In this guest blog post, Jay Gurbani, Global Technical Alliance Manager at Dynatrace, discusses how observability goes beyond traditional monitoring, allowing teams to rapidly detect and resolve issues. Dynatrace Service on Microsoft Azure offers a unified solution containing these key ingredients for DevSecOps and platform engineering success.

In the fast-evolving landscape of cloud-native technology and software delivery, DevOps and platform engineering are foundational. Yet, to ensure reliability, security, and efficiency, these practices require additional support. One crucial investment is observability.

Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring, offering a comprehensive view of system performance and behavior. It includes metrics, logs, traces, topology mapping, code-level details, and user experience metrics. This real-time awareness enables teams to rapidly detect and resolve issues, crucial for maintaining the agility and reliability central to DevOps and platform engineering.

Observability also acts as a launchpad for maturing DevOps and platform engineering. shows organizations actively use observability data to drive automation decisions, automate release validation, identify bottlenecks, and automate delivery pipelines.

Observability and DevSecOps: a shift-left approach

Observability empowers teams to embrace a shift-left approach, taking proactive measures early in the software development life cycle (SDLC). This approach, integral to DevSecOps, ensures optimal software functioning and quick issue resolution, fostering a culture of shared responsibility for software and infrastructure integrity.

Without observability, executing a DevSecOps approach becomes increasingly difficult. Lack of insights leads to inefficient management and resolution of vulnerabilities, attacks, and threats. Conversely, with observability providing clear insights, teams can immediately address issues, preserving resources and enabling DevSecOps at scale.

Observability and platform engineering: efficiency unleashed

Platform engineering teams benefit immensely from observability, which goes beyond monitoring infrastructure health to providing insights for capacity management, performance optimization, compliance, and other critical aspects. For example, observability can track and analyze usage data to help engineers understand when and how to scale resources based on system demand, enabling confident execution of high-importance tasks.

The role of AI in DevSecOps

When integrated into DevSecOps, artificial intelligence (AI) transforms data into actionable insights, automating workflows across development, security, and operations. Causal AI, combined with machine learning-based algorithms, analyzes vast datasets in real time, providing precise answers driven by root cause analysis. This capability is monumental, providing in-depth context around system issues and anomalies.

Informed by past performances, predictive AI forecasts future system needs, fostering a proactive approach to system health and maintenance. These capabilities minimize disruptions, cyberattacks, and downtime by identifying potential issues before they escalate.

The role of AI in platform engineering

For platform engineers, AI optimizes resource allocation and scalability, and introduces autonomous operations. AI-driven insights enhance system reliability and overall platform resilience, enabling intelligent resource allocation for optimal scaling without human intervention. Automated rollbacks or rollouts based on observability data enhance system reliability and overall platform resilience.

Observability, cloud, and AI: a powerful combination

Together, observability, security, and AI redefine DevOps and platform engineering, accelerating software delivery and fortifying tech stacks and applications against emerging security challenges. This synergy is essential for organizations navigating modern software development and infrastructure management as we continue to shift to the cloud.

Dynatrace on Microsoft Azure offers a unified solution containing these key ingredients for DevSecOps and platform engineering success. With end-to-end observability powered by hypermodal AI and built-in security analytics and protection, Dynatrace empowers organizations with the capabilities needed to unlock agility, efficiency, and scale in the modern business landscape.

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