May 2023 Summaries

Progressive delivery is a strategy that allows organizations to introduce new features to users incrementally, minimizing risks and avoiding the pitfalls of the "move fast and break things" mentality. This approach uses methodologies like feature flagging, which provides fine-grained control over which users can access new functionalities, enabling real-time changes without redeployment and reducing costs by not requiring additional infrastructure. Feature flags can be implemented through OpenFeature, an open standard that simplifies integration with in-house or commercial solutions, and are crucial for decoupling deployment from release, thus making continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) less daunting. Additionally, observability is vital in progressive delivery systems, allowing teams to monitor the impacts of changes effectively. Platforms like Dynatrace use feature flags to manage and observe deployments, ensuring a controlled and safe rollout process for new features or algorithms by monitoring individual user impacts and system performance.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) has become an essential practice for organizations undergoing digital transformation, ensuring that applications remain responsive, resilient, and available amid increasing complexity and customer expectations for flawless performance. As online transactions grow, with U.S. mobile retail e-commerce spending exceeding $387 billion in 2022 and online travel spending projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2027, organizations are hiring SREs to manage the intricate IT environments that are crucial for maintaining reliable uptime and service quality. SRE combines software engineering principles with infrastructure management, leveraging continuous monitoring and high automation levels to support agile development, ultimately impacting business objectives and financial outcomes. The pursuit of "five-nines" availability, where systems operate 99.999% of the time, is challenged by the complexity of cloud environments and the vast amounts of data processed, necessitating automation and AI for effective management. Aligning SRE practices with business goals involves setting and monitoring service-level agreements (SLAs), objectives (SLOs), and indicators (SLIs) to ensure service performance meets expectations. Innovations like Dynatrace's Site Reliability Guardian (SRG) enhance SRE capabilities by automating change impact analysis and ensuring secure and high-quality software releases, thereby reducing overhead for SREs and improving outcomes for DevOps teams.

Dynatrace recently hosted its Amplify Sales Kickoff 2023 event, which was conducted both globally and virtually, focusing on empowering its partners to leverage new Dynatrace solutions for digital transformation and growth. A highlight of the event was the Dynatrace Partner Awards, which recognized exceptional achievements of partner organizations and individuals over the past year across various categories such as Cloud Innovator of the Year and Special Recognition for Excellence. Award recipients from diverse regions including EMEA, North America, Latin America, and APAC were acknowledged for their contributions to cloud innovation, training and certification, and digital service excellence. The event celebrated partners like amasol, Accenture, and Hitachi Systems, among others, for their commitment to expanding capabilities, enhancing customer experiences, and driving business success through strategic collaborations with Dynatrace.

State Chief Information Officers (CIOs) face challenges in building trust with constituents by enhancing digital citizen experiences, modernizing legacy systems, and transforming the government workforce, as highlighted in NASCIO's Top 10 Priorities for 2023. In a Dynatrace webinar, IT leaders from Minnesota and Michigan discussed how their modernization efforts positively impacted both citizen satisfaction and employee morale while reducing costs. A Deloitte survey links positive digital interactions with increased citizen trust in government services. Kailey Smith of Minnesota IT Services emphasized the importance of maintaining service quality during cloud migrations and noted that using the Dynatrace observability platform was crucial in managing risks and ensuring smooth transitions. Tammy Zbojniewicz of Michigan's Department of Technology, Management, and Budget highlighted the efficiency gains in incident response times, freeing up IT staff for more strategic tasks. The integration of citizen and employee experiences into a Total Experience (TX) strategy has been beneficial, leading to improved digital transformation outcomes, risk mitigation, and enhanced employee productivity, breaking down IT silos and boosting morale.

Dynatrace has revolutionized cloud-native service tracing and observability by introducing Davis, an AI-driven root-cause detection engine that reduces the overwhelming amount of alerts and raw data traditionally handled by operations teams. By analyzing causal relationships and collecting events related to the same root cause, Davis effectively minimizes alert spam and aids in faster problem resolution, significantly reducing mean time to resolve (MTTR). The interactive problem mode offers a powerful troubleshooting assistant that maintains context during problem analysis, guiding users through detailed problem-related information with visual markers and side panels. This functionality enables DevOps teams to quickly identify, remediate, and analyze incidents, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of underlying software issues. Additionally, Davis integrates with Service Level Objectives (SLOs), providing immediate context and analysis for SLO degradations, thereby enhancing real-time incident management. The platform invites user feedback through the Dynatrace Community to continually improve its offerings.

Log forensics, the process of investigating security incidents using log data, has become more complex with the rise of cloud-native technologies. As organizations increasingly adopt these technologies to enhance competitiveness and agility, they face challenges in maintaining control and visibility over their expanding cloud environments. This lack of visibility can compromise application performance and security, prompting teams to rely on observability technologies. However, these technologies often present data in silos, leading to blind spots in security investigations. Dynatrace, a software intelligence platform, addresses these issues by offering deep visibility and understanding of applications and infrastructure, augmented by its data lakehouse, Grail. Grail retains data context without requiring upfront categorization, enabling precise and swift analysis of security events. By leveraging tools like Dynatrace Notebooks, Query Language (DQL), and Pattern Language (DPL), teams can perform effective log forensics, uncovering insights into malicious activities and improving their security posture. A case study involving Ludo Clinic demonstrates how these tools were used to detect and investigate a SQL injection attack and related suspicious activities, highlighting the efficacy of Dynatrace's solutions in identifying and addressing security threats.

Network performance monitoring is essential for cloud operations teams to manage application and infrastructure performance across multicloud and hybrid cloud environments. Despite the widespread adoption of various monitoring tools, organizations struggle with network-related issues due to the complexity introduced by numerous applications, services, and interdependencies. As network traffic increases, largely driven by hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, organizations are investing more in network visibility tools, yet often maintain multiple, siloed tools that fail to provide a comprehensive view of network activity. Effective observability requires unifying data streams, topological mapping of cloud entities, and automation to analyze vast amounts of data and identify root causes of issues. Dynatrace offers solutions such as the Dynatrace Grail data lakehouse and Smartscape topological mapping, integrating with partners like Gigamon to enhance network traffic insights. The use of causal AI, like Dynatrace's Davis, further aids in automating data analysis and providing contextual insights, enabling teams to maintain service levels and address network performance issues efficiently.

In celebration of National Volunteer Week in April 2023, Dynaspace for Women (DFW), an employee resource group at Dynatrace, organized its first group volunteer event in partnership with the nonprofit A Girl Like Me Inc., founded by Tyra Moore. The event involved building care kits for new mothers in Detroit, reflecting Moore's mission to support at-risk young women and mothers with education and resources for healthy life choices. The event, attended by 16 volunteers, facilitated discussions that inspired further philanthropic initiatives, such as collecting prom dresses for a future event and inviting Tyra Moore to speak at a DFW meeting. Founded in 2019, DFW, with over 380 members, aims to support women within Dynatrace, highlight their achievements, and encourage more women to enter the tech industry, promoting diversity and inclusivity.

Software industry IT leaders are under pressure to accelerate digital transformation and deliver high-quality, innovative software rapidly to remain competitive, as highlighted by a Dynatrace survey of 150 IT leaders, which shows that 81% believe digital transformation has sped up in the past year. This rapid pace necessitates difficult tradeoffs among quality, security, and user experience, with some organizations sacrificing code quality and security to meet instant delivery demands. Skills shortages further exacerbate these challenges, with 74% of software CIOs identifying a lack of skilled developers as a significant issue. Despite this, only 38% of CISOs see hiring more staff as a viable solution, whereas 86% advocate for extending a DevSecOps culture to accelerate transformation and enhance software delivery. However, barriers to adopting DevSecOps include mistrust between security teams and developers, perceived hindrances to innovation, and a lack of unified platforms. Automation and the convergence of observability and security on AI-powered platforms are increasingly seen as critical to overcoming these challenges, with 93% of CIOs supporting the increased use of AI and automation to scale DevSecOps practices, emphasizing the importance of such integration for resilient software delivery.

ChatGPT and generative AI technologies, like GPT, have emerged as transformative tools across various industries, particularly in software development and delivery, by offering improvements in efficiency and productivity through automation and natural language processing. While these technologies are still in their infancy and pose risks such as errors, bias, and intellectual property concerns, their integration with causal AI promises to enhance their utility by providing precise and actionable insights. Companies like Dynatrace are exploring these potential use cases, demonstrating how AI can democratize information and streamline processes by enabling more effective data querying and problem-solving. However, the success of these technologies relies heavily on the quality and context of the input they receive, necessitating stringent data privacy and security measures to protect sensitive information. The convergence of generative and causal AI is expected to propel further innovation, allowing organizations to achieve unprecedented levels of productivity and software development speed while maintaining reliability and security through intelligent automation.

As applications increasingly distribute across multiple cloud environments, achieving comprehensive observability becomes both crucial and challenging. OpenTelemetry, an open-source tool, has emerged as a standard for instrumenting custom applications, aiding developers and operations teams in understanding software behavior and troubleshooting issues. This second installment of a three-part series delves into configuring OpenTelemetry for a demo application comprising a PHP frontend and a JavaScript agent running on Node.js. The article explains the setup process for both PHP and Node.js environments, detailing the installation of necessary packages and the initialization of OpenTelemetry libraries for collecting telemetry data. It emphasizes the importance of both automatic and manual instrumentation to provide comprehensive insight into application performance across distributed systems. Additionally, it explores the concept of context propagation, which allows for seamless tracing across different services, and the use of metrics to visualize key performance figures. The series underscores the enhanced troubleshooting capabilities enabled by OpenTelemetry and hints at further integration possibilities with Dynatrace's OneAgent for automated telemetry reporting, to be explored in the final part.

The blog post discusses how Dynatrace utilizes the Site Reliability Guardian to automate software delivery and quality validation, embodying DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) best practices to ensure reliable, secure, and high-quality software releases. Announced at Perform 2023, the Site Reliability Guardian allows development teams to establish quality objectives in their code, which are validated throughout the delivery process, from development to production environments. It supports a shift-left approach, providing insights into production environments and enabling pre-production validations to improve software quality. Various Dynatrace teams leverage the Guardian for tasks such as monitoring demo applications and conducting chaos testing using AWS Fault Injection Simulator, ensuring the resilience and performance of applications. The Guardian also facilitates release validation through the "four golden signals" (latency, traffic, errors, and saturation) using Dynatrace Grail's capabilities. The post encourages organizations to adopt these practices early in the software development lifecycle and invites feedback on the Site Reliability Guardian through the Dynatrace Community.

Observability has become crucial in multicloud environments, and OpenTelemetry is a leading open-source tool for collecting observability telemetry data. The series explores how OpenTelemetry provides insights into application performance and runtime details through its SDKs and libraries, which allow instrumentation across various platforms and languages. The final part of the series introduces Dynatrace's OneAgent as a tool that enhances telemetry data collection with minimal effort, by automatically monitoring supported technologies and offering additional insights into host performance, application and service monitoring, real user monitoring, and database performance. OneAgent seamlessly integrates with OpenTelemetry, extending its capabilities by providing a comprehensive view of the system and services, including detailed metrics such as CPU usage, DNS query times, and database call durations. This integration results in full observability, facilitating better understanding and debugging of applications and systems by capturing a broad range of metrics that vanilla OpenTelemetry instrumentation might miss.

Observability is crucial for understanding and managing the behavior of complex software systems, especially as workloads increasingly shift to distributed cloud-based services. OpenTelemetry, an open-source tool, has become a standard solution for making systems observable by instrumenting telemetry data, allowing developers to gain insights into software performance and issues beyond traditional logging capabilities. It supports traces, metrics, and logs to provide a comprehensive view across application boundaries, enabling better error detection and performance monitoring. A demo series explores using OpenTelemetry to add observability to a distributed web application, showcasing how traces can follow request execution flows and metrics can track system performance. The series also emphasizes the importance of connecting to analytics backends like Dynatrace for data analysis and visualization, illustrating the setup process and benefits of integrating OpenTelemetry for enhanced system monitoring.

Dynatrace Managed's release version 1.266, rolled out starting May 22, 2023, includes various updates, enhancements, and bug fixes. Key changes involve support adjustments for several Linux operating systems, which will phase out by late 2025 and early 2026. The release resolves numerous issues across different components, such as Application Security, Autonomous Cloud, and Synthetic Monitoring, including fixes for vulnerabilities, UI navigation errors, and configuration problems. It also introduces improvements like increased hard limits for metric event configurations and adjustments in metric event tag filter logic. Additionally, cumulative updates in this release address specific concerns like long loading times in Unified Analysis screens and permissions issues in multidimensional analysis and service metrics configuration.

Dynatrace has introduced Davis data units (DDUs), a new licensing model for monitoring metric consumption, starting with version 1.198 of its software. This model provides a transparent and flexible way to manage and predict metric usage, replacing the previous custom metrics licensing. DDUs are used to quantify metric data points, enabling more accurate predictions of usage in dynamic environments, and initially apply to metrics, with future plans to extend this to log monitoring and events. Dynatrace offers a free tier of 200,000 DDUs per license, which renews annually, allowing users to explore features without cost concerns. The transition to DDUs is automatic, with existing custom metrics volumes converted to DDUs, and users notified via the Dynatrace interface. The introduction of DDUs also includes a consumption overview feature, where users can track their usage, and a future release will expand these principles to include log monitoring and events.

The OneAgent release notes for version 1.265, published on May 9, 2023, detail several updates and enhancements, including the introduction of new technology support for CBL-Mariner 2, DataStax client for Apache Cassandra 4, and Jakarta RESTful Web Services 2.1+. This release also brings improvements in OneAgent health monitoring, enabling users to detect anomalies through an overview of deployed modules and their health statuses. Additionally, there are updates in error logging for remote Linux installations and enhancements in OneAgent extensions to reduce data gaps. The release addresses numerous resolved issues across various modules, such as infrastructure monitoring, Node.js, and .NET, alongside handling vulnerabilities like CVE-2022-48468 with a protobuf-c patch. Furthermore, support ends for Internet Explorer versions 7-10 and older JavaScript frameworks, aligning with Microsoft's end of support for these versions.

Dynatrace has inaugurated a new office in Denver, Colorado, selecting the city for its thriving tech community, innovative reputation, and skilled workforce, following an exploration of 20 cities. The Denver office, set in the LoDo neighborhood, is strategically positioned to support the company's growth, with plans to expand from 100 employees to 400 by 2025, and to double its current 26,000-square-foot space. Focused on customer service, sales, and partnerships with local universities, the office aims to foster collaboration and innovation, offering amenities such as a fitness center, meditation room, and spaces designed to enhance creativity. Dynatrace emphasizes a culture of collaboration and employee well-being, providing benefits like unlimited paid time off and volunteer time off to promote work-life balance. The company is committed to contributing to Denver's tech industry, leveraging its unified observability and security platform to drive innovation while nurturing a work environment that reflects its values of inclusivity and teamwork.

The retail sector is facing a critical juncture as the demand for online shopping surges and brand loyalty diminishes, prompting IT leaders to enhance digital experiences to improve conversion rates and revenue. To meet these challenges, a shift to DevSecOps is underway, allowing retailers to deliver secure, reliable shopping experiences, though the pace of innovation presents challenges in maintaining application reliability and security. A significant portion of retail IT leaders acknowledges the necessity of integrating a DevSecOps culture to accelerate digital transformation, though barriers such as trust issues between developers and security teams, and the absence of a unified platform, hinder progress. Automation and the convergence of observability and security are emphasized as crucial strategies to overcome these obstacles, with AI and automation playing a pivotal role in scaling DevSecOps practices. Despite a skills shortage, many CIOs believe that extending DevSecOps culture is more effective than hiring additional personnel, with the goal of creating seamless, secure omnichannel shopping experiences and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Open ecosystems, characterized by shared data and services across organizations, are transforming collaboration by fostering faster development and partner integrations. While these ecosystems offer benefits such as increased flexibility and collective innovation, they also present significant observability challenges. Organizations must integrate diverse telemetry data like metrics, logs, and traces to effectively manage and optimize these systems. Open source tools such as OpenTelemetry, Fluentd, and Prometheus assist in this endeavor, but a comprehensive strategy involving AIOps is essential to provide meaningful insights from the data. Platforms like Dynatrace offer a solution by consolidating open source data and employing AI for context-aware monitoring, supporting organizations in navigating the complexities of open ecosystems while enhancing collaboration and performance.

Intelligent automation is pivotal in overcoming the challenges faced by organizations adopting a DevSecOps approach to software delivery, especially in mitigating the risks associated with accelerating release validation and addressing siloed processes. With the increasing complexity of multicloud environments and data proliferation since the Log4Shell vulnerability, security risks have intensified, prompting a shift towards integrating security earlier in the software development lifecycle. The demand for rapid software innovation often forces teams to compromise on security, as noted in the Dynatrace 2023 CIO Report, which found that many security teams lack complete, real-time visibility into vulnerabilities. Silos within DevSecOps frameworks hinder communication and collaboration, thereby exacerbating these risks. AI-driven automation offers solutions by facilitating release validation, automating ticket assignments, and enhancing code-level vulnerability detection, ultimately improving efficiency and reducing the time to address security issues. Despite the specificity and speed challenges that contribute to silos, intelligent automation enables organizations to maintain secure and swift software delivery by ensuring critical information flow and appropriate task allocation, supporting a more cohesive and effective DevSecOps strategy.

As organizations increasingly adopt multicloud environments, IT operations analytics (ITOA) becomes crucial for effectively managing and analyzing operational data to ensure efficient cloud operations. ITOA leverages artificial intelligence to unify, store, and analyze data, providing insights that enhance the deployment of digital products, improve IT operational efficiency, and boost customer engagement. By automating tasks and employing big data technologies like Hadoop, NoSQL, and Dynatrace Grail, ITOA identifies patterns and anomalies to facilitate proactive decision-making and optimize resource management. A data lakehouse approach integrates the benefits of data lakes and warehouses, enabling unified data storage and analytics that offer real-time insights and support advanced AI analytics. This approach enhances IT operations by providing AIOps teams with improved visibility and the ability to respond to performance and security issues promptly.