Don’t call Dynatrace a cloud monitoring company, an observability business or a cloud management specialist, please.
Dynatrace has been (and mostly still is) all that, but the Dynatrace of today is a software intelligence company. Why? Because that’s what system observability really leads to in terms of what it opens up, what it facilitates, how it manifests itself in ongoing (hopefully more healthy) system operations and how it ultimately delivers on that word the tech industry loves to use these days – outcomes.
The company is now focused on its mission to enable software team leaders to extract precise business insights from data in real-time, in context and at a massive scale. That, dear reader, is the scope of observability (sorry, software intelligence) these days.
Grail causational data lakehouse
This end of 2022 period sees Dynatrace now extending its trademarked Grail causational data lakehouse to power business analytics.
As causational data (where a change in one piece of data causes a change in another) lakehouse (where data lakehouses are – as many will know – an approach that combines the structured order of a data warehouse with the expansive unstructuredness of a data lake), Grail retains complete context across all types of data so users can get precise answers – even for questions they haven’t thought of yet
The Dynatrace platform can instantly capture business data from first and third-party applications at a massive scale without requiring engineering resources or code changes. It prioritizes business data separately from observability data and stores, processes and analyzes this data while retaining the context of the complex cloud environments where it originated.
Dynatrace says it designed these enhancements to enable teams to drive accurate, reliable, cost-effective automation and conduct efficient ad hoc analytics covering a wide range of business processes.
Example application scenarios include order fulfilment and bill payments, service activation and customer onboarding workflows, as well as the impact on revenue from new digital services. This business analytics news builds on capabilities that Dynatrace launched in October 2022, leveraging Grail to power log analytics and management.
BI tools don’t cut the (cloud) mustard
Today we know that organizations depend on digital services to drive revenue, customer satisfaction and competitive differentiation. But, to optimize these services and user experiences, business and IT teams increasingly rely on insights from various business data sources.
Those sources might (very typically) include: application usage, conversion rates, inventory returns etc.
So we get to the problem – and, if we’re lucky, we also get to how and why Dynatrace will tell us that it has something genuinely special to offer – and that problem is that traditional business intelligence tools lack the speed, scale, flexibility, and granularity required to deliver insights about services built on complex cloud architectures.
According to a study from one source, two-thirds of organizations are not comfortable accessing or using data from their business intelligence tools and so the suggestion here is that business analytics in modern cloud environments requires a new approach.
“Dynatrace gives us insight into the business impact of our applications’ performance and enables our teams to proactively solve problems, deliver better customer experiences and drive more value for our organization,” said Stephen Evans, head of quality, monitoring, SRE/DevOps Technology at global fashion company PVH.
The fashion company says that the new enhanced capability to access and store all business data provides great scalability. It also frees teams from the constraints of sifting through data to determine what is valuable and what should be stored. What we’re talking about here is the ability to analyze all data and deliver precise and contextualized answers in real-time.
Data in IT-context
“To drive digital transformation at scale, organizations need trustworthy and real-time insights from their business data. Existing solutions often rely on stale data, fail to deliver precise answers in IT-context, and require manual maintenance and coding from engineers,” said Bernd Greifeneder, founder and chief technical officer at Dynatrace.
Suggesting that the Dynatrace Grail causational data lakehouse positions the Dynatrace platform to overcome these hurdles, Greifeneder says that by elevating the priority of business data to ensure it arrives unsampled and with lossless precision, even from third-party applications where developers are not accessible, business and IT teams using the Dynatrace platform can now easily access valuable business insights on demand.
“This has the capability to unlock nearly unlimited business analytics use cases, allowing our customers to instantly answer their most challenging questions with accuracy, clarity and speed,” added Greifeneder.
Dynatrace expands on this whole discussion and says that over the past few years, observability vendors have sought to address analytics challenges, opportunistically introducing real-time reporting for a limited set of business metrics.
Overcoming architectural design constraints
Using existing APM agent and log monitoring capabilities made it reasonably easy to access certain business metrics and metadata to add to IT dashboards.
“But these solutions have largely fallen short of business and IT users’ needs. Since they rely on capabilities designed for IT monitoring, they inherit a series of architectural design constraints that limit their usefulness. Top among these are sampling-induced imprecision, limited access to critical business data embedded in application payloads, and lack of context,” insists Dynatrace, in a product white paper.
The firm says that its business events, Grail and OneAgent technologies work together to overcome these limitations, prioritizing business data separately from observability data to deliver precise, real-time business insights with deep visibility into application payloads.
This, contends the organization, is an entirely new approach to monitoring, investigating, and acting on business metrics. This enhancement to the Dynatrace platform is generally available and you can read more here about Grail for business analytics.
About Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist and corporate content creation specialist focusing on cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects software engineering, project management and technology as a whole. Adrian is a regular writer and blogger with Computer Weekly and others covering the application development landscape to detail the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is. His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge - and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.