Holy (boundless) observability: Dynatrace launches Grail
Dynatrace is of course not just a systems and data observability specialist.
The company quite specifically describes and denotes itself as a ‘software intelligence company’ with a platform spanning what is said to be ‘boundless’ observability, security, business analytics and more besides.
This new (perhaps somewhat maverick) label boundless has not been used so far, but it is now in line with this month’s launch of Grail™ (trademark left on deliberately here to illustrate product status branding), so what is it?
This is a new core technology for, of and in the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform.
Grail is promised to ‘revolutionise’ (Dynatrace stays with the maverick line there) data analytics and management by unifying observability data as well as security and business data from cloud-native and multi-cloud environments.
It will do this while retaining its context and delivering instant, precise and cost-efficient AI-powered answers and automation, says Dynatrace.
Future extensions
Initially, Dynatrace is leveraging Grail to power log analytics and management. The company expects to extend the technology to power additional IT, development, security, and business analytics solutions.
The company reminds us that multi-cloud and cloud-native architectures, the backbone of modern digital transformation, produce an explosion of data. This data is siloed, reflecting the diverse parts of the cloud ecosystem where it originated. To extract value from this data using traditional solutions, IT Ops, DevOps, SRE and security teams need to structure it to reflect questions they expect to ask in the future.
They rely on time-consuming manual procedures, including data indexing and rehydration, in addition to managing multiple data repositories, which cannot react quickly enough to rapidly changing application and cloud environments or evolving security threats.
The cost and overhead of maintaining antiquated procedures and fractured toolsets outpace the business value. Modern clouds demand a new approach.
According to IDC’s Stephen Elliot, “Sprawling and dynamic cloud-native and multi-cloud environments are an ecosystem of various technologies and services… and the composition changes by the second. This paradigm makes it critical for organisations to acquire a platform with advanced AI, analytics, and automation capabilities. The platform must be able to ingest all observability, security, and business data, put it in an accurate context in real-time, and facilitate access to data-backed insights when needed.”
Adding Grail to its platform positions Dynatrace to address these needs, says Dynatrace.
Causal AI: precision data-context
“Organisations are painfully in need of a revolutionary approach to observability, security, and business data analytics that transcends the performance limits of their existing solutions by as much as 100X for complex use cases while relieving existing cost constraints for managing cloud-native and multicloud environments. Grail delivers by boosting the Dynatrace-approach to causal AI, which retains data-context with precision and at massive scale. Starting with logs, Grail makes it possible for teams to leverage instant analytics for any query or question, cost-effectively,” said Bernd Greifeneder, founder and chief technical officer at Dynatrace.
Grail is a causational data lakehouse with a massively parallel processing (MPP) analytics engine — it uses the new Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) for context-rich log analytics.. and it works in concert with other core Dynatrace platform technologies, including:
- OneAgent to automatically discover, activate, and instrument applications, microservices, infrastructure, and any dependency in modern cloud environments.
- Smartscape to continuously update the full-stack topology.
- PurePath to provide distributed tracing and code-level analysis.
- Davis causal AI to process data and deliver precise answers prioritised by business impact.
Dynatrace Grail for log management and analytics is expected to become generally available within 30 days of this story.
