Dynatrace goes for Go (Golang)
Software applications need management, monitoring, testing and continual levels of deep tissue massage to ensure they run as intended and deliver to the user requirements for which they were initially built.
This is the space that Application Performance Monitoring (APM) specialist Dynatrace has been working to position itself since the company was initially formed in its first iteration back in Austria in 2005.
The company’s application monitoring (and testing) tools are available as cloud-based SaaS services or as on-premises software… and this month we see the firm extend its work to provide automatic code level insights into applications that rely on the popular Go programming language.
Go Golang
Sometimes referred to as GoLang, Go was initially developed by Google as an open source programming general purpose programming language.
It is a static programming language (meaning variables must be declared upfront) and statically typed and explicit (code must be manually structured to execute specific tasks).
Looking at the latest news from Dynatrace, the company insists that [when alterations need to be made to an application] there is no need to inject code into thousands of microservices or change the code of a Go application… instead, Dynatrace automatically discovers and monitors Go components.
With this feature, Dynatrace extends its scope of AI capabilities for cloud native platforms including Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift.
Why go for Go?
So why the focus on Go?
Because (based on 2018 GitHub usage) Dynatrace says it has recognised how fast Go is growing in terms of popularity – it is estimated to now be used by nearly two million developers today.
“Go is lightweight, suited to microservices architectures and fast becoming the programming language of the cloud. Yet most monitoring tools are blind to Go which has left organisations having to do manual development and configuration to get any sort of insight,” said Steve Tack, SVP of product management at Dynatrace. “The Dynatrace platform is built for the cloud and now automatically picks up and shines a light into Go components, ensuring that Go isn’t creating an enterprise cloud blind spot.”
Looking inside a cloud
This new capability is said to be particularly important to organisations that are using high-profile cloud platforms built using Go.
They now have visibility into the performance of the source code of these platforms which means they can utilise the AI from Dynatrace to automatically surface the root cause of performance problems… and this, in turn, enables DevOps teams to focus on optimisation rather than troubleshooting.
These same benefits also apply to those that are developing using Go, with the additional benefit of being able to get more accurate performance insights.