Dynatrace Unveils DevSecOps Automation Partner Program

‘What we wanted to do with these partners is create a closed-loop automation program,’ says Steve Tack, Dynatrace’s senior vice president of products. ‘It’s … purpose-built integrations, where customers can enable them in a much simpler and faster approach.’

A new Dynatrace program will allow DevSecOps teams to easily integrate more than a dozen partner solutions—from companies including GitLab, Gremlin, PagerDuty and Slack—with its software intelligence platform for multi-cloud environments.

The Waltham, Mass.-based company, which provides observability, runtime application security and AIOps capabilities for development teams, said its new DevSecOps Automation Partner Program will help organizations move more quickly through their software development life cycles and deliver better business outcomes through automated actions.

“What we see within the market is still a lot of manual, kind of tedious tasks that organizations are going through, and it’s got a negative consequence of either speed in time to market or resiliency of a service once you deploy it into a production environment,” said Steve Tack, Dynatrace’s senior vice president of products. “And typically … they’re using a lot of different vendors to deliver services and to make sure that those services meet the businesses’ expectations. We’re bringing the intelligence and automation of Dynatrace and working with these partners to then deliver an automated approach within the market and within the enterprise.”

Other solutions available for integration with Dynatrace with “just a few clicks” are from Bitbucket, Microsoft’s Azure DevOps, Jira Software, LaunchDarkly, OpsGenie, Snyk, Tricentis NeoLoad and xMatters, an Everbridge company. The integrations will be available in the Dynatrace Hub, which customers can access through the Dynatrace platform.

“We’ll continue to add on as we go … and continue to work across different use cases that customers are looking to drive,” Tack told CRN.

Dynatrace based its selection of technology alliance partners on where it saw prevalent adoption within its target market of the 15,000 largest enterprises globally, according to Tack.

“There was definitely a demand,” he said. “A customer always has an ecosystem, and we’re looking to make those ecosystems run faster and smarter. The Dynatrace platform has always been open, so APIs are accessible, but there was a lot of more simplistic webhook integrations—like a fire-and-forget-type of mentality. What we wanted to do with these partners is create a closed-loop automation program. It’s … purpose-built integrations, where customers can enable them in a much simpler and faster approach, but then also deliver on a more complete outcome from the customer standpoint. They’re not doing the duct-tape-together; they’re not doing simple actions. They’re really getting more of a system.”

Everbridge’s new Digital Operations Platform is one of the integrations that Dynatrace is enabling under the partnership. Everbridge, a critical event management (CEM) company, launched the new platform in November to help customers automate and streamline service delivery and IT incident management.

“The key here is what we are looking for is a true partnership of companies that we can offer the CIOs of this world, because their challenges are very common,” said Prashant Darisi, Everbridge’s vice president of CEM global solutions. “They are tied to legacy tools, they want to adopt modern tools, they are accelerating digital transformation. But we also must recognize that no vendor should stand up and claim to do everything. The idea is to put the best of breed together, and this is one such attempt to do so.”

Solution Providers’ Roles

While Dynatrace’s new program represents an alliance with technology partners, it’s Dynatrace’s solution provider partners who’ll be instrumental in pulling it together when it comes to end customer value, according to Tack.

“They’ll sell it, and I think the more important part is that it’s usually being connected with some sort of broader transformational effort,” he said. “They’re helping drive the process of culture change that needs to go along with this as people move from traditional operations to maybe more of a DevOps and SRE [site reliability engineering] culture and approach to software delivery. It’s really the life cycle of the customer that I think they have the biggest impact on.”

Dyntrace’s DevSecOps Automation Partner Program “opens up a whole other world” for Orasi Software, according to Todd Williams, account executive for application performance monitoring for the Kennesaw, Ga.-based DevSecOps-focused technology and consulting firm, a Dynatrace Premier Partner.

“We’ve had a Dynatrace practice historically that’s been mostly focused on helping customers with their core monitoring use cases and helping customers fix problems faster in their production-based applications,” Williams told CRN. “But with this announcement and having a DevSecOps automation piece, it opens the door to bringing those customers further along in their DevOps journey and using our DevOps practice that, all along, has been talking about the importance of observability in a DevOps strategy. This just makes the vision that we’ve been preaching a lot more attainable and more easily executed with our Dynatrace customers. Being able to bridge the gap … is going to be huge. It’s just been something that we’ve been clamoring for.”

Dynatrace markets its Software-as-a-Service offering through a global direct sales team and a partner network that includes resellers, systems integrators and cloud service providers. In its fiscal third-quarter earnings report this month, the company said its partners “influenced” more than half of its new transactions closed in the third quarter and that new annual recurring revenue transacted through hyper-scaler partnerships—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google Cloud and Red Hat—more than tripled. Dynatrace disclosed revenue of $240.8 million for the three months ended Dec. 31, 2021, a 32 percent increase from the same period in 2020, and net income of $14.6 million.

‘Wave Of The Future’

Matthew Fornaciari, co-founder and chief technology officer of Gremlin, sees Dynatrace’s efforts to build out a DevSecOps partner ecosystem as “the wave of the future.”

“A lot of these tools are kind of hyper-specialized, and there’s going to need to be a lot of interaction between them to build a more robust system in general,” he said.

San Jose, Calif.-based Gremlin’s chaos engineering platform helps companies improve resilience and reduce downtime.

“Think of it as like stress testing, or kind of like performance testing, but on the underlying infrastructure for people’s large-scale distributed systems,” Fornaciari said. “Our customers have been wanting to continuously run these tests to make sure that they basically can validate their systems against particular failure modes any time anything changes. This [partnership] is actually giving them a really easy way to be able to do that, instead of having to kind of duct tape and baling wire things together. We’ve got a first-class citizen here that incorporates Gremlin and allows them to continuously test to make sure that their systems stay reliable and stay resilient.”

Meeting Customers ‘Where They Are’

Dynatrace’s DevSecOps Automation Partner Program helps San Francisco-based GitLab’s mission to meet its customers “where they are,” according to Nima Badiey, GitLab’s global vice president of alliances. GitLab is the provider of The DevOps Platform, an open-source application designed to help organizations deliver better and safer software faster.

“We’re reaching out to all of our APM [application performance management] partnerships to make sure that we establish an integrated approach to how we solve customer problems … so that as they adopt GitLab and modern DevOps best practices, our modern platform will actually interoperate with the existing technology choices they have made,” Badiey said.

Badiey is optimistic about the future implications of the Dynatrace partnership. Many APM vendors have tremendous libraries of user, machine and application behaviors that get much more sophisticated when mobile application development and edge topologies are layered in, as well nested microservices, he said.

“This intelligence can be mined for specific patterns of behavior, and that information can then feed into identifying use cases or kind of like heat maps of where we more normally find problems and issues,” he said. “That level of intelligence is really, really important, and I think we’re in the early days of actually seeing APM companies and APM partnerships advance to the level of we’re no longer training these models manually via machine learning—that there is an automated AI component that starts doing pattern recognition. That’s really the next frontier of the value and benefits that APM providers can actually give back not only to end users and customers, but also upstream partners with which they integrate.”