At its Perform 2023 conference Dynatrace made seven new product announcements, anchored by the inclusion of logs, metrics, traces, topology, changes and security data into Grail.
The Product Line Refresh Enabled by Dynatrace Grail
Below is the list of the product announcements made at Perform 2023. This was the most comprehensive and impactful announcement on the part of Dynatrace since its move away from the legacy AppMon product and to the new architecture based upon what was then called Ruxit.
- All metric types (metrics, traces, relationships, topology, changes, security) are being added to Grail (previously logs only)
- Everything is easily queried in the Dynatrace Query Language (DQL)
- AutomationEngine allows for issues to be automatically remediated (and other tasks to be automated)
- AppEngine allows custom apps on Grail and AutomationEngine to be built and deployed
- Davis turns data into actionable answers
- BusinessFlow allows business metrics to be integrated into custom applications
- Security is fully integrated into Grail and AutomationEngine
- CarbonImpact tracks carbon footprint
- Strato is the new design system behind a new UI
DQL, AutomationEngine, AppEngine, BusinessFlow, CarbonImpact and Strato are all entirely new products. All of this was announced for availability in Q2/2023.
The Dynatrace Product Set and Architecture
The fully fleshed out role of Grail was the most important part of the announcements. The keys to Grail are its ability to handle the variety, scale and volume of the data in a real time and cost effective manner and most importantly the treatment of the topology and relationship data as a first class citizen in Grail.
This is a down payment on the area of automated problem resolution. The problem with automating something like problem resolution is that you had better be 100% sure that the change that you are about to make to fix the problem at hand is in fact the correct change. Knowing for sure that you are about to change the configuration of the correct server is now possible because you can now know for sure that you are targeting the correct server (because the factual relationship is in the data).
The Dynatrace Product Architecture Announced at Perform 2023
Unique Attributes of Dynatrace Grail
Other vendors have built or bought databases intended to be able to ingest and store large quantities of various data types with high cardinality and make that data immediately useful for problem detection and resolution. What makes Grail truly unique is that the topology and dependencies for each piece of data are captured at ingest time and stored as a first class citizen with the data itself.
Grail is equally adapt at handling metrics, traces and logs and being a high scale and real time graph database at the same time. The information required to relate things to each other (for example the logs that pertain to an anomalous metric) are captured at ingest time, and stored with the data as it arrives. This means that the users of Grail (the people, the Davis AI and other applications) do not need to separately ask (query) for the related items, the related items are available as built-in features of the data.
Sample Dynatrace Grail Query in DQL
Below is an example of a query in DQL which is leveraging the topology and relationships in the data. Notice that the person writing the query does not have to search for the items related to the object of interest. Those related items are already available because they are linked to the primary query object (the Frontend Load Balancer) by the topology and relationship data.
Dynatrace Product Line Overview
Below is a picture of what the Dynatrace product line will look like once all of these new features and products are delivered in Q2/2023.
Summary
It is natural for people to assume that just because Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, and IBM (Instana) are in the leaders quadrant of the Gartner APM and Observability Magic Quadrant that all of the products from these vendors are more or less the same. This has never been true and it is now less true given that Dynatrace is delivering truly differentiated functionality for its enterprise audience.
