April 2023 Summaries

Dynatrace's Grail data lakehouse introduces custom buckets to enhance data management by allowing users to control data retention and access policies, optimizing cost and availability while ensuring compliance with regulations. This feature addresses the traditional challenges of observability and business-data storage, which often involve costly compromises between data retention and accessibility. By enabling granular data management without the overhead of archiving or retrieval processes, Grail provides a transparent pricing model based on data retention duration and read-data volume, eliminating hidden fees. Users can create custom buckets for specific use cases, such as retaining logs for debugging, infrastructure monitoring, or compliance with local regulations, and manage these buckets via an API with strict permission policies. The solution empowers businesses to derive quick insights from their data without performance degradation, maintaining a balance between cost-efficiency and compliance.

Dynatrace has introduced the Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS), a flexible and transparent pricing model designed for cloud-native applications that require scalable observability and security. DPS allows customers to make an annual spend commitment at the platform level, granting full access to all capabilities on the Dynatrace platform without hidden fees or monthly commitments. The subscription model is based on extensive collaboration with customers and best practices, offering a simple contract with a rate card for usage pricing. It features an Account Management Portal for detailed insights into consumption, enabling users to manage budgets effectively. DPS also includes hourly pricing for Full-stack Monitoring and Application Security, providing flexibility to scale Dynatrace resources as needed. The model emphasizes transparency and fairness, avoiding ancillary fees and promoting collaboration by not charging per-user fees. DPS is currently available for Dynatrace SaaS environments, with plans to extend it to Dynatrace Managed customers.

Anticipatory management of cloud resources is essential for modern IT systems, and traditional reactive approaches often result in overwhelming alert storms due to their inability to scale with dynamic cloud environments. Dynatrace's Davis AI offers a proactive solution by using predictive analytics to forecast resource demands, thus preventing resource shortages and reducing unnecessary alerts outside business hours. This approach employs the Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) for data analysis and integrates AutoML to select optimal prediction models based on time series characteristics. By leveraging Dynatrace's AutomationEngine, organizations can automate predictive workflows, ensuring timely notifications for necessary resource adjustments. The Davis Forecast mechanism, embedded in the Grail data lakehouse, facilitates a shift from reactive to anticipative strategies, enhancing the reliability and efficiency of cloud operations. Additionally, users can explore these capabilities through Notebooks and integrate them into custom applications to address specific business needs, with support available through community engagement and comprehensive documentation.

Public sector leaders are advancing their digital transformation efforts by prioritizing secure applications amid increasing complexity, driven by cloud infrastructure, automation, and open-source resources. However, these advancements come with risks due to potential vulnerabilities in prebuilt libraries and third-party products, necessitating continuous application security throughout runtime. Dynatrace addresses these challenges with its enhanced Dynatrace for Government platform, featuring an Application Security Module that provides automatic and continuous protection. This solution, which is FedRAMP and StateRAMP authorized at the Moderate Impact Levels, leverages advanced observability, AI, and automation to offer attack detection and blocking, runtime vulnerability analytics, and automatic updates. By doing so, it ensures that public sector teams can innovate securely without sacrificing performance, offering capabilities such as precise impact assessments and vulnerability management from detection to closure.

Dynatrace Notebooks, introduced in a session at Dynatrace Perform 2023, offer a solution for teams overwhelmed by large data sets, by enabling exploratory and collaborative analytics that help streamline data analysis and foster inter-team cooperation. With interactive dashboards, these Notebooks provide intuitive visualizations that simplify complex data, making it easier for different teams like CloudOps, ITOps, and site reliability engineers to access and interpret data in context, breaking down silos and enhancing collaboration across organizations. Utilizing a data lakehouse approach, Dynatrace Notebooks allow users to interact with data through simple, fast user flows, enabling them to explore, manipulate, and share insights quickly, aided by features such as DQL queries, dynamic filtering, and automation. This capability not only enhances the understanding of data but also accelerates problem-solving by allowing team members to work collaboratively on the same documents and interact directly with analysis results, facilitating faster resolution of critical issues and enabling the creation of data-driven narratives and reports.

As digital transformation accelerates, enterprises are increasingly adopting serverless functions, a top cloud technology due to their scalability and cost-effectiveness, with Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) becoming popular for running granular tasks. Serverless applications, composed of event-driven functions managed by platforms like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions, offer benefits such as automatic scaling, reduced infrastructure complexity, and pay-as-you-go pricing. However, they pose observability challenges due to their ephemeral nature, statelessness, and complex dependencies, which make data collection, visualization, and analysis difficult. To address these challenges, the Dynatrace platform provides comprehensive observability support for serverless technologies across major cloud providers, utilizing automation and AI to capture metrics, logs, and traces, enabling end-to-end visibility and facilitating anomaly detection and root-cause analysis. Dynatrace integrates with cloud vendors using OpenTelemetry for enhanced monitoring, offering tools and best practices for deeper insights into serverless functions, thereby aiding in optimizing application performance and costs.

Critical application outages can severely impact citizen trust, employee satisfaction, and operational efficiency, prompting the need for improved observability-driven DevOps in state agencies like Minnesota IT Services (MNIT). By integrating observability data into their DevOps pipelines, MNIT has enhanced their ability to make data-driven release decisions, catch bugs early, and ultimately reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) for technical issues. This approach, aided by tools like Dynatrace, has reduced the time needed to resolve complex problems from days to hours, allowing teams to spend less time troubleshooting and more on innovation. Observability has also fostered better collaboration among IT staff by breaking down silos, leading to improved working relationships and enabling MNIT to meet project timelines consistently over the past three years. As traditional cloud monitoring methods struggle to scale with expanding multicloud architectures, modern observability platforms powered by AIOps and automation offer a proactive approach to prevent outages and improve digital experiences. This shift is essential not only for state agencies but also for commercial enterprises facing similar challenges, as it significantly enhances operational efficiency and reduces downtime costs.

State and local agencies are tasked with efficiently utilizing taxpayer funds while fostering innovation and productivity, as demonstrated by Tammy Zbojniewicz from Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management, and Budget (DTMB) in a recent webinar. Zbojniewicz achieved significant annual savings of $1.4 million by retiring outdated technology and rationalizing tools, which involved consolidating to a single application performance monitoring (APM) tool, Dynatrace, and decommissioning legacy systems that were costly and complex. This consolidation improved productivity, reduced staff requirements, and enhanced application reliability and performance for Michigan’s 21 executive agencies. Initially met with resistance, the adoption of the new system eventually increased as the benefits became apparent, with all critical applications monitored within 18 months. The observability provided by Dynatrace not only improved incident response times but also allowed staff to focus more on code development rather than troubleshooting, demonstrating the value of a streamlined, comprehensive monitoring approach that can guide state and local governments through technological transitions effectively.

Dynatrace Managed release version 1.264, rolled out starting April 24, 2023, introduces a range of updates, features, and fixes aimed at enhancing system performance, security, and user experience. Key updates include the upgrade from Managed to SaaS, with a comprehensive guide to facilitate a seamless transition, and the enhancement of the OpenSSL library to version 1.1.1t for improved security. The release also updates Java Runtime Environment (JRE) versions for various components to improve performance and security. New settings allow users to exclude specific log sources from storage while still processing them for metrics and events. Additionally, the release notes detail the future discontinuation of support for certain Linux operating systems by the end of 2025 and early 2026. Several resolved issues across various components, such as Application Security, Autonomous Cloud, Cluster management, Synthetic monitoring, and User Interface, aim to fix bugs, improve system functionalities, and resolve security vulnerabilities. The cumulative updates in this release also address specific problems related to configuration migrations, anomaly detection, and issue management within high-availability clusters.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) remains a crucial metric for financial services firms, guiding strategy to attract and retain customers amid rising competition from digital-first providers. A recent survey by Dynatrace, involving 300 IT leaders from financial services and banking institutions, highlights the accelerated pace of digital transformation, with 90% of respondents noting an increase in the past year and 26% expecting it to continue. However, this fast-paced change results in difficult trade-offs between speed, quality, and security, with over half of CIOs acknowledging compromises in these areas. The pressure is exacerbated by skill shortages, leading IT leaders to focus on automation and collaboration strategies. While 95% of CIOs support a DevSecOps culture to enhance transformation, adoption varies across sectors due to trust issues and collaboration barriers. The convergence of observability and security on AI-powered platforms is seen as essential for improving CLV by facilitating faster innovation and secure, seamless customer experiences.

The British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC) has prioritized end-to-end observability to enhance user experience and operational efficiency in its gambling services, which include lottery, casino, and sports betting. By partnering with Dynatrace since 2021, BCLC has transformed from a reactive organization relying on players to report issues, to a proactive entity with a comprehensive monitoring system that provides real-time insights into both frontend and backend operations. This change has enabled BCLC to improve customer and employee experiences by offering a more reliable service and gaining a detailed understanding of user behavior and system performance. The collaboration with Dynatrace Business Insights has facilitated automated real user monitoring, allowing BCLC to make data-driven decisions and optimize their digital environment. The company aims to integrate this observability across its lottery and physical casino operations, promoting a unified monitoring approach with designated Dynatrace champions within each team.

Dynatrace is introducing a new access management system that replaces its former role-based permissions with security policies, allowing for more granular control and dynamic user authorization for its platform, including Dynatrace Grail and AppEngine. These managed security policies simplify access configuration and accommodate standard scenarios, while also allowing for customized policies when needed. Administrators must set three main permission types—querying data in Grail, accessing Dynatrace Apps, and supporting services—and can use the Dynatrace IAM APIs to automate policy management. The initial setup has been streamlined with auto-assigned policies for existing admins, and a migration script is available for transferring existing platform-access permissions. The system supports modern access management needs and ensures that managed policies remain up to date with platform changes. Users and administrators are encouraged to provide feedback on the new system to further enhance Dynatrace's authorization settings.

As data growth continues to accelerate, the importance of implementing data privacy by design becomes increasingly critical for organizations. This approach involves integrating security considerations into cloud systems from the outset, rather than as an afterthought, and includes practices such as continuous security testing and fostering a mature DevSecOps culture. The challenge is heightened by the emergence of widespread vulnerabilities like Log4Shell, which affected millions of applications and devices, underscoring the need for greater transparency and visibility in multi- and hybrid cloud environments. During a discussion at Perform 2023, Dynatrace product managers highlighted the role of their platform in enhancing data security and privacy through measures such as data exclusion at multiple points, encryption, tenant-specific security functions, and comprehensive API access management. By employing a Secure Software Development Lifecycle, Dynatrace ensures rigorous security assessments and compliance with standards like SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR, offering a robust framework for organizations looking to strengthen their data security posture.

The OneAgent release version 1.263, published on April 17, 2023, introduces several new features, enhancements, and resolved issues across various modules, including .NET, Go, Infrastructure Monitoring, and Mainframe. This version also expands technology support to include platforms like .NET 7, Amazon Corretto 20, and Eclipse Temurin 20, alongside enhancements such as capturing BizEvents via the OneAgent Go module and adding SMB v1 support for Infrastructure Monitoring. The release addresses 11 resolved issues, such as fixing premature event closures in the OS module and correcting detection issues in .NET and Go modules. Additionally, it marks the end of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS 4.7 and announces the discontinuation of support for Internet Explorer 7-10 and certain older JavaScript frameworks. This update is comprehensive, covering various platforms and technologies, and aims to enhance performance and compatibility across systems.

Log auditing and forensics are crucial for securing cloud-native applications and infrastructure, yet the complexity of such environments necessitates a new approach that integrates observability and security data. This convergence provides security teams with comprehensive visibility into application security issues, allowing for real-time detection and response to threats. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native technologies, they face challenges such as managing the large volumes of log data generated, understanding distributed topologies, and addressing skills gaps. These challenges can hinder effective security incident response. Platforms like Dynatrace Grail offer solutions by combining observability with security data, enabling efficient log analysis and enhancing DevSecOps strategies. By automating workflows and providing a unified platform for data governance, Dynatrace Grail helps organizations manage the complexities of cloud environments, allowing them to conduct thorough investigations, detect vulnerabilities, and prevent future attacks more effectively.

As organizations increasingly migrate applications to cloud-based environments, they face challenges balancing the agility of microservices architecture with the complexity and lack of transparency it can introduce, leading to significant security vulnerabilities. A recent survey highlights that nearly half of organizations have backlogs of vulnerable applications, with threats like the Log4Shell zero-day vulnerability illustrating the potential disruptions and costs these weaknesses can incur. The convergence of observability and security practices is becoming critical in managing these vulnerabilities and fostering a DevSecOps culture, as it enhances collaboration among development, business, and security teams to address application performance and security issues proactively. DevSecOps, which integrates development, security, and operations, is increasingly seen as vital for enabling faster, more secure software releases, especially as traditional databases struggle to keep pace with the scale and complexity of modern cloud-native environments. This approach is underscored by the theme of the RSA conference in 2023, "Stronger together," which emphasizes the importance of collaboration and automation in cybersecurity, further spotlighting the need for more integrated and automated security measures in the face of escalating digital transformation and cloud adoption.

At Dynatrace, career development is emphasized as a fundamental aspect of the company culture, encouraging employees to pursue their interests and grow professionally. The organization supports this initiative through resources like online courses, training, and educational reimbursements. Molly Rossman, a long-time Dynatracer, exemplifies this growth mindset, having transitioned from the Professional Development Program to a senior consultant role and finally to the People & Culture team as a talent development program coordinator. Her career reflects a commitment to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace, aligning with her personal passion for organizational change. Rossman views professional development as a lifelong journey and shares insights into her career transitions and strategies for success in a recent episode of "Get to know Dynatracers."

Tractor Supply Co. has embraced multicloud observability to enhance its cloud performance amid rising customer demand and digital transformation efforts. As part of its ONETractor strategy, the company migrated many of its ecommerce and enterprise analytics workloads to Microsoft Azure, using Kubernetes-managed software containers to better understand customer preferences and personalize shopping experiences. The transition involved significant complexity, including decisions about re-hosting or refactoring on-premises applications, and underscored the importance of real-time visibility provided by Dynatrace's observability platform. This platform was crucial for identifying and resolving performance and security issues without downtime, especially during A/B testing and the shift to a commercial database solution based on Redis. The comprehensive monitoring and data-driven insights afforded by Dynatrace have been pivotal in ensuring seamless cloud operations and enabling proactive management, contributing to the company's agility and performance optimization in the cloud environment.

AWS Lambda Response Streaming is a new feature that allows users to stream response payloads back to clients, enhancing performance for latency-sensitive applications by sending partial responses as they become available, thus improving the Time to First Byte (TTFB). This capability supports larger payload sizes, raising the default limit from 6 MB to a 20 MB soft limit, and requires minor modifications in Lambda functions to handle streamed responses. Dynatrace, a launch partner for this AWS feature, provides integrated support and full-stack observability, helping IT teams optimize cloud operations with automated intelligence and AI-driven insights. Dynatrace offers seamless monitoring, including AWS Lambda metrics, without manual configuration, and helps organizations achieve service-level objectives by simplifying error analytics and optimizing response time hotspots. With its advanced observability features and real-time event analysis, Dynatrace facilitates efficient management of cloud applications, ensuring secure and flawless interactions while supporting enterprise scalability.

As IT ecosystems grow increasingly complex, application resilience has become a crucial priority across various sectors, including higher education. At Perform 2023, a discussion led by Balint Kelen from Dynatrace and an IT manager from a major American university highlighted the challenges of maintaining application health within intricate IT environments. They emphasized the importance of comprehensive visibility into these ecosystems, noting that traditional monitoring solutions often fall short due to their inability to integrate across systems, resulting in siloed environments and costly executive-level dashboard maintenance. The university, which manages hundreds of applications crucial to its operations, adopted Dynatrace to improve monitoring capabilities. Dynatrace's new AI-driven Health View features provide a simplified, color-coded dashboard that caters to diverse stakeholder needs by offering both high-level overviews and detailed insights into application health and connectivity. This approach ensures that all stakeholders, regardless of technical expertise, can access relevant and comprehensible information, thereby enhancing application resilience and facilitating better decision-making processes.