The Evolution of Application Performance Management

Great to be able to attend Dynatrace Perform 2018 and be able to hear first hand what Dynatrace is doing to enable clients, and all companies, to successfully achieve digital transformation.

Dave Anderson, Global VP of Marketing, opened the conference with an overview of the exponential complexity companies are facing today with cloud, multi-cloud, containers (68% of clients have in production with a 225% increase in Docker instances), and microservices (73% of clients have in production). Companies need visibility into all of these.

Dynatrace has moved from 4 to 26 releases per year over the past year to provide clients with a solution that's easy to use, provides insight on the entire stack with AI intelligence in a hyperscale cloud to make digital transformation possible.

Steve Tack, SVP Product Management, discussed the law of accelerating returns with technology following predictable and exponential changes. Humans are programmed to think linearly. If I take 30 steps, we move about 30 yards; if I move exponentially, I end up going around earth several times. This sort of exponential evolution has led to microservices, Agile, and NoOps. Companies can't manage by Visio any longer. Management systems are not keeping pace with complexity. We need to make an exponential leap to deliver on UX and CX expectations. Today's clients are managing cloud and digital transformation. They need enterprise unified monitoring and relentless innovation that goes beyond our traditional view of APM.

There's complexity at the edge. Clients need access to information about their applications from data centers to the edge, anywhere and anytime, across multiple containers and microservices that are replacing monoliths to provide a multichannel digital experience.

Dynatrace now has a single platform, all-in-one approach to manage the digital experience with the same analytics engine to extend out to get a view into all platforms and an analytics AI-based approach to solve problems, with multi-cloud management and universal visibility that's easy to use.

The platform will highlight key KPI findings with the ability to drill-down into information and probe-based with host-based insight. The platform automates discovery and instrumentation of containers provides a single lens view to manage the entire environment and replaces SI (systems integration) tools to bring infrastructure, logs, APIs, users and APM together.

There are three areas of focus:

1) Find cloud initiatives – DevOps, NoOps, BizDevOps

2) Unify enterprise monitoring – expand coverage and consolidate

3) Plan your journey – action your roadmap at the innovation center

Florian Ortner, Chief Product Officer, introduced four new product features that provide access control at scale and complexity whereby:

• Every service is detected

• Everything is baselined

• Everything is in the AI engine

Management Zones were introduced by Guido Deinhammer, Senior Director Product Management in response to the massive amount of information developers, DevOps teams, testers, and performance managers are inundated with from numerous tools. Management Zones strive to provide access control to manage the massive scale and complexity of data and alerts providing focus and context for the infrastructure team, application owners, and DevOps team so everyone can focus on what’s relevant to them until it’s necessary to collaborate to solve a problem. Problems can be published to Slack channel for collaboration and resolution.

Log Analytics was introduced by Pawel Brzoska, Director of Product Management. With applications so complex you have gigabytes of data and you don’t know where the information you need is, Dynatrace provides a single agent to monitor application performance and root cause analysis along with out-of-the-box log content where you can also drill down into interactive log files. This provides all performance and troubleshooting data in one place, easy access to log data in one place.

Digital Experience Monitoring was introduced by Alex Sommer, Director of Project Management. Digital Experience Monitoring enables users to choose which performance metric is right for their business. As more companies move to SaaS more applications, they need to be able to have real user monitoring everywhere. While the initial driver of this feature was user group issues with ServiceNow, I can see organizations benefiting with regards to Office 365 and Salesforce. 

Simon Scheurer, Chief Software Architect/Lab Lead introduced Session Replay which enables users to add context to errors. Users can click on where a problem occurred and then look over the shoulder to see the user interaction. Session replay shows you everything the user did to provide a granular level of user interaction. It even works on Google Docs.