AppEngine empowers organizations to create custom apps for better data insights

Modern observability platforms offer automatic, precise root-cause analysis and data insights. However, to make the most of these insights, organizations need a way to create custom apps for better data insights. Enter AppEngine.

Today, IT and development teams have myriad responsibilities in managing and working with cloud environments. They need to create new products and maintain existing ones to deliver customer value at speed and scale while managing risk. Therefore, modern observability platforms are becoming a must-have tool for these teams.

Teams can now use an observability platform to unify operations, business, and development data to gain automatic, precise answers about cloud environments and user experience. Further, developers can build more agility into their processes with an intuitive, low-code approach to create custom, compliant, and intelligent data-driven apps and automation.

The ability to create custom apps becomes increasingly important as organizations strive to innovate and grow. They want to develop secure, compliant custom apps and integrations—whether in the cloud or on premises. Indeed, according to one report, more than 50% of U.S. organizations have over 100 custom applications in development and testing today.

A modern observability platform like Dynatrace is uniquely positioned to serve as a foundation that enables teams to build low-code, custom apps that are secure, compliant, and based on precise answers. And with Dynatrace AppEngine, IT pros have the tools to build custom apps that serve their organization’s business needs and fit in their multicloud ecosystems.

The convergence of observability and security data

Organizations now realize that better understanding their applications and cloud environments is the key to assessing their health from both performance and security perspectives. Therefore, leaders are embracing a converged security and observability approach by unifying all observability and security data in a single location or source of truth.

As a result, these leaders can ask different questions of the same data. And because the data is complete and in context, the answers and insights are always accurate, resulting in an increased trust of these data-backed insights. As development and security teams work more closely together, they also recognize the importance of converging observability and security data to deliver answers and insights through secure, compliant, enterprise-grade applications.

Dynatrace AppEngine supports these goals and empowers customers and partners with an easy way to create and share custom apps for their IT, development, security, and business teams. With consistent answers and insights, organizations can solve their toughest business challenges.

Unifying data, retaining full data context

The Dynatrace platform now uniquely consolidates observability, security, and business data while retaining full context and dependency mapping with its data lakehouse, Grail. Additionally, its modern architecture delivers cost-effective storage and compute. As a result, teams benefit from low-cost cloud storage that provides access to all data and doesn’t require data rehydration. This frees teams from manual approaches to connecting siloed data—using imprecise machine-learning and correlation-only techniques—and the high total costs of using multiple DIY-style solutions.

AppEngine uses this data and simplifies intelligent app creation and integrations for teams throughout an organization. It provides automatic scalability, runtime application security, secure connections and integrations across hybrid and multicloud ecosystems, and full lifecycle support, including security and quality certifications. As a result, for the first time, any team in an organization can create intelligent apps powered by causal AI and build integrations for use cases and technologies specific to their unique business requirements and technology stacks.

Delivering precise answers and insights to the whole enterprise with secure apps

AppEngine is a core technology in the Dynatrace platform that enables anyone in IT, business, or security to create and share inherently secure, custom apps that leverage causal AI and data and scale well. It’s a more productive and secure approach for teams to meet requirements without undermining an organization’s security posture. By using these secure apps, teams are empowered with powerful mechanisms for collaboration and insight-sharing across domains.

AppEngine is built for enterprise software development needs

The custom applications that teams develop run in the Dynatrace environment and automatically meet enterprise requirements, such as scalability, availability, performance, scale, governance, and full lifecycle support.

AppEngine provides a runtime environment that automatically scales the environment, ensuring the application is highly available and performing healthily. Additionally, AppEngine handles security and compliance by leveraging the capabilities of the Dynatrace platform, including access control, secrets management, audit logs, and app signing. Further, the EdgeConnect capability allows secure connections to on-premises systems. This ensures users do not damage the enterprise’s security posture with insecure rogue applications. And, lastly, it provides full lifecycle support with a rich developer experience to create, deploy, and manage applications easily.

Endless possibilities with custom apps powered by observability, security, and business data

Dynatrace customers and partners can now easily bring their business logic to data and create applications on the Dynatrace platform. Dynatrace tames the underlying complexity of managing data in a cost-efficient, performant way, ensuring the integrations with an organization’s ecosystem solutions are inherently secure and everything runs and scales in an automated way. This allows teams to focus on quickly creating apps and sharing with others to promote collaboration and data-backed decision-making.

The following apps showcase the power of AppEngine and the diversity of use cases it can address:

• Smartscape Health View. Teams can visualize an application’s vital signs, including its security posture. This app also showcases AppEngine’s ability to unlock actionable insights from data through enrichment, visualization, and analytics.
• Site Reliability Guardian. This enables teams to proactively maintain service-level objectives by automating quality and security gates. This also exemplifies how apps created using AppEngine fuel answer-driven automation to optimize cloud operations.
• Carbon Impact. Organizations can understand and reduce the carbon footprint of hybrid and multicloud ecosystems. This also demonstrates how AppEngine can help teams measure and optimize the key performance indicators that matter most for business executives or regulatory requirements.

This newfound agility in packaging and delivering data-driven answers and insights in a secure, compliant way is highly beneficial for customers seeking to use data for automating insights and actions.

Taking your data insights to the next level

At Perform 2023 in Las Vegas, Dynatrace announced a host of platform enhancements to enable IT pros to move from data in context to insights on which they can execute with confidence. The platform has been updated with a variety of capabilities to enable teams to discover data insights more easily:

• expanded Grail data lakehouse to support new data types, such as metrics and distributed traces, and enable exploratory analytics with causation powered by topology and dependency mapping;
• a new user experience for collaborative and exploratory data analytics using Notebooks;
• Dynatrace AutomationEngine for automating BizDevSecOps workflows driven by answers from causal AI; and
• Dynatrace AppEngine with a low-code tool set and application programming interfaces for building and sharing custom, compliant, data-driven apps.

To learn more about Dynatrace AppEngine and how to create low-code applications for exploratory analytics, check out our on-demand Perform sessions.