How Dynatrace guarantees the “value” of your IoT value chain

In this blog post, I will talk about the IoT value chain and why monitoring and security are its backbone and therefore absolutely crucial for success. The value chain is always about collecting, processing and analyzing data, plus applying the gained insights at the end. To get a better understanding, let’s first have a look at the different parts of the value chain.

Capturing/sensing data

The first part of the chain is to get all the data. Sensing data wherever it lives: machines, devices, cars, houses, smart meters etc. In fact, you can connect every “thing” you want information from. Data can also be received from humans by talking to Alexa or interacting with a smartphone.

Processing data

Gaining full visibility also means capturing and processing huge amounts of data, which can’t be sent to the cloud for analysis anymore. Furthermore, IoT is often applied in remote areas and therefore often faces latency issues. I talk about this in more detail in the blog post “IoT shifts from the cloud to the edge. Dynatrace sees it all”.

Analyzing data

To really gain benefits from all this data, you have to apply Artificial Intelligence, in the form of Machine Learning for example, to gain insights from the collected data. Even this happens in many cases already at the edge. Platforms for analytics are not only available from the cloud providers (for example AWS IoT analytics or Azure analytics), but also from companies such as Siemens with Mindsphere or C3IoT with its IoT platform.

Applying results/business logic

The collected data allows you not only to trigger real-time actions, but also predict the future and apply measures accordingly. Knowing everything about a machine allows you predictive maintenance and therefore, a high mean time between failures and a low mean time to repair, for example. In addition, factories can adjust their production lanes predictively with data collected from consumers. To be able to adjust quick enough a high degree of automation, as well as highly agile processes such as Kanban, have to be in place.

To ensure and maximize the success of your value chain you mustn’t forget about its backbone, which is made up of security and monitoring.

Security

That security is important is something that most of you are aware of. Securing the IoT value chain means securing not only the devices, but the whole chain, including the connections, the processing, the cloud and the application. What definitely comes into play around securing IoT devices in the future is blockchain by helping to create networks of trusted devices that exchange data in a secure way and trigger automated actions via smart contracts.

What goes hand in hand with security and beyond is the monitoring of the IoT value chain.

Monitoring

As there is often a lack of visibility, monitoring is not only crucial for data health and reliability, but also for security in general. Missing visibility means missing classification and as a result fully automatic interface generation, driver integration and credentials configuration is not possible – this leaves IoT devices vulnerable. But there is much more of what Dynatrace can do for you.

With Dynatrace, you will not only gain end-to-end, but also code-level visibility. This is important to be sure about the validity of the collected data as well as ensuring the flow of data. Unnoticed data-loss can result in distorted data and long-lasting outages can result in a chain of reactions due to missing or delayed decisions. As data is the new oil it is obvious to build one’s business upon this data and if data is the basis of your business it is absolutely essential to ensure the quality and the flow of the data.

To ensure this, Dynatrace captures all transactions – all users – all the time. (As well as all of the associated full-stack analytics.) This, in turn, provides the type of 100% high-fidelity data necessary to enable real-time dependency detection and ultimately, self-learning Artificial Intelligence. Data quality is key for every AI algorithm not only within Dynatrace, but also for your IoT value chain.

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