After participating in another great KubeCon Europe event earlier this month, VMblog has circled back with one of the show sponsors, Dynatrace, to learn more about what's new at the company and what they are doing with OpenTelemetry. To do that, we spoke with their SVP of Product, Steve Tack.
VMblog: For
any of our newer readers, can you give us a quick background on Dynatrace and
what you do?
Steve Tack: Sure. To power the digital services that define
modern banking, manufacturing, healthcare, and so much more, organizations are
shifting from traditional on-premises data centers
to multicloud environments with Kubernetes as the orchestration
layer. These environments are dynamic and produce a volume
of data that's beyond human capacity to manage. That's where Dynatrace comes
in.
At the highest level,
Dynatrace provides software intelligence to help the world's largest 15,000
organizations accelerate digital transformation. Our platform combines broad
observability, spanning applications, infrastructure, user experiences, and the
latest open-source standards, such as OpenTelemetry, with AIOps and automation
- including continuous discovery, proactive anomaly detection, and optimization
analysis across the full software lifecycle - and application security. This
combination helps our customers tame cloud complexity, speed innovation, and
deliver better business outcomes.
To
illustrate, consider driving a car without a dashboard - you would not
understand how fast you are going, your vehicle's temperature, how much gas you
have, or if your engine needs service. Now, imagine this scenario in a modern
multicloud environment, which is thousands of times more
complex. Dynatrace provides digital teams with the insights they need to
maintain observability into their cloud ecosystems, including the overall
performance and the impact on user experience and the business, overall.
VMblog: Earlier
this month, Dynatrace participated in KubeCon Europe where you made an
announcement related to OpenTelemetry, can you start by telling us a bit about
what OpenTelemetry is and how Dynatrace has been involved in the project up
until now?
Tack: OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing
Foundation (CNCF) project and an observability framework for cloud-native
software. Its goal is to provide a collection of vendor-agnostic tools,
APIs, and SDKs for organizations to use to instrument, generate, collect, and
export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) for analysis. This enables
digital teams to understand their software's performance and behavior. Since
the OpenTelemetry project started around two years ago, many
organizations,
including
Dynatrace, have come on board to help contribute to the
specification, and to make rich data collection easier and more consumable.
Dynatrace, along with companies including Google
and Microsoft, is a top contributor to OpenTelemetry. We lend our experience
and expertise building enterprise-grade tracing. In November 2020, we announced that our
patented distributed tracing technology, PurePath,
supports OpenTelemetry
and W3C Trace Context with increased coverage for serverless and service mesh
architectures. Essentially, these enhancements increased the breadth of data
and the scope of the cloud ecosystem encompassed in PurePath distributed
traces, to include OpenTelemetry data. This provides DevOps, CloudOps, and
cloud application teams deep, automatic, and intelligent observability at scale
for the most complex cloud environments.
VMblog: That
is great, it sounds like you have done a lot of interesting work in the space
thus far. Can you also summarize Dynatrace's latest OpenTelemetry announcement?
Tack: Dynatrace is committed to providing
enterprise-grade observability regardless of the telemetry data source. As
such, our latest
announcement describes how we are extending agentless
support for OpenTelemetry. This enables customers to send OpenTelemetry data
directly to the Dynatrace® Platform when agents are not possible or necessary. It
also adds to the OpenTelemetry data already automatically captured by
Dynatrace
OneAgent®, such
as pre-instrumented open-source frameworks, cloud services, and custom metrics.
As a result, Dynatrace customers can use
the OpenTelemetry open-source standard for any data
source, and leverage Dynatrace's industry-leading AIOps and automation
capabilities to deliver predictability and precise
actionability across their cloud-native technologies.
VMblog: What
are the biggest challenges facing those who are looking to leverage
OpenTelemetry for cloud-native tech?
Tack: Today's multicloud environments enable
organizations to rapidly scale digital capabilities. Keeping up with the data
created by these highly complex, container and microservices-based
environments, however, is more than any one human can manage alone. To keep up
with all the data, ITOps, DevOps and SRE teams need to have visibility into
each service and any transaction. Any observability blind spot imposes a
potential risk. When issues arise, these blind spots increase the mean time to
repair (MTTR).
OpenTelemetry increases the breadth of the data
and scope of the cloud ecosystem that organizations can observe. But when it comes
to implementing tools and processes to manage and make sense of everything
happening in the cloud ecosystem, collecting data is only a starting point.
Organizations will find their teams are quickly overwhelmed if they continue to
rely on manual approaches to gain insights. This is why we made AIOps central
to the Dynatrace platform - the value of OpenTelemetry will only be unlocked
through a unified platform that goes beyond delivering data on dashboards and
provides precise answers with root-cause analysis to enable greater efficiency
and continuous optimization.
VMblog: What
benefits does Dynatrace provide for those adopting OpenTelemetry?
Tack: With integrated
AIOps and
Cloud Automation at the core of its platform, Dynatrace
makes open-source observability easier, smarter and more efficient for all. The
platform continuously maps multicloud environments and their dependencies, so
that users can harness the broadest set of observability data,
including metrics, logs, and traces, as well as data from user experiences and
the latest open-source standards. As a result, DevOps and SRE teams will be
able to automatically detect anomalies, deliver answers prioritized by business
impact and with code-level detail, and drive optimizations across the software
lifecycle. This intelligent approach surfaces and proactively resolves any
issues in the cloud ecosystem and enables teams to focus on optimizing their
services instead of wasting time analyzing raw data or piecing together
dashboards from disparate tools.
VMblog: For
those who are interested in keeping up with Dynatrace, what else can we expect
from the team this year?
Tack: The Dynatrace team is
constantly innovating and looking for new ways to deliver value to our
customers. Over the next few months, we'll have several new product updates,
customer stories and partnerships. For anyone interested, visit us at www.dynatrace.com or visit our blog for more information.
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