Dynatrace, at its Perform 2020 conference today, extended the reach of the Davis artificial intelligence (AI) engine it makes available via its application performance management (APM) platform to include deeper ties with mobile applications along with an ability to track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue trends and customer churn.
In addition, Dynatrace has enabled one-click integration with web analytics tools such as Adobe Analytics.
Those capabilities are in addition to deeper integration between the Davis AI engine and Kubernetes that was announced earlier this week at the conference.
Mike Maciag, chief marketing officer for Dynatrace, said usage of APM platforms is expanding beyond IT teams to include business users at a time when organizations are building and deploying more digital business applications. Most of those emerging applications revolve around mobile computing devices so Dynatrace is also extending the reach of the Davis AI engine to provide digital experience management capabilities, including advanced analytics and segmentation of mobile app user sessions, auto-instrumentation for additional mobile platforms such as React Native and tvOS and insights into third-party mobile applications components, he said.
Specifically, Dynatrace multi-dimensional analytics now include crash reporting workflow and granular segmentation capabilities spanning health, performance and usage metrics across all app components and user actions. That capability will eliminate an APM blind spot most organizations have today, said Maciag.
With more than 200 billion mobile applications having been deployed at a cost of $120 billion in 2019, Maciag said it’s apparent the scope of the challenge requires additional help from an AI engine.
Coupled with an ability to now track how application performance is impacting KPIs, Maciag said there is now an opportunity to unlock a gold mine of business data that is locked up in observability platforms using modules such as the Dynatrace Digital Business Analytics.
To further enable that capability, the Davis AI engine within that module provides automatic, real-time alerts on anomalies that might impact the business now using a wider array of data sources.
It’s not clear to what degree business users might rely on APM platforms to surface events that could impact business outcomes. Most business users rely on either business intelligence (BI) applications or traditional spreadsheets to manage the business. However, as more processes become digitized using software APM platforms can surface events long before they are ever reflected in a BI application or spreadsheet. In fact, chances are good that business leaders are more likely to be able to affect the ultimate outcome sooner should they choose to analyze events in real-time via an APM platform.
In the meantime, as application environments become more complex, reliance on APM platforms continues to grow. Once used mainly to keep track of only the most mission-critical monolithic applications in the enterprise, organizations are now tasking DevOps teams to manage entire business processes end to end basis. The challenge, of course, is most of those business processes consist of a wide variety of front and back-office applications that more often than not were built using entirely different frameworks.
