Guest: Bob Wambach (LinkedIn)
Company: Dynatrace (Twitter)

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Bob Wambach, VP of Product Marketing at Dynatrace, to talk about major product announcements and to share his insights about the current trends in the market.

Recent Dynatrace product news:

• For the Grail data lakehouse, its parallel processing lakehouse that takes advantage of the economy and scale of public cloud resources, there are significant enhancements to consolidate observability, security, and business data with custom and exploratory queries.
• It launched AutomationEngine, which delivers intelligent automation to enable organizations to operate clouds more efficiently, innovate faster and more securely, and ensure consistently better business results.
• It launched AppEngine, which allows companies to build custom, compliant, and intelligent data-driven apps for their IT, development, security, and business teams.
• A new generation of Dynatrace apps such as Site Reliability Guardian (automates quality and security gates) and Carbon Impact (reduces the carbon footprint of hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems).

Shift left is a real thing, and it’s important. It means involving more stakeholders and bringing more ownership into pre-production, into the application development cycle, so that you are able to identify and prevent bad code or security vulnerabilities from actually getting into production.

Platform engineering vs. SRE vs. DevOps vs. DevSecOps vs. BizDevSecOps

Roles are becoming broader, more influential, and able to address a greater number of use cases. They are no longer siloed as in “I do observability, you do security, or you do business analytics.” They are converging to collaborate more, to learn more about different disciplines, to share information more easily, and to drive better business outcomes through technology.

Importance of AI/ML and intelligent platform solutions:

While there are potential downsides to AI, especially when you think about how it’s used in media and how it can be used in advertising, it has an important role to play in making our lives better. When we talk about end-to-end observability, machine learning is understanding the past to predict patterns. In very dynamic environments where you are constantly changing and you’re encountering things that you’ve never seen before, causal AI, which is fundamental to Dynatrace, gives customers a leg up on understanding things and knowing what to do about it. That, to me, is one of the most exciting things about the path forward.

Common challenges and pain points:

• Many companies are still siloed, i.e., several teams want to do their own bespoke monitoring for specific applications.
• They may be using platform companies, but those platform companies have siloed data. Or if they have consolidated data, it’s all based on correlation.
• Teams are too busy and overwhelmed with work.
• Company leaders struggle to get everybody on board.

Advice for companies looking to adopt cloud technologies:

• It’s a leadership and cultural thing. If you want change, you have to have the willpower to change.
• Find out what is the right pace of change for your company.
• The more you adopt observability solutions, the better it is for your business.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.