Dynatrace AppEngine: Everything thinkable is now possible

Dynatrace is known for delivering great out-of-the-box value from end-to-end solutions derived from the most complete data available. By introducing Grail, we revolutionized the analysis of observability, security, and business data at any scale. With the new Dynatrace AutomationEngine, we're adding answer-driven automation to Dynatrace platform capabilities. The newly added platform technology Dynatrace® AppEngine enables customers to create custom, compliant, and intelligent data-driven apps. AppEngine opens a new chapter in "platform extensibility" that brings logic to data, thus offering users myriad new ways to get value from data using the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform.

Many organizations attempt to combine tools, products, and do-it-yourself solutions with custom code to fulfill custom use cases that are specific to their unique business requirements and technology stacks. Not only are these approaches difficult and costly to maintain, they also lack proper security and scalability.

Especially when seamless end-to-end solutions are needed, it’s necessary to add relevant business context to data to unlock the value of insights that are hidden in the vast amount of observability, security, and business data derived from modern clouds, and overcome the challenges of data that’s locked in organizational silos.

AppEngine empowers organizations to tame cloud complexity, innovate faster and more securely, and ensure consistently better business results, thus delivering answers and driving collaboration across teams.

Multiply the value of your data with Dynatrace

In contrast to other custom app development solutions and extensibility frameworks that embed third-party interfaces and self-hosted custom code via iFrame, Dynatrace AppEngine enables you to create custom apps tailored to your specific needs that are integrated into the Dynatrace platform and offer a simplified user experience.

AppEngine is a core technology within the Dynatrace platform. It empowers Dynatrace customers to use the same tools and technologies as Dynatrace engineers to develop new tailored apps. App developers have the same limitless possibilities for creating customized analytics and integrations in any IT environment, whether in the cloud or on-premises. Apps enable organizations to leverage a goldmine of observability, security, and business data—and add further value by addressing any imaginable use case.

Boundless possibilities

You now have unlimited possibilities to address any use case you can imagine. Consider a simple interactive app that helps convey the business impact of new product enhancements by combining IT Ops metrics with business data—or an app that not only calculates the costs of your cloud usage but also automatically optimizes it by leveraging the power of Davis, our causational AI, and the new Dynatrace AutomationEngine. Or imagine a vulnerability notification generated by Dynatrace Application Security triggering a custom security app that initiates a fully automated action flow, informs your SecOps team, and creates and assigns tickets to the right people with all the relevant contextualized information. These and an unlimited array of other use cases are now possible with AppEngine.

We’re also releasing a variety of apps that we developed using AppEngine. These will be built into the Dynatrace platform and address use cases ranging from automation to security and business analytics, and include apps such as Smartscape Health View, Carbon Impact, and Site Reliability Guardian.

Dynatrace Carbon Impact is a perfect example of combining data stored in Dynatrace with external data and custom logic to explore and visualize the sources of your IT carbon footprint, regardless of where your workloads run. It measures and reports carbon emissions for all Dynatrace-monitored hosts across your entire environment, including hybrid and multicloud, in a single interface and translates utilization metrics, including CPU, memory, disk, and network I/O, into carbon emission metrics. The app automatically identifies opportunities to reduce carbon emissions, capturing the details needed for analysis and making informed decisions.

From code to app to code

Apps built with Dynatrace AppEngine can take different forms. From full-blown apps addressing end-to-end use cases, like the Carbon Impact app example shown above, to small “components” that focus on a particular task, such as:

• offering integration with external line-of-business (LOB) applications
• connecting apps with external databases, normalizing data for immediate platform-wide usage
• extending the Dynatrace AutomationEngine with new custom actions
• adding reusable UI components to extend Dashboards and Notebooks with new chart types

Once you write an app, you can use it everywhere within the Dynatrace platform: within Notebooks, as part of a workflow running on AutomationEngine, or as a standalone app.

Logic to data: Understanding the value of data at its source

Many data-related requirements, such as GDPR, governance, data quality, or auditing, must be addressed when writing software. These requirements are mandatory from both a performance and a cost perspective.

Analyzing petabytes of data only works if the logic is very close to where the data is stored and processed. Grail, the Dynatrace causational data lakehouse, is built for managing and querying enormous amounts of data from the entire hybrid and multicloud environment. Utilizing the capabilities of Grail together with Smartscape topology mapping and Davis AI, AppEngine understands the IT, security, and business value of data in context. This contextual understanding enables you to do any analysis you need and helps to answer questions that can’t be answered with disconnected data stored in different silos.

Addressing enterprise needs: Security, scalability, and manageability

Traditionally, building apps and integrations on different enterprise software platforms was tough and required a lot of effort. By using Dynatrace AppEngine, developers can focus their time on adding value by meeting the urgent needs of the business instead of managing integrations and runtime infrastructure or addressing security needs. The apps run in the Dynatrace environment, thus automatically meeting enterprise requirements. This provides benefits including:

• auto-scaling runtime environments
• automated delivery and operations
• governance by Dynatrace Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• built-in security capabilities such as code shielding, secure runtime environment, audit logs, SSO, secret vaults, and more
• safe connection for secure remote invocations using EdgeConnect

And all of this comes with full app-lifecycle support, including extensive developer experience for creating, building, deploying, and managing apps.

Data value at scale: Become a data-driven enterprise

Dynatrace AppEngine enables teams to achieve better business results by offering a secure, serverless, auto-scaling runtime environment that makes it easy to create custom, compliant, data-driven apps, that address the use cases that are most important to them.​

Everything thinkable is now possible. With apps delivering answers and driving collaboration across IT, development, security, and business teams, you can multiply the value of your data.

Dynatrace AppEngine will be available in Q2 2023. In the meantime, look for upcoming webinars sharing more insights on the app offering of the Dynatrace platform and how to build your own custom apps. Visit our webpage or follow us on LinkedIn to stay current with upcoming announcements and activities.