PurePerformance - Perform 2020 Andi on the Street: Mobile, Service Meshes and Self Service

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

Andi Grabner, our man-on-the-street, gets the scoop on:-How to improve every user’s mobile experience​ - with Dominik Punz-Advanced observability in cloud native microservices and service meshes�� with Alois Mayr and Sonja Chevre-Monitoring-as-a-self-service with Kristof Renders

Welcome everyone to another episode of Pure Performance Cafe. I'm still strolling through the hallways of the Cosmopolitan here in Las Vegas and I bumped into Dominik Puntz. Hi Dominik. Hi Andy, nice to see you. Yeah, it's been, I think, I know we saw each other off and on when we were rushing from one session to the other. Right. Dominik, for those people that don't know you, you have been with Dynatrace for quite some time. Yeah, so I've been with Dynatrace since 2010 and I saw a lot of things happening here and how we grew and also learning, understanding all these different challenges that our customers have, especially focusing on the RAM side obviously. So yeah, today I'm here mostly focusing on our mobile

session, so that's gonna be in this afternoon. Awesome, yeah. About noon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. So, I mean, you said it's obvious, but you are a product manager for the real user monitoring, on the real user monitoring side, as you said, focusing on RAM, mobile RAM. And I think Alex was on stage earlier, and then he was already showing some of the new

capabilities. Right. You're running into a breakout soon. Can you give us a little overview of what you're going to talk about in this breakout that is focused on mobile? Yeah, so we have Thomas Rotter here from KBC. And KBC for the US folks that might not be aware of is a large bank in Belgium and I think it's one of the largest banks and they are also developing a mobile banking app which has a user base

from more than a million people. So they have coming in sessions of one million sessions per day, something like that. And it's, I mean, KBC started to innovate themselves really soon. So they were one of the first banks with a mobile banking app. And they also had features really early, like scanning QR codes. But of course, right now they are innovating again. And one of the cool things they are building right now is an embedded third-party vendor store within the banking app which allows their customers to for example buy train tickets or parking tickets stuff like that and of course doing this in an organized and and controlled way they are using Dynatrace to make sure that all the teams know what's going

on, that the performance is right, that there's not too many errors. And yeah, they are also building many dashboards to make sure that the right people get the information they need. That's awesome. And I think it's fascinating when we talk about mobile apps and in the mobile app, you have a third party store where you basically then run third-party apps and it's also great to know that you can actually monitor all these things with Dynatoys because you want to know what's your overall user experience on your mobile app but how does third-party content that actually delivers business value but still how does that third-party

content also contribute to overall user experience you want to highlight any problems that are there. Right. So yeah, that's really important for them. And as we will see in the session, there is also different ways how you could get the visibility that you need in Dynatrace. So for example, at KBC, they've been using our use SQL query language a lot and just pinning data to the dashboards.

But we will also see how maybe other approaches like using key user actions could even be a better solution for this purpose. That's awesome. So there's a lot of terminology obviously that we are throwing around because we're used to it. Key user actions, USQL. For those people that are not familiar with these terms, there's a lot of content out there on the community, on YouTube, where we actually explain all these technologies

in case you're interested in. Obviously, it's a great way for you, or the way you explain it, it sounds like a very interesting session for everybody either to attend if they are here in Vegas, or if not, at least watch the recording. Right, definitely. So also, it might be interesting, so I, we have a large customer base in the banking sector, so it might also be interesting for those to take a look what others are doing, maybe across the ocean in Europe. Yeah, that's awesome. Cool. One more thing in the end that I want to ask you. So you are product manager, you

are constantly improving the product. What is the thing that is coming out, maybe with the current sprint that we deployed or in the next sprint or two, that you think will be extremely valuable for our, especially, mobile RAM users? What excites you? So yeah, right now, it's exactly one of the things we are going to show in this session as well.

So it's really the key user action feature, which allows you to take a look at individual user actions and really defining the KPIs that matter to you and just understand if you're holding up against your standards or if there's anything you need to improve. That's awesome. I think we also talked earlier about this feature and you told me that what this really allows you to do is to specify custom aptX thresholds. And for those people that know aptX, I think aptX is great because aptX abstracts away

or it gives me an overview, an easy overview of what the real user experience is by looking at individual actions and then by looking at the complete session of the user and then coming up with basically a red, green, and yellow indicator, right? Good, bad, or you know, them in the middle. And I think having the option now to define these things very granularly is really cool because it completely maps into what we are doing on the CI-CD set with SLIs and SLOs.

When you pick your key user or your key metrics, you define your criteria and then you get automatically, you define your criteria, and then you get automatically alerted in your pipeline. And in this case, it's probably an automatic alerting mechanism in your production environment. Exactly. So it really helps you to get an overall health status of your app and still allows you to have individual thresholds for whatever matters. I have one more question that comes to mind.

So we see in Nitrack the release better software faster. We have a session that talks about Canary deployments. It's actually another bank from New Zealand that is talking about it. Is this something we also see in the mobile space where people are playing around with, let's say, feature flags, with Canary deployments, with blue-green deployments, or something like that, and then Dynatrace giving you the visibility into the individual versions

of the app? Yeah, so one thing we're going to see in this session is also how KBC rolls out new app versions. So they're still in a mode where they deploy four major app versions per year. And for those, they actually start sending out the private link to some good customers. And they are using it first. And then over the course of a month, they actually ramp it up to 100%.

And what they do in Dynatrace is they have a dashboard showing the KPIs for the latest version. And next to it, they see the KPIs for the last versions. So this helps them to see if the new version contains any problems or if anything is... It's awesome. I think the industry now calls this progressive delivery. That means you are starting to deliver new content or new versions and then based on that feedback from the initial set of users, you then decide good enough to roll it out or not.

But they're not just leaving it to the feedback from the users, but they also have the data in dialogue. Of course, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. Cool. Hey Dominik, thank you so much. I know we need to rush. The session is starting soon. So yeah, all the best and I'll see you later. Yeah, thanks. See you later. Bye.