Dynatrace Updates ‘Explainable AI’ Engine To Provide More Kubernetes Insights

Dynatrace is shipping enhancements to Kubernetes support to provide DevOps teams real-time answers about performance issues and anomalies across the full stack of Kubernetes clusters, containers and workloads.

by Tom Donoghue

Tags: AI, Cloud, containers, DevOps, Dynatrace, insights, Kubernetes, workloads,

This extended capability comes as Dynatrace’s Davis explainable AI engine can now automatically ingest Kubernetes events and metrics.

In addition, Dynatrace can now also automatically discover, instrument and map heterogeneous container technologies within Kubernetes, according to said Steve Tack, Dynatrace senior vice president of product management.

“We reinvented Dynatrace specifically to support multi-cloud and microservices architectures, providing precise answers about the applications and infrastructure in these environments in real-time and at scale.

“Our explainable AI engine, Davis, now automatically ingests additional Kubernetes metrics, making Dynatrace even smarter about clusters and containers. This distinguishes us as the only observability solution that provides precise answers about issues and anomalies across the full stack, from the platform to the workloads running on it. Ultimately, that’s what enables our customers to tackle the complexity inherent in Kubernetes environments with speed and efficiency,” Tack said.

Dynatrace provides software intelligence with AI and complete automation to modernize and automate enterprise cloud operations. Dynatrace’s suite of integrated technologies provides insights about app performance, infrastructure performance and the experience of all users.

Highlights of the updated Dynatrace platform include:

Precise, AI-powered answers: Davis adds the ability to ingest additional Kubernetes events and metrics, including state changes, workload changes and critical events across clusters, containers and runtimes. These capabilities let Dynatrace better understand all dependencies and relationships across the entire Kubernetes stack -- from clusters to containers, and the workloads running inside. As a result, Dynatrace can provide full-stack observability at scale and deliver more precise, AI-powered answers to dramatically simplify Kubernetes roll-out and management.

New cloud application and microservice analysis capabilities: With Dynatrace, organizations can now understand and optimize Kubernetes resource utilization, enabling administrators and application owners to identify and solve performance issues and improve business outcomes proactively.

Extended automatic container instrumentation: Dynatrace now automatically discovers instruments and maps heterogeneous container technologies within Kubernetes environments, including implementations based on Docker, CRI-O and containers. This makes it easy to deploy and manage even the largest containerized environments. New container resource usage analysis also provides broader coverage for the range of container runtimes used by organizations.

One early adopter, Takuya Tonaru, a product owner at Yahoo! Japan, noted Dynatrace’s combination of AI plus full-stack visibility is already proving benefits.

“In a dynamic cloud environment, it’s crucial that we have full-stack observability so we can continually understand and optimize performance. Dynatrace allows us to do exactly that, providing both deep visibility into resource utilization and performance automatically, as well as identifying issues and anomalies across our entire web-scale cloud via its AI engine, Davis. This allows us to spend our time focused on building a better experience for our customers rather than gathering facts from disconnected tools to gain performance degradation insights.” He added.

Research Study Confirms Increasing Use of Containers, Kubernetes

Dynatrace’s latest updates come as research shows the adoption of cloud-native architectures, such as Kubernetes and containers, continue to explode.

A recent CIO research report shows that 68% of organizations are already using containers, with 86% expecting to have deployed them within 12 months. Kubernetes is becoming a preferred container orchestration system. As organizations digitally transform and scale up their Kubernetes applications and microservices in production, the dynamic and distributed nature of these environments make it impossible to understand and manage simply by looking at metrics and dashboards. Full-stack observability, coupled with precise AI-powered answers are needed across the Kubernetes platform, containers and workloads.

During the Dynatrace event, Perform 2020, Tack told the audience, “We’ve seen a doubling of Kubernetes usage in the past six months.” Thanks to the latest updates, Dynatrace can “help drive speed, take multiple data sources, bring them into a common model and drive those answers at scale," he added.

For his part, Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen described how more than 500 million apps and services would be developed and deployed by 2023 – the equivalent to the total number of apps and services developed in the last forty years. As the number of apps and services deployed increases, teams face increased pressure to speed up native mobile app innovation and resolve app issues quicker.

Tack also described how Dynatrace is bringing business analytics to both developer sand business with enhancements to the Dynatrace Digital Business Analytics module. The latest update sports new “business KPI anomaly detection” and other analysis capabilities via the Davis AI engine.

The Dynatrace blog from the event described these business benefits this way.

Aiming to further enable business, dev and IT teams to collaborate to deliver better business outcomes, the enhanced capabilities help teams:

Identify when business metrics are out-of-line with expectations, using Davis’ extended capabilities to process business KPIs.

Proactively identify and resolve problems before customers are impacted because Dynatrace now delivers automatic, real-time alerts on business-impacting anomalies.

Bring Davis precisions to any web analytics tool with our new, out-of-the-box integration with web analytics tools including Adobe and Google Analytics.

Dynatrace Perform 2020 was held in Las Vegas, Nevada, Feb 15-18. Readers can view on-demand sessions here.

back