Dynatrace offers intelligence software to simplify cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation. With automated and intelligent observability at scale, its all-in-one platform provides accurate answers about the performance and security of applications, the underlying infrastructure, and the experience of all users; enabling organizations to innovate faster, collaborate more effectively, and deliver more value with less effort.
About how the platform works and what it can contribute to companies, we had the opportunity to chat with José Matías, regional director of Dynatrace Iberia.
[MCPRO] What are the keys that make Dynatrace a necessity for companies looking to better understand the performance of their applications?
[José Matías] The fact that Dynatrace is an “all-in-one” software intelligence platform, the heart of which is AI, is a significant benefit to our customers. This makes work much easier for IT teams who are not forced to compare results on the performance of their applications, as well as to query data in different control panels of numerous solutions that analyze different parts of the same process.
With Dynatrace, customers can see their cloud-native hybrid environment at a glance at all times, as well as all interactions and departments across the entire technology stack. Given the complexity of today’s technology infrastructures, automation is the only viable option for organizations looking to free their technology departments from manual and routine tasks to ensure that everything runs smoothly and performs optimally.
With Davis, Dynatrace’s artificial intelligence engine, teams receive automatic and accurate responses to what is happening in their technology environments in real time, allowing them to solve problems quickly and spend less time solving them in favor of innovation and value. for business.
[MCPRO] What position does Dynatrace occupy in Spain? What goals do you set for next year?
[José Matías] Dynatrace continues to invest in the Spanish market, assisting our clients in their digital transformation process. We continually seek to expand our presence in Spain, with a strong base of employees and local partners who work tirelessly to provide software intelligence that can help them compete in today’s ever-changing market.
[MCPRO] In recent years we have seen how more and more companies are opting for hybrid and multicloud environments… in which DevOps teams work. What are the main challenges they face?
[José Matías]Digital transformation is booming, with most CIOs saying their digital transformation has accelerated in the last year and 57% expect it to accelerate even more, according to a study by Dynatrace.
Cloud computing is at the center of this digital transformation due to its agility, efficiency, and scalability benefits. This same report to which I referred reveals that eight out of ten companies currently have an advanced multicloud configuration and 54% of them expect to increase its use.
However, many of these companies are realizing that this complexity of the cloud has gone beyond the “human” ability to effectively manage this environment manually. The fundamental challenge is to manage this complexity and, at the same time, keep up with innovation in a fast way.
Ultimately, one of the biggest challenges facing CIOs today is reducing the amount of time their teams spend on manual and repetitive maintenance tasks, greatly limiting their availability to focus on driving innovation.
I would venture to say that, in IT departments, your human resources spend almost half of their time on essential tasks. Another problem that organizations face is different teams working isolated in silos, with limited communication and lack of shared data. This disconnection causes delays in the development of new products or updates of existing ones.
[MCPRO] What are the main factors that indicate that an application is not working as it should? What types of alerts should you pay more attention to right out of the box?
[José Matías] In some cases, a sudden increase in the use of a digital service can cause problems in the user experience. This can manifest itself in a slower experience, an inability to complete a purchase, or pages not loading. Problems that cause these slowdowns include overloaded infrastructure capacity or requests for incorrectly configured databases.
Businesses may not always be able to predict traffic spikes, but they can ensure they have the foundation in place to deal with the unknown.
This includes rethinking team structures and aligning technical and business specialists more closely, a practice known as BizDevOps. This improves collaboration between teams and encourages the exchange of data between them to provide greater context to problems that arise. As a result, organizations can be better prepared and ensure that their teams can more effectively support the needs of the business when unexpected situations arise.
[MCPRO] How important is AI today to predict application behavior? What can we achieve in the future with these smart algorithms?
[José Matías] It would be a mistake for organizations to only view AI through the lens of monitoring and managing the IT environment, as it is also very useful for generating better results in teams and in the use of BizDevOps.
By combining artificial intelligence with automation, organizations can achieve autonomous cloud management, predicting, identifying and solving any application problems before end users are affected.
However, reaching this state requires a holistic approach to managing application performance; combining information about its operation and advanced observability across the entire cloud infrastructure with the management of digital experience and the capabilities of AIOps.
[MCPRO] A few months ago, Dynatrace announced the incorporation of an automation and orchestration module for the entire life cycle of cloud applications to its platform. How does it work in practice and what are its advantages?
[José Matías] The Dynatrace Cloud Automation module provides developers, DevOps teams, and SREs with an end-to-end integrated platform spanning from pre-production to production, unifying observability across the entire application lifecycle and automation of delivery pipelines.
This translates into shorter innovation cycles, higher quality software, and faster time to market. Cloud Automation includes a fully supported version of Keptn, an open source initiative, which provides organizations with an enterprise-level control plane for cloud and native application lifecycle orchestration.
This supports seamless integration of DevOps toolchains with Dynatrace’s intelligent, automated platform, expanding our openness and support for the broader DevOps ecosystem.
[MCPRO] Security in the cloud is another of the most worrying topics, especially in Docker containers or in orchestrators like Kubernetes. Are IT teams sufficiently aware of how important it is to protect applications in the cloud as well?
[José Matías] A few months ago we announced our entry into the security market with our Application Security module, which extends Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability to detect security vulnerabilities and eliminate blind spots in cloud-based applications.
With it, DevOps teams can focus their efforts on fixing high-priority vulnerabilities, rather than being overwhelmed by alerts and not knowing which issues are critical. We have recently expanded our AI-powered vulnerability detection capabilities for applications running on Node.js and in Kubernetes environments, linking vulnerabilities discovered by Dynatrace to individual containers.
Increased observability in cloud-native architectures provides DevSecOps teams with more accurate, real-time information on the origin, nature, and severity of software vulnerabilities in their production and pre-production applications.
As a result, teams are able to make real-time decisions based on hard data, mitigate security and business risks with greater speed and efficiency, and accelerate digital transformation with greater confidence.
[MCPRO] How important is Open Source in your value proposition? And in the IT strategy of companies?
[José Matías] Dynatrace has always been committed to open source systems and we believe it is a market that has a very strong current and future growth rate.
Dynatrace is integrated with OpenTelemetry, an open source project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), to provide end-to-end distributed traces, analytics, and actionable responses at scale.
We also recently announced dedicated agentless support for OpenTelemetry. This allows customers to send additional OpenTelemetry data directly to the Dynatrace platform when it is not possible or necessary to use an agent. As a result, Dynatrace customers can use its industry-leading AIOps and automation capabilities to drive more insights from their Open Telemetry data, across all cloud-native technologies.
