APM Evolves to Autonomous Cloud Management

I appreciated the opportunity to attend Dynatrace Perform for the fourth consecutive year, a standard industry practice for research analysts.

Reflecting on the evolution of the Dynatrace product offering, from application performance management to hybrid multi-cloud, containers, and microservices, it is impressive and shows how prescient the company was several years ago when they decided they needed to support the management and monitoring of applications across myriad environments and platforms.

Today, customers and employees want their software and applications available all of the time on all of their devices. Four years ago, Dynatrace realized how disruptive the cloud environment would be and revamped their solution that's driven by artificial intelligence (AI), with real-time dependency mapping, full-stack, and hybrid data sources, and automatic, continuous, discovery and instrumentation.

Given the scale and complexity of today's environments and the influx of data, automating monitoring and using AI to help identify what needs to be addressed is critical since this is far more than humans are able to monitor and make sense of. As several clients mentioned, if Dynatrace says you have a problem, you have a problem. It eliminates false positives and provides a tool that allows you to drill down into each report and find the source of the problem.

Dynatrace accomplishes this with OneAgent where a JavaScript tag is injected into the HTML of each application page that's rendered by web servers. These tags enable OneAgent to monitor response times and performance across all platforms and browsers. 

Their goal is to provide answers rather than data using AI to suppress the noise and push decisions up enabling everyone to focus on the future and the strategy rather than running network operations. 

Clients and channel partners see the benefits of zero-touch operations:

• Removing 50 percent of application management run cost

• 100 percent reduction in false alarms

• End-to-end detection

• 68 percent reduction in critical production issues

• 66 percent increase in resolution speeds

• Less time monitoring, more time with family

On the build side, Dynatrace helps to improve code quality integrates with other tools to improve testing, and enables preproduction alerts for abnormalities. Developers are able to focus on the business problem they are trying to solve with code rather than worrying about how the code will run and perform. Dynatrace performs real-time feedback for development and ops for immediate learning. 

FTD moved from AppMon to Dynatrace during the midst of their Mother's Day promotion, also known as their "black Friday." They were able to see the 200 percent greater conversion on the new site and quickly moved 100 percent of their digital program to Dynatrace in one day.

As companies emphasize user experience, customer experience, and digital experience, the analytics, reports, and dashboards from Dyntrace are being used by many more departments in the organization beyond IT. Several speakers at the conference have expanded their roles beyond IT into leadership roles as chief digital officer and manager of e-commerce operations and digital marketing.

This single-source of truth is promoting greater communication and collaboration with developers and operations able to work together to clearly identify friction and performance issues and resolve them in a timely manner. 

It will be interesting to see how Dynatrace will use its platform to provide security for applications and autonomous cloud deployments in the coming months.