Back with a bang on day two, Dynatrace exceeded expectations yet again with a whole host of announcements.
With the same ethos in mind, the performance management company looked at the hype capabilities in the IT industry – artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing.
Once again, perfection was the goal for Bernd Greifeneder, CTO at Dynatrace. Keeping customers at the heart of all its operations, Dynatrace’s virtual assistant Davis powered today’s problem solving performance announcement as it looks to disrupt the Internet of Things (IoT) market.
The assistant is now readily available to deploy through Amazon Alexa with Dynatrace, allowing customers to ask questions to help solve or find the root of a problem. Pitched as being unlike any solution before, Davis will use AI to detect and report the main cause of the issue and how to overcome this through voice command and control.
“What we’ve done with Davis is exactly what the industry needed,” said Greifeneder Dynatrace. “Working with Alexa as part of the notification programme, incorporating Davis takes this to another level for customer experience. Now, users can simply ask Alexa to check the status of their systems by calling on Davis.”
Somewhat of a simple addition to Dynatrace’s performance portfolio, of course the company did one better and pushed Davis into the Microsoft HoloLens platform as well. Using AR, customers can have better visibility of what is happening with their systems, right in front of them.
Having Davis incorporated into this system and taking on the world through another lens, Dynatrace is offering the voice assistants to help analyse and identify the root of problems sooner than any other method.
Despite the excitement from the company, it was the first to admit that HoloLens was not market ready as of yet. However, the company did promise to boost its current innovation programme. Inviting a total of 15 new customers, for a price tag of $25,000, customers can get hands on training with the Dynatrace R&D team on best ways to innovate their products and bring more solutions to them.
Within the programme, customers will get the chance to engage with capabilities such as HoloLens, bringing that idea to market. Furthermore, lab sessions will be held to educate customers on future capabilities and how they can benefit their business to operate performance management in this way.
The second big announcement made at the conference in Las Vegas today was a development in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and self-driving IT. Andreas Lehofer made a bold entrance on stage this morning and said: “AI is the hype topic of the whole IT industry. It constantly fails to deliver on its promise to customers.”
Pointing two fingers of blame at AI’s failure to deliver on the algorithms, Lehofer said they are far too slow to cope with the dynamics of a modern environment. Secondly, the ways solutions have been built are not adequate to help or understand the root of performance problems.
Of course, it came as no surprise that Dynatrace once again had the answer and solution. Lehofer split the company’s theory into three main areas; better data quality, stronger context and semantics and smarter algorithms.
“Taking all the data that machines have and using semantics to help find the cause of the problem, detecting the issue without learning anything. Dynatrace’s capability drills down to code-level detail and put all these together brings a unique capability for Dynatrace, which is business impact calculated.”
Improving AI across the industry includes the self-driving market, which is fast becoming a dominant market in the technology industry. To reach the potential Dyantrace now knows is possible, Greifeneder said it is as much about the culture as it is the technology. “It is 80% culture and 20% technology to have a successful outcome,” said Greifeneder. “AI gives the answers and orientation, but business operations create the culture needed to go further.”
AiOps is the future of the IT industry according to Dynatrace. With AiOps, it will open Dynatrace AI to external data, which will be leveraged automatically by the capability and update the customer model automatically. The benefits of AiOps are providing more data and context to change and problem detection.
Going one step further, Dynatrace AI will be able to identify abnormal situations within the performance metrics allowing Dynatrace to automatically deploy actions to solve the problem.
Lehofer said: “Dynatrace AI is great and efficient because it shows business impact, but with a technical business related root cause. Dynatrace AI takes monitoring to a whole new level, extending it further than ever expected and more interestingly, beyond the monitoring its about automation of DevOps processes.”
Another streamline process Dynatrace has developed further for customer experience is its cloud platform. Greifeneder returned to stage and said: “Cloud for Dynatrace from the beginning is enabling multi-cloud visibility. Supporting all major platforms, Dynatrace shows dynamics to how container environments change over time and links it to application performance and user performance.”
Day One of Perform2018
Enhancing these qualities further today, Dynatrace has announced its cloud Function as a Service (FaaS) capability, which will be available in BETA in February this year. The new capability will allow customers to develop, run and manage applications whilst Dynatrace finds solutions to errors.
Closing the keynote for day two, Greifeneder said: “One thing to take home is, don’t think of Dynatrace as just monitoring. Dynatrace has risen to control, to manage, to orchestrate and to be part of the fabric.”
