PurePerformance - What we learned from Game Changers at Perform 2022 with Steve Tack

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Steve Tack has been leading Dynatrace Product Management for the past 10 years. He was one of the few Dynatracer’s delivering the key product announcements from Perform 2022 live from Vegas this year.In this session we recap the key product announcements, which breakouts to watch and which keynotes you don’t want to miss. To make it easier to follow up follow these links:On Demand sessions from Dynatrace Perform 2022Product Announcements: Observability in Multi-Cloud Serverless, Software Intelligence as Code, DevSecOps Automation Alliances, Real-Time Security Attack BlockingShow Links:Steve Tack on Linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetack/Dynatrace Perform On-demand videoshttps://perform.dynatrace.com/2022-globalObservability for Multicloud Serverless Architectureshttps://www.dynatrace.com/news/press-release/dynatrace-delivers-the-industrys-most-complete-observability-for-multicloud-serverless-architectures/Software Intelligence as Codehttps://www.dynatrace.com/news/press-release/dynatrace-delivers-software-intelligence-as-code/DevSecOps Automation Alliance Partner Programhttps://www.dynatrace.com/news/press-release/dynatrace-launches-devsecops-automation-alliance-partner-program/Real-Time Attack Detection and Blockinghttps://www.dynatrace.com/news/press-release/automatic-detection-and-blocking-of-attacks/

It's time for Pure Performance! Get your stopwatches ready, it's time for Pure Performance with Andy Grabner and Brian Wilson. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Pure Performance. My name is Brian Wilson and as always I have with me my wonderful co-host Andy Grabner. Andy, how are you doing? Are you ready for our funny introduction today? Of course, I'm always ready for a funny introduction, especially it is... What is it today? It's late in the evening here. It's actually not a funny day considering what just happened in the world if people are listening to this but i think we have to take the best out of it because the world keeps moving and we do our best to um you

know educate and entertain people turn up everybody exactly yeah no but i'm really i'm really happy because we have a special guest today yes especially and Yes. And he's been with us for a long time now. Yeah. In fact, I remember way back when this guy was compared to, I forget the actor's name, but he used to be on community and, um, uh, taught was a talk soup. Who was that? I think he knows who I'm talking about, but, uh, yeah, I forget who it is. Joel? No, not Joel. Joel McHale. And I would be, if people confused me for him, I would be very happy. But I don't think that'll happen. So Steve, welcome to the show.

It's about time you guys had me on the show. I'm very happy to be here. Yeah, you said, why did it take that many years? So you have a totally different tone now as you're public on record. But Steve, seriously, it's great to have you. Can you please just quickly introduce yourself for those folks that have maybe not heard of you yet? Sure. My name is Steve Tack. I lead the product management team for Dynatrace. And so I spend a lot of my time not only on roadmap, investment themes, problem areas, but a lot of time also with customers, prospects, partners, analysts, and more. So I get to see a lot of different dimensions of the market. And I think a great thing, and that goes for you and for many others of the leadership team,

also includes, I think, Brian and myself. We are Dynatrace and we've been here forever, right? I think a great thing is that we've seen a lot of things over the years. We have evolved with our customers. We've seen their growing pains and their pains as they went through transformations. And I think what I love about Dynatrace, and I also said this in my keynote at Perform, which is a primary topic today, that I really love the company because from the top, from burned downwards, we have so many people that have been here for ages. And I think that's great. Yeah, no, I think there's

something really special when you can get that kind of tenure and the camaraderie that comes with it. And by no means is it because it's an easy and comfortable ride. I think what keeps us all motivated is how challenging this is and how much pride and value we take out of helping customers succeed in the space with what they can do with Dynatrace. So definitely a unique spot, especially in tech. Yeah. And then, you know, talking about customers, typically, you know, pre-COVID, we have covered Perform, our annual user conference on-site. Brian, we had also the guys from Perfbytes, Mark and James there, and we were covering all of the different sessions this year. This was different. So it was last year because it was also virtual,

but we wanted to take the opportunity to give people a little recap in case they have not seen any of the coverage, any of the breakouts or keynotes. And I would really, I mean, Steve, we were two of the fortunate handful of people that actually made it to Vegas, which was nice. And because some people may not realize, while obviously the breakouts were, you know, pre-recorded, we don't want to lie about this, breakouts were pre-recorded. The keynotes, however, were mostly done live, which was really great. We had a great production company on site.

Maybe also a shout out to Hart Wilcox is the company that we have decided to partner with. They've done a phenomenal job. And we had two days of hands-on training days, well, virtual, but live. And then we had day one and day two. Steve, you have been leading all of the keynotes around product announcements. And I just want to quickly walk through kind of what we announced on day one and then go on to day two. But let's first start with day one and see what was relevant. Why did we choose? Why did we decide to announce the things we announced on day one?

And what was it all about? And what are the kind of the takeaways from you also? what do you think people need to need to understand and look into yeah so um good good way to tee it up because uh i think it gives us a chance to not only look at the announcements in isolation but we can talk about the trends that we're seeing in the market what we're learning from customers and partners. And as we were talking about on the pre-call, we do announcements on a continuous basis. I mean, if you take a step back and look at what Dynatrace provides, we don't batch things up.

We're not doing two major releases a year like even some other large SaaS vendors do. But we want to make sure we're continuously putting new capabilities into our customers' hands. And usually what we try to do around Perform is highlight some of the things that we think are most relevant for either pain points that are being addressed or new innovations that we want to make sure people take a hold of

and run with. And there's usually themes as we go through the different days. And to dive now into day one, the focus really was around modern observability and how people are driving that forward. And I know as we work in a market that's full of buzzwords, we have to be a little bit careful of too much puffery. But I do believe this, you know, down to my toes, that digital transformation is a real trend. That's not an aha moment that's going to blow anyone's hair back. But the thing that I always enjoy is you take that word or phrase, and then you just put it into context to one customer. And it really comes to life. And what we've seen over the past year, whether it's a retailer shifting from bricks and mortar to buy online, pick up in store, or changing a business model

in terms of just even, we've all been using online banking forever, but the impact COVID and the pandemic had on branch operations to the way people are taking care of travel. I mean, there's just so many different initiatives that have taken place. And so day one was around taking that theme, but then looking at how people are attacking it to making sure they're getting value. And we all know cloud-native technology is really the vehicle of choice here. That's not going to be a surprise to your listeners. But once again, trying to do it in the Dynatrace way, we brought forward two announcements that are helping customers go down that path.

And the first one was around Dynatrace's introduction of the most complete multi-cloud serverless architecture support. So something we've been doing for a while with AWS, but bringing it forward to GCP and Google Functions, as well as Azure Functions. And when we think about serverless, we really think about this in kind of the macro view. It's not just functions. It's the Kubernetes containerized platforms, managed Kubernetes, and more. And our goal is to help customers adopt these new technologies with confidence so that they can do it at scale, that we're providing them answers in the Dynatrace way that they can then drive intelligent automation off of, and also make sure we're helping them coverage their multi-cloud environments and so these are themes that have been running through

the dynatrace roadmap but it was a great time to punctuate it uh and bring it forward so um i'll uh i'll pause there and just uh make sure i don't keep rambling and that you're doing a great job for especially for a first-time guest. You're doing an awesome job. I've been prepping, Andy. Once you invited me, I've been doing this dress rehearsal almost every night. And he's been practicing for years waiting for us to ask him on, remember? That's true.

One thing I just want to point out that you mentioned about the transformation of everything. I was just reading an article the other day about how the restaurant industry is really having a hard time adjusting because of COVID, everyone got used to ordering takeout and getting delivery, and they cannot maintain serving their customers. Now the customers are going back and also doing all the takeout stuff. So just, and everybody expects it to just come now now like i want to get my order and i want it done right and it's much bigger than obviously just the software side of it but like every industry is absolutely getting hit by even the ones you wouldn't even think like restaurants you wouldn't think are going into digital and have to deal with that but they're being forced because the market is now demanding that right many people want to just get their food

and take it home i don't necessarily want to eat it at the restaurant, right? But so it's everywhere. It's changing. It's in places we never thought of. Maybe also to add to this, an example that I've seen in some restaurants, one of my restaurants now that I've been to offer, you can order at your table with your cell phone, right? I mean, obviously they have the QR codes and then you can get the menu, but you can also order.

And I think that also brings the digital experience to the physical experience, which is really cool, but also challenging. Because what happens if I order, and then it takes, I order a beer, because that's what I like to drink in the evening, and then I just have to wait five minutes. This is not the experience that I want,

because somewhere... I want it now. I need my beer. Yeah, because my Kubernetes cluster in the backend just kind of ran out of resources and therefore my order got lost somewhere in, I don't know, cyberspace. But Steve, sorry, you want to say something? No, I was just going to agree with both what you and Brian said

that different industries and also influence the expectations you have elsewhere. And so it's all too easy. We, we often use maybe more consumer sort of brand experiences or retail experiences, but it, whether it be manufacturing, whether it be any, any industry, like you said, Brian, restaurants, these trends are very pervasive and they're, they're global. There's not any sort of limit or it's just bleeding edge companies or just one

industry or the other, you know, the, the reality is, this is a very, you know, broad challenge that, that people are reacting to. And there will be winners and losers in terms of how well they can adapt, you know, to these, these these new expectations. Hey, Steve, I know I want people to watch, obviously, the keynotes that you did, where you also brought in the product managers from Lint and showing all of these capabilities. Especially what you said here, I want to highlight a couple of breakouts, because folks, if you are going to perform.dynatrace.com, and if you've registered in the past, you can just

sign in with the same credentials and you can see everything on demand. A couple of things that really were special to me on day one, I remember the session from SAP. So Tim Gerlach, who I've also worked with over the years, he was showing how he's using Dynatrace to monitor all of their cloud environments across four hyperscalers plus the SAP cloud. They have 200,000 one agents. They have 7,000 users of Dynatrace, right? I mean, that's quite a scale. And they're ranging from everything from, you know, as you mentioned, Kubernetes, but also using OpenTelemetry to then monitor workloads where the one agent is not the best

choice, whether this is serverless for whatever reason or whether this is some also traditional code basis. Right. I mean, that's really phenomenal. So check out this session. Another session that I want to highlight because you mentioned the, you know, the full kind of experience that we bring now, the broadest coverage. There's a session from Mario Mauracher and Patrick Turner, two product managers, with Eric Little from Wiley,

talking about how they are using Dynatrace to really cover containers, Kubernetes, but also serverless. I think there's some really great sessions. This is in the Advanced Dynamic Cloud Native Workload track. So we have a couple of tracks. So please check them out. I'm sure there's more. But as you navigate through the recordings,

what I always like, click on it, you know, like scan through it. You can, once you're in there, you can easily also navigate back and forth in the video to pick the sweet spots. But the nice thing is that we have customers really show how they're using these capabilities and how they are innovating and

how they become game changers which is also the topic of of perform right how to become digital game changes great first announcement yeah and andy i think the the sap one especially the the big thing i got out of that one is if you think back to the last time sap spoke at perform when they were talking about uh building their own monitoring platform and then they discovered dynatrace and they're like oh well we can just use that instead of building our own now they're moving into this well we have other data sources and we want to pick the right way to get data to capture the data right and as we know with the whole open telemetry and the DIY movement capturing is just one part and I think part of what this announcement we bring to Steve is what do you do with that data once you capture it? That is the harder part, right? You can manually instrument

your code, not that anybody necessarily wants to do that, but you can do that, right? But you have to get into something that's going to intelligently analyze it and bring things up to you. And I think that's where that piece really shines. And the example with SAP was, yeah, we're going to use multiple ways to get data, some dynatrace, some telemetry, some other ways of getting it. But at the end of the day, we need to get it into some platform that we can analyze this all properly and make sense out of it. And that to me was the real, just awesome thing about this idea of moving forward, what do we do with our data? And that's important to be able to support all that. Yeah.

Steve, day one, what else was there? Yeah, so the second big announcement was around delivering software intelligence as code. And I want to take one step back and build off of what Brian was saying, because I think that's a really important point. Somewhere along this path, when we started adopting, quote unquote, cloud native tech, we regressed a little bit. And it's almost like the end game is getting data and throwing it on the dashboard. And building on

Brian's point in terms of making it actionable, driving answers, I think that that bleeds into the second announcement, because this is really about automation at scale. And so when we think about the movements like infrastructure as code, GitOps, everything is code, this is very much aligned and analogous to that, where we don't believe it's just about capturing data. It's something where we have to make sure that development teams can innovate faster, that you get strong collaboration. I mean, that SAP stat of 7,000 users is awesome. It's not just

kind of the wizards in the back room, the handful of people that are taking action, but it's really about a community at that point. And so the announcement of software that are taking action, but it's really about a community at that point. And so the announcement of software intelligence as code, when you peel back, it's about new API endpoints and settings granularity for autonomous teams and things along those lines. But when you look at the output and the objective that it helps customers get to, it's about how do we make sure observability, how do we make sure AIOps, how do we make sure application security

are built into these applications as the dev teams design them so that you can run them at scale with resilience and put more focus on really building new capabilities that are meaningful to your business versus kind of manual handoffs between DevOps and SRE teams or painful manual instrumentation and things along those lines.

So this has also been something that we've been building through Dynatrace. It also harnesses and captures some of the work on the open source side with Monaco and things along those lines. But this is something where we see it's not just an announcement of product capabilities and platform capabilities, but it really should have an impact on the culture and the process that people drive. Exactly. And you bring up Monaco, right? Monaco stands for monitoring as code. It's the internal project that we open sourced because we at Dynatrace also had the need to configure and manage Dynatrace at scale because for those people that may not know, we are obviously using Dynatrace to monitor and manage all of your Dynatrace clusters. And nobody wants to sit there and manually create dashboards for a new cluster that we

monitor or set up new alerts. And with nobody, I actually mean my wife Gabi, because Gabi, she's in the Dynatrace A's team and they have invested a lot in automation. And what they've built on top of the Dynatrace API is a layer that allows you in a declarative way to define what do you want from Dynatrace, what metrics on which dashboards, which alerts, what tagging rules.

And then you can put this like you would put your code or your configuration for your deployments, for your tests in Git. And then you are pushing it as part of a deployment and delivery process to Dynatrace. Because as you are pushing code into different environments, you're not only pushing code, you also want to push the necessary configuration changes

for monitoring observability. And i thought that was really nice right and and and sometimes these things happen you know we we think we think something is useful for our customers the nice thing i believe with dynatrace is we are always our first customer because we are a software company we have you know innovated over the years we've transformed over the years and so we have transformed our platform. And therefore, we bring the stuff to our customers that we thought was really useful. And yeah, pretty cool.

Some sessions to highlight here. I always try to bring up a couple of breakout sessions. There is a track called Advancing DevOps and DevSecOps. And this one covers a couple of these. How can we automate dynatrace into a delivery cycle right so i've done a session with mike kobush from any ic showing how we can automate observability into the testing cycle there are some others i one want to highlight here from sergio hinoyosa he's one of our colleagues. And the session is called Observability Driven Orchestration from Git Commits to Production Release. Really cool stuff. So please do me a favor and check it out. There's a lot of stuff in the Advancing DevOps and DevSecOps track.

And Andy, one thing I wanted to add to that point, too, is just the fact that a lot of what we're talking about are advanced features, that SAP obviously is doing things like that very well. But a lot of our customers don't necessarily always have the time to go down those routes of like, hey, I want to get into advanced automation and all. But they know about it. Right. So obviously within Dynatrace, they can do these things manually, the regular way things are going. But the real beauty of it there, to me at least, is that now that's now that's open when they have the time, when they find the teams that they can start experimenting, they can start leading down that path. Because the only way you get there is to start experimenting with it and say, hey, look at this cool thing we did. Then someone else comes in and says, that's awesome. Let's see what more we can do with it.

And with these announcements, you have that ability now. The door is open for you to get down that path when you can get to it, when you can spend the time. So you're not limited, right? You're using Dynatrace, you have that ability to get there when the opportunity presents itself. I think that's really, really important to enable our customers that way. So day one, just to wrap that day up, I think people should also have a look at the customer panel. I'm just looking here. We had Dell.

We had Humana. We had Ford on the customer panel with Andrew Hiddle talking about their experiences as they have been kind of transforming their organizations. And obviously, we had the keynote from Professor Max Techmark. Hopefully, I pronounced his name correctly. An MIT professor talking about being human in the age of artificial intelligence. So day one, I remember Steve, day one was Wednesday, exactly Wednesday night. I think we had a good dinner and some good drinks and some good conversations. Absolutely. And then we were all prepped for day two. And day two brought even more really relevant announcements for the game changers.

You want to walk us through your first announcement? Yeah, let's jump in to the announcement of launching the DevSecOps Automation Alliance Partner Program. program. And I think this is an easy bridge from your reflection on the NAIC talk and how they're looking to automate more through their environment. This is something that we see across every Dynatrace customer. It's really how can we help make their ecosystem smarter? How can we work more closely with our partners and others that kind of flow through that ecosystem? And so we put a little bit of a focus point here on the pipeline. So as people look through how they advance their continuous delivery pipeline, how are they doing it in a way that they're getting the right feedback loops, that they're aware of how things will perform in production, but then also how we

increase speed. So that's where sort of the work with Atlassian from Bitbucket or Jenkins or how do we drive that forward? How are we sure it's going to be resilient? So maybe some of the more advanced use cases like working with Gremlin and chaos engineering to intelligent release decisions through things like feature flags with LaunchDarkly. These are all the areas where when you think about the right signals that you have, the right answers, as we've talked about, you can really increase speed, increase ultimately the better experience at the edge for those digital interactions.

But I think we had close to 17 launch partners here. I'm sure I'm maybe not doing it justice and pulling out folks like X Matters or PagerDuty or GitLab. Or I'm sure, Andy, you'll add some on the top and Brian. But this was really about making sure that we continue to drive the ecosystem forward for the benefit of all of our mutual customers and ultimately allow them to deliver better experiences

to their end customers at the same time. Yeah, for me, the big point here is, I think some of that you missed, maybe Slack and Microsoft and I guess- Who are those companies? Yeah, no, they're the broader. Who are those companies? Yeah, I've noticed. No, but I think for me, the big benefit here, and I just want everybody to understand,

observability is not just something that allows you to put a metric on a dashboard. Observability is what's going to drive your delivery processes and delivery decisions. And what you as customers or you know future customers whoever you are are asked to do is integrate observability into your processes that means using observability to make automated decisions on whether a build is good to go from dev to staging from

staging to production and just to keep it in there now you have two options you can either integrate all of these tools, your testing tools, your feature flagging tools, your deployment tools, with your observability platform of choice, which means you need to write a lot of custom code or you rely on custom point-to-point integrations. Or you do it the Dynatrace way,

because what we have done is we've said we don't want to build another point-to-point custom proprietary integration with all of the DevOps tools. We don't want to build another point-to-point custom proprietary integration with all of the DevOps tools. We don't want you to write and maintain all of these scripts that chain everything together. So what we have been doing, and I think this is a lot of thanks to the work we've been doing with the open source project, Captain, we have standardized the way we want DevOps tools in the future to collaborate and to integrate.

We are standardizing on the way we integrate. We have adopted an event-driven model, which is the same model that we're using to break monoliths into microservices and connect individual services to really, again, fulfill the business process. So we've taken what works for cloud-native development and bring it to the DevOps and SRE space. And we provide you an open source driven framework that we bring to our customers as part of cloud automation to allow you to hook in any of your tools. So protect your investment in your point tools, but let us take care of chaining them all together through open standards.

So you do so that you don't have to hire more automation engineers to build and maintain your bash scripts that will break anyway all the time. And I think this is for me the magic here, what we're doing. And it's great with the 17 launch partners that we have, because they basically tell us that this is exactly what they want. Because also these launch partners that you brought up, let's say Gremlin. Why should Gremlin or Microsoft or LaunchDarkly invest engineering resources to build and maintain integrations with all of the observability tools? Proprietary. Why not go with a standard? And I think we are in the unique position here to drive this standard.

And with this, we will help us, our customers, and hopefully the larger community. And this is why I'm really excited about this. Yeah. And that's a really good emphasis point. I probably skimmed over it too quick, is that open operability, then also we see the benefit of continuing to drive the Keptin project forward, but Dynatrace customers take advantage of that as part of productized capabilities in the Cloud

Automation module. And I do want to take a chance just to thank, obviously, I get to be a spokesperson for a lot of these releases, but that was an example where we brought Alice Reitbauer to the main stage, just like Florian Ortner was on day one. Andreas Berger, we'll get to next, but there's so many, so much great work, you know, that, that the team's doing to, to bring this forward. And I'm lucky enough to be the person who introduces it to the audience, but there's so many people who are passionate and care about this and doing, you know, really innovative, great stuff to, to drive it forward. And this ecosystem is an example of, you know, multiple companies, you multiple companies coming together on the work that Andy, you and others have been doing with Captain as well and should have a big impact within the industry.

And you also got to see that nice break sign behind Alois in the cafe there. But the other thing I wanted to point out with this, right, all these integrations point to a fact that I think there's an assumption, or I think a lot of people understand, but it's never really said out loud. Observability doesn't mean that a human has to observe, right? Observability allows the machines to do the observing. So if you have that full-fledged and you're capturing the richness of data, you can put that in the hands of machine to machine to machine or software to software, whatever it is. It doesn't mean you as a human have to go and observe all that. And we've seen that coming through already. I mean, going back to one of our old favorite Perform speakers,

who's now with us, Nestor, right? We learned about how they made all their machines talk to each other, and that's becoming more and more commonplace, more and more enabled. And just stressing the fact that it doesn't mean you as an operator in this realm have to be able to look at all this data, make the machines do the work. And that's where we're heading. So it's awesome. Yeah. And Brian, that's the only way companies will be able to get the speed and scale. There's no way to get the humans to do that broadly. And so I think that's a really good point

that it's so core to our belief system that we sometimes skip over that as well in the sense that this reactive manual looking at dashboards is something that, yes, there's a point in time where you need to be able to go investigate that way, but that should not be the starting spot or the MO. We really want to drive as much of the automation in there as possible.

And that's a really good point to stress. Steve, so this was announcement one, which already is pretty excitement on day two. So announcement three, if you do the total number, there was one more announcement on day two. What was that all about? The second announcement on day two will take what we just talked about around the DevSecOps alliances and put a little bit of a spotlight on security for a moment. So this is an area where we've been evangelizing the Dynatrace approach to runtime detection and production for a little while now. And we had a huge marketing event called Log4Shell that really created a lot of

energy around this topic right around December. So the announcement here was taking and building upon the vulnerability analytics and identification that we already do, and adding real-time attack detection and blocking. So Andreas Berger joined us on stage for this one and showed, using actually the log for shell incident and vulnerability, that not only does Dynatrace detect that and help prioritize where your remediation efforts should be centered based on risk and other sort of analytics that we uniquely embed in there, but that as your team is going through the remediation efforts, we can give you the

comfort and security that we can actually block further attacks. So as other people try to take advantage of those openings and different attack vectors that we will actually stop and protect the environment. So as some might call this the RASP market or RASP mode two or whatever you define that as, it's really taking application security to that next level, realizing that you can't test your way out of these vulnerabilities, that you can't scan your way out of them, that in a cloud-native dynamic environment, you really have to protect from within the application. And Dynatrace is now offering the ability

to really manage that real-time attack protection. And so super exciting announcement, super exciting innovation and then you know really highlighting this convergence of security and observability in cloud native environments and i because it's fresh on my mind i just re-watched it and i tweeted about it it is day two, the tech session, minute 14, when Andreas Berger is showing the protect feature, which I thought was really interesting because he made a very cool comment. He said, vulnerabilities come, right? You cannot test for it. I think that's what he said nicely. But the thing is, what do you do between the vulnerabilities detected until you can actually fix it?

You need a safeguard. You need somebody, a guardian angel that can kind of protect you and give you the time that you need to actually fix all of these vulnerabilities. And I think this is actually the time, at least that's what I took away from his presentation. We can help you buy that time. You get this time back so that in the time you are vulnerable, until you fix it, we help you basically make sure that these requests are not doing any harm. And I thought that was a really powerful message. Yeah, if we need a name for that, we have the name for Davis for AI.

Since you just called it Guardian Angel, we'll have to call it Clarence from It's a Wonderful Life. That'll be the working name the other cool thing i thought with the security bit not necessarily with that latest announcement but justin you mentioned the whole whole log for shell is how receptive everyone is suddenly we will just mention oh if you have interest in the security piece or like yes right and then the cool the great thing like from andy and i's point of view for years now we've been talking about this whole shift left now i know there's also a bit of a shift right movement right going on andy all these things have been coming up and when people realize we can have

these scans going on shifting left so that we know in our cycle we're pulling down the right package we're capturing if somebody forgot to grab the the latest package that might be the best one to use. It's just the same model that we're seeing from a performance point of view being baked into security. And it's just really encouraging to see how many people are starting to take security seriously now. Because it's like performance, it's been the slow uptake. But I think Log4Shell, for all the unfortunate reasons that that happened. It's just a nice, it's nice to see people responding proactively with that. Yeah. And I think Brian, to that point, what's changed is, is they realize the existing processes just are built for, for an environment that doesn't exist anymore. And so when they think about how do they protect themselves moving forward,

how can they deploy fastly and with confidence that it's secure, they realize that they'll have to extend and change their approach, much like their environment is changing. And that's where you're right, it is unfortunate. I don't mean to make light of the war rooms that people are in and their mediation efforts and things like that. But it really does. It just personifies a lot of the challenges that we see that will be pervasive in the world. And, you know, as people adopt these technologies more and more. So it was definitely an interesting point in time. And you're right, the reception has been very positive to this

because no one wants to put any of their customers' data at risk, the potential of a breach, anything along those lines. And so putting such a high degree of trust in terms of the types of companies you want to do business with, this just goes right along with that. For the security topic, I really also want to highlight a breakout session. It's called Address Log for Shell with Ease. That is a session from Andreas Berger, who did also the keynote with you, and also Christian Schwarzbauer, who is the lead architect.

I would really highly recommend this because they really show some really great stuff what we're doing. Now besides, I mean we've talked a lot about these announcements. I think in the end what we also want to make sure is that what matters most is the end user, right? I mean we help our our customers transform, provide digital services. there's a lot of great breakout sessions around how to monitor and optimize the user experience for instance vitality did a session was called how to proactively deliver seamless user experience vitality one of our customers i think in the uk how do how they monitor the business impact from end user and including mobile. So they really showed the whole range of our capabilities from mobile back to the backend system.

Another thing was from state of Minnesota was another really great session on day one, optimizing app performance with end-to-end visibility from UX to code. So folks, as you are listening to this and as you are contemplating about do I really want to, what type of content is interesting for me from perform, what should I consume, really check out these different tracks. There's such great information, especially the customer sessions. Now, if you watch these breakouts, typically in the beginning with a Dynatrace speaker, kind of teasing it up and talking about what we've done from a product perspective and why we've done certain things. And then it's the customer speak. I can really encourage you to check it out.

Steve, this was day two. On day two, we had a couple of interesting other keynotes too, right? I want to highlight the customer panel that SAFE was leading, Duke Energy, Lockheed Martin, and Park and Fly. So this was all around how they are using Dynatrace's Davis AIOps capabilities. Really fascinating. Then we had Debbie interviewing Simone Biles, and I'm still frustrated that I didn't get to meet her in person because exactly when she was there for that session, I was delivering a hot day class, but I was prioritizing our customers, delivering hands-on training to meeting her, but you met her, right? I did. I did. I have a picture of, in realizing that this is a podcast, I'm about six foot two, she's four foot eight. So that

made a nice contrast. But it's the first time my 12-year-old daughter ever got excited about work was when I told her that I was going to meet Simone Biles. That was a highlight for her. And Simone was kind enough and gracious enough to take a lot of pictures, and she recorded a really quick video snippet that I was able to send to my daughter introducing the two of them. That's awesome. And then my personal highlight, it was my keynote with Kelsey Hightower.

And the keynote itself was fascinating, but I'm pretty sure I've said it many times already. More fascinating for me was him and his personality and also the fact that he came in a day and a half earlier, even though we only hired him for the keynote, that he came in a day and a half earlier even though we only hired him for the keynote but he came in a day and a half early and he spent all of wednesday with me walking through a technical discussion but then also giving me direct personal feedback and advice on how to run interviews like this and i'm not sure if he listens to this but if you ever get a chance to see and meet kelsey tell him that he's a true game changer in many ways. And he also then, what was so great for me, when we were done with the keynote, he kind of heard, hey, we're doing a day two wrap up.

And he said, hey, Andy, can I be part of the wrap up too? I just wonder if I'm here. What else should I do? And then, yes, of course, he did the wrap up. And then afterwards he said, hey, I have another four hours until my plane leaves. Let's go and grab some pizza. And then we grabbed pizza. It was just really phenomenal.

MARK MANDELBAUM- Yeah. I watched a little bit of that post one. And going back to point number one, one thing Kelsey said that really resounded with me, and I'm summing it up, I hope I don't get it wrong, was around the idea that he sees the future of Kubernetes as limited, meaning stressing that a lot more people are going to eventually want to just start going over and more and more serverless, right? Because Kubernetes was a great way to get

off your own infrastructure and you could run it and have it doing a bunch of magic for you. But now that this whole serverless and function type of thing is really getting solid, it's like, why do we want to even maintain that bit? I just want to write my code and push it out. And that comes back to this idea of if you're doing that, you just have to get whatever data you can and get that information out of it by any means, right? So get the data in, process it, get answers, get information. And it's this highly evolving ecosystem that we're always going to be having to stay on top of. But I think, you know, as a company, we're definitely set up for that. But even just for our customers as well, who, you know, you talk to anybody who's using Kubernetes,

and you have the developers who don't necessarily have to notice it, but then you have the whole team who's maintaining Kubernetes, and that's a whole other big job with its own frustrations. So it's interesting to see that what he's seeing out there is that people are starting to try to see how they can pull away from Kubernetes even. And it's really getting to that whole platform as a service. We've talked about this in the past before, too, Andy, where it's like Cloud Foundry, I think, was ahead of its time. You still maintain that, too, even though you have to maintain Kubernetes. But the idea of, like, I just want to write my code and push it and be done. And I think that's, you could see the writing on the wall.

We're heading down that path a lot more. So, really cool stuff. Yeah, he also basically said, right, I mean, we always, what we do as an industry, and I think also human as humans in general we look at what is working right now and what is not working and this is then basically influencing the next iteration of what we're doing we're taking the stuff that works and we're optimizing the stuff that doesn't work well or that that can be optimized and this is how we ended up with kubernetes and this is how we're going to end up with serverless some people i think we also discussed this in the wrap up, may jump even over Kubernetes completely if they are not yet sold into it

and then go straight into the next generation of technology. Like some countries may have never went, I don't know, to, you know, let's say, I think from an internet perspective, right? I mean, there were different iterations on how we deliver internet to our to our you know citizens right and whether you want to lay landlines or whether you just do everything radio i mean there's different technology advances and sometimes you skip over even why not yeah yeah um a lot of great i was really happy that we could actually be there in Vegas. I know it was just a selected small group of people.

I'm really much looking forward to next year. Really what makes Perform special is the interactions with our customers. And this is what, let's keep fingers crossed that nothing else bad happens, but it looks promising that next year we will be back in vegas yeah yeah i had a nice two-year break from the insanity but uh it'll be good to go back got a two-year rest from from the non-stop action it's different on the working side because you know yeah yeah i want to highlight uh just one or two more sessions. I looked at, I really like the software intelligence platform roadmap session. So Wolfgang Baer and Paul Schumacher did a great breakout on the roadmap. And they talked about especially how AI ops, how the adaptive baselining works for business metrics.

Great coverage on dashboard improvements that are already there and also coming in the next couple of sprints. Also, he talked about settings 2.0 and all the API changes. And there are a lot of sessions around OpenTelemetry. Alindo Lima with Granger, our customers, did a great session called Get Actionable Answers at Scale from OpenTelemetry. Matt Ryder, one of our PMs on Kubernetes, several sessions on Kubernetes, so check it out. Henrik Rexit, he's on our team, another great session on kind of like a best-off of his Is It Observable YouTube channel that he has on how to really do observability right on Kubernetes, and so many more things.

Probably the list goes on and on. Yeah. Steve, this was your first appearance on the podcast. STEVE VILLACHICA- I know. I'll be waiting to see if I ever get a return invite, I guess, on how this is received. I know it's more. I know you guys do a great job of

uh i'm a listener so i know that you're very much on the industry topic line and this obviously has a little bit more of a dynatrace angle but uh i think it also is you know relevant for where where a lot of we see our customers and others but thanks thanks for uh having me on the show definitely and and don't don't uh i'm not sure what's And don't undersell your position here in the industry because you are leading a software company from a product perspective that wants to make an impact to our customers, and therefore you are challenged with similar things.

We are, as we all know, as every organization, we also have to face challenges around technology choices. We have to face challenges around growth. We have to face challenges around how we make sure we keep innovating with the speeds that we are. And therefore, it's completely important to have you and your thoughts here as well. Don't just downplay your position here.

CHRISTIAN BRINKHOFF- uh it's a good call out that these are real challenges for everyone i i know brian you're off in the pop culture you know but i i think of that scene in um a league of their own when when tom hanks says if it was easy everyone could do it or it's the hard that makes it good um and and so i think tackling the really hard challenges are uh are rewarding um but uh but that rewarding. But that's definitely what we're up to. Do you use words like tackling because it's got your name in it? My challenge to you, Steve, though, is you are talking to a lot of our customers. You're having the conversations about their challenges and all that. So I think, you know, I personally, and I'll put Andy on the spot, I think it would be great to have you back on to talk about what the challenges are that, you know, companies are

seeing and what they're trying to do to tackle those. Cause I think a lot of our listeners are working at these companies or other companies that have similar, uh, situations that they're going through. So I think that would definitely be a great, great thing to come back and talk about. Yeah. I don't know about you andy put you on the spot he's gonna say that's a terrible idea i'm game the uh the one thing i wanted to just to say too i want to really give a shout out to to perform because um you mentioned earlier how we have we don't hold up releases right it's like every two weeks or stuff, stuff's coming out. And if I go back to the early days of Perform when it was more Atmon,

and we were on that six-month release cycle, there was always this big bang of cool new stuff coming out. And as we moved into the new Diantrace platform, I started wondering, like, how are we going to have cool announcements during the Perform if the announcements are coming out all year? And it was a little bit softer, but i think we're getting into a a nice cadence where i don't know if it's timing or just coincidence but as we've seen the last couple of performs have been having some really great um great announcements going out through them so it's really cool seeing that evolve into that way without having to compromise on holding releases up or anything like that so So it's quite amazing what's going on.

Yeah, I mean, for me, it's not necessarily, I mean, the announcements are great. I would think even better at performance to show that customers are actually implementing and getting value of these announcements. Because everybody can make an announcement about a new cool feature, and it sounds shiny on the press release. But the question is, does it really improve the lives of people? And that's what our customer testimonials are all about.

And them actually putting their name out personally, their company name, and then investing the time to show with all fours and a breakout. I think this is just, I mean, for me, the best thing about Perform. Cool. Any final thoughts, Steve? No, I think we've covered a lot of good ground. Uh, I, I love the call to action that, that you guys provide of going out watching some of the breakouts. And I think as, uh, people look through the breakouts, they should find things that they can implement today and get value. And so both, we talked a little bit about solving challenges, but there's a lot that customers can learn from and get value. And so both, we talked a little bit about solving challenges,

but there's a lot that customers can learn from those breakouts in terms of how to implement things that will probably be on the relative scale, low effort for high return. And that's what excites me too, is seeing people getting the return and implementing those changes that they can use in their business for their own end customers and different strategies that they're driving forward. So nothing other than that. But, yeah, thanks again, guys, for giving me the opportunity to share the different announcements.

Wonderful. Thanks. Well, Andy will give me all of the links he's talked about, so those will all be in the show notes. So if you're listening, you can go to Spreaker.com, S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R.com and look for the show. It will also be up on our website, Dynatrace.com. I think if you do slash pure performance,

it'll redirect you to the proper URL. I think there's a path in between there, but if you want to get to those, they're free to watch. You just have to sign up. But even if it's not related to the product, the topics in general are, I think, of very much a great interest. There we go. I'm having the problem speaking today, Andy. My goodness. All right. Andy, any last words from you? No, I'm just happy that we had Steve on the call, and I'm sure it's not the last time.

Yes. All right. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We'll be back to our regular programming next episode. And, yeah, thank you, everyone, for listening. Have a wonderful day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.