PurePerformance - Dynatrace PERFORM 2019 Day 1 Wrap-up

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

James and Mark will just chat about everything today, and some NOTD stories and Super Bowl prep! Brian gets ready for his birthday dinner.

It's time for PerfBites. What the f*** is PerfBites? The fourth square meal of the day. Don't forget the PerfBites. F*** waffles. Add nutritional value to your brain. PerfBites. Whatever.

Hey! Hello, everyone. Here we are. We are wrapping up day one at Dynatrace Perform 2019 in Las Vegas. Las Vegas. Las Vegas. Stay right on the mic there, sir. Yeah. So we're good.

This is just you and me. Brian's not here doing anything. So now we can talk about Brian behind his back, right? I really hate what he did to the Beach Boys. I really do. It was tragic. He should have been on medication. I know. Well, he was probably. Yeah. Yeah. But should have been on medication. I know.

Well, he was probably. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, it's actually been really fun. We posted, if people are listening now, we posted some live things throughout the day and then some pre-recorded stuff just to fill the blanks. Yep. Which was fun.

But nonetheless, there's a whole bunch of good content. James, before we go any farther, this is our fourth Dynatrace Perform in a row. Yes. It doesn't seem like we've been at every one for four years. Well, I still did not have hair at the first one. Yeah, that hasn't changed. It's about the same. Your hair was not blue then. No, no. It was old man gray, kind of white silver gray thing yeah yeah um but it's this is a tremendous event and remember the first year we talked about it like it was like the old mercury conferences where it was just a room it had an energy yeah and like a perf geek energy yeah like super perf geek energy now now things have transformed, we do have more geeks this year than in previous years.

Yeah, there are more perf geeks. Yeah, I think we've gone from about 1,000 attendees, I think Laura said, around 2,000 this year. Almost 2,000, yeah. But what I've noticed is more suits. Well, maybe so. Not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe so. suits well not necessarily a bad thing maybe maybe so but also then you've got dave anderson the head of marketing global vp whatever he is and he's like he's mr converse all-stars things like so yeah he's wearing a t-shirt just like the rest of which is like the perf nerd suit

yeah like perf bite shoes you know who go figure where did they come up with the PerfGeeks like Converse All-Stars? Imagine that. That'd be you and me. Yeah. Six years ago doing this podcast. But, yeah, so it's bigger. It's bigger. And there's more people.

It's got a little bit more structure to it. And do you remember some of the sessions that we heard about that first year in Orlando like four years ago? I honestly don't. There was a lot of Atman still profiling, diagnostics, optimizing apps. I was on a panel just talking about what are the biggest problems you're identifying. I remember the Segway-like robot cruising up and down the hallway. Oh, yeah, that was scary. Yeah, with the iPad on top of it.

But it was an app performance diagnostic geek thing. And now all the messages, things we get from main stages, pipeline delivery optimization. It's AI. Operations and development. All the stuff that's happened in four years, it's changed a lot. And it shows in every session. It has changed. Which means our profession is changing.

And that's good. Evolve or die. Yeah. Type of thing. I think that's absolutely right. So, Mark, we're right on the cusp of the Super Bowl here. We are. So I think it's worthwhile to talk about some of the unique performance challenges that come along with the Super Bowl.

Okay. Which is different than Black Friday prep. Which is different than Black Friday prep. Okay. So when we think about the Super Bowl, essentially we have every commercial is a spot sale problem. And a unique spot sale problem because people are sitting in front of the TV. And what are they grabbing? They're not going to go over to their desktop machine in the office.

They're grabbing their phone. Or their smart TV. Or their smart TV. And then they're immediately clicking the link on the cool commercial. Yeah. Yeah. So, first of all, we all mobile traffic, slightly higher latch time. Now, people are going to be on Wi-Fi, so it's probably pretty good.

They're probably getting pretty good speed. So I can tell you right now, if you haven't mobile optimized your site. Oh, yeah, that's the first thing. You're too late for that. Form factor. Okay. Because that's a lot of refactoring. That is a lot of refactoring. So you're too late. that. Form factor. Because that's a lot of refactoring. That is a lot of refactoring.

So you're too late. But what can you do? If your first couple of pages are not fully sitting inside of a CDN and you don't seed the CDN and have a 24-hour timeout on it for Super Bowl day, you can still do that. That one's a pretty easy switch to make. It is. And tell nobody to promote anything until it's in the CDN. Until the Super Bowl is over. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Embargo. Yeah. They can deploy up to midnight of Super Bowl Day, but then they can't deploy anything else, and you want to run automated scripts or have human users seed that CDN cache as much as possible. I think you're right. Because otherwise, what's going to happen is you're going to take this dirty device called a phone. You're going to have a million people clicking on it right after a commercial. Yeah.

And then you have higher latch time. It's a dirty last mile network. Yep. Basically, you're in the worst of all possible situations. And we see year after year companies fail in their Super Bowl ads. I think you're right. And then the marketing professionals claim success. Yeah.

We were so successful, we crashed the website. Yeah, but that's schadenfreude. That's not actually good. Yeah, that's trying to pull a win from a failure. Yeah, exactly. So now I'm thinking outside of the CDN, which is a great thing to do at the last minute. I know customers that have been doing prep. Their Super Bowl was not Black Friday.

This is like ordering pizza or ordering other foods. There are things that are maybe not directly... Wing providers. Yeah, they're not directly related to an ad on the Super Bowl. Yeah. Because wasn't it Victoria's Secret that went down on the Super Bowl way back when? Didn't they do like the Angels ad? Well, they had

the Victoria's Secret fashion show years ago that collapsed and they re-engineered to go from unicast to multicast and they saved it. But, yeah, that's a whole separate story. I'm wondering about solutions like Fastly, the accelerator kind of proxy, that if you're not quite a CDN but you have like a webperf rules engine in the CDN, Fastly might have, you might be able to win some things through them. Stick a varnish appliance in front of your load balancer and set some caching policies there so the load doesn't actually make it all the way to your web servers.

So either a full-on CDN like an Akamai or the other pieces. Or, I don't know, I would maybe think at less than a week in time, if you're worried, call up the guys at Fastly and see if they can, because it's just a DNS routing through their servers. Exactly. That could work really well. So I like that idea. Other than that, I think you just prepare by drinking a lot on Super Bowl Day and just hope your website doesn't go down.

Have your team prepared. Yeah. If it fails, make sure you capture logs from everything. Yeah. If you have Dynatrace integrated, make sure you're capturing all of that history. You have it all the way up to the point of failure. So forensically, you can go back through it afterwards and take a look at it. And this might be a good point to actually plug.

If you don't have Dynatrace integrated in your back-end infrastructure at this point, and you're not sure what's going on with your logs and what your retention policy is and how you analyze them. Put Dynatrace in the mix so at least you have that historical record and it's being captured in the cloud so someone can analyze without even coming on site. Oh, yeah. You can leverage third parties for remote analysis live when you're having problems.

Yeah. I mean, there's some very strong features there that you can take advantage of. I would even say, Dynatrace-wise, the speed with which you can be up and running from a single agent install and start getting information, it might even be worth it just to jump in the deep end of the pool and say, let's just deploy Dynatrace everywhere. We're at the Dynatrace conference, and we are being paid, full disclosure, to be here because they're friends of ours.

They like to pay for our travel. But honestly, let's reflect a little. Again, we've talked a bit about the announcements, the lifetime free for developer edition and the AI ops kind of ideas that are announced today from Dynatrace. I think that the free developer thing is really similar to when Lode Runner started doing the trial and the community edition. Henrik was here talking about the community edition. Yep. A lot of the commercial tools, it's just staving off open source. Sure, absolutely.

Makes perfect sense. And open source is matured, as we know. But I don't think in the Dynatrace space, there isn't that. There's not a comparable product in the open source world. Single solution, yeah. Yeah, I mean, well, that's the problem with open source in general, is you have these components that are available of a solution. Little pieces together.

And even if we choose JMeter as our performance testing solution, it doesn't really have a monitoring and reporting interface. We've got to hook it together with other stuff. With other stuff. Elk. You're the duct tape. Yes, yes, you are the product. You know, the human being is the product. Which is great for consultants, I will say.

If you're a consultant and you're like, I got, you know, 16 different tools that I glue together and duct tape together. That's great. It's not a single solution. Yeah, I mean, you look at the Elk Stack versus Splunk or Sumo Logic. Yeah. Splunk and Sumo Logic and other log analysis tools there. Even Dynatrace has a bit of that, yeah. Dynatrace has a log analysis tool as well. You look at the Elk Stack, it's a dozen applications.

Oh, yeah. You know, that you've got to band-aid and duct tape together. And maintain, manage, evolve. And if one of those revs and the rest of them aren't fully in sync, your solution is gone. Yeah, completely. But I still like the idea that that resistance we talked about before, that developers don't like getting a call from anyone, let alone a salesperson. Yes, exactly.

I can see the spirit of experimentation being part of this. I want to try some tools and learn what I learn and then recommend stuff. Yep. So I think it's a very, very good announcement. You think about what Andy's done, like the Dynatrace or even the Atmon trial stuff, very successful. I think one thing that's really a game changer is Davis was open sourced. It was two years ago, I guess. Two years ago, yeah.

Now they're open sourcing the AI engine. Itself. Behind Davis. With a bunch of open APIs to access it. Exactly. So there's no reason why you can't take that AI engine and start feeding it data that has absolutely nothing to do with Dynatrace. And have it build patterns and do analysis and things of that nature. Here's what you and I have talked about on News of the Dam multiple times

is you really have to have a monitor on, like, the Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Cardi B, or, you know, it's the Michael Bublé. Chance the Rapper. Chance the Rapper, yeah. You've got to monitor their Twitter feed so that if the rate goes up, you need to like and then correlate that to Ticketmaster and then correlate that to another point. So I think with this. Yeah. Downdetector.com.

Exactly. You know, Taylor Swift says something. Downdetector goes off. And if you know competitors that take your traffic, if they go down, you're going to get that traffic. I could see extensible ecosystem monitoring, competitive space monitoring pulled into the AI engine. Heck, I could see the AI engine going into financial data, looking for fraud patterns and things of that nature. Metadata about human behavior in interaction now becoming pattern recognition for anti-fraud. Yeah, because you're looking for something which is an anomaly.

Right. You said, tell me something that's odd, Davis. Yeah. Oh, we've noticed these five people doing odd things. Yeah. Oh, tell me more. Tell me more about five people doing odd things. Yeah. Oh, tell me more. Tell me more about those odd five odd things. Tell me more about these odd people.

Yeah. All right. So that's cool. I like that idea. They're all coming from a server farm in Russia. And they're posting a lot to Twitter. Yeah, that's exactly right. The open part of it. Now, I remember a lot of complaints many years ago using Atman or the first Dynatrace.

It was very, very closed. I mean, it was really hard to get data in and out of it at all. I mean, it normally has a proprietary database on the back end that was running in SQL or Oracle or something. And that has changed. As Ruxit became Dynatrace, the API was always there. The REST interface was always there. And, again, I think they're making it even easier to make those interactions to JIRA, ServiceNow, some of these other process and, I want to say, like, bureaucracy integrations.

Yeah. Like, I have great great information but I don't know how to make it actionable in my crazy... I don't know how to broker it out to you. Yeah. And turn it into like a plan as to how we're going to do stuff. I like those other I call them almost non-technical

integrations because it's about how you wrangle the cats into doing work. You wap at them with a little mouse thing maybe you put some cheese in the jira ticket and then get the cats and mice or i don't know how that works something like that clearly i don't really know how that integration works i don't even know how cheese works but but anyway i like i like the openness part because i think that's been missing from the dynatrace story as a strength and now I think that could be a serious strength for them.

I wonder, since we're in Las Vegas and the Super Bowl is coming up, I wonder if there's a sports book that will take bets on commercials and whether the sites go down associated with them. There's got to be a market for that. There's got to be betting against. Why don't we have a News of the Damned betting club? A News of the Damned betting club. Yeah.

So who's going to go down? Well, we are headquartered in Nevada. Yeah, I mean, we're probably legit. I suppose we could technically take bets through our website. We might have to register differently with some taxes or something. But, you know, we're not actually betting on the game itself, just to be clear. We're betting on the commercials. The chance of the website going down when the event happens.

You know, there could be a real problem. Crash website betting. There could be a real problem with insider information on that one. Well, yeah, but you would have to get out to some employee contract, your employment contract. Widget Co. has got a commercial coming up on the Super Bowl, and the employees at Widget Co. have decided to take bets out against their own marketing department. I think this is dangerous for the guys in the marketing department who celebrate the website crashing because now they're going to put money in their own pocket. So, yeah, you're right.

Maybe this is a bad, bad idea. Yeah, I think so. We're betting on our personal success, not necessarily the company's success. Awesome, awesome. So for anyone who's never been to a perform, we like to just share what we said at the top of the show. It is kind of one of the last performance only. Now, they're expanding the story, but performance geeks thrive in this strange little conference community. It is. And even some of the people wearing suits, they're performance geeks or

they're ex-performance geeks or they're high socially functioning performance geeks. Entrepreneurial performance geeks. Entrepreneurial social geeks. Ryan Folk is a performance geek. You can tell he's still a geek. He was wearing a coat today. So you have this ecosystem that you can have a very good, in-depth, technical conversation with a peer at this conference and then turn to them and say, do you want to get a scotch afterwards? That could work. Yeah. Even though you and I are both suffering getting over a head cold. Yes. That still works. That could work. Even though you and I are both suffering getting over a head cold, that still works. That's medicine. That's medicine, that's right.

Have you walked around to see many partners at all? I haven't done that today. Tomorrow, that is on my agenda. Because working for tech systems, I actually need some relationships with some partners for sub-vendor purposes. That sounds really, really good. So I'm going to be talking to them about their MIMs, minimum engagement length, minimum lead time. Their MIMs.

Minimum rate, you know, on-site versus off-site. Not MIMs. Like mint or mint. Or not like MIMs pie. Or a breath mint. Or not like a thin mint in a Monty Python sketch. A mint or mints. Or not like mints pie. Or a breath mint. Or not like a thin mint in a Monty Python sketch. A thin mint, yeah. But they're minimums.

What is your minimum lead time? What is your minimum engagement length on-site, off-site? What is your minimum bill rate? They all have margin requirements. They all have some amount of bench time to support and we've got to respect that so I need better information on the partner

community for where we have a Dynatrace engagement who do I go to and it's not always going to be dictated by who has the best rate but who has the best resource and I just see a few of the great sponsors and supporting vendors that have been here. The PagerDuty guys are right here.

We've talked about the X Matters folks that have these great hats. Pivotal has been here for the last four years. Absolutely four years. I don't know if Splunk is in the room anymore. Maybe somewhere. Well, I think there's a challenge in the log analysis. Could be a little bit of competition there. But obviously, Neotis is here.

That's three years in a row for sure. But there are a few others that we'd want to look. So giving a shout out. There's some new ones. Cap Gemini. Yeah, Dell EMC. Cap Gemini is here. AWS, of course.

We had an interview earlier today It's really, really good It's well So it's growing from a partner perspective, I think And also just positive experience generally Now, day two Day one wrap up We always talk about the food

Yes I spilled my food Breakfast all over myself Actually, I believe your breakfast attacked you. It did. It just jumped out of its thing all over me. So we had these breakfast sandwiches from a company called Egg Sluts. Yeah, Egg Sluts.

Yeah. And they were very tasty, but they were not. They were slutty all over me. It was a soft egg. Yeah. Panera has moved to this soft egg as well. Really. It was a soft egg. Yeah. Panera has moved to this soft egg as well. Really? Is it a real egg?

It's a real egg. How does it stay soft? I had the same problem that you had the first time they switched it, which is... It just spills all over you. You bite into it, and it went all over the front of my clothes. So that's one reason why you don't wear a suit. Yes. When you're eating soft eggs from the egg sluts.

Or you'd be like from the south, and you take that napkin, and you just do a Jethro Bodine right in front, and you just cover your whole front. Yeah, I like that. So food-wise, a hot day always has good food. So if you come for the hot day training, the food is always excellent. Fantastic breakfast, lunch. Melissa always does that planning. So I think I'm going to thank Melissa for the excellent food when I'm teaching.

And days two and three, it's a much larger crowd. Yeah, it's huge. Yeah, so they're serving all the meals in the marketplace area, which is great for the vendors. You get a chance to dine, see the vendors. I mean, they used to break it out and have meals separate from the marketplace. Yeah. So much more exposure for the vendors. Yeah, lots of cool traffic.

As a result, it's more fast food-ish. Yeah, and a lot of self-serve, right? It's kind of you can just get some food and mingle about by here in the podcast, come back and do that kind of stuff. The one thing that's different, remember four years ago we encouraged a lot of people to share their performance stories? Yes. It's like there's a lot of repeat people here, but we haven't been getting as many stories before. I wonder if their management spoke with them and said, perhaps you don't want to share those stories. It could be that maybe news travels, oh, no, they're going to make fun of you.

No, but we never make fun of them, but they're not allowed for NBA purposes to share the story. But we're still welcome people's stories. Well, you know, maybe tomorrow. There's still an opportunity tomorrow. There's still an opportunity. I'll actually tweet that out on the story. But we're still welcome. Well, you know, maybe tomorrow. There's still an opportunity tomorrow. There's still an opportunity. So we could send. I'll actually tweet that out on the thing. That would be good.

Because we usually give away a nice parting gift. A pair of shoes. We gave away a drone a couple years ago. We need to talk because I have to figure out how to redesign the PerfBite shoes. Because they got rid of the thing we used to do. I know. I'll figure that out. But there was also, I posted the drone paper airplane

like phone controlled paper airplane drone. Oh, cool. I thought it was really cool. So I think we'll give one of those. We'll see how that goes. Any other reflections on the end of day one here? Venue wise, I think the Cosmopolitan better suits this conference than the Bellagio did last year. The Bellagio's conference center is so massive.

It's huge. And it took so much time just to walk the venue that for the size of the conference, I think it was overwhelming. Yeah, yeah. The Cosmopolitan is just a great venue for this event. Much more comfortable. It's compact. It's more intimate. Yeah.

It's easy to get to and from the rooms and the event. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. So I got to give a kudos and shout out to the migration from the Bellagio back to the Cosmopolitan. The rooms at the Cosmopolitan, fantastic. Holy cow. You got quite the awesome quarter room there. I don't know how I wound up with the room that I did.

But, yeah, it's got a porch that goes all the way around the outside. Very nice. Yeah, a party later. Just like The Hangover. Yeah, we've got a hip-hop crew coming up. Yeah, no, that sounds good. I personally will probably just be taking some cold medicine and going back to sleep. Yeah, a double shot.

Yeah. So, yeah. So, Mark, what are your thoughts? Well, I just kind of wrap things up here. I'd like to just sort of thank our friends at Dynatrace for inviting us back. Yeah. This is always bigger and better and more. This is a great show.

Yeah, it is really fun. Yeah, so we have some new fans, new friends, which is kind of fun. And we actually have a podcast sign this year. Yeah, we need to get a picture of that and post that. It's like serious. It says podcast on the sign. And we have an on-air sign. Yeah.

It's just doing the normal outro. So we would do the normal thing that we say in the spiel of the whatever. So I'd like to thank my mother for tuning in. Yes, thank you to James' mom. I'm assuming she's tuning in this evening. She hasn't been chatting online. And thank Rachel as well. Yes.

For giving me a hall pass to come out here for a couple days. That's very cool. As we're doing house planning and stuff like that. Yes. And happy birthday. Happy birthday. Well, you know, it's been a year since the last performance. Oh, that's true.

I've had a birthday. You've had a birthday. I did turn the big 5-0. We also didn't. It's Brian's birthday today. It is Mr. Wilson's birthday. I forgot it last year, and I forgot it this year because it's performed. So it's happy birthday to Brian. And I have to tell you, here we go.

There we go. Happy birthday to Brian Wilson. Mr. Wilson. We are very pleased that you are joining us and supporting us in the peer performance podcasting. So a great happy birthday from everyone here at Perk Fights. Yep. And Brian Wilson. All right, and we're going to catch you tomorrow.

Catch everyone. Come and listen to us tomorrow. Day two of more of the same periodic live from the main stage, periodic things. And, yeah, that'll be good. We'll talk to you all tomorrow. Have a great evening everyone good night