The Future of Observability, AI, and Platform Engineering

Mike Maciag, Chief Marketing Officer at Dynatrace, recently sat down with company founder and CTO Bernd Greifeneder to discuss Dynatrace’s 2024 predictions for key technology trends like observability, AI, and platform engineering. Their discussion yielded valuable insights for developers, engineers, and architects to consider this year.

The Rise of Composite AI

A key theme was the rise of “composite AI,” which Greifeneder describes as “the combination of multiple types of AI together to form the sum, something that provides way more value, is more precise, more productive.” While generative AI tools like ChatGPT can be useful for certain narrow tasks, Greifeneder notes they have limitations when it comes to robust automation of complex systems. 

As he explains, “If you want to do root cause analysis to automate remediation in operating systems, then causally is the only one that can facilitate this because it’s the only one that understands your live system immediately.”  

By combining generative techniques with causal and predictive AI, organizations can create more powerful and reliable intelligent systems. As Greifeneder says, adding these capabilities together into a “composite AI” delivers “a much stronger and robust automation.”

Securing AI-Generated Code

However, the rise of AI also brings new risks, especially from autonomous code generation. As more code is created without human supervision, quality and security issues can emerge. 

Greifeneder warns that “the more code is generated, not supervised or reviewed by humans properly, you get more code that is derived from other systems from the internet that are either not following your internal security or consistency standards.” 

He believes combatting this requires a “digital immune system” to “protect applications from the inside by ensuring code resilience by default.” This type of innate security will be essential as AI-driven code generation expands.

Getting Runaway Data Under Control 

The massive growth in data across IT environments also received significant attention. Greifeneder notes, “We are on a trajectory with at least every other year, the data volumes that we collect are doubling,” driving exploding cloud costs and emissions. 

As he says, "This whole data explosion seems to be infinite. And right now we are on a trajectory with, at least every other year, the data volumes that we collect doubling. So this is huge."

Getting this rapid expansion under control will require greater observability of infrastructure utilization paired with smart orchestration leveraging reliable, trustworthy data. 

Here, the concept of “data observability” becomes critical. As Greifeneder explains, “If you want to automate your production environments, and you leverage data...you need to have some form of guaranteed quality.” With more augmentation of observability data with business data, open telemetry data, and other sources, “data observability is all about ensuring that your automation and your business analytics is reliable.”

Platform Engineering Becomes Mission Critical

Finally, the Dynatrace leaders predict platform engineering will become essential. This involves “productizing the whole process of the software delivery lifecycle...into something that becomes a self-service platform,” Greifeneder says. 

Key tenets are enabling self-service access, driving extensive automation, and codifying standards and best practices like security controls into the platform. 

Greifeneder believes platform engineering represents “the next step forward” for DevOps teams by encapsulating and productizing key processes, practices, and controls into an easily accessible platform.

Additional Key Considerations

The full interview contains additional predictions around the decline of SIEM solutions, appointing Chief AI Officers, sustainability objectives driving greater observability, and more that engineering leaders should review. 

As Greifeneder notes, "Observability will become mission-critical for the C suite in the drive to support the organization’s sustainability and FinOps objectives."

As technology complexity continues accelerating in 2024, following Dynatrace’s forecasts provides an invaluable head start on preparing your organization.