A new virtual assistant is joining the likes of Siri and Alexa, with davis entering the AI scene.
davis has entered the virtual assistant market, joining the likes of Siri in the intelligent comms space. However, unlike Siri Davis has been tailored to the IT professional and has been developed to answer questions about the performance of any aspect of the digital ecosystem.
Explaining davis to CBR, Dynatrace’s Michael Allen said: “Effectively, it’s a bit like having Siri for IT operations. By enabling users to ask questions about the state of their digital services, davis effectively consumerises digital performance management for the first time, providing a much more interactive experience for the user. Insight provided by davis can be used to identify issues that need to be prioritised, enabling IT teams to review data within the Dynatrace dashboards to gather more information on the root cause of service disruptions.”
davis, which stands for Digital Assistant for Virtual Interaction Services, can be used either with Amazon Alexa or Slack and can be used to instantly answer questions such as: What performance problems impacted my revenue today? Can you tell me about user activity levels? Are there any capacity issues? Were there any outages last night?
As to why businesses need davis, Mr Allen pointed to the many moving parts of the IT ecosystem – a complex maze in which davis is positioned to act as an intelligent guide. Navigating microservices, dynamic cloud environments, dynamic data centre and software-defined networks, Dynatrace believe that an AI-powered digital assistant like davis will take the strain off human operators having to manually manage and troubleshoot the IT maze.
“It’s crucial for companies to have an AI powered digital assistant, capable of doing all 
the complex number-crunching and computation for them, to identify the solutions to any digital performance issues before users feel any adverse effects,” said Mr Allen, VP EMEA at Dynatrace.
“AI can instantly analyse the myriad layers of constantly evolving dependencies between applications and digital infrastructure, allowing it to pinpoint the root-cause of any bottlenecks or performance slowdowns, so IT teams can overcome complexity and fix those issues quickly.”
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The next step in the roadmap for ‘davis’ will see Dynatrace working with more customers to develop questions that are very specific to their needs and environment. Jeppe Lindberg, Application Performance Manger at retail giant, COOP, in Denmark, was among the first to trial the virtual assistant. He said:
“Futuristically, I want to ask ‘davis’ questions specific to COOP, such as “Are our PoS terminals, or payment solutions, at risk of performance problems?” While we can already see this via the dashboards, over time ‘davis’ will bring this to our attention conversationally. It’s a game changer.”
AI underpins the ‘game-changing’ davis, with Mr Allen explaining to CBR:
“Dynatrace can instantly analyse thousands of sources of data on the performance of a business’ digital services, using its inbuilt AI capabilities. This allows users to identify the root cause of any digital service degradations so they can quickly find the solution and get the problem resolved.
“These AI capabilities are the secret sauce of Dynatrace’s ability to trace the almost infinite number of potential dependencies that can exist between IT infrastructure and applications, so that davis is able to quickly and easily provide simple answers to the hugely complex questions that people in the business need to ask.”
