Dynatrace Perform, the annual event to highlight all things Dynatrace, was held at the ARIA in Las Vegas from February 3–5. I was there to get a look at the company’s new offering directed at developers: Observability for Developers. Dynatrace is well known for its artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) products that help infrastructure and operations (I&O) engineers spot, diagnose, and mitigate issues before they turn into outages. Observability for Developers is analogous to this but directed at software engineers. Here’s a few of the interesting capabilities:
- Davis AI. Davis AI is a generative AI interface to help developers analyze logs, traces, events, and metrics using a conversational interface. It makes it a lot easier for developers to monitor health and analyze end user interactions.
- Live debugging. Live debugging of cloud-native apps and AI-powered troubleshooting enables developers to get access to runtime data in any environment, including production. Data can be masked and access-managed within Dynatrace to prevent sensitive data from being improperly accessed. Using “snapshots” lets developers see how data is flowing through the code paths to help them debug the “only happens in production” issues.
- Self-service capabilities. Dynatrace offers a capability to enable a self-service portal to developers for accessing data from production such as log traces, performance benchmarks, access to live debugging, and so forth. This enables the ops side of DevOps to level up their practices and serve developers at scale.
What I’d Like To See
Dynatrace has a set of capabilities, such as dashboards and customer impact metrics, that are meant for high-level leadership — e.g., CTOs and CIOs. This allows them to monitor progress toward high-level business goals. I’d like to see a version of this scaled to each level of the organization, all the way down to the individual product team members — product managers, dev leads, developers, designers, testers, security champs, etc. — to allow them to monitor their own business performance metrics. If you know my coverage of value stream management, you might have a sense of where this is going: Observability for Developers has the power to not only help developers diagnose apps, but it can help monitor and communicate the unique value that they are creating with their efforts, such as reducing cloud spend by optimizing an algorithm, speeding up transactions with less latency, and reducing the number of random errors in production — in other words, going beyond DORA and talking about the metrics that really matter.
Here’s how I see Observability for Developers fitting into the world of value stream management:
What It Means
Powerful application runtime diagnostic tools such as distributed tracing, performance analytics, metrics dashboards, data masking, and more have existed for some time, but they were primarily meant for high-end, “born in the cloud” organizations that had the talent, resources, and drive to create those capabilities for themselves. Observability for Developers democratizes access to these powerful capabilities and lets every organization gain access to top-tiered diagnostic features. But it can be more: It can also be a powerful tool to help everyone in the organization see how they fit into the overall value delivery chain, prioritize work that matters, and ultimately be happier knowing how much they contribute to the bottom line.