What's Going to Make Developers' Lives Easier?

I had the opportunity to catch up with Andi Grabner, DevOps Activist at Dynatrace, during day two of Dynatrace Perform. I've known Andi for seven years, and he's one of the people that has helped me understand DevOps since I began writing for DZone.

We covered several topics that I'll share in a series of posts.

Six New Product Introductions Last Two Days. What Are the Devs Going to Be Most Interested In? 

There are two developer personas I want to address. 

One is the developer that is benefiting from the data we collect from your apps. We collect traces, logs, metrics, and all this stuff. Everything is in Grail. I think the coolest thing for developers is Dynatrace does a pretty good job detecting anomalies. 

We've always been doing this to detect an anomaly and create a problem ticket. Up to now, a developer was basically getting a problem ticket. They then could explore the data and data trace. 

We are now able to give you an analysis. When a problem arises, the first thing we do is figure out which development teams are responsible for this problem. Then for the workflows we create, we are automatically capturing more data that is relevant for developers. We automatically capture the logs and the traces and convert them into metrics. We put them all into a workbook, and then we give the workbook to the developer. 

Instead of the developer being faced with a general problem, they get specific and relevant diagnostics and a personalized workbook with all of the information the developer needs to really focus on the problem that his or her component actually read. 

Because the problem typically includes multiple components. Maybe infrastructure service is part A, and another service is Part B of the problem. As part of the problem notification process, instead of sending the problem to ten developers, I  break the problem up by dependency and send each developer a notebook with the relevant information for his or her service. All of the data in the context of the problem is in a single notebook. Developers can collaborate on solving the problem within the notebook; this is the beauty of notebooks. They are living documents where you can explore the data and pull the model if needed. The starting point is now so much easier, with much of the previously required detective work already completed.

You're not overloading people with the information they don't need. Therefore, you're not wasting their time. And you're promoting collaboration rather than finger-pointing makes it okay.

So the first developer persona is the one that will be monitoring the reps, and in case there's a problem, give them all the right information. 

The second developer persona will be the one that is building custom apps with AppEngine to handle the exponential growth of data. We are seeing a huge increase in data analytics and data analysis. 

I think we will see developers that will build the next generation of analytics apps on top of Dynatrace. AppEngine provides the framework with an easy-to-use, low-code way to create custom, compliant, and intelligent data-driven apps for IT, development, security, and business teams. 

We are making it simpler and easier for the global developer community to use their imagination and creativity to build whatever apps they think will help add value to their company and their end users.