PurePerformance - Autonomous Monitoring for Blue Prism with Steven Marrocco
Episode Date: January 30, 2019Steven Marrocco shares his experience with automated monitoring and management using Dynatrace for virtualized environments leveraging Blue Prism for problem-solving, collaboration and knowledge insig...ht algorithms. No actual robots were harmed in this recording.
Transcript
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Coming to you from Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, it's Pure Performance!
Hello everybody and welcome to Pure Performance and PerfBytes coming to you from Dynatrace Perform 2019 in Las Vegas.
In Las Vegas.
Yes, I'm Brian Wilson, and once again, my co-host is not Andy Grabner, because he's running around like a madman these days.
So I had to settle for having the one and only Mark Tomlinson from PerfBytes.
Yeah, second-tier guest to the Pure Performance world.
Yeah, I mean, just to fill in for some other people.
Actually, I'm really glad to be here. This is really good and this has been really fun.
Yes, and Mark, I want to tell you we have with us now
just getting out of his session, Steve,
hopefully I'll get it right. It seems like it should be Steve in Morocco.
That's correct.
That's what I thought.
Awesome.
You're from RBC, right?
You're the Senior Technical Systems Analyst?
Yes, I am from RBC.
What if people don't know what RBC is?
Oh, that's a good question. There could be a lot of acronyms out there.
There could be.
You're right.
That was my mistake.
It is.
RBC actually stands for the
Royal Bank Company. That's why sometimes you will see it as RBC Bank of Canada. Oh, really? Oh,
yeah. Actually, you know what? Don't quote me on that. Okay. Let's just go with it. All right.
I knew, I know there was some, some different, there's different, uh, like legal terminations
for corporations and stuff in Canada.
So, yeah, I'm not part of any of that. So, right. Right. Yeah. So you're, you're from the great
way North. I am from the great North based out of Toronto, Canada. Awesome. Welcome. Welcome to the
States. Thank you. Beautiful here. So have you been, you've been in Las Vegas before then or now?
No, this is my first time. Super excited. Awesome. We can give you one piece of advice,
please,
which is if you leave,
even if you're down just a little bit,
it's a win.
Consider yourself lucky.
I don't know how to take that.
It could be,
no,
like,
you know,
in money,
you know, like if you're up or down in terms of money,
like too much,
cause it could end up like the guys in the hangover movie.
Oh God.
And he,
he,
he didn't mean like if you,
if you leave
and you're sad no i wasn't talking about it was the presentation that bad be honest guys just be
honest that's right well you know so i i love the title of your your your your presentation but
obviously i couldn't get in there to see it because mark and i are quite busy over here but
the title of your presentation is Robotic Process Automation,
which sounds awesome, especially coming from the fact that our software
was originally developed and still mostly maintained over in Austria,
home of Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is, you know, the Terminator.
So now we're talking about robotic process automation.
What is this?
It's funny you ask, because about six months ago, I had the exact same questions you had.
So right now, especially in the banking world, and I'm going to say probably in the enterprise world, RPA or robotics process automation has become quite the buzzword. how it's used in RBC is that those tedious tasks that nobody likes to do that wastes hundreds of
man hours are now being automated by these robots and to give like a very high level how this works
is we have this product called Blue Prism which is a vendor product I don't know much about the
company themselves but their product is phenomenal I can't say anything bad about that and it pretty
much has a bunch of these little virtual desktop environments that are hosted on our cloud solution here within RBC.
So it's on premise and they have a server and they just execute all these business processes that
the business users actually create. Fortunately enough, the way this tool Blue Prism is created
is that it has a very intuitive interface. So there's actually not really much coding unless
you really want to develop these processes, which is great because who better to create
an application than the business users themselves, right? So that's just a very high level
understanding of what RPA is. If you want me to go into more detail, I'm more than happy to do that.
Well, before we go into my, I just want to bring up one thing. It confused me because you had the
term robotic and this is maybe a conversation for a different day. But to me, I guess I would always assume a robot entailed some sort of robot, you know, basically, it's a fancier word
for what we kind of term regularly
as just like an automated process, right?
Or am I just thinking of it too simplistically?
You know what? That's kind of what it is.
How I like to look at it is it's just the robot
with just the brain.
Yeah.
So it's not smart in a sense,
but it does what you tell it to do.
It can't pick up a machine gun like Arnold
and come after us.
Right. Or in Terminator
is it Terminator 2 where the melty guy
does the melting thing?
Remember the melting version?
The T3 was the
Terminator 2.
If you think
about modern AI, machine learning
and stuff, it's sort of all of the
Blue Prism combines all the different aspects if you think about modern like AI machine learning and stuff, it's sort of all of the, uh,
blue prism combines like all the different aspects of what it,
for the creation of the brain,
everything from like problem solving,
the collaboration piece,
uh,
and all of the knowledge and insight algorithms.
Right.
I wouldn't go that far.
Okay.
But I'll support that.
Okay.
So,
uh,
I guess you should,
you should be a diplomat, by the way.
That's actually my future profession.
I'm just here in technology for a while.
Yeah, that's fine.
Get my roots set, right?
Okay, to be a little bit more specific then
regarding developing an RPA process
is there's a spy tool that they like to call it
where you can actually let it track your motions
and your clicks.
So for example, say... I know this happens within the bank a lot.
We have a website that has a million, I'm going to over-exaggerate for a second,
but a million different type of filtering options to extract data from.
So instead of having a user do this all the time, we get the bot to do it ourselves.
And say there's future calculations, even in Excel excel you can have it set up macros have it do its own calculations and spit out a result interesting
yeah so that's pretty much like a high level understanding how it is how it's utilized here
anyway so getting to the dynatrace part of the implementation i think is the coolest part right
my favorite part yeah so how where do you where does it fit in? So once you have such a, this is my opinion
on any application and any infrastructure. Once you have such a large
infrastructure, you can't leave it unmonitored.
Right? And I know you guys probably know that better than anyone else.
So how this kind of all started, which is pretty cool, is
my manager comes up to me and he's like, hey, we have over 400 virtual desktop environments.
We have 500 processes across the bank executed daily.
We need to monitor this.
People, when something goes wrong and something goes down, nobody is aware.
And I'm like, OK, let's start from somewhere.
What's currently being done?
And I found out that we actually have users who are watching this thing that Blue Prism provides
called mission control. And it's a client that sits on the server itself that will tell you
if a process is running or not. Now, I'm very, very against eyes on glass.
Sure.
I don't think anybody, you know, I think there's better ways of spending our time.
Not saying there's anything wrong with it, but, you know, you shouldn't have somebody just sitting there looking and waiting for a process to fail.
Yeah.
If you go for lunch, what if you, you know, you know, any, that's all possible.
Yeah, it doesn't, but it doesn't scale.
Everyone knows that.
Exactly.
It doesn't scale.
So, quick little background about myself.
I'm actually, I've actually worked with Dynatrace products for a little bit over three years now.
I'm more familiar with Atman than I am with Dynatrace SaaS or manage what we use in the bank.
So my manager knew this, came up to me, he's like, can Dynatrace help us here?
And I'm like, I have no idea.
So I stepped away and went to my favorite, one of my good friends, Google.
And I asked it a question and it spit out a result written by David Jones.
And it was an article about actually RPA monitoring using Dynatrace SAST or managed.
So I gave him a little reach out, asked him, we had a quick call, did some digging around.
And we actually figured out that it was a viable solution.
So I want to step back for one second, if that's okay with you guys.
Sure, sure.
Perfect. So we had a user group in May of this year.
And this is the first user group I've been to in about two years since then.
Anyway, this is when they actually advertised Dynatrace SaaS and OneAgent.
And I remember seeing this all on the screen, seeing them demonstrating all this really cool stuff, how simple OneAgent and how Dynatrace Manage uses AI and all this stuff to predict problems,
do problem analytics and all that stuff.
First thing I said, though though this is unbelievably not true
i'm like i cannot believe that a product can be this simple and do so much so i remember going
off and i was talking to uh a few other people from dynatrace i don't believe it i don't i i
literally don't think this is true like and then try it out so come come to now, I go to install one agent, right?
And I'm actually very familiar with the manually install installation Atman agents.
And as great as they are, they can be quite tedious.
Sure.
So I go to our manage the portal.
I download the agent.
I run the installer.
I click two buttons and it says it's done.
I didn't set up a host connection.
I didn't tell it a collector to point to.
I'm like, how does it even know where to go?
And then magically a pizza shows up delivered.
That's it.
You didn't even ask for it.
It just knew that you needed pizza after you did that.
Didn't even ask.
I actually thought it broke.
I thought it just installed and was sitting there.
Go back to our portal.
There it is.
My host is being identified.
My processes just need to be restarted.
I was going to say, I'm telling you, when we all started seeing that for the first time too,
a few years back, we kind of had the same reaction. Like, wait, what just happened?
Right? Yeah.
It's so impressive.
Everybody loves to pick on things, right? Especially in this industry.
So I was like, where's the mess up? What else do I have to do? There's got to be
a catch. And there was nothing. It was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. It was so brilliant
actually that a guy who has no idea, a colleague of mine who has no idea what Dynatrace is,
I just gave him the installer. I'm like, can you put this on a few more virtual desktop environments?
He's like, what do I do? I'm like, just run it. I went out for lunch, came back.
We had 15 more virtual desktop environments instrumented, just like that. So somebody
who had no experience with this, didn't even know what the tool was, was able to install
us. So that was, and this is like without even automated deploys or anything fancy like
that. That was a huge, just a huge win right there on its own, right? So we have no configuration.
We have instant identification.
So right now I'm just going to go on about the benefits of what we've seen so far using
Dynatrace with Blue Prism RPA, if you want me to continue or stop.
Yeah, go on. Yeah. And kind of hit the high, I mean, kind of share with us the highlights thing,
like what's been the biggest, biggest thing you've overcome or the biggest problem you've solved?
Okay. So this is,
so as I was saying earlier,
before we didn't have really any monitoring on the actual virtual desktop environments themselves.
And this doesn't seem quite minuscule,
obviously to you guys working with such large applications,
but for our run the bank team,
so consider that prod support,
this was a game changer.
So now after that simple installation,
we go in and we automatically have
all of the host information, right?
Like CPU, memory, and disk.
We also know that when the application,
so this quick FYI,
this application's very, very database heavy.
I mean that it logs actually everything to a database.
Wow.
So if the database,
if anything happens with the database,
this thing's not working.
So I was sitting with RTB and they're like, I'm just showing them off.
I'm showing them the problem analytics, I believe Dashlet, if that's what it's called.
Yeah.
Where it just shows you all the issues and it lists like three VDIs, just red.
And they're like, oh, that VDI.
I'm like, yeah, they're like, we spent the morning looking at that.
I'm like, what do you mean?
He's like, there's an issue with it.
Look at it.
The space is at that. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, there's an issue with it. Look at it. The space is at zero.
So I know that's very simple, but how they were able to just automatically see and know what was wrong using our managed portal.
Yeah.
They were very impressed and happy with this.
Along with that, it also helped identify a database connection issue right off the bat.
Someone's like, well, why aren't the processes working? Look over, just says they're right in that perfect little dashlet, database
error, connection interrupted, X, Y, and Z. And what I'm trying to get at right now is that
instant delivery from the product. So what I'm saying is that there was no configuration needed.
We literally had to install an agent, restart a service, and that was it. And we get all of that
out of the box. So coming with people that have no APM experience or people that agent, restart a service, and that was it. And we get all of that out of the box.
So coming with people that have no APM experience or people that do, such as myself,
that's just a massive win in my eyes alone.
Yeah. Let me ask a little bit, Steve,
like the landscape of all the different apps that you have,
you're not an expert in all of them.
Like if you're working in APM, it's like somebody brings in vendor X, vendor Y, blah, blah, blah.
These database connection things are like the monitoring pieces
you get by default are like, well, these are really common things
that affect any kind of app or any kind of client.
So do you find that that's sort of the Dynatrace
taking the most common things and boiling them up,
but also gets applied across a wide breadth of the applications you guys have in production.
Are we talking applications as a whole right now?
Yeah, sure.
Oh, for sure.
So actually, coming from my past, my old application was the most heavily monitored application in the bank.
Don't quote me on this.
I'm pretty sure we had over 200 agents installed in production alone. So it was quite
an impressive application. It was our digital check processing application.
So that was just, yeah.
So Dynatrace does a great job. It's just grabbing those
simple errors that people could go and scrape logs and probably eventually
find and presenting
them to you right away.
It reduces having a war room for people.
I've been in a war room for two days before over an issue that nobody knew what was going
on because we had no insight to the application.
And then once we got Dynatrace installed, that pretty much went from days to hours, I think even minutes at one point.
Yeah, I've been part of that.
I used to be a customer way back, but that's on the Atman side.
But speaking of Atman, I want to do a slight little pivot here, only because you said you had experience with Atman in the past.
I think you said about three years or so, right?
Yeah.
Was that it?
And then you're moving over to dynatrace now coincidentally
um on monday during the hot day sessions the class i was uh doing was uh dynatrace for atmon users
uh where we were you know we're trying to train people on you know how to use dynatrace if you're
coming from an atmon background and maybe some different ways of approaching things you went
through this obviously yourself there what did you find the experience was from transitioning from Atman to Dynatrace?
As you know, it's not a one-to-one type of transition.
Some things are different.
Some things don't exist anymore.
Some things you think about differently.
What's your experience and what would you take away from that?
So in terms of a learning curve,
we've already spoken about OneA agent and how that's adopted.
Right.
And how great that is.
So there's a special place in my heart for Atman.
Just because I'm the most experienced with it.
Yep.
We should have some theme music for the nostalgia of Atman.
You know what?
It is a great,
it's a great,
it's a great tool.
I was about to use an expletive, but it really, you know, it is a great, it's a great, it's a great tool. I was about to use an expletive,
but it really, you know, it really, really is, you know, I can't, you know, I grew, I used it for, I don't know, six years or so. So yeah, I'm right there with you, but obviously things change,
right? Times, things move on. Is there anything that, what do you find is improved? What do you
find is better? Is there something, anything that you're still really, really missing? I mean,
things change a lot. Obviously every two weeks you have a new release
i don't know if you're up up to date on the latest things but what's your experience been with that
switch over can i be honest yeah please lack of clicking you're saying you clicked more in atmon
or less than atmon more in atmon to get where i needed to go so So if you have an exercise routine,
you're doing less work.
So you need to make up for it by maybe doing extra steps.
Like you got more exercise using Atman
because you had to click more.
Exactly.
And I know that sounds like
that's not a good way of talking about the product.
It's easy.
No, no, no.
It's easy.
It is though.
And that's the thing is I appreciated it more.
Everything was cut and managed. Of course, when you first open it, it's a new application, right?
I'm like, okay, what do I do?
But you know what?
I didn't find it difficult to click around and kind of figure things out.
I remember going to the smart scape view and that was like a game changer. The reason why is because some people,
and I think this was mentioned at the user group I was at,
they don't understand, especially with large applications,
what's going on, who communicates to what,
what's everything doing.
So the way how it's SmartScape will show you
how these applications are communicating
in like a nice spider web, that was a really cool feature.
But just back to the comparison really quick.
So in At atmon like when
you're creating a measure creating a bt like yeah there was a lot of shortcuts to get into that
and that kind of doesn't exist in dynatrace quote me if i'm wrong in a similar sense um like for
instance uh rpa blue prism doesn't really have an entry point like it doesn't have an api or or like sorry a request portal so we had to do a
custom service yeah which was extremely easy because i remember in atmon like uh doing running
a cpu sample and then having to like just grind through all the methods and classes to figure out
which one that i needed to do uh whereas with managed, I was able to just go into it,
create a service, search the actual method name
that I was looking for.
It would pop up.
Let me do a super class if I wanted to.
Let me just instrument a method.
And then if I wanted to get fancy, which I have been,
go into like a request attributes
and instrument those with that. And that's actually,
which has been a vital,
like a really huge requirement for this blue prism automation effort or
monitoring effort. Sorry.
Yeah. And that was, I forget how long ago request attributes came in,
but I remember that was a big sticking point for me. Cause again,
I came from, I'm on the pre-sale side, right?
So I came from doing all the Atmon stuff to dynatrace and of course if i had come to dynatrace the dynatrace
tool brand new i wouldn't have known about all these other things but i'm like but what about
this feature that feature that feature and what i found what was the most amazing thing is um to
really give our development team a a shout out is there's. They're on a two-week release cycle, right?
So as soon as request attributes were ready in their initial form,
they were in the product, right?
And then it's collect feedback, improve,
collect feedback and continuously improve the feature,
not just that feature, but any features.
So that really, really helped because, you know,
back in the Atman days, it was like six months for a major release.
Especially coming from the client side and working for a bank, we have processes in place.
I think our versioning is very...
I think we were like six months behind whatever was currently released.
But now with, I think, Managed, we are on the four-week upgrade cycle, I think.
Don't quote me on that and don't go to anybody from RBC with that. I may be wrong.
But it's a lot faster, basically, though, right?
There we go. Thank you.
Yeah, and it's awesome. And I think that's what really helps that transition is the fantastic
work the development team is really pushing out these things that, you know, initially some features they, you know, might have thought, you know, we're taking a new approach. As you
said, let's get rid of eyes on glass. Let's get rid of this and that. Let's stop doing these old
way of things. And so many of our customers came back and said, but we still need these. We're not
ready to take the training wheels off. Or maybe some things really do serve a good purpose still. And there's always cases where sometimes the people, product or development team might be a few steps ahead of where public is.
So the public isn't ready for giving up things.
But the awesome thing was they were able to turn around and be like, okay, oh, that is important for you still.
Oh, well, we didn't think so.
But here, let's toss it right back in.
And within a few releases,
it's all back in.
Not all back in,
but you know what I mean?
It's very agile.
They could really, really make these changes,
which I think really helped with that transition.
Yeah, super impressive.
Because I can only imagine the demands
even coming from us.
Yeah.
To get the what we want and stuff, right?
So again, I really appreciate that.
Yeah, I think anyone that's using any vendor tool
in a highly regulated space with the clients
and all of the audit pieces you have to go through,
managed means not just managing the complexities
and the pain of keeping a Dynatrace implementation going,
but you're also, as a partner,
taking on liability and risk
in the face of all of that compliance.
And two of the other customers that I've been talking to have the same thing. They're like,
if we go manage, then we have a partner that's, you know, if it's not working, it's not a hundred
percent internal, especially when it comes to security breaches and things like that. So,
so yeah, it sounds like it's working, working for the same good reasons for you, Stephen. That's
good. Yeah. And what's, so I don't know, darn, I forgot what this is called.
So pretty much how ManageWork,
which I just found out recently,
is how, is it called,
is it called Mission Control
or Mission something for you guys?
Mission Control.
Yeah, because then you have Dynatrace 1 as well,
don't you?
So Dynatrace 1 is sort of like a services,
help desk kind of thing.
Yeah, so what I'm trying to get at actually,
it was really cool.
So I was talking to David Jones and he was just like, what's your tenant ID? I'm like, well, this is
on-prem. Why does it matter to you? Gave it to him anyway. And he was
able to check out what's been going on. Obviously, we have read-only access
and I'm assuming this has been dealt with from the security side at RBC because it's available.
But it was just so nice that I didn't have to be, okay, hold on, let me
start up a website, let me get you on a call. He was able to just to like, you know, help me then in
there. And I kind of, I really liked that feature. I thought that was really cool.
And I think it's important to point out, that's why it's called managed, right? You're, you're
hosting it, but you're making a call back with health checks back to our systems so that even
if you're not aware of it, we could be like, hey, your disks are full. Did you guys realize that?
Or just even like a standard support ticket.
We have access to some of the critical components of that.
Obviously, we don't have access to the data you're collecting or anything like that.
But that managed piece kind of is you're not alone anymore.
Yeah, which is exactly how the pizza got delivered right after you installed the 180.
Exactly. That's where you installed the 1A. Exactly.
This way to bring that all back, Mark.
We started off asking you, this will be your first time in Las Vegas.
Is there anything you are looking to do when you're in Las Vegas this week?
Well, so you guys have that Topgolf thing.
Yeah.
MGM Ground.
Oh, yeah.
That's actually going to be really fun, I think.
Yeah.
So it's funny because I was talking to my girlfriend.
I'm like, oh, I really want to go.
She's like, well, just go.
And then I get the invite.
I'm like, this is destiny.
This is fate.
Again, it's the telemetry on the managed install for Dynatrace.
Oh, you guys are too good.
And we get you to the social activities that you desire.
Brilliant.
Aside from that, you know, I've never been to a big casino before, so I'll check that out probably.
Yeah, absolutely. And, and of course walking the strip is, uh, you know, if the weather is nice,
it should be quite nice when we're there. Um, okay. So I wanted to ask you one more,
one last question before we go. Um, we just had new year, right? 2019. Woo. Everything's
going to be better. Um, that's what they always say. Yep, always the hope.
Do you have any performance-related resolutions that you want to declare publicly for the whole world to hear?
Performance with myself or at work?
Thinking initially more like work, like performance, like system performance, you know, like monitoring, all this kind of stuff we're talking about.
But if you have a professional performance thing you want to share instead, you can go ahead and do that. No, I was just talking to somebody
about this and pretty much I just want to help more people, you know.
I have a few presentations actually after perform within RBC
just showing off the presentation I'm doing I just did here and
you know, how else we can instrument
and utilize Dynatrace for other applications.
So 2019 is going to be the year of wisdom for me.
Give it one of those.
The year of paying it forward, sort of.
Yeah, exactly.
Great. Well, I hope you enjoy the rest of your time.
Are you spending any extra time after the conference is over?
Yeah, staying for the day Thursday and
taking the red-eye back to Toronto. So I'm hoping to maybe get some hiking in. I don't know, just
enjoy this beautiful weather. That's all that matters to me. It was negative 20 in Toronto like
a week ago. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, not going back to that. All right, well, thank you for taking time
and talking to us, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your reform. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks. Bye-bye.