Dynatrace has enhanced its analytics capabilities to enable digital experience monitoring, including session replays, based on the logs, metrics and traces it collects via its observability platform.
Steve Tack, senior vice president of product management at Dynatrace, said this update makes it simpler for DevOps teams to track user journeys across the multiple components and microservices that make up a modern application environment. Rather than trying to, for example, determine the impact of an issue by parsing through log data without any context, Tack said Dynatrace’s analytics capabilities will automatically fire up a session replay to enable DevOps teams to view the exact nature of the application issue being experienced.
Previously, DevOps teams would have needed to deploy the Dynatrace session replay offering separately. The overall goal is to remove much of the friction DevOps teams encounter when trying to fix an application issue by providing context in a way that is more accessible, he added.
In general, as observability continues to advance, it’s now become much less about the amount and types of data that can be collected, said Tack. The data is table stakes for achieving observability, he added. The focus now needs to be on the richness of the actionable analytics being surfaced once that data is collected, he said.
In fact, as more organizations start to build and deploy applications based on highly interdependent microservices, the richness of the analytics is now more critical than ever, noted Tack. While microservices-based applications are more resilient than monolithic applications, troubleshooting them is more challenging whenever application performance degrades, he added.
It’s not clear at what rate DevOps teams are embracing observability. The concept has always been a core DevOps principle, but, for the most part, more mature DevOps teams have only been able to achieve what amounts to continuous monitoring of pre-defined metrics. Observability platforms promise to surface anomalies indicative of IT issues before they escalate; DevOps teams can then launch queries to better determine their root cause and potential severity.
Dynatrace is making a case for an observability platform, accessed as a cloud service, that employs the company’s Davis AI engine and machine learning algorithms to surface the root cause of application issues.
As observability platforms continue to evolve, the days when IT teams determined the root cause of an IT issue by process of elimination are finally coming to an end. DevOps teams will be gaining more visibility into their application environments in ways that surface more meaningful actionable intelligence. That intelligence is especially critical for externally-facing applications driving digital business transformation initiatives.
There is, of course, no shortage of options when it comes to observability platforms. In some cases, IT organizations are opting to rely on cloud services while others are extending DevOps platforms they built themselves and continue to maintain. Regardless of the approach, the issue will no longer be how to collect data as much as what to do with it once it’s collected.