Dynatrace Deepens AI Ties to Kubernetes
Dynatrace today at its Perform 2020 conference announced it has extended the reach of the Davis artificial intelligence (AI) engine embedded within its application performance management (APM) platform to ingest a wider range of Kubernetes events and metrics.
In addition, Dynatrace revealed it can now automatically discover, instrument and map heterogeneous container technologies within Kubernetes.
Finally, the company also announced it has extended the capabilities of the standalone module it makes available for monitoring infrastructure to be able to ingest data from Kubernetes, Prometheus OpenMetrics and Spring Micrometer as well as additional services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. In addition, Dynatrace can now create custom metrics and events based on log data. What’s more, the Dynatrace Davis AI engine has been extended to analyze thresholds and baselining algorithms for all infrastructure performance and reliability.
Mike Maciag, chief marketing officer for Dynatrace, says that while the company has always made infrastructure monitoring available as part of its core platform, it also makes available a module for IT teams that want to focus solely on infrastructure issues.
Dynatrace has seen a major spike in interest in containers across its customer base, Maciag says. A recent survey of 800 CIOs conducted by the company finds 68% of organizations are already using containers, while 86% expect to be deploying containers across the next 12 months.
The challenge is that as organizations move to combine all those containers to build microservices-based applications, the complexity of the IT environment reaches a level that IT teams are not able to keep pace with unless they can leverage some form of AI, he says.
At the same time, Dynatrace has been contributing to the OpenTelemetry initiative, which seeks to provide a single set of application programming interfaces (APIs), libraries, agents and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics. Currently a sandbox project operating under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which also oversees the development of Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry has attracted vendors including Dynatrace, Google, Microsoft, LightStep and Splunk. The goal is to make it easier for monitoring tools such as those provided by Dynatrace to observe increasingly complex IT environments via a common set of agents and APIs.
As part of that effort, Dynatrace plans to contribute to OpenTelemetry higher-level instrumentation APIs that promise to provide higher-fidelity tracing code to enable developers to build observability into their applications more easily, thereby reducing blind spots as new methodologies and programming languages emerge. Dynatrace also plans to integrate universal Trace Context across multiple cloud platforms as well as enhance the runtime management of the modules that make up OpenTelemetry.
Rather than each provider of observability tools building and deploying its own agent software, the future of DevOps will be driven more by open source agents that will be embedded in all the major platforms used to build and deploy applications. Dynatrace will then add value by providing the analytics applications and workflow engines required to consume the data within the context of its platform. Chances are, however, there will be a high correlation between platforms employing OpenTelemetry and Kubernetes.
