Dynatrace Pushes The Agentic AI Envelope In Observability With New ‘Intelligence’ Offering

The launch of Dynatrace Intelligence, along with other announcements at the company’s Perform customer and partner event, follows Dynatrace’s multi-year pivot to a channel-centric go-to-market strategy.

Dynatrace today unveiled Dynatrace Intelligence, the latest generation of the company’s observability platform, which fuses deterministic and agentic AI capabilities for more reliable IT operational observability.

Dynatrace, which is holding its Perform annual customer conference (with a partner component) in Las Vegas this week, also debuted a number of additional new products and enhancements including Dynatrace Intelligence Agents, which the company said are designed to take action across IT and business operation workflows and drive closed-loop autonomous outcomes.

The company also introduced expanded cloud-native capabilities to work with the major cloud platforms, enhanced developer experiences, and the availability of advanced Real User Monitoring capabilities.

All this comes as Boston-based Dynatrace continues a pivot to the channel that began four years ago under CEO Rick McConnell. Today the company works with about 700 channel partners, including global system integrators and leading solution and strategic service providers: Last year about 80 percent of new sales bookings came “through and with” the company’s partner ecosystem, said Jay Snyder (pictured), Dynatrace senior vice president of partners and alliances, in an interview with CRN.

Dynatrace is putting increased emphasis on partners who not just sell and implement the company’s technology, according to Snyder, but who build observability practices and help customers leverage the data and insights generated by the Dynatrace platform to improve their IT and business operations. (The company is currently exploring working with managed service provider partners, Synder said.)

“What my mantra has been—and it’s been fairly consistent for the last year-plus—is that we’re moving from the transaction to the lifecycle-based approach for our customers,” Snyder said.

“We want our partners to be thinking not about the deal. The deal is just the starting box. And then it's how are we going to manage this customer over time, collectively, to deliver the most success,” he said.

Partners also bring a wealth of vertical industry expertise to the Dynatrace platform (“That’s a huge value for us,” Snyder said). And they help customers integrate the Dynatrace technology with customers’ broader IT landscape to automate IT remedial tasks, provide operational data to workflow systems such as ServiceNow (Dynatrace and ServiceNow announced a multiyear strategic collaboration deal in October), and support organizations’ cybersecurity systems.

“Our goal is to use [partners] as the services extension of our company and or in conjunction with our own services business, where they leverage our technical expertise to augment their own delivery services, and we co-deliver, and that model is starting to work really, really well for us,” the channel chief said.

Part of that approach is that Dynatrace is now providing partners with tools, frameworks and capabilities from its own service organization.

Over the last year and a half Dynatrace and some partners have been signing what Snyder calls “teaming agreements” that go beyond traditional deal registration by spelling out the needs, deliverables and expected outcomes of customer engagements.

“It is not just that we are holding ourselves and our partners accountable, but the customer gets the best possible outcome because we work back from the customer,” the channel chief said. “It means that we're partnering much more strategically, much earlier in the sales cycle, and we're getting much more value out of the partner. And the partner is getting more value out of Dynatrace.”

Dynatrace Intelligence Debut

Dynatrace describes the new Dynatrace Intelligence offering as the latest phase of the evolution of the company’s Dynatrace Platform.

Amid increasing IT complexity, including sometimes unpredictable AI and agentic systems, Dynatrace Intelligence is designed to help organizations move from reactive responses to IT events, to proactive remedial and preventive actions, and even advance toward autonomous operations across digital ecosystems, Dynatrace said in today’s announcement.

An AI engine that works with the Dynatrace Platform, Dynatrace Intelligence is designed to observe and optimize dynamic AI workloads. The software combines deterministic intelligence, grounded in real-time causal context, with agentic AI that can “safely reason, decide, and act within defined guardrails,” according to the company.

Dynatrace Intelligence stores and unifies data in Grail, Dynatrace’s unified data lakehouse system. That data is continuously and automatically enriched by Smartscape, the company’s real-time, automated topology mapping technology that visualizes dependencies across an application stack.

Also unveiled Wednesday was Dynatrace Intelligence Agents, built on Dynatrace Intelligence, that take action across workflows and drive autonomous outcomes across IT and business operations, according to the company.

Increased Cloud Integrations

While Dynatrace offers its own AI agents, Dynatrace Intelligence provides bidirectional integrations with agents from other vendors including ServiceNow, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Atlassian, GitHub, Red Hat and others.

Dynatrace also announced expanded cloud-native integrations across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, links that the vendor said provide organizations with a clearer, more unified view across multi-cloud environments.

Also new are development enhancements for building agentic and large-language model-drive applications. The innovations, according to Dynatrace, unify front-end, back-end, AI telemetry, database, cloud and mobile systems into a single developer-facing experience built on Grail, Smartscape and Dynatrace Intelligence.

“What we're doing is bringing all of that together into one single platform, so you can understand how everything is connected, from the cloud infrastructure to the application to the end user experience and even to the business outcomes,” Snyder said. “And they're not just pulling in the raw data, but they feed it into the Dynatrace intelligence layer…which will then use the AI to explain what's happening. This is incredibly powerful and useful for a development team.”

The channel chief said the new development capabilities will be especially welcomed by Dynatrace’s system integrator partners.

Dynatrace also announced the launch of next-generation Real User Monitoring (RUM) capabilities, combining front-end telemetry with back-end context, to empower teams to better understand and optimize user experiences.