Dynatrace enhances Business Analytics with business events powered by Grail

Highlights include lossless precision, deep access to business data, and instant indexless queries.

Following the launch of Dynatrace® Grail for Log Management and Analytics, Dynatrace is excited to announce a major update to our Business Analytics solution. Business events powered by our new Grail™ data lakehouse and by other Dynatrace platform technologies ensures the real-time precision that business and IT teams need to make data-driven decisions and improve business outcomes. Business events deliver the industry’s broadest, deepest, and easiest access to your critical business data. Powered by Grail, you can now unify, store, and instantly analyze massive volumes of business data from anywhere, automatically enriched with the IT context needed to unlock precise AI-powered answers and automation.

The need for real-time business observability

Business leaders benefit from in-the-moment business insights, frequently articulating the need for real-time visibility into business data to support agile business decisions. In fact, business teams are often envious of the real-time IT observability that operations teams enjoy. That’s because their existing business intelligence tools often lack the broad context, ease of data access, and real-time insights that are needed to understand and improve customer experience and complex business processes. Business intelligence tools are generally backward-looking, relying on accounting, CRM, ERP, and other business systems to surface anomalies, report results and trends, or mine historical data. To highlight the problem, a recent report from Dimensional Research indicates that 86% of the data used by business analysts is out of date, often by two months or more. While last week’s or last month’s data might be acceptable for historical reporting, it doesn’t help teams respond to dynamic business conditions or react to process anomalies.

The business observability gap

Over the past few years, observability vendors have sought to address some of these analytics challenges, opportunistically introducing real-time reporting for a limited set of business metrics. Using existing APM agent and log monitoring capabilities made it reasonably easy to access certain business metrics and metadata to add to IT dashboards. But these solutions have largely fallen short of business and IT users’ needs. Since they rely on capabilities designed for IT monitoring, they inherit a series of architectural design constraints that limit their usefulness. Top among these are sampling-induced imprecision, limited access to critical business data embedded in application payloads, and lack of context.

Business events, Grail, and OneAgent

Business events, Grail, and OneAgent work together to overcome these limitations, prioritizing business data separately from observability data to deliver precise, real-time business insights with deep visibility into application payloads. This is an entirely new approach to monitoring, investigating, and acting on business metrics. It represents a significant enhancement to our previous Business Analytics capabilities, which emphasized the value and simplicity of business data captured from real user sessions. Business events can be captured by Dynatrace OneAgent, sent from web or mobile real user monitoring RUM, from external sources via public API, or (coming soon) extracted from log files. Business events make it easy for teams to spot business anomalies, long-term trends, and process optimization opportunities, answering even the most challenging business questions with accuracy and clarity. Since business events are automatically enriched with IT context, business and IT teams can collaborate effectively to achieve shared business goals.

Unlike business analytics offerings from other observability vendors, Dynatrace Business Analytics easily supports a wide range of important business use cases that demand auditable accuracy. From order fulfillment and bill payments to service activation flows and customer onboarding milestones, business events deliver on the promise of real-time business observability. Business and IT teams can monitor and optimize complex business processes that might span weeks or months, uncovering anomalies before they affect business outcomes. Deep access to in-flight application payloads makes it simple to capture critical business data without code changes. Grail unifies business and IT data at a massive scale for powerful exploratory analytics to answer even unforeseen questions as they arise.

Here’s a quick look at how business events and Grail work together:

1. Business event sources include OneAgent, web and mobile RUM sessions, external business tools via a public API, and (coming soon) log files.
2. Business events are processed through the ingest pipeline using the Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) to transform and enrich the data and set retention periods.
3. Grail unifies business and IT observability data from all sources, leveraging the Smartscape® dependency model to automatically build causational context.
4. Dynatrace Query Language provides exploratory analytics through ad hoc queries without the need to index. Explore interactively with the Log and event explorer, pin your queries to dashboard tiles, or execute queries via the API.

Unlock the value of your business data

With business events from Dynatrace, business and IT teams enhance collaboration and improve agility by leveraging real-time insights and operational analytics for informed business decisions.

Grail, DQL, and business events are available now in select AWS regions and will be available on Azure in early 2024. To learn more or to get started, contact your Dynatrace representative.

What’s next for Dynatrace Business Analytics?

There’s much more in the works, using Grail as a game-changing enabling technology. Next to come will be business events from logs, complementing existing OneAgent, RUM, and external sources.