PurePerformance - Dynatrace PERFORM 2019 Welcome to Day 2

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

Mark, Jame and Brian talk about today's announcements.

Coming to you from Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, it's Pure Performance! Hey, good morning everybody! It's time for Pure Performance Bites. Yes, today is Wednesday, January 30th, 2019. We've been doing this for three years together with you, and you'd think listeners wouldn't be confused, and they're still a little bit confused. Yes, people come up to the booth and stare at us. Well, the fun bit now is that we have a permanent on-air behind us. So everyone says, oh, are you on-air?

Yeah, we're on-air. And we're sitting here just like typing on our laptops. Yeah. So it would be weird. Yeah, I'm doing performance work. I'm doing text-to-speech on-air. Yes. So good morning.

Good morning. So we just watched the opening announcements and the opening main stage performance. Yes. Right? Yes. Right? Yes. And, you know, I got to hand it to Dave Anderson. Right? We gave him a little ribbing last night. Not some critical feedback.

Yeah. Positive, constructive feedback. About the somberness. The earnest tone. Yes. He's a very sympathetic guy, actually. We need to improve our lives. And it was very earnest.

And it was almost as if he did that. He watched the keynote speech about being a grain of sand on the beach. Yeah. Being really small in the universe. Which is kind of a depressing thing. Yeah. But then today he came back with a vengeance, kicking and screaming like, We're going to get better.

We're going to do things. Yeah. I really like how he asked everyone to come down front and make a testimony there at the end and be baptized in the Dynatrace. Is that? No, wait a minute. That was a different event.

Oh, that was a different event. I think you had a different event. They have the pool. That's the Mormon temple, I think it was, right, where they have the pool. Oh, I'm sorry. They use a jacuzzi to baptize you. I used to live in North Carolina, and Billy Graham is there.

Oh, yeah. Every corner had a baptismal pool, right? It is kind of a flashback to the Crusades there. Okay. The Billy Graham Crusades. Awesome. But we are here, and of course, in good form. Dave kicked it up.

Congrats, Dave. I just want to shout out to you. Congrats, Dave. Yeah, so props. You can follow him, actually, directly on Twitter. He's Dave Ando. That's right. Congrats, Dave. Props. You can follow him directly on Twitter. He's Dave Ando. That's right. Dave Ando. And if you say it really fast,

Devando. It seems like one word. If you say it fast three times, he appears and gives you a Donatrace demonstration. Could be, but actually, I wonder if that's actually... If he started his own tech company, that's a good name. Devando.

Yeah. Anyway, so's a good name. Devando. Yeah. Maybe, yeah. Anyway, so. Enough about Dave. Yeah, enough about Dave. Props to you, Dave. Yeah.

Day two. Day two, yes. We're a little tired. A little tired. We were out to people watching. We had a whole conversation last night with people who've been observing the workers. We'll call them workers here in Las Vegas. Okay, that's right. Professionals.

Yes, yes. That was a rather bizarre conversation. It was, especially now that people are observing. Yes, do not accept leaflets from people on street corners in Las Vegas. The leaflets in Las Vegas, it's an adult kind of a town for that kind of stuff. But I do still think it's completely wrong. When you're a geek, and they know you're a geek in Vegas when you're wearing your backpack walking through a casino. And it doesn't have like an oxygen tank in it or something.

It's like got a computer in it. But then the professional workers will come around and put their little leaflet cards in the back of your backpack. Yes. So you get up to your room and you're like oh i'm unpacking things or you worse yet you take it home and your your spouse or partner starts taking apart your your briefcases oh honey what's uh what's what do i see here who's uh who's charity who's uh yeah and you know what who's bunny or or what what's worse and this happened to me um we had our training session our se training session right uh over the summer at some point.

I forget where. We were in Minneapolis, home of Prince, right? Yes. And the new generation. On the last day as we're leaving, we all have our luggage in the room there. One of my colleagues was funny enough to write on a little note, hey, Brian, thanks for last night, blah, blah, blah, and with some professional-sounding name signed on it. I get downstairs.

When I get home, I'm taking all my stuff out, doing my laundry, and I find the note. I'm like, I'm so glad I did this laundry because, yeah, it's kind of a funny joke. Anyway, we're way off topic now. We are way off topic. We have some announcements. The third announcement yesterday was AIOps and openness.

Those were the first two. Those were the first two and the developer free trial or free for life. Yep. Today, session replay. Right. But to me, Brian, this is deja vu. It's deja vu all over again. Isn't that the saying?

Yogi Berra? Redundant. Yeah, so last year. Well, you know, at least it's not like the cat in the Matrix. The glitch? The glitch.

It means they changed something. Or Berenstain Bears versus Berenstain Bears. Now you're even more off topic. Look that one up. Really? Anyway, yeah. That's fascinating.

That shows you the glitch in the time continuum of our world. Okay. Okay, so basically everyone knows it was the Berenstain Bears from their childhood. Right. You go on and you look. It's always been the Berenstain Bears. What? Yeah.

And you can't find any evidence of it ever being the Berenstain Bears. But everyone's like, no, it's always been the Berenstain Bears. So anyway. Let's tie this back to Session Replay. Yes, isn't there another one like that of like the Ford logo or the Chevy logo? Something. Like people remember the Chevy logo looked a certain way, and you go back and look in history, and like it's not that logo.

Yeah, so these are the breaks in the continuum. And this is really what... Session replay does go back in time and replay stuff. But it's with your computer systems here in 2019, not necessarily the books from your childhood or automobile logos. I brought

it home, didn't I? Keep it together. So Session Replay, anyone who listened last year or was paying attention last year, we made this big announcement about Session Replay. And I myself was super excited. Yeah. Because for me, it's like, oh, great, they're based in Barcelona.

I want to become a Session Replay expert, so I have an excuse to go to Barcelona. And then we went back to work on it. So basically, there's been doing a lot of work on it. So did anything actually come out last year for session replay, or was it just announcing that we were working on it? We were announcing working on it, and then there was eventually some large customer, like let's say a private betas.

So this is very – so people might think about session replay, think about something like T-Leaf, right? And be like, okay, so what? What are you guys doing? The session replay that we have is a whole new style of doing it. A whole other ballgame. Completely different ways, much lighter weight, everything else, right? And it's also connected into the smartscape and all of the data that's in Dynacast. Well, that was some of the extra work that was going on this year.

So I think what happened was, again, I'm just going to project here. So hopefully I don't lose my job for these projections. No, no, that's fine. This is a total guess. We had a viable, somewhat viable product at the time last year. Right. Then there was some, all sorts of scaling tests, real-world testing. But as we saw today, some of the features in session replay

that are now available today were not available at the time last year. And I think it makes a lot more sense that when you're going, if you're going to come out with this, come out with a bang. So to me, the biggest thing that I saw today, which was really, really, really amazing to me is we always had the ability with session replay, you know, and what we've been seeing where you'll look at a user session, there'll be a button. You can go to the session replay bit. Yeah. in what we've been seeing, where you'll look at a user session, there'll be a button,

you can go to the session replay bit, right? Now, this doesn't sound groundbreaking, but when I saw it, I was like, holy cow, I didn't realize we didn't have that, and that's so critical. What you do is when you're on a session replay node, and you look at the timeline, and there's all these little nodes with the different actions the user is taking. Right, and you can see the flow.

Yeah, and if you're seeing, okay, something funny is going on here, you can click on the node. That'll bring you right on back to, now this will bring you back to the user session, see the flow. Yeah, and if you're seeing, okay, something funny is going on here, you can click on the node. That'll bring you right on back to, now this will bring you back to the user session, to the waterfall. That was sending that traffic. Yeah. So it's integrating, I mean, it's taking in direct full integration between the replay,

the user session, the waterfall, the full stack, everything back there. Right. And it was that we had it in one direction. Part of this is going back to the other direction, which I know. Okay. It doesn't seem that crazy, but I'm sure there's a heck of a lot there because if you think about it, that's going back to the full stack transaction. Oh, yeah.

The back end and everything, which going through all the data, collecting the data points, putting it all together. So I think there's something else to bring up here on session replay. T-Leaf was kind of expensive from a resource costing perspective, how much it added to the front end. Oh, yeah. And I think it's critical that if you're going to have a session replay solution, that you don't need to engage in what's called quantum monitoring.

You don't want to change the state of what you're monitoring by monitoring it. Yeah, yeah. And this, again, this is not capturing a video. This is, as far as I remember, all the DOM manipulations into a text file. It's the metadata evidence of the session. Yeah, and then we can reconstruct that all with everything. There was also some cool stuff with the data scrubbing. So obviously data privacy is very important. And the odd thing is I remember talking to one of the banks last year,

and they're like, we need to be able to see the data on the screen, which you would think in the banking industry you wouldn't want to. Right. But for compliance, the banks were like, no, we need to be able to see it because if a customer comes and says, my thing only says, you know, I was on there, and you guys said I only had $10,000 in my account, you know, they need to be able to see. Show me the evidence of that. And be like, oh, yeah, no, we see what your thing is.

So data masking for certain levels of security but not others. you know, they need to be able to see and be like, oh, yeah, no, we see what your thing is. So data masking for certain levels of security but not others. But it was funny, the interesting one that they showed, you would think, okay, if it's masked, the entire field is blanked out. Yeah. But the example that they just showed in this was for there was an international phone number. Right. And it was getting a form error because I don't know how international phone numbers work, but it was like plus, the plus sign, and then the number. And normally that entire thing would be masked.

Right. The reason there was an error is because it didn't have like plus 00 or plus slash forward or whatever the other codes were. So if the entire field was masked, you wouldn't know what was in there that was triggering the error. Right. Whereas if they only mask not the, I forget the characters that they call them, but there's certain character elements in fields. Like even a regular telephone number, you might have a hyphen, right? So if someone did 201 plus 555 plus 1212 instead of dash, you might see the pluses and be like, oh, well, you put pluses in between.

You know the format's minus, right? Yeah. So it's going to have that in there so that when you're looking back to say, why did this person get an error field or an error and whatever and couldn't proceed you won't see the real information but you'll see the character codes the sorry the characters that were crucial for the formatting so so not pii data but just enough whatever the formatting pieces that are required so it's taking that masking to another level where yeah it's not just all or nothing and then under the covers you've got pans and everything else now what's interesting is even

though you've got layers of data in motion right data data and transmission data in flight i think is the other phrase data at rest the other compliance pieces dynatrace has full access to a lot of this data in its unencrypted form as it's flying through the app. So you do have the ability. We should talk to somebody who's gone through an audit process with Dynatrace in the auditor's vision, in their scope, to say how does Dynatrace handle that compliance from a session replay and storage. Because if you say you store that session, you have PII or PCI data at rest that has to be encrypted at rest.

So it's got to be stored encrypted. But I think when you're doing things like user names and all that, I don't know if that's actually even coming back. It probably is. It's got to be stored somewhere. No, no. I think it's being masked at the source. Yeah, it could be.

And obviously, as you know then, because you bring up this concern, a lot of people might be like, oh, well, you have the data once it's in the back end and all that. And no, we don't actually because that's in a method argument maybe, which you would have to elect to capture. So that's your choice. That's your choice to capture, yeah. A lot of the misnomers with these types of tools are that all this data is being captured and seen. And in reality, most of it is not.

Now, when you get to the front end, if your username is in your URL, that's being passed back. Right. Well, then that's open to the world anyway. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's a... And that's a YP, not an MP. It's never the tool itself. What are the other applications they mentioned for session replay was using in-dev and test, right?

So you have a bug, and you want to basically prove that with an unattended, like if you're in CICD, and you have unattended automated tests, and a test is failing, you want to go and actually see exactly why that test failed. Now, that's been in many of the automated testing tools for a very long time. Oh, sure. Video, session capture. Screen capture on error. Expected versus actual. But this just adds another correlated way to say there was the error, but here it's connected to everything in the back end.

And quite frankly, Mark, there are a lot of open source functional tools which are not as capable as the previous generation commercial tools. Agreed. For reporting purposes. So this is filling a gap. Yeah, so if you had auditing on the test runs to say this is a certified release, then you can prove that those test results. So this is a very, again, use the tool in a way it wasn't designed. Yeah, and the nice piece about what you're saying there is you're using one tool for it.

So if you do see that there's an error, let's say you have the Jenkins integration or some pipeline integration and one of these tests comes back and says it fails. Yeah. Well, you're looking at, you can look at the failure data within Dynatrace and then click right through there to get to that instead of having to say, okay, let me go find that test runner, the screen capture on error or whatever

it is in my other tool. It's all interconnected to the one piece so you're just it's faster. When Dave was talking about Uber, one of his younger colleagues complaining about having to move their finger a couple millimeters to be found on the location better. That's all about speed and ease of use, right? To me, I think people have political objections to Uber. That's why they switched to Lyft. But this was more about, I'm talking about the ease of use.

Any extra little step you're taking is another inconvenience in your job. So session replay, back on the automated testing piece for functional tests, unattended functional test execution. Yep. This is also a solution that you say you could just add. You don't have to change

your scripts. You just run the same thing. You're just adding session replay to the QA. And by the way, session replay is also going to give you some performance data. How long? Performance hit, you mean? No. How long it takes to render. Oh, yeah.

Well, that's already in RUM data. That's not going to be in session replay. Session replay is showing you the... No, but from a CICD perspective, you also have this data coming in for ROM, and you can now ask questions on a single-user basis on a CICD side of the house. Yeah, yeah. You could make decisions on the pipeline. Does it work for one versus does it work for many, performance-wise?

Okay. You lost me a little bit, but that's okay. Okay. You might get some rendering insights. But, I mean, again, if you use session replay together with RUM, I just think that once a test breaks, the very first question is, why did it break? Did the tool break or did the software break?

And did that break happen on the client, or is it connected all the way to the back end data, application logic, whatever? And there's things that you don't see in your data. There's things you don't see in a JavaScript error. There's things you don't see in code. And again, another good example with the cruise booking was they went through, they got to the page where they're looking at their final prices and the prices didn't look right. So the user clicked back to their search to see oh here was the my my cost

okay the cost was right so now i click back and oh wait now i have to reselect my room reselect my deck reselect re-enter my information none of that is an error right but it's a usability issue yeah that you know maybe you're losing conversions from that. You're going to have no data on that because it's not an error. So that's really, really key for when session replay kicks in so that you have a full understanding of what's going on with the piece. So, yeah, and then the big thing was, right, we're talking about, well, when is it, right? We heard about it last year, we heard about it this year. I was watching the thing the whole time. I'm like, when is it? Come on. about it last year about this year i was watching the the thing the whole time i'm like when is it come on like i just wanted to know like cut to the chase when do we get yeah uh end of february is open beta at all so it's been in a very very

limited beta uh we were baited doing betas with very large customers i think that one was uh yeah yeah that's what what he said the cruise line so it was a very large customer beta so that we can work out all the kinks end of february it's going to be open for anybody to apply to the beta program now. Session replay. And so session replay is on the table. And I would say this is not your 2018 session replay. This is not your tea leaf replay. No.

This is not your automated capture and that thing. This is a whole new session replay. It is, and it's all integrated. Session replay 2.0. Session replay Redux. 3.0? How about, yeah, I don't know. I think they were talking a little bit about...

No matrix in your language as well. Part 2. There you go. Two and a half. 33 and a third. All right, awesome. So congrats on the session replay stuff. That was pretty awesome.

What else did we see on main stage? There was a little bit of talk. They didn't really go too deep into it, but I think there was a little bit of talk. I heard Dave Anderson referencing it earlier, so it must have been a real little bit of talk. Yeah. But there's this query language. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know about the query language?

Have you seen any of that? Yeah. So it's been available in the API. I didn't catch when it's... I know we've had access to it in the GUI via debug flags, but I'm wondering, I didn't know if... I don't know what kind of announcement was made there, but for everybody out there, for the run data, right?

It's already in the API that you can get access to it. Yep. But you can also run queries within the tool itself to create charts and graphs and everything. So it's really being able to write queries against the RUM data for things that you couldn't build in a regular type of dashboard. Show me users from region X who did not convert and had money in their cart and how much value was left in the cart when their session ended. Show me the number of people who were allocated a cart who never used it and the cost associated with it. So this actually puts Dynatrace closer to usability of like Splunk, Grafana with Influx,

the Influx query languages, some of the Times, Cassandra. I'm thinking of like some of the unstructured query language pieces. But again, it's been supported in the API. I used it in the API two years ago it was there in the API. And the key there is that if you want... But now it's easier to use. Yeah, you can use it within Dynatrace. But again, I really like to stress the API

because any tool is going to have limitations on what you can do with it. The key thing is you always have access to this data. You want to pull it out and do whatever you want. Let's say you're a coding genius. You want to put it into a Cassandra database and align it with 16 other data sources. And use Grafana to do some kind of crazy...

Other telemetry. Yeah, you could use it. You could use it in Dynatrace. You could use it elsewhere. There is a spec. There's a document. Actually, the docs on the query language are actually really good.

In the RUM world, like if you go the documentation online and in the community, there's a whole separate little thread for using the query language, which is pretty good. So there's a lot of help. So I could use the API to pull results into a LaTeX build document process that automatically generates an iBook format. So when the executives get up in the morning, they can just pull up their iPad and they can actually see daily reports. Perfect.

Sort of a manifest of what got pushed, what features, what's good, what's bad. I like that. This is like the hard sell side of the Dynatracing, working on the sales side, because when you're trying to sell a product to a technology team, Dynatrace has all this amazing stuff, AI and all that. Everyone else comes in and tries to say,

we have these checkboxes and all. You go down that whole battle of everything. But where it really comes in, where the real difference is, I mean, tons of real differences, right? But for me, the critical difference is these APIs where you have all these things. They're like, what do you want to do? Guess what?

There's APIs. You have the data. This can be done, right? It's so open. And the idea, again, doing things that it wasn't designed to do. We have interfaces built in to allow you to do things that we weren't designed to do. And when you start thinking about, James, doing a report from this, great idea. It can be done.

You are doing the integrations into your automated performance testing. Yeah. Great idea. You can do it. Like, there's no, you don't hit the brick wall. You don't say, okay, everything's self-contained. This is where we can use the tool. I think the only limitation is your imagination at this point oh that's frightening i know and so we we can imagine you know we have conversations

with people like we did yesterday with henrik it's like these ideas if you know the discipline and you've lived in the trenches of the pain it's like oh you know what would be really nice i need to make sure that guy gets a report and then these people over here they get this and they get that and then we can use that same data to rerun the pipeline when it's, you know. If you can imagine how to solve a problem, there's definitely an easy way to do it. Think about a lot of things you have at home. I know I have had conversations with my dad where he gets really frustrated because he's got a stereo receiver that has some sort of Bluetooth thing or some hook-in with Google, but he wants to have some remote speakers but he needs to get get it to work with his player and there's brick

walls everywhere blocking all this compatibility and making everything work you know these things happen all the time in real in the real world where you're like i i have this thing i want to be able to make it do this oh i can't you know and when you have a combination of tools like when we were talking to henrik yep where he's got you you got the openness on Neotis, you got the openness on Dynatrace. I want to do this. Oh, I can do it. Yeah. You know.

That's great. I really love where the good tools are going these days. All right. Anyway. Last part of my wrap-up is the commentary on people wearing Dynatrace shirts. Yes. Because the other thing that they shout out from the main stage was that they told everyone on day three, apparently we're going to do like a 2,000-person group photo with our T-shirts,

like wearing the Dynatrace shirts, which even though you have different hashtags on the back, the front is the logo. And apparently, just look around the room here. Now, we're on the radio, but there's a lot of Dynatrace shirts like everybody's wearing their dynatrace shirt that explains it's a good performance cult it is it's definitely more than 10 i think you're we're probably 50 of the people have their shirt on that explains why i'm looking around and saying i don't recognize half of my fellow co-workers I think there was a gentleman even with a kilt who was wearing a shirt. Oh, yeah, no, we know that guy.

He was in the Puzzler. Okay. He had a Utila kilt on. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember him. He was great. But, yeah, I've been looking around all day, yesterday and today, being like, I don't recognize half of these employees.

I'm like, oh, they're not. Because they work for your customers. But the thing is, yeah, we're all wearing the exact same shirt. Yeah. So it's good. We are all one. I get to be more generic now. We are all Dynatrace one.

Yes. Any other thoughts for day two here? We're going to do it. We should capture some testimonials. We haven't hardly got any. That would be nice. I know. We're up on a little dais this year.

We're not at ground level. So I think people are scared to talk to us. They're intimidated. Especially since they see the on-air sign behind us. People stay away from the booth. We used to be able to stealth sneak in, just catch them. Hey, want to chat? So we may be doing that.

We have a bunch of other folks that we'll catch out of their sessions. We'll post some of those today. Yep. And that will be fun. And then, of course, this morning I just feel triumphant because I did not spill egg juice all over myself at breakfast. Very good, Mark. I mean, that's an upgrade. That's a step up for me.

You're growing up. Yeah. You're becoming an adult. Taking on responsibilities, you know, at my age, right? And once again— That hangover recovery doesn't work if you squirt the egg all over yourself. And once again, for Brian's birthday, and today is Andy's mom, her birthday. Yes.

Thank you. Happy birthday, Mr. Anderson. Happy birthday, Brian. Happy birthdayom. Happy birthday, buddy. Happy birthday to you. Is it Colin? No. Is that me? What?

Mooty. Okay. That'd be like Andy Woodson. Okay. And there are a few other notables in the performance industry. Robert Linton just had a birthday a couple days ago. Happy birthday, Robert Linton. You know, I share my birthday with Oprah Winfrey, so happy birthday, Oprah.

Get out of here. Wow. Well, not the exact same year, but I think she's the 29th, yes. That's very exciting. That means I'm bound for success. Yes. And you get a session replay, and you get a session replay, and you get a session replay. Everybody look underneath your booth.

Yes. Awesome. Alright, so welcome to day two. Yep, we got a lot of great stuff in store today, so stay tuned everybody. Stay tuned and we'll catch you guys a little later. Bye-bye. I'm gonna go get a guy to help me. Thank you.