PurePerformance - Dynatrace PERFORM 2019 Session Replay with Simon Scheurer

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

We take a deep look at the new Session Replay news with Senior Director of Product Management Simon Scheurer

Coming to you from Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, it's Pure Performance! Hello everybody, welcome back to Dynatrace Perform 2019 in Las Vegas. This is Brian Wilson of PerfBytes, and AskPerfBytes, along with the lovely and talented Mark Tomlinson and the very well-dressed James Pulley. Hey. PerfBytes. So this is pure. I'm going to try to get this right, get it right this time.

Pure PerfOrmance. No, pure. PerfByte Performance Perform. That's why I don't even try. Project. All right, but we have a... Performance Project. Who's our guest here?

It's a joint podcast. That's all you need to know. Yes. Hopefully, I'll get the right inflections on the last name. I'm so excited that you're here to chat with us. Close. Lick. Scheuter, actually.

Scheuter. No, you were pretty close, honestly. The Americanized version. That's all the one that matters. You have to practice your Deutsch. Fair enough. You're the... let's see. Senior Director of Product Management.

Yes. Exactly. And the announcement today is session replay. So we're really psyched to have you dig a little deeper into this with us. Yes. Happy to do so. Yeah. Yeah.

We, you know, when we are doing all our full stack story and we have just seen that with all the AI we have, sometimes we had just this, it just stopped at the user experience. And we wanted to complement that with having this final picture, this final puzzle piece. And that's when we started digging into session replay. And today, we finally are ready to release it into a public beta such that all our customers can use it and we're really proud of that. Yeah and some so congratulations arriving at this point we had pointed out that there was some session replay even last year it wasn't the full

capabilities that you guys have been working on now. Well it was some of it it was kind of ready yeah but you know it was not it didn't have the qualities that we think it needs to have to be production ready to go now one of the aspects was really volume um because think of a mobile user and you want to do session replay on it he's on an edge connection you, you know, upload tens of megabytes of data. Yeah. Maybe even kill his data contract. It would not be resilient. So we did a lot around bringing volume down, bringing bandwidth down.

Okay. But also because of these upcoming regulations in Europe, GDPR. Oh, that's right. You know, we had to or we wanted to also add a lot of more capabilities to make sure we can protect customers' privacy. So all these aspects we did, and now we're ready at a level where we can say it's ready to go into production, large-scale production. That sounds great. And I saw with the data protection, the nice feature that you talked about today in terms of the telephone number, where certain characters that are not related to the data will still be exposed so that you can see if it is because of a wrong formatting issue

or something like that as opposed to just blanking it all out um and that little bit of finesse is really important because when you're dealing with having to mask that having to deal with gdpr you don't want to fully lose the ability to still understand what happened so i could i definitely you know we've yeah i've been I've been dying for session replay. I love it. You know, I've been wanting to get my hands on it. I know a lot of our customers are, so I'm very excited to hear that we're finally, we're getting to the beta now in February.

Yeah. So I was going to say, like, we have people listening on the podcast who maybe have no clue what we're talking about. So maybe just kick us off with, off with what are the three things that explain session replay? Well, I think probably you just need one thing. Which is really watching over the shoulders of a user and making a movie of what he does.

Because that's literally what it is now. So it's really a pixel-perfect reproduction of everything that's going on on his screen. We don't have the audio tracks, we don't have the guy talking. Well, we don't have the audio tracks, so we don't have the guy talking. Well, maybe not yet. Apart from that...

Or Siri, you're not talking to Siri. Cortana. We don't see his face, but everything that's going on on the screen, including all the moves, all the clicks it does, everything that changes the entire visual experience, that's what we have in a pixel-perfect,

4K quality way. Right, right. And that's what Session Replay is. Now, is it leveraging HTML5 interfaces to do a lot of this, or browser-wise? But it's also native apps, any kind of app. Well, it leverages HTML5. We also are working on the native app support.

This is not yet out. The reason being that on native apps, you don't have the same capabilities as with HTML. And we are just not yet happy with what level of volume we have reached. So we want to shrink it down more without compromising quality. And that's where we're not yet there.

So we'll release the mobile part later. And they're just going into better now with the web version, with the HTML-based version. That sounds cool. What about combining it? Because the thing that we've been thinking is combining session replay in other use cases, like combining it with RUM data, with RUM, and combining it with the SmartScape, right? So you're actually kind of pulling all of these pieces together.

And is that part of the vision for where we're going? Absolutely. I mean, it's not only part of the vision. I think it's the main element that actually distinguishes Dynatrace Session Replay from all the other products in the market because it is interwoven with ROM. It is part of ROM. So it's not a separate part. It is ROM. And, of course, I made a small demo this morning with, let's say, just a customer case.

A customer calls in and he says, you know, I ordered this hoodie, but it came with the wrong color. And now you go into session replay, you look for the reaction, you're able to find it, right, where he clicked on that. You see it in session replay that he actually did click the red hoodie. But now that's not the only part. Interesting is now that from that point, you can actually drill in down to the last line of code because this very color selection was always slowish. So I just drilled in in line of trace

and saw that they needed 55 database statement to build it. Don't ask me why. Someone wrote that code. Someone wrote that code. Someone wrote that code. It was not Simon. No, it's not me. But that's exactly what you get. And this full stack insight, you know,

this is something that no other product can provide. This is really a unique selling proposition that we have with Tandroid Session Replay. Yeah, when I saw this morning when you showed that, I knew we could always go from the sessions to the replay. But then when you clicked on the node in the replay went back to the step in the waterfall i mean in the thing went to the waterfall i was like i think that was a little bit newer i'm like that bi-directional is so important because again you don't have to jump out and figure out

where you were and get back and it's you know it seems like such a small little piece but that seamless flow was just yeah i love I love that. That was great. And I think it's important too to understand with the example you showed was great. At least I think when people think, well, I have an error, I maybe get a JavaScript error, I see a slow rendering time. But what you don't see is a lot of the usability stuff, right? And so in the example that we saw this morning for people on the internets was that a user goes through, they get to the final step. It was like a cruise purchase. They get to the final step, looked at the price, and they're like, is that the price I picked?

They go back, looked at their search, looked at their price. And then when they go back forward again, they're presented with pick which deck you want, pick which cabin you want. When you get to the form, all the form fields are empty again. So there's no error going on anywhere. It's an error in design. But it's a horrible user experience. But terrible user experience. And that's what I think is like where you say, everyone else is stopping at rum. We're not looking at actually what the user is feeling, right? So it changes that dynamic a lot.

Very cool. And you mentioned division now. And this is exactly division where we want to go. Because if we want to be truly full stack, we cannot stop at performance errors and availability and these kind of topics, but we need to include the usability part. And that's also where we will invest heavily now in the next years and months. That we are not just, you know, session replay is our first piece, but the next thing will be to more easily being able to find the sessions that matter from a usability perspective, right? Where did people rage click? Or were they just moving the cursor around because they didn't know, they were confused, right? And we can recognize these things, and then we will flag the sessions.

And also, I'm guessing there would be metadata from a session replay itself that's usable in the AI engine. Absolutely. So you can start doing, you know, having an automated or autonomous way to get to those, hey, there's a lot of people with very similar behaviors as thus, which relates to, I mean, that's very interesting for like a human factor study and everything else. I mean, ultimately, we want to have the same functionality for usability analysis that we currently have for problem.

We want to have root cause detection and we want to have the remediation. So our vision is that, of course, it goes into the AI because we will have all these attributes. We can also raise problems now because suddenly there are more people confused and more people are frustrated or rage clicking.

So, you know, your usability has changed or we detect dead clicks, right? Yeah. And this, of course, should also raise a problem. So if you do a new deployment and suddenly you have 20 times as much people that are rage-clicking, you are obviously a severe issue.

And for me, you know, a code level problem or a usability problem, it's the same kind of problem. It just keeps people from doing what they want to do. Yeah, yeah. And so we should treat them the same way. And obviously this is where we want to go. Not just show, you have a problem, but where

is it? And what do you need to change to make it disappear? And this step, I think, this will be the next big thing to really give our customers the ability to automatically know what they need to change to improve their applications. Yeah.

Yeah. I wanted to ask, so we know that's going to be in the AI. Are there plans? What we've been talking to with a lot of people these last few days are creative uses of products, right? Where we have a fantastic API in Dynatrace and people are starting to use it in a lot of creative ways. We're doing really cool integrations with Neotis,

or they're coming to us and working with us. A lot of vendors are, you know, us and OpenShift working together. Are there plans on this data being available via the API so that users can start using it, like, in ways we weren't even planning for? Yeah, definitely. So we already have it available through the user session query language. Okay. So there we already can access the data.

So that's already in the API as well? Yeah, this is there. But we'll extend it because there are some elements still missing. Well, technical reasons, I don't want to delve too deep into it, but this is definitely, we'll add that. And also all these usability properties

that I just mentioned, we'll add them as as well such that whatever you want to do you can actually access all already all this rich information available to get into even new uh use cases that as you said we don't even know what they could be but of course you know someone's going to think of something yeah yeah yeah yeah we'll be surprised yeah they will run i see a whole discipline developing to provide reporting to marketing departments on usability just out of the RUM data and session replay. Completely independent of the back-end statistics. I see somebody being the VP of user psychology. You know, with the rage clips you talk about. But accessibility, I mean, you think about the people that do invest in accessibility and human factors.

They're all like PhD level psychologists and they're looking at human behaviors and ergonomics. And that's a very costly thing to do if you have a rare, somewhat rare app, maybe less rare now, where you're almost ubiquitously invading the human experience with software and interaction and digital interaction to do every function. I loved the video this morning on the main stage, the guy trying to get into his house after going to the dentist. It was fantastic. But that's just it. Session replay for that guy would be like, wow, this is, yeah. But that's, I mean, that's a real human experience. But we'll see that same thing digitally by leveraging data and metadata analysis about a session.

That's right. Always have a hard back, a physical backup. A physical backup. Yeah, exactly. A key. Exactly. What else should we know about session replay or anything else? Or Barcelona?

Well, Barcelona is a great city. Yeah. I just had to bring some actually i got into trouble in the airport yeah i wanted to bring some jamon serrano from barcelona yeah i've heard about bringing a whole egg yeah and i actually declared it which probably was a bad idea so i went through like free scanners yeah yeah no apart apart from that, Barcelona's gorgeous as always. Did it make it through? Yeah, yeah. It did make it through. It was just... I don't see any in front of me.

It's gone. I'm really sorry. But it was good. It was good. It was really good. I mean, I already made the main points. The next thing, the next big thing also for me and the Barcelona team will be to dig into the usability analytics part and add more intelligence to the on-top-off session replay.

And we're really thrilled to get that done. Now, they announced near the end of February, it'll open to anyone who's interested. They can just send along information, contact their rep, or go through the community even, I think. Exactly. And then an expectation for the beta would be, you know, starting with different customers and rolling through different sectors,

different kinds of apps. What are you looking forward to there? Well, I mean, it's always just I want to get it out now to get the real feedback, right? Yeah, yeah. Because it's a visual, and we'll just find out things we're not even dreaming of yet. And so that's why I'm so eager to finally get it out on the market. And we will be rolling it out pretty broadly. So from the beginning, we want to cover different industries to also get really good feedback.

And we will also put the process in place with TimeTrace, one premium business insight to support these customers such that we can also help them with recommendations and really get an intense dialogue going. That sounds good. That sounds good. That sounds good. Congratulations. Thank you. That's really great.

And thanks for joining the podcast. Well, very welcome. We've never come to Barcelona to perform, to do a podcast. Don't we need podcasting in Barcelona? Absolutely. Would we have to speak Spanish? It's totally mandatory. And one of our other hosts speaks Spanish,

so he could come and speak. They speak Spanish in Barcelona, in Spain. In Catalonia. Catalonia. Well, you know, Barcelona is pretty international, so Spanish, you'll be fine. And even English, it's okay. All right. So you definitely should come.

All right. Okay. We just put a plug in there, Brian. We're going to go to Barcelona. All right. Excellent. All right. Thank you, Simon, so much.

It's been a pleasure as always. Thanks for having me. We'll hopefully have some really great, well, maybe we'll get to catch up in a few months. Excellent, in Barcelona. And definitely sign up for the beta. Yeah, sign up for the, yeah, that stuff's delicious. Sign up for the beta and sign up for Perform Barcelona, everybody.

Yeah. I think it's probably for Perform Barcelona, everybody. Yeah. I think it's probably opening pretty soon. Anyway, thanks for coming. Muchas gracias. Thanks for having me. All right, thanks. Bye-bye.