Need to Simplify Your Cloud Complexity? This Unified Observability and Security Platform Can Help

TL; DR: Cloud complexity can bring many troubles, including losing oversight on vulnerabilities. Dynatrace is an AI-powered observability and security platform that allows companies to gain visibility across their cloud infrastructure and simplify security and management. It uses a hypermodal AI approach, which includes causal AI, generative AI, and predictive AI, to help teams mitigate vulnerabilities, answer complex questions, and innovate faster. We spoke with Alois Reitbauer, VP, Chief Technology Strategist at Dynatrace, about the platform, its unique capabilities, and why observability is essential for cloud systems.

The more complex a situation, the less control you often wield. For example, having one adorable puppy may seem manageable. But a bundle of puppies racing and playing across your home is a different story. You may lose sight of some of those furry tails, leaving you with chewed-up floorboards and a frayed mental state.

The current business landscape bears a similar outlook. A business may start with a few SaaS tools or cloud services, which can be manageable to oversee. But as the business onboards more services to streamline and maximize its operations, it becomes increasingly challenging to maintain and analyze them.

Of course, there are benefits to owning various SaaS and cloud services. So eliminating some and consolidating may not always be the answer. However, teams can turn to observability to better understand their solutions and manage these tools effectively with a unified view.

Enter Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers a unified observability and security platform to harness data and reduce cloud complexity. It leverages a layered AI approach to simplify management and help users find precise answers that drive automation, so businesses can innovate faster and more securely.

“As systems become more complicated, differentiation between impact and root cause becomes less obvious. This is where you need an AI-based observability and security solution to take a lot of this off your plate without the guesswork,” said Alois Reitbauer, VP, Chief Technology Strategist at Dynatrace.

Dynatrace allows users to break down silos and gain valuable visibility into complicated systems to prevent or mitigate issues before they affect end users. It supports more than 650 technologies and platforms so teams can easily integrate their systems.

Dynatrace’s mission is to ensure every digital experience and interaction across industries everywhere is flawless and secure. It does the hard work and discovery, so teams can innovate faster with less risk, operate efficiently, and drive better business outcomes.

“If the system underneath you is changing constantly, your level of understanding of how the system is behaving is going down. So you need a solution to take this off your shoulders,” said Alois.

To understand how a system functions, businesses must analyze it. But once a system becomes too complex, following real-time alerts becomes more difficult to track and mitigate. Dynatrace allows companies to get precise answers and outcomes without the legwork.

Dynatrace is a modern solution that combines security and observability to ensure teams can see into their systems and operate securely. Alois said businesses need solutions that do more than tick off checkboxes when managing security.

“I think that real-time response will become more important. Also, the rules for reporting securities are becoming more strict for companies. That’s why you need those solutions that help you with zero-day attacks and do it in an intelligent way, unlike ticking boxes,” said Alois.

Dynatrace provides users with critical, automated insights for their security analytics. Its security advisor can prioritize threat hunts for zero-day vulnerabilities and accelerate incident investigation. Dynatrace can also visualize incident response and real-time impact and provide information for quick remediation.

Leveraging Dynatrace allows users to make informed decisions and discover problems before significant impact can happen. This way, teams can proactively manage their systems and find answers to their questions instead of reacting when issues arise.

Alois said the Dynatrace team has leveraged AI for over a decade with its Davis AI engine and recently expanded its existing casual and predictive AI capabilities with generative AI for a “hypermodal” approach

Dynatrace’s hypermodal AI approach covers more ground than enlisting one type of AI. This way, users can leverage a dynamic AI solution that converges multiple AI technologies to solve different challenges and provide more insight.

“We created our own AI stack that consists of three different types of AI. So with observability, you first need to understand if your system is working the way it’s supposed to. That’s what we use predictive AI for,” said Alois.

Its predictive AI model uses historical data and compares it to a system’s current behavior to predict future behavior and detect anomalies or deviations. Dynatrace’s second model is causal AI, which can help users understand cause-and-effect relationships.

“It builds up a real-time model of your environment, which we call Smartscape, where it understands it and then does analytics on top of it. This component differentiates between cause and effect and understands your environment to help you answer questions,” said Alois.

Alois said causal AI helps users avoid the inadequacy of some alerts. Every alert is not the same. So causal AI helps users decipher which alert is the root cause and which is just a replication of system theory.

DavisAI also uses generative AI and large language models to produce precise answers, AI recommendations, and intelligent automation. Users can prompt the Davis CoPilot to generate remediation responses and discover new ways to improve their environments.

Dynatrace’s AI-powered platform also accelerates analysis.

“AI is faster at analyzing and doing it without confirmation bias. A human could never run through 2 million possibilities and check all of them for the sake of being on the safe side. But for a machine, it takes a couple of milliseconds to run through all of those options,” said Alois.

Dynatrace integrates seamlessly with various cloud and container environments, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes, and SAP. It also offers a complete view of the health of an entire cloud infrastructure, taking cloud monitoring to the next level.

“Every system you add to your stack is increasing the complexity of the system. So the cloud and third-party systems you’re running will keep increasing core business functionalities,” said Alois.

Dynatrace allows users full visibility across cloud and on-premises tiers, including OS-level and network metrics. It also eliminates blind spots, enabling teams to detect issues with third-party services, load balancers, disconnected hosts, and hypervisor dynamics.

Alois said many people misunderstand cloud management, thinking their cloud provider will handle everything for them. But that’s not true. This is why a platform like Dynatrace is so handy. It can help simplify cloud complexity so users can streamline their cloud management.

And Dynatrace has plans to make cloud monitoring even simpler. Alois said the team will provide more flexibility and accessibility regarding data, so teams can run custom analytics to answer more complex questions and expand use cases. Dynatrace also plans to extend its AI capabilities.

“We have used AI for a long time. But we want to open it up for customers so they can build their own AI workflows and capabilities, even by exposing it with natural language to our customers,” said Alois.