Nine ways technology executives can get significant business value with the right observability platform

As a technology executive, you’re aware that observability has become an imperative for managing the health of cloud and IT services. You may not be aware of how much untapped value is waiting to be unlocked through the right observability platform. Data with context can improve your ability to deliver on your goals, modernize your organization, and accelerate business transformation.

The Dynatrace platform enables executives to drive change faster, increase IT and R&D productivity, reduce business risks, optimize costs, and decrease carbon footprint. These outcomes are made easy through the platform’s unique ability to turn data into answers and action, in contextual, real-time, and cost-effective ways that were previously impossible.

Unearthing a goldmine of value

As founder and CTO of Dynatrace, I must constantly drive change. I also have the privilege of being “customer zero” for our platform, which enables me to continually discover where Dynatrace can deliver on more use cases to drive my team’s productivity and innovation. Change is my only constant.

Realizing that executives from other organizations are in a similar situation to my own, I want to outline three key objectives that Dynatrace’s powerful analytics can help you deliver, featuring nine use cases that you might not have thought possible.

Drive innovation

To remain competitive, executives are seeking productivity gains while simultaneously driving modernization initiatives. Observability data presents executives with new opportunities to achieve this, by creating incremental value for cloud modernization, improved business analytics, and enhanced customer experience.

However, technology executives face a significant challenge getting answers in time, as their needs have evolved to real-time business insights that enable faster decision-making and business automation. Exploding volumes of data must be prepared, catalogued, stored in multiple, disconnected tools. The data must then be retrieved from data lakes and converted into rigid schemas. It can take data analysts months to extract insights and answer executives’ questions using these approaches.

With the latest advances from Dynatrace, this process is instantaneous. Unlike anything before, contextual analytics in Dynatrace provides answers to any question at any time, instantaneously. That’s because it does not require any pre-prepared schemas, and access to cold/hot storage is fully automatic and with zero latency. Moreover, it is fast, powered by its massively parallel processing data lakehouse.

As a result, organizations can reduce complexity, effort, and processing time to run powerful business analytics on exabytes of data in real time. Dynatrace enables executives to drive a stronger, data-driven organization by increasing automation and productivity.

Mitigate risk

To cope with serious business risks —including major outages, security breaches, or missing out on realizing AI’s value — executives require a modern, proactive approach. Dynatrace analytics capabilities, powered by hypermodal AI, enable executives to drive improved availability, strengthened security compliance, and heightened confidence in AI initiatives.

Executives are shifting to proactive risk management, aiming to prevent availability issues and expedite remediation. However, AI introduces new risks, such as increased software complexity, accelerated cyber-attacks, and potential regressions from rapid releases. Siloed teams and the reliance on disparate tools lead to manual intervention and delays, which are unsustainable given tightening regulations including DORA, NIS2, and the SEC’s four-day reporting rule.

Dynatrace uniquely solves this conundrum, enabling executives to use a new generation of AIOps and SecOps to predict and mitigate risk, rather than reacting to availability and security incidents. It does this by combining causal, predictive, and generative AI to uncover the deep context of issues using a unified source of observability and security data. Automated root-cause analysis and real-time risk analysis are only two examples that help executives get closer to the vision of self-healing operations and security.

Optimize cost

With the constant pressure to do more with less — or much more, much faster — executives must control cost and complexity. Dynatrace can help executives to achieve these goals by reducing tool sprawl, driving cost optimization, and meeting their sustainability goals.

Optimizing costs is a proven way to free up budgets for innovation. Young talent (our future executives) has a valid interest beyond making more money, as sustainability and green coding are vital to protecting both their own and our future.

As new waves of technology roll over us, executives are struggling to keep tool sprawl under control. Tool sprawl not only goes deep into our pockets, but also hampers consistency and productivity. Tens or even hundreds of DIY and commercial tools are being used to handle logs, metrics, traces, security events, and vulnerabilities all in their own way.

Insights are therefore dispersed in a multitude of data lakes, storage systems, and reporting platforms. This is inefficient and creates avoidable risks. The principle of “keep it simple, stupid” is more important than ever, translating to consolidating tools and making processes more consistent at higher grades of scalability and automation.

Dynatrace is uniquely placed to meet this need as it consolidates tools, storage, data, processing, and automation capabilities together in a single, unified platform. This reduces the number of moving parts and eliminates process inconsistencies, driving team productivity and increasing software delivery quality and security.

As a result, organizations can streamline processes by moving towards platform engineering and developer self-service portals to unburden engineers while increasing software quality and security at a higher consistency.