking down silos and facilitating automated diagnostics and remediation, which is essential for managing the unpredictable nature of interdependent systems.

Red Hat OpenShift is a cloud-based Kubernetes platform that facilitates the building, deployment, and scaling of applications both on-premises and in the cloud, offering automated installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management. It enhances Kubernetes by providing comprehensive multi-tenancy features, advanced security, integrated storage, and CI/CD pipeline management, making it easier for organizations to manage their Kubernetes environments. OpenShift supports cloud-native development and microservices architecture, allowing businesses to modernize legacy applications, run mission-critical applications, and build data-intensive applications with high performance. The platform's automation capabilities are crucial in managing dynamic containers and microservices, with tools like Dynatrace providing automated monitoring and orchestration to ensure application health and performance. OpenShift integrates with popular DevOps tools, improving productivity and reducing project timelines, and emphasizes best practices for security and management to maintain a secure and efficient environment.

The Dynatrace Managed release notes for version 1.260, published in February 2023, detail specific updates, features, and resolved issues pertinent to the Dynatrace Managed service. Key enhancements include an updated OpenSSL library for improved security, more granular retention settings for Real User Monitoring (RUM), and changes to operating system support planned for 2025 and 2026. The release addresses numerous issues across various components, such as application security, autonomous cloud, and synthetic monitoring, with a focus on improving robustness, resolving security vulnerabilities, and enhancing user experience. Particular attention is given to correcting errors in metrics, user interface, and configurations, as well as optimizing performance and stability across the platform. The release also includes cumulative updates that continue to resolve additional issues and vulnerabilities, ensuring ongoing reliability and functionality for users.

Environmental sustainability has become a critical focus for organizations and investors, driven by regulatory mandates and a growing awareness of the need to balance human activity with the natural world. The Carbon Impact app, developed with Dynatrace® AppEngine, provides a solution by tracking and analyzing carbon emissions across hybrid and multicloud environments to support carbon-reduction initiatives. This app converts utilization metrics like CPU, memory, disk, and network I/O into CO2 equivalents, offering insights into the IT carbon footprint and identifying opportunities for emissions reduction. Despite the potential benefits, many organizations lack the tools and real-time analytics required to measure and reduce their IT carbon footprints effectively. The app aims to transition organizations from passive reporting to active reduction efforts, providing detailed reports and recommendations to guide actions. As regulatory bodies like the SEC and the European Parliament enforce stricter sustainability reporting rules, tools like the Carbon Impact app become essential for organizations to meet compliance requirements and inform investors about sustainability risks. Overall, the app serves multiple audiences, aiding compliance, investment guidance, and operational teams in reducing carbon footprints and aligning with ESG initiatives.

Dynatrace's Grail data lakehouse is designed to handle the vast amounts of data generated in modern multicloud environments by combining the storage capabilities of a data warehouse with the analytical flexibility of a data lake. This platform allows organizations to integrate and analyze logs, metrics, and traces, offering a comprehensive view of observability data. Grail's architecture supports high cardinality and complex queries without schema or index constraints, providing rapid insights through the Dynatrace query language. These capabilities facilitate data-driven decision-making and automation across teams, enhancing collaboration and analytics through features like Smartscape topology mapping and the newly introduced Notebooks. Unveiled in 2022, Grail aims to address the challenges of data volume, variety, and velocity, offering scalability and speed that surpass traditional databases, thus empowering organizations to turn data into actionable insights efficiently.

Dynatrace, in collaboration with Snyk, has developed the DevSecOps Lifecycle Coverage app to enhance security across both pre-production and production environments by integrating runtime vulnerability analytics and pre-deployment security tools. As containerized applications become more prevalent, organizations face challenges in maintaining security due to frequent deployments and complex environments. The app provides a comprehensive view of application security, automatically prioritizing and remediating vulnerabilities based on risk, while bridging gaps between development and security teams. This integration aims to eliminate blind spots by combining Snyk's container scans with Dynatrace's AI-powered runtime insights, enabling organizations to operationalize security through automated notifications and workflow integration. By offering clear insights and reports on application security, DevSecOps Lifecycle Coverage with Snyk helps organizations improve their security posture, effectively manage risks, and optimize investments in security programs. The app is set to be available within 90 days, with a preview program inviting select customers to refine user experience.

At Perform 2023, Dynatrace CEO Rick McConnell emphasized the necessity of modern observability in the cloud era, highlighting that the burgeoning complexity and data volume necessitate automation and advanced analytical capabilities. McConnell pointed out that traditional cloud monitoring is inadequate for managing this complexity and that observability needs to become mandatory, integrating application performance, infrastructure, and real-user monitoring into a cohesive system enhanced by artificial intelligence. He advocated for a shift from incident response to incident prevention, leveraging AIOps and automation to address IT resource shortages and improve system reliability. McConnell further stressed the importance of collaboration and data consolidation across teams to effectively manage cloud environments, asserting that a unified observability platform can enable organizations to innovate faster and enhance business outcomes by breaking down data silos.

DevOps is a strategic approach that integrates software development and IT operations to improve application delivery and performance, characterized by continuous integration, delivery, and monitoring practices. Originating from efforts to address agile development challenges, DevOps emphasizes collaboration, automation, and the use of cloud-native technologies to streamline processes and enhance software lifecycle management. The framework benefits organizations by fostering a cultural shift towards more efficient and scalable development practices, aligning development with operational goals to meet the increasing demands of stakeholders and customers. DevOps incorporates practices like microservices, infrastructure as code, and AI-driven analysis to automate and optimize the software delivery process while addressing potential challenges such as security risks, organizational silos, and compliance issues. With a focus on cross-functional collaboration, DevOps aims to create a seamless delivery pipeline that supports rapid development and deployment, leveraging observability and self-service platforms to empower teams and enhance the overall IT environment.

As organizations increasingly rely on cloud technologies for digital transformation, they face challenges such as cloud complexity and data management. At the Perform 2023 conference, Dynatrace executives highlighted how their approach to cloud observability can help businesses navigate these challenges. Key industry trends include a shift from on-premises to multicloud architectures, necessitating comprehensive situational awareness and collaboration among BizDevSecOps teams. Automation and intelligence are crucial for managing data scalability and maintaining security, particularly against zero-day vulnerabilities. Dynatrace's platform offers unified solutions for application performance, infrastructure monitoring, digital experience, and security, emphasizing the importance of context and intelligence in delivering scalable answers and automation. By integrating these capabilities, organizations can focus more on innovation and achieving business goals, demonstrating the exponential value of a unified observability platform.

Dynatrace has expanded its analytics capabilities with the introduction of Grail™, a causational data lakehouse that unifies observability, security, and business data, offering instant answers through its massive parallel processing capabilities. Building on this, the platform now supports additional data types and graph analytics, enabling its AI engine, Davis®, to provide deeper insights and more flexible data analysis. New features include Metrics on Grail, designed to manage extensive metrics with high cardinalities, and Traces on Grail, which enhance trace analytics for complex cloud-native architectures. The integration of Smartscape for DQL retains data context, allowing for comprehensive and precise analytics across various data types. Alongside these technical advancements, Dynatrace has redesigned its user interface with Strato, focusing on a user-centric design that democratizes data access and interaction. This includes the introduction of Dashboards and Notebooks, which simplify data visualization and exploration, fostering greater collaboration and empowering users to make data-driven decisions. These enhancements provide a robust framework for diverse use cases, such as improving customer satisfaction, optimizing cloud operations, and enhancing security measures, all while maintaining cost-effective, large-scale analytics with long retention times.

Dynatrace Notebooks is an innovative feature within the Dynatrace platform that enhances collaboration among IT, development, security, and business users through interactive documents, enabling exploratory analytics and data storytelling. This capability allows teams to use code, text, and rich media to build and share insights while leveraging the Grail data lakehouse for analyzing large volumes of observability and security data. By using Dynatrace Query Language (DQL), users can create and share visualizations without moving data outside the platform, mitigating privacy and governance risks. Notebooks facilitate a unified approach to data visualization, empowering teams to derive actionable insights and improve decision-making without requiring predefined hypotheses. The platform's enhancements, including the AutomationEngine and AppEngine, further support intelligent automation and custom application development, providing organizations with tools to optimize cloud operations, enhance security, and accelerate innovation. At Perform 2023, Dynatrace highlighted these advancements, emphasizing the importance of moving from data access to delivering AI-powered insights efficiently.

Dynatrace's AutomationEngine is a low-code/no-code platform designed to streamline workflow automation across hybrid and multicloud environments, allowing IT, development, security, and business teams to manage complex cloud ecosystems more efficiently. By leveraging causal AI and an integrated observability platform, AutomationEngine enables teams to automate tasks such as application performance monitoring, security vulnerability routing, and cloud resource provisioning, reducing manual efforts and improving operational efficiency. The platform's answer-driven automation relies on trustworthy data, provided by Dynatrace's Grail data lakehouse, ensuring accurate problem identification and resolution. Additionally, AutomationEngine enhances tool consolidation, reduces complexity, and supports compliance and data privacy through built-in governance features. Recent enhancements to the Dynatrace platform, announced at Perform 2023, include expanded data lakehouse capabilities, improved user interfaces, and new analytics tools, further empowering teams to derive actionable insights and optimize cloud operations.

Dynatrace's AutomationEngine enhances the platform by integrating observability, security, and business data with causal AI, enabling automated BizDevSecOps workflows at an enterprise scale. This integration addresses the complexities and challenges of managing modern cloud environments, which are increasingly difficult to handle manually due to their scale and the volume of data generated. AutomationEngine offers real-time situational awareness and automates tasks such as vulnerability assessment, security gating, and infrastructure orchestration. By adopting an automation-as-code approach with tools like Monaco, organizations can create adaptable workflows with a no-code, low-code interface, facilitating collaboration and reducing manual toil. The platform supports extensive third-party integrations, allowing for diverse automation use cases across IT, security, and business operations. Dynatrace's AutomationEngine leverages platform-wide event triggers, enhancing predictive and proactive automation, thereby helping enterprises streamline operations and reduce reliance on manual intervention.

Dynatrace has introduced AppEngine, a core technology within its platform, enabling the development of custom, compliant, and intelligent data-driven applications tailored to specific organizational needs. This innovation allows users to leverage comprehensive observability, security, and business data, enhancing the value of insights by integrating logic directly with data and addressing any conceivable use case. AppEngine provides a simplified user experience by integrating apps into the Dynatrace platform, contrasting with traditional solutions that often require complex, costly maintenance and lack scalability. By utilizing AppEngine, organizations can navigate cloud complexities, accelerate innovation, and achieve better business results through a secure, serverless, and auto-scaling runtime environment. This platform empowers collaboration across IT, security, and business teams, ensuring that the full potential of data is realized. Dynatrace AppEngine is set to be available in Q2 2023, with further insights and developments to be shared through webinars and online platforms.

Modern observability platforms, particularly Dynatrace and its AppEngine, empower organizations to innovate by enabling the creation of custom, compliant, and intelligent data-driven applications. These platforms facilitate IT and development teams' efforts to manage cloud environments efficiently, providing tools for automatic root-cause analysis and data insights, which are crucial for developing secure applications that unify observability and security data. Dynatrace's architecture, including its data lakehouse Grail, supports cost-effective data storage and seamless integration across hybrid and multicloud ecosystems, allowing teams to build and share custom apps using low-code approaches. This integration fosters collaboration and enhances data-driven decision-making by retaining full data context and mapping dependencies. Dynatrace's capabilities are showcased through applications like Smartscape Health View and Site Reliability Guardian, which demonstrate the platform's ability to optimize cloud operations and address diverse use cases. The platform's enhancements, announced at Perform 2023, further streamline exploratory analytics and automate workflows, facilitating a shift from data insights to actionable outcomes across IT, business, and security domains.

Dynatrace has introduced an advanced code-level vulnerability detection feature that evaluates all requests passing through applications to identify vulnerabilities, providing continuous security assessment amid rising cyber threats. This technology utilizes deep insights from OneAgent® to track potentially vulnerable data flow and combines these insights with Dynatrace Smartscape® topology for accurate threat impact assessment. Unlike traditional security testing tools that rely on pre-written scripts, Dynatrace's approach uses real user-generated data to discover unknown and zero-day vulnerabilities, allowing developers to proactively address code weaknesses. Currently available for Java processes, the feature supports vulnerability injection types like command, SQL, and Java code injections, and aims to broaden its technological coverage. By detecting vulnerabilities both in pre-production and production environments, the tool helps reduce remediation costs and improve security posture. Available with Dynatrace version 1.260 and OneAgent version 1.259, existing Dynatrace customers can access this feature via the Application Security module, while new users can quickly start with a free trial.

At Perform 2023, the primary focus is on IT automation and the complexities of modern multicloud ecosystems, with an emphasis on utilizing modern observability platforms to enhance efficiency and business outcomes. The event highlights the convergence of observability, security, and business data facilitated by technologies like causal AI, which supports workflow automation and exploratory analytics. Dynatrace has announced platform enhancements to automate processes and provide deeper data insights, including the introduction of tools like AutomationEngine and AppEngine, which enable the creation of custom apps for improved data analysis and security insights. The conference also addresses the growing need for automation to manage the increasing complexity of IT environments, with a significant number of organizations recognizing IT automation as a strategic component of their digital transformation. Additionally, the role of real-time vulnerability management is emphasized as essential for maintaining application security in intricate cloud systems. The data lakehouse model is promoted as a solution to effectively manage and contextualize large volumes of data, providing real-time insights and fostering collaboration across organizational silos.

Monitoring memory allocations and object churn is crucial for maintaining the performance and health of a system, as excessive memory allocations or leaks can lead to crashes or unresponsive services. Dynatrace offers comprehensive memory allocation analysis that can help identify the root causes of such issues. A real-world case highlighted in the text demonstrates how an abnormal increase in memory allocation, particularly in a Java API, was traced back to a message handler responsible for sending configuration updates to connected agents. The investigation revealed that frequent changes in ActiveGate connections led to numerous configuration updates, consuming server resources and indicating potential inefficiencies. Despite the server managing memory allocations effectively, the situation underscored the importance of using memory metrics to detect underlying problems. This analysis emphasizes the value of memory profiling in uncovering unexpected issues and optimizing system performance.

In the digital age, user interactions with digital touchpoints such as websites and mobile apps significantly influence brand perception, with expectations shaped by leaders like Google and Amazon. A digital experience (DX) involves users' interactions with various digital platforms, and factors such as availability, performance, and usability impact these experiences. Poor digital experiences can quickly lead to lost business, as users can easily switch to competitors, and negatively affect brand reputation. Organizations must monitor and improve digital experiences using tools like Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), Content Management Systems (CMS), and Customer Data Platforms (CDP) to ensure seamless, personalized interactions. Strategies such as personalization, responsive design, and fast load times are crucial for enhancing user satisfaction. Dynatrace offers a comprehensive DEM solution that includes Real User Monitoring, Session Replay, and Synthetic Monitoring, allowing businesses to optimize user experiences and improve collaboration between IT and business stakeholders by providing actionable insights and addressing issues proactively.

Dynatrace offers a scalable and context-based alerting solution for managing Kubernetes clusters, addressing the complexities and limitations faced when using open-source tools like Prometheus, especially as environments grow larger and involve multiple teams. While Prometheus and Alertmanager are suitable for small Kubernetes environments, they present challenges in scaling, training, data access, security, and configuration consistency across multiple instances. Dynatrace simplifies the alerting process by allowing users to configure global anomaly-detection settings through its web UI, reducing training needs and enabling easy customization per team or cluster without requiring deep knowledge of query languages. This approach ensures streamlined management, with built-in access controls and the ability to overwrite default settings as needed, while also supporting automation through the Dynatrace API and future GitOps-style configurations. Dynatrace continues to expand its alerting capabilities, as demonstrated by its recent release and ongoing enhancements, supported by insights from a comprehensive Kubernetes usage report.

NASCIO's 2023 State CIO Top 10 Priorities highlight cybersecurity as the leading concern for state and local government agencies, followed by digital government services, with workforce issues rising significantly in priority. As citizens increasingly demand efficient digital services, government agencies are modernizing through technologies like cloud computing and microservices to enhance service delivery and meet market expectations. However, this transformation introduces complexities, particularly in cybersecurity and workforce management, as agencies struggle with talent shortages and the need to retain skilled workers. The concept of Total Experience (TX) is emerging as a critical strategy, ensuring satisfaction not only for citizens but also for employees interacting with agencies. Solutions like StateRAMP are aiding in overcoming security challenges by providing standardized cloud security verification, while platforms like Dynatrace support agencies in achieving digital transformation goals with precise issue resolution and automation, ultimately enhancing constituent experiences and managing cyber risks efficiently.

The integration between Dynatrace and Azure Monitor offers an automated, AI-powered observability solution for Azure workloads, simplifying the process of monitoring cloud resources. This collaboration allows Dynatrace customers to set up observability in just one click directly from the Azure Portal, eliminating the need for manual configuration and multiple team involvement that typically accompanies such setups. This seamless integration, enhanced in October 2022 to include Azure Monitor metrics and topology, empowers developers with deep insights into their Azure cloud resources, enhancing troubleshooting and optimization efforts. By automating the setup and credential configuration, the partnership provides a streamlined, SaaS-based experience that supports a wide range of Azure services, thereby facilitating a more efficient digital transformation journey for organizations.

Dynatrace introduces a new approach to observability by integrating business events with its Grail-powered analytics, overcoming the limitations of traditional observability solutions. This innovation allows for the extraction of metrics from business events, providing lossless precision and deep access to application payloads without the need for coding. The integration enables real-time business insights and exploratory analytics, supporting agile decision-making and automation through a shared view of measurable business goals. By employing Dynatrace OneAgent and Grail, business events benefit from long-term storage, unaggregated granularity, and instant indexless queries, while maintaining the Smartscape topology context. The extracted metrics allow for comprehensive calculations, visualizations, threshold-based alerting, and AI-driven analytics, enhancing the capability to monitor, analyze, and automate business processes effectively.

Service meshes have become a pivotal solution for managing the complexity inherent in microservices-based applications, especially within mature Kubernetes environments. They provide a dedicated infrastructure layer that facilitates service-to-service communication, offering benefits such as centralized traffic management, enhanced security, resilience, and improved observability. Istio, a prominent example of a service mesh, uses Envoy proxies to manage and secure interactions between microservices, enhancing both performance and operational insight. However, adopting a service mesh introduces challenges, including increased architectural complexity, potential performance overhead, a steep learning curve, and the risk of vendor lock-in. Observability is another challenge, as service meshes like Istio often require manual code changes to achieve comprehensive end-to-end visibility, which can be labor-intensive and incomplete. Solutions like Dynatrace aim to address these observability issues by providing automatic, AI-driven insights and root cause analysis, helping organizations overcome the limitations of traditional service mesh observability without additional coding or configuration.