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Massachusetts-headquartered Dynatrace, which provides an intelligence layer to monitor and optimize application development, performance and security, today announced key updates for its core platform, including a new AutomationEngine that enables teams to streamline monitoring and other activity across a variety of workflows.

Developers, security specialists, operations personnel and even business users can tap into the platform. The company made the announcement at its annual cloud observability conference in Las Vegas.

Other enhancements announced at the conference include support for more data types on the company’s Grail data lakehouse — which also could be described as an observability database — and a new user interface to simplify custom analytics. 

Founded in 2005, Dynatrace started as an application monitoring solution but evolved into an all-in-one “software intelligence” platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to provide insights into application performance, their underlying infrastructure and the experience of end users.

The platform helps teams modernize and automate enterprise cloud operations and release higher-quality software faster — competing with the likes of New Relic, DataDog, LogicMonitor, AppDynamics and Splunk.

At the core, Dynatrace’s platform is built of five key technologies. First, OneAgent collects detailed metrics by discovering and instrumenting applications, microservices, infrastructure and any dependency in modern cloud environments. Then, PurePath captures and analyzes timing and code-level context for all distributed traces, end-to-end, across the entire stack, while SmartScape maps the topology, visualizing the dynamic relationships among all components across every tier. 

Finally, Grail data lakehouse provides contextual data analytics and management using massively parallel processing and the proprietary Dynatrace query language (DQL). As well, Davis AI ensures fault-free analysis, providing precise results (like where the problem is and its exact cause) prioritized by business impact. 

Dynatrace AutomationEngine: A new component

With the announcement of AutomationEngine, set to hit GA in three months, Dynatrace is adding another technology to its platform. As the company claims, it will work in conjunction with the remaining technologies and leverage Davis AI to deliver answer-driven automation across boundless BizDevSecOps workflows. This will help enterprises operate clouds more efficiently and innovate faster and more securely.

The engine, Dynatrace notes, can trigger automated remediation and progressive delivery to continuously evaluate software against specific service level objectives (SLOs). It could also automatically route evidence of vulnerabilities discovered by Dynatrace application security to the right team or automate cloud infrastructure and compute resource provisioning by forecasting future requirements.

“This provides a feedback loop that makes the automation more intelligent and business value–oriented,” Bernd Greifeneder, founder and CTO at Dynatrace, said. “Now, teams can extend this answer-driven automation to nearly unlimited use cases, like managing seasonality, reacting to changing user experiences, disabling features for security or quality reasons, or enhancing software orchestration to reflect myriad external factors.”

Grail gets better, new UX

Since its launch in 2022, the Grail data lakehouse has supported logs and business events. Now, Dynatrace is taking it to the next level by bringing the ability to store, process and analyze metrics, distributed traces and multicloud topology and dependencies.

With this development, the lakehouse will be able to work with the massive volume and variety of data in modern cloud ecosystems while retaining its context and without having to restructure it.

The company also debuted a new user experience for the platform, delivering improved dashboarding capabilities with graph analytics and Dynatrace Notebooks, an interactive document capability that enables IT, development, security and business users to collaborate.

“Now, they (teams) can perform custom queries that leverage directed graphs that reflect continuously updated ecosystem topology and dependencies to derive answers with causation,” Greifeneder explained. The answers derived are more precise than results from more conventional methods, and the collaboration enabled covers more people across an organization, he said.

Dynatrace Perform conference runs from Feb. 13 to 16.