Assessment Are you ready to meet the challenges of the microservices revolution?

The agility, innovation and scalability that come with microservices and containerized architecture also come with added complexity.

In fact, analysts and thought-leaders are in full agreement; one of the top challenges in Cloud-native application development is the ability to quickly identify root cause for performance issues in a microservices environment and keep pace with the expectation of lightning-fast development cycles. Can your monitoring solution keep up?

With 53% of global infrastructure decision-makers reporting at least some implementation of microservices and container architecture in their organization, and an additional 20% planning to implement in the next 12 months, a containerized environment alone isn’t enough to put your business ahead. (Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics Infrastructure Survey)

The organizations that deliver peak experiences to their customers and emerge as leaders in the microservices revolution will be those that take advantage of cloud-native monitoring solutions with the benefit of an architecture which extends observability within an open standards framework, such as OpenTelemetry and provides visibility across the full-stack, back end, application level and even the user experience.

Measure your microservices maturity with this checklist to identify ways your organization can improve and succeed in cloud-native application development.

01 What works for you today won’t necessarily scale for the future.

How prepared is your organization to evaluate, adopt, and deploy business-critical solutions to meet the pace of iteration in development?
Do you trust your monitoring solution to meet the agility of your containerized environment as your operation scales?

You might know your ecosystem pretty well now, containers and all, but what happens when things need to change?

Will your current strategy set you up to take advantage of new technologies or integrations to deliver a better experience to your customers?

“Microservices enable unprecedented agility and scalability, but the architecture causes significant cultural disruption. Application leaders should understand this new design paradigm, its prerequisites and its disruptive impact before determining where and when to use it — if at all.” (Innovation Insight for Microservices, Gartner)

Even if you aren’t sure exactly what your ecosystem will look like in the future, you should have the confidence that comes with a software intelligence solution that scales automatically and adapts to your needs. Get answers, not added complexity.

Before they implemented Dynatrace, the leading all-in-one software intelligence platform, Beachbody’s wide variety of IT infrastructure and inadequate monitoring solutions led to an overload of alerts and no real answers.

Case Study Beachbody gained complete visibility in minutes

Fitness company with a variety of IT infrastructure:

  • On-prem, physical servers, virtual machines, VMware, AWS, Docker, Lambda functions

Dynatrace was installed in 250 hosts, allowing complete infrastructure visibility in minutes.

Davis, Dynatrace’s AI engine, identifies root causes of any problems to enable fast resolution. No more alert overload.

The Beachbody team chose Dynatrace for its ease of use. Now they can spend less time searching for outages and more time refining and automating processes.

Other APM solutions require you to install multiple agents, including one in every container. Only Dynatrace can automatically detect all containers and microservices as they spin up without modifying images or manual configuration.

Deployment made easy.

Even if you don’t know precisely which technologies are running on every host, Dynatrace OneAgent continuously auto-discovers and maps dependencies within your complex environment with a single install. This includes all services and application workloads, even those running in containerized environments, such as Kubernetes.

02 Disparate, home-grown monitoring tools add complexity to already complex environments.

Can you automatically trace dependencies and connections between containers?
How many tools do you currently use to monitor your application?

Getting to a singular source of truth with microservices: Monitoring architected for cloud-native apps vs. disparate tools

The need for rapid development in today's highly iterative release environment can lead organizations to take an ad hoc approach to IT tools—resulting in more time spent on manual troubleshooting efforts and less time focused on innovation.

The ad hoc approach is avoidable—just ask customers who have deployed Dynatrace’s OneAgent, a proven "hands-free" approach to automation that scales to the Enterprise. With zero-touch configuration through auto-instrumentation and continuous discovery, this all-in-one platform gives your team the ability to see not only what's running inside containers, but also the vital connections and dependencies between components from layer to layer.

Case Study A leading online money transfer service consolidated their toolset

The company’s IT landscape had to evolve quickly to support its rapid growth over eight years, driving enterprise cloud complexity.

  • Used a range of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS solutions
  • 95% of production systems in Microsoft Azure
  • Big data platform in Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The team knew that second-generation monitoring tools couldn’t master their cloud complexity. They needed more than just monitoring. Enter Dynatrace.

  • The platform’s automation, software intelligence, and seamless integration were major advantages.
  • With Dynatrace, the company gained a single source of “business truth” and greater visibility than ever before
  • They were able to consolidate their existing toolset and rely on clear context from Dynatrace.

03 Monitoring containerized environments allows you to reduce manual effort, innovate more quickly, and focus on delivering quality experiences to your customers.

How often do anomalies and issues with your environment always require manual resolution from a team member or war room?

It’s all about agility. Nearly 1 in 4 IT professionals identified “responding faster to business needs” as the most important goal for their organizations. (Voice of the Enterprise Digital Pulse Vendor Evaluations survey, 451 Research)

When there’s a problem with your application, legacy monitoring tools don’t determine the root cause—they leave that up to you.

It takes massive manual effort to sort through a chain reaction of alerts to fix the issue, and by that time, users have been affected.

The team at DISH knows too well that the satellite industry has no time for outages. They chose Dynatrace for its ability to detect root causes and resolve issues as quickly as possible, sometimes even before it affects customers.

When issues or anomalies do arise, Dynatrace provides teams with a business impact analysis—the severity of an anomaly in terms of its impact on real users and business KPIs.

Case Study DISH put customer experience first

Though they’d undergone transformations in other areas of their services and business, DISH had been using the same monitoring systems for eight years.

They chose Dynatrace to deliver the most reliable service to DISH customers and viewers, trusting the software intelligence platform to facilitate faster feedback loops, locate problems quickly, and eliminate downtime.

Dynatrace ignited a culture shift in DISH, empowering them to become proactive rather than reactive when it comes to performance.

“We’ve been able to separate ourselves from our competitors due to the quality of service our customers receive, because when we see any kind of problem we’re on it and addressing it, getting it resolved quickly.”
― Eric Harris, Manager of Enterprise Systems at DISH

AI-powered Dynatrace masters your microservices and Kubernetes containerized environments, giving you visibility into what really matters: the true health of the services running in your containers and clusters.

Learn more about how Dynatrace can help you start on the path to victory in containerized monitoring.

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