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September 06, 2021

Dynatrace uses Microsoft Azure to build a world-class observability platform for its customers

Dynatrace is a worldwide leader in observability, AIOps, automation, and application security. With its core business focused on monitoring application performance, development, and security, the company wanted to create a modern software as a service (SaaS) application that would expand their product offerings on Azure and scale in line with their growth. In partnership with Microsoft, the company is building a modern, multicloud architecture on Azure to support this initiative, and creating new avenues for business growth through deeper integration with Azure.

Dynatrace

Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Massachusetts, Dynatrace offers an observability, AIOps, and application security platform for modern, dynamic hybrid, and multicloud environments. 

Customers use the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform to monitor applications, microservices, and the infrastructure they run on, across all cloud environments, as well as on-premises. With many Dynatrace customers already managing their business solutions in multicloud environments, including Microsoft Azure, Dynatrace realized an opportunity to expand its Azure offering.

Reinventing its platform for a multicloud world

This effort was led in part by Guido Deinhammer, who joined Dynatrace as a product manager 11 years ago, and now serves as the company's Chief Product Officer. Deinhammer was part of the small team the company created in 2016 to envision what an all-cloud world was going to look like. How would the Dynatrace platform deal with the speed, complexity, and scale of cloud-native technologies? How would it manage the immense volume, velocity, and variety of data produced by the countless applications and microservices in modern cloud environments? “The old way of monitoring—what we now call observability—wasn’t going to work,” Deinhammer says.

Deinhammer and his teammates realized the company needed to reinvent its platform in anticipation of a dynamic hybrid and multicloud world. They decided to build a platform on one common set of data with AIOps at its core to help customers work in even the most complex cloud-native architectures.

The reinvented Dynatrace platform, built on Azure, has helped the company connect with innovators at large organizations who want to simplify their cloud journeys and accelerate their digital transformation. The Dynatrace solution is built for cloud-native platforms like Azure, and for the volume, velocity, and variety of data, as well as the scale and frequency of change customers experience today. 

The platform continues to evolve. The ever-growing complexity of new, cloud-native applications and infrastructure, as well as the prevalence of open-source software have shifted priorities for many Dynatrace customers. There’s a new emphasis on application security, as well as demand for solutions that can automate the numerous tasks and processes in modern cloud environments that humans no longer manage on their own. To address these needs, the Dynatrace team has continued to expand its platform, including the recent additions of Application Security and Cloud Automation Modules.

Accelerating customer and company growth with Azure

By collaborating with Microsoft and adding Azure to its cloud offering, Dynatrace not only has greater reach, but has also advanced its architecture with Azure services such as Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS).

Utilizing Azure services, Dynatrace helps customers monitor services on Azure, and readily handles data across multicloud and on-premises environments. Also, with automation and intelligence at the core of the Dynatrace platform, customers can move to the cloud with more confidence than ever before.

“We love the flexibility, scalability, and reliability the Azure platform brings,” says Mike Maciag, Chief Marketing Officer at Dynatrace. “Our development with Azure and partnership with Microsoft is critical to our ability to support our customers’ continued growth and innovation.”

Dynatrace uses several Azure services for hosting. Along with Compute, Storage, and Networking services, Dynatrace uses AKS to ensure its platform is scalable, reliable, and consistent across deployment models. Dynatrace also uses Azure Active Directory to enable single sign-on for its team of approximately 1,000 engineers, providing security and reliability during the transition to an increasingly remote work environment.

The company continues to build deeper integrations with Azure, offering its customers full enterprise-grade observability of Azure services. Customers will soon have access to the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform directly within the Azure Portal, which means customers can easily implement Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability and application security capabilities for their Microsoft Azure and hybrid cloud environments. This is done through a streamlined implementation process that covers everything from procurement to automated deployment and configuration. And, to help customers better understand what’s going on in their cloud services, Dynatrace uses Azure Monitor for advanced observability across Azure environments.

With its focus on the world’s 15,000 largest organizations, many of Dynatrace’s customers already have a strong relationship with Microsoft and a preference for running Azure. “We really have to support what our customers need,” says Deinhammer. “From this perspective, it’s important for us to run our systems on Azure. And aligning our goals has driven us to collaborate even more in our sales and business development organizations.”

Looking ahead to deliver more value

A Gold Cloud partner of Microsoft for the past several years, Dynatrace has made a significant investment in the partnership, and in Azure product development. The company recognizes customer demand for deeper integrations with Azure services and the need for its product to be flexible enough to deploy anywhere.

Dynatrace collaborates with Microsoft product and sales teams on hundreds of customer accounts to align on application and infrastructure strategy and deliver the best combined value to the customer.

“Through these efforts,” says Maciag, “we’ve seen a significant increase in growth with our current customers, as well as opportunities with new customers as they move to modernize their applications and infrastructure with Azure. We expect this to accelerate as we roll out enhanced integrations through the year.”

The two companies are engaging in co-development efforts to adjust the Dynatrace platform to work seamlessly with the Azure platform and its services—including Azure Monitor, Azure Application Insights, Azure Spring Cloud, Azure Cosmos DB, and Microsoft Teams. These enhancements will simplify the user experience to make it easier for joint customers to access intelligence, streamline procurement, and accelerate deployment.

As customers are transforming in the cloud, re-architecting and creating new applications, and continuously delivering updates to positively impact their business, Dynatrace and Microsoft help guide them through their digital transformation journeys. Through continued development on the Azure platform, Dynatrace intends to deliver even more value to its customers. “Our partnership with Microsoft has been incredibly beneficial to our business and to our customers,” says Maciag. “Microsoft has helped introduce us to new customers and to new teams and use cases for our joint customers, and Dynatrace has helped Azure customers to achieve more in the cloud more quickly. This is truly a symbiotic relationship.”

“We love the flexibility, scalability, and reliability the Azure platform brings. Our development with Azure and partnership with Microsoft is critical to our ability to support our customers’ continued growth and innovation.”

Mike Maciag, Chief Marketing Officer, Dynatrace

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