Partner Spotlight: Dynatrace

The OpenShift Partner Spotlight is a recurring series that highlights the integration work our partners have done with OpenShift. This month's featured partner is Dynatrace. Dynatrace was one of our first Primed members and is an active participant in the OpenShift Commons program.

Let's start with an introduction: Name, role, and how long you've been with Dynatrace.

My name is Daniela Rabiser and I’m a Technical Product Manager at Dynatrace. I’m currently focusing on broadening and deepening Dynatrace’s monitoring capabilities for OpenShift and Kubernetes environments. Before joining Dynatrace in 2017, I conducted research in the area of feature modeling and evolution support in industrial software ecosystems. I hold a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.

For anyone not familiar with Dynatrace, can you provide a quick overview of what you do?

Dynatrace is a full-stack, fully automated, and intelligent monitoring solution specifically built for highly-dynamic container/microservices environments like OpenShift. You only need to install a single agent per node and Dynatrace does the rest. It automatically detects any new container deployments and monitors the applications and services running in them without touching your images or modifying your run commands. Further, Dynatrace artificial intelligence learns the normal behavior of your applications and constantly looks for anomalies. If a problem is detected, Dynatrace automatically identifies the root cause and lets you know the level of impact on your users.

Before we get into details, what changes are taking place in the industry that drove this integration?

Companies are moving to the cloud and redesigning their applications using containers and microservices, coupled with the adoption of agile methodologies, to quickly react to their customers' needs. This is commonly referred to as digital transformation. While this approach to application development has a lot of benefits, it also introduces a significant level of complexity. Containers come and go and now, instead of functionality updates every six to nine months, independent teams can make updates to microservices as frequently as needed. Needless to say, this creates a lot of complexity that can’t be managed using traditional monitoring tools. That is why we built Dynatrace!

As I said before, we use automation and AI to streamline the monitoring process. Companies that understand the need to digitally transform also understand the need to have the customer at the center of everything they do. That is what Dynatrace does; it provides the answers companies need to ensure a flawless user experience. With OpenShift being a platform for digital transformation, we saw it as a natural fit to integrate Dynatrace with OpenShift and build a partnership with Red Hat.

Given that, can you describe your integration efforts with OpenShift?

As of today, Dynatrace is listed on the Red Hat Container Catalog with a OneAgent Docker image for full-stack monitoring of applications running within an OpenShift cluster and we provide our customers with guidelines on how to deploy Dynatrace OneAgent on OpenShift Container Platform using a DaemonSet.

Also, Dynatrace recently introduced a powerful feature that allows you to derive tags from your OpenShift environment. This enables you to automatically organize and filter all monitored OpenShift application components. For example, you can easily filter technologies or problems based on these tags. And you can also leverage such tags to set up fine-grained alerting profiles. But Dynatrace not only picks up labels of your OpenShift resources, it also automatically detects annotations and memory limits attached to your pods.

Utilizing a team of 600+ developers, Dynatrace releases new features and functionality on a bi-weekly basis. This allows us to match the speed of the cloud and quickly react to this fast-changing technology landscape. Our mission is to constantly improve the monitoring support for OpenShift and Kubernetes environments, so check out our product news for the latest updates.

What are the next steps for Dynatrace?

Dynatrace will be hosting our annual user conference, Perform, in Las Vegas January 29th to the 31st where we will make several key announcements. One of those announcements that OpenShift users will find useful is a new feature we call Management Zones. Management Zones provide another layer of security and can automatically be tied to the Kubernetes namespaces you have already defined. So, the same policies you enable in OpenShift will be enabled in Dynatrace as well. If you want to have different views within Dynatrace that are not based on namespaces, you can do that as well. It will be highly customizable based on each organization’s needs.

What is your favorite thing about working at Dynatrace?

At Dynatrace, I’m part of a stellar team of experts working on the latest technologies. Together, we go the extra mile to deliver the #1 application performance management solution trusted by the biggest companies in the world. On top of that, I get to work with the latest cloud native technologies and partners like Red Hat.

Where can people go to find more information?

Check out the Dynatrace for OpenShift webpage or at the Red Hat Container Catalog.