Companies need to move away from DIY projects to track bugs in applications. A central policy is crucial to be able to respond quickly with the right solution.

At the Dynatrace Integrate event in Barcelona, ​​we sit down with the company’s CEO, Rick McConnell, to take a look at the challenges of the increasingly complex application chain. While in the past updates were carried out every one to two weeks, today this sometimes happens hundreds of times a day. The demand to make software faster and more reliable is increasing.

The key to a smooth and secure process is visibility of the application chain across the entire organization, including any silos that may exist. Although software is often behind their core business, many companies today still use self-developed DIY projects too often.

Dozens of proprietary tools keep the entire chain in order, but this comes with a number of risks. Dynatrace offers a total solution that maps and monitors the entire chain using a holistic approach and reacts proactively when necessary. McConnell: “We must abolish the traffic light principle, which is still used too often in organizations today.”

Not one, but many

By a traffic light he doesn’t mean a flashing light relationship, but the three colors: red (wrong), orange (works a little) or green (works). “Once something goes red, many organizations still start a long, slow triage process. This used to be much quicker because a developer had to create and publish their own build. He or she had complete control over it.”

Once something goes red, many organizations still start a long, slow triage process.

Rick McConnell, CEO of Dynatrace

“Today there is one container after another, libraries, new compilations, no one has control over the entire process from start to finish. Add to this the emergence of generative AI that helps with programming, and you quickly realize that such a triage process takes far too long.”

McConnell also points to users who are becoming increasingly sophisticated. “If something doesn’t work on a website or in an application, a consumer can try again an hour later. If it still doesn’t work, you’ve lost it. Identifying problems shouldn’t take hours, days or weeks, but rather minutes or not at all through proactive work.”

Three colors are not enough

With Dynatrace he wants to abolish the traffic light principle and offer a sophisticated solution that offers absolute transparency across the entire organization by mapping everything. “You have to be able to show exactly what is happening at any time. Three colors are not enough. Don’t tell me how bad a problem is, let me know how to solve it and exactly where it is.”

In his story, he gives a clear example of an online pet food store. “That sounds weird because I didn’t know there was a market there for our product, but it turns out there is,” laughs McConnell. There was a sales leak in the shopping cart and money was lost every day. “The organization couldn’t find what the problem was.”

“After a quick proof of concept, we activated Dynatrace at the customer and after a day we were able to isolate the problem thanks to the analysis of millions and billions of interconnected data points. The problem? Users with an old version of Safari caused an error in the shopping cart.”

Trust automation

He touches on an important point here. Pointing out an error is one thing, but mitigating the problem makes a visibility solution like Dynatrace much more valuable. The platform has been working with purely fact-based causal AI for more than ten years. This, along with predictive AI (using machine learning), ensures problems are resolved before they occur.

You can’t keep exponentially expanding the software team to oversee everything. Then you can put your talents to better use elsewhere.

Rick McConnell, CEO of Dynatrace

MConnell gives a simple example: “An application has run out of capacity in AWS. Our solution recognizes this and restores the environment by providing more space.”

“We need to gain the customer’s trust so that our software performs such automatic steps. Organizations have to do all of this in the long term. You can’t keep exponentially expanding the software team to oversee everything. Something like that is not realistic, it would be better to use their talents elsewhere if they can already find the talent in this competitive market.”

Data as the most important asset

The ObservabilityThe market is now worth $50 billion and will continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future. A complete overview of all processes is simply necessary so that everything works and stays running. The amount of data is increasing explosively today and will grow even faster in the coming years.

“You want to process all data types such as logs and behavioral analytics in an integrated repository that is highly scalable and based on a data lake. Combine that with AI that can provide causal, predictive and increasingly generatively precise answers, and you get automation and self-healing.”

Today, tomorrow and next year, data remains the most important asset of companies. The more precise the visibility, the more efficient it becomes. “The days of everyone staring at dashboards are over,” McConnell says clearly. “A decent view of everything is no longer a thing good to have but a crucial way to improve business results.”