What to expect from Dynatrace Perform 2024
Keen to make sure we get back up to speed with everything that’s happening in Nevada this month, the Computer Weekly Developer Network is headed back to Las Vegas for Dynatrace Perform.
The event is staged in person at the Aria Resort & Casino from Jan 29 to Feb 1, 2024 with an online virtual offering running concurrently.
As we noted last year, Dynatrace’s application monitoring and testing tools are available as cloud-based SaaS services, or as on-premises software. The company has established roots in Application Performance Monitoring (APM), but now describes itself as an operation that combines full-stack observability and runtime application security with advanced AI to deliver intelligent automation from data.
Let’s also remind ourselves that Dynatrace Grail uses the organisation’s own Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) to provide context-rich log analytics and work in unison with Dynatrace OneAgent – a technology designed to automatically discover, activate and instrument applications, microservices, infrastructure and any dependency in cloud environments.
Rather than simply recount and regurgitate the event agenda, let’s cover some of the keynote sessions.
Rick McConnell, chief executive officer at Dynatrace will present a keynote entitled ‘A vision for a cloud done right’ and he will be joined by Colleen Kozak, the company’s chief transformation officer.
This session will be followed by ‘The Dynatrace difference’ presented by McConnell and Bernd Greifeneder, chief technology officer at Dynatrace. According to the show notes, “Bernd and Steve explore what makes the Dynatrace platform radically different, and Rick identifies the three biggest challenges organisations face doing business in the modern cloud.”
Following these keynotes, Steve Tack, SVP for product management will present a session entitled ‘Overcoming cloud challenges & optimising costs’ with Greifeneder and Dynatrace’s SVP and chief customer officer Matthias Dollentz-Scharer.
Dynatrace view on 2024
Looking ahead to 2024, the company has made a whole raft of predictions for the year ahead.
The company says that in 2023, many organisations prioritised efficiency and cost reduction while facing soaring inflation. Now in 2024, they’ve been asked to do more with less, innovate faster and tame the ever-increasing complexities of modern cloud environments.
Below is a summary of Dynatrace’s top seven technology predictions:
No. 1: Composite AI will be central
A wave of generative AI solutions, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, emerged in late 2022. As they progress through the hype cycle in 2024, organisations will realise these technologies, while transformational, cannot deliver meaningful value alone. As a result, organisations will move toward a composite approach to AI.
According to Dynatrace, “Composite AI combines generative AI with other types of artificial intelligence to enable more advanced reasoning and to bring precision, context and meaning to the outputs that generative AI produces. For example, DevOps teams will combine generative AI with fact-based causal and predictive AI to supercharge digital innovation by predicting and preventing issues before they occur and generating new workflows to automate the software delivery lifecycle.”
No. 2: AI-code: digital immune systems
In 2024, more organisations will experience major digital service outages due to poor-quality and insufficiently supervised software code as developers continue to use generative AI-powered autonomous agents to write code. No one will be around who fully understands the code. Therefore, no one will be capable of quickly resolving problems in the code. These challenges will drive organisations to develop digital immune systems that protect their software from the inside by ensuring code resilience by default. These systems will harness predictive AI to automatically sense problems in code or applications as they emerge and trigger an instant, automated response.
No. 3: The Chief AI Officer (CAIO)
As employees become more accustomed to using AI in their personal lives through exposure to tools such as ChatGPT, they will increasingly look to use AI to boost their productivity at work. Organisations realise if they don’t empower their employees to use AI tools officially, they will do so without consent. The chief AI officer (CAIO) will oversee their use of these technologies in the same way many have a security executive, or CISO, on their leadership teams. The CAIO’s role will center on developing policies; ensuring the workforce is educated and empowered to use AI safely; and protecting the organisation from accidental noncompliance, intellectual property leakage, or security threats.
No. 4: Mandatory data observability
Data observability will become mandatory as organisations seek to drive smarter automation and faster decision-making in 2024. Organisations will demand technology that provides data observability to enable them to rapidly and securely ingest high-quality and reliable data that is ready for analytics on demand. Increased data observability will enable users such as ITOps and business analytics teams to understand not only the availability of data, but also the structure, distribution, relationships and lineage of that data across all sources, including different platforms in a distributed hybrid and multi-cloud environment.
No. 5: Mission-critical observability
Organisations’ increased use of AI will be a key driver of this trend as it boosts cloud resource consumption, resulting in expanded scope 3 emissions. However, AI-powered analytics of the observability data from cloud environments will help organisations tackle expanding emissions and mature their FinOps and sustainability practices. Increased use of AI-powered observability will enable organisations to automatically orchestrate their systems for optimal resource utilisation, reducing emissions and the cost of running their cloud environments.
No. 6: Platform engineering solidifies
Organisations will recognise that a seamlessly functioning and secure software delivery pipeline is equally important to business continuity as the quality and security of the digital services on which end users and customers rely. Therefore, there will be a shift toward productising the tooling used to drive DevOps, security, and site reliability engineering best practices. This will bring platform engineering to the fore as organisations codify the know-how and capabilities needed to automate secure software delivery pipelines.
No. 7: SIEM will become irrelevant
In 2024, next-generation threat intelligence and analytics solutions will phase out security information and event management (SIEM) systems. These modern solutions enable security teams to extend capabilities beyond log analytics to access the context provided by a broader range of data modalities and different types of AI working together. These include generative, causal and predictive techniques.
It is – arguably – quite enlightening to see a company lay down its themes for the year ahead in informal but exacting form in this way. We can imagine many (if not all seven) of these themes being discussed at Dynatrace Perform 2024 and at least one of these threads being the rationale for the new product announcements that will of course be saved for the show.
