We kicked off the new year with our annual customer event, Dynatrace Perform, and many new announcements. If you weren’t able to join us in person, you can watch all the mainstage keynotes, innovation sessions, and breakouts on demand on the Dynatrace Perform 2026 webpage.

In this blog, we’ll focus on brand-new product enhancements that accelerate service troubleshooting, provide richer cloud context for AWS, and deliver meaningful improvements that reduce friction in daily workflows.

If you want to jump straight to our curated sandbox environment for the capabilities mentioned below, head over to our dedicated playground launchpad.

Dynatrace Intelligence

Our biggest news is that Dynatrace Intelligence is now available. It’s the industry’s first agentic operations system that effectively fuses deterministic insights with agentic action to deliver reliable outcomes with autonomous prevention, remediation, and optimization at scale.

Here are the new features and capabilities now available in Dynatrace Intelligence:

• Dynatrace MCP Server: In addition to the local MCP server that was launched in May 2025, our remote MCP server is now generally available.
• Dynatrace Assist: The evolution of Davis CoPilot puts Dynatrace Intelligence at your fingertips. Dynatrace Assist pulls context from Grail, maps relationships using Smartscape – our real-time dependency graph – and collaborates autonomously with Dynatrace agents using the tools provided by the Dynatrace MCP server.
• Agentic ecosystem: Whether you aim to level up collaborative operations with SRE agents, enjoy closed-loop autonomous operations with ITSM agents, or want AI-powered code repair with developer and coding agents, we’ve got you covered. Maximize the value of your tool landscape by leveraging our agentic integrations.
• Agentic workflows: Turn your workflows into agentic automations leveraging Dynatrace Intelligence. This program is currently available in a Preview program.

Smartscape: Real-time dependency graph

The new Smartscape experience delivers a real-time dependency graph that helps practitioners move from “watching signals” to understanding true entity health and cause-and-effect across fast-changing cloud, Kubernetes, on-premises, and hybrid environments. It adds major new capabilities:

• An all-new Smartscape app with powerful visual analytics and domain-specific views,
• Fully native cloud entities with complete metadata (including raw cloud/Kubernetes object JSON),
• and agentless cloud data ingest for automatic enrichment of dependencies and policy context.

This allows teams to diagnose faster, reduce MTTR, and make better architectural and operational decisions with real production context.

Smartscape enables exploration across millions of relationships, strengthens incident collaboration via in-context workflows like Visual Resolution Path and “view topology” actions, and improves security and governance by visualizing exposure and attack paths with real blast radius and enriched cloud native semantics like tags, ownership, cost centers, and compliance attributes.

The new Smartscape extends far beyond a standard topology; it offers domain-specific views tailored to the unique requirements of your use cases—whether application performance, cloud infrastructure, or essential business services. The following pre-configured views are now available.

• Smartscape on Grail: discover all entities and relationships in your environment
• Infrastructure overview: gain insights into which components are running and how they’re connected
• Service dependency graph: see how your services are connected
• Problem graph: understand problem impact and blast radius
• Kubernetes overview: map your Kubernetes environment, from clusters to components
• AWS EC2 ecosystem overview: understand your entire EC2 ecosystem and resource relationships

Have a look at our recent Smartscape blog post to learn how these enhanced views help solve real-world challenges.

Cloud Operations for AWS

Dynatrace enhanced Cloud Platform Operations expands AI-powered observability into an operations-first experience for practitioners (cloud ops, SRE, and platform teams) by unifying cloud metrics, logs, and events across AWS, Azure (see Preview program), and Google Cloud (see Preview program) in a single platform, enriched with topology-aware context for faster troubleshooting and safer automation. It introduces:

• fully managed cloud connections with a guided wizard (no extra infrastructure),
• expanded ingest that captures more cloud service metrics plus richer cloud events (including hyperscaler-native security alerts),
• and automatic reuse of existing cloud tags to drive access control, ownership, cost allocation, alert routing, and preventive workflows—so teams can move from fragmented signals to clear, actionable answers at enterprise scale.

This allows users to shift from reactive monitoring to proactive cloud operations built around three outcomes: prevention (predict anomalies and trigger workflows before user impact), remediation (AI-driven RCA plus self-healing automation to cut resolution time), and optimization (continuous cost and performance efficiency via real-time insights and recommendations).

For platform teams, the big win is operational simplicity: the onboarding flow is GitOps-ready and removes the need to maintain ActiveGates for CloudWatch ingest on this path. For practitioners, the win is troubleshooting speed: reimagined exploration, resource-rich metadata, and opinionated insights reduce the time from “something’s wrong” to “here’s why.”

Real User Monitoring experience

The new Real User Monitoring (RUM) experience adds modern frontend signals that match how today’s web and mobile apps behave—for example, soft navigation for Single Page Apps (SPA), user interactions (clicks/taps/scrolls), and background requests—alongside Core Web Vitals and key mobile performance signals (including troubleshooting enhancements like application not responding and symbolication). Out of the box, teams get task-focused workflows and dashboards that connect frontend symptoms to backend reality, so you can pinpoint what’s slow or broken and shorten the path from user complaint to verified cause and fix.

Achieve faster validation of real user impact and clearer prioritization: Users & Sessions grounds investigations in actual sessions, Error Inspector groups and prioritizes errors with the right context, and Experience Vitals helps identify which requests/assets drive slowdowns using redesigned analysis views—so teams can reduce friction, resolve complaints with confidence, and connect experience trends to business outcomes via custom dashboards, notebooks, and DQL exploration, with built-in privacy/permission controls, and optional extended retention for deeper historical analysis (currently available in a Preview program).

AI observability

Dynatrace has expanded agentic AI observability with a broader framework and protocol support, so teams can build, run, and debug autonomous agent systems with confidence across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Support now includes popular agentic ecosystems such as Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Bedrock Strands, LangChain Agents, Google Agent Development Kit (ADK), OpenAI Agents SDK, and Model Context Protocol (MCP)—with signals unified via OpenTelemetry and OpenLLMetry into a single correlated observability model for end-to-end visibility across agents, tools, models, and dependencies.

Alongside this expanded support, the new AI Observability app delivers a purpose-built experience to observe AI workloads end-to-end—from agents and LLMs to orchestration layers and tools—so practitioners can validate changes faster, reduce risk, and ship AI features at scale. Key capabilities include end-to-end monitoring of agent interactions and tool usage, prompt/tool/model tracing and debugging across multi-step flows, cost visibility (token consumption, cost trends, caching impact), actionable dashboards and drill-downs (including faster validation via A/B testing across model/prompt variants), and enterprise-grade security, privacy, and governance views such as surfaced guardrail outcomes for auditability and trend monitoring.

Investigations: Transform how practitioners derive actionable insights

The Investigations app provides a central starting point for exploring analytical insights across Grail data. It gives practitioners immediate access to essential investigation capabilities—such as analyzing large DQL results, pivoting queries based on metadata, reviewing investigation history, and connecting logs, metrics, events, and traces—helping practitioners quickly uncover root causes and accelerate complex investigations.

Improved Dashboards experience

We’ve enhanced several ready-made dashboards that improve your dashboard experience and make insights clearer, faster, and more consistent. You can duplicate and adapt them to kick-start your own dashboards.

• The Getting started dashboard demonstrates the major types of visualizations you can use and provides example tiles and layouts.
  
• The Page performance & errors dashboard serves as a starting point for investigating page performance and web front-end navigation. It surfaces the most important web performance and reliability KPIs at a glance, highlighting key metrics such as page load time, error count, navigations, LCP, INP, and CLS.
  
• The XHR & fetch performance dashboard includes core KPIs such as request duration, time to first byte (TTFB), and fetch failure rate. These help you quickly spot slow or failing back-end calls that affect the user experience.
  

Where to start this week

We encourage you to take advantage of all the efficiencies and insights these new Dynatrace capabilities provide. Depending on your role, here are the recommended next steps for SREs, Cloud Owners, and Development teams seeking faster service troubleshooting loops, richer AWS cloud context, and other meaningful improvements that reduce friction in their daily workflows.

Get started: SREs

1. Start with Dynatrace Intelligence for faster incident loops

1. 1. Open Dynatrace Assist during an active issue to pull context from Grail and map relationships via Smartscape, then let it collaborate with Dynatrace agents/tools (via MCP) to accelerate triage and next steps.
   2. If you use chat/agent tooling internally, connect via the Dynatrace MCP Server (remote if you want centralized access) to make Dynatrace context available in your agentic workflows.

2. Make Smartscape your default “blast-radius + causality” view

1. 1. Use the new Smartscape app and Visual Resolution Path/view topology actions to validate true upstream/downstream impact and shorten MTTR.
   2. Leverage native cloud/Kubernetes metadata (including raw object JSON) to quickly confirm “what changed” vs. “what broke.”

3. Automate closure with agentic workflows (Preview program)

1. 1. Convert recurring remediation steps into agentic automations by combining Dynatrace Intelligence with Workflows for closed-loop operations (start with a high-confidence, low-risk runbook).

Get started: Cloud owners

1. Onboard AWS with enhanced Cloud Operations first
   1. Use the fully managed cloud connection and guided wizard to bring in unified metrics, logs, and events with richer AWS context, without maintaining ActiveGates for CloudWatch ingest on this path.
   2. Ensure your cloud tags are clean and meaningful, because they’ll automatically drive ownership, access control, cost allocation, and alert routing.

2. Operationalize outcomes: prevention, remediation, and optimization
   2. Set up alerting and dashboards around the three outcomes:
   3. Prevention: anomaly prediction + proactive workflows
   4. Remediation: AI-driven RCA + self-healing actions
   5. Optimization: continuous cost/performance efficiency using context-rich insights
   6. Use Smartscape to validate dependencies and impacts across accounts, regions, clusters, and services.

3. Plan for multicloud setup
   3. If you’re also on Azure or GCP, use what you learn on AWS to establish a standard operating model, then extend to preview programs when ready.

Get started: Development teams

1. Start from user impact with the new RUM experience

1. 1. Use Users and Sessions to reproduce issues from real sessions, then jump to Error Inspector and Experience Vitals to identify which requests/assets/interactions drive pain.
   2. For SPAs and modern apps, validate soft navigation, user interactions, and background requests alongside Core Web Vitals to quickly pinpoint frontend bottlenecks.

2. Connect frontend symptoms to backend issues

1. 1. From a slow, erroring session, follow the workflow to backend services and dependencies (Smartscape helps confirm causality), shortening the path from complaints to verified root causes.

3. If you ship AI features, instrument them with AI Observability

1. 1. Adopt the AI Observability app for end-to-end tracing across agents, tools, and models; use cost visibility and A/B validation to safely iterate on prompts/models.
   2. Standardize telemetry via OpenTelemetry and OpenLLMetry, and if you use agent frameworks (LangChain Agents, OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, Bedrock, or MCP), start by observing one representative production flow before scaling coverage.

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With crash intelligence from the new Dynatrace RUM experience, practitioners get a dedicated mobile health view that instantly highlights regressions and stability issues, while two ready‑made dashboards surface performance and troubleshooting insights with zero setup. Where traditional tools stop at isolated crash reporting, Dynatrace connects every error and crash signal—across native, hybrid, and cross‑platform apps. The result is a single, intelligent experience that helps teams ship faster, fix issues sooner, and deliver trustworthy mobile apps.

Why mobile troubleshooting has fallen behind

In the web world, metrics like Core Web Vitals provide a common language for performance. In mobile, no such standard exists, despite mobile apps being far more sensitive to performance regressions than desktop applications. There’s an even bigger challenge: while browser‑based issues can be fixed instantly with a quick deployment, mobile bugs require a full app‑store release and rely on users updating their devices; this makes mobile bugs far more difficult and slower to reverse. It also makes proactive observability even more critical for mobile than for web. Furthermore, today’s mobile apps span hundreds of device types and unpredictable network conditions, and frameworks like React Native or Flutter must function reliably across a range of hardware and operating‑system versions. These layers make traditional “crash-only” analytics insufficient.

While a slow app start can cost you a new user before they’ve even reached your home page, a poorly performing view can stall your conversion funnel. And a frozen view can quietly destroy user trust without leaving any clear trace in your logs. Other monitoring tools often treat these problems in isolation: a crash report here, a view-analytics SDK there, an app-start metric captured in another tool… But teams need unified context, not fragmented data on glass.

A dedicated mobile performance experience

The new Dynatrace RUM experience solves this problem by bringing together performance and stability in a coherent picture rooted in real user journeys, not isolated events. This combined visibility is what sets Dynatrace apart. The foundation of the new RUM experience lies in a new performance analysis capability that reflects how mobile apps actually work. Apps are now represented through mobile “views”—the mobile app pages that users interact with as they move through the RUM experience. Dynatrace automatically detects views for native iOS and Android apps, with manual instrumentation available for frameworks like Flutter and React Native. Performance signals for each view tell a story, including, for developers, where the errors or exceptions occurred.

These metrics are stored as Dynatrace Grail®-native data with all relevant dimensions, enabling rich analysis across devices, OS versions, app versions, and frontends. These metrics are fed directly into Experience Vitals, where App Owners and PMs can drill down from a high-level performance view into detailed metrics for each view. Select any specific view to reveal its performance characteristics, error footprint, and context across the user journey.

App health intelligence on the basis of crashes, ANRs, and error context

Crashes have always been a pain point for mobile developers, but ANRs are often worse. Many tools treat ANRs as an afterthought, offering incomplete or inconsistent visibility. Error Inspector, the dedicated app for frontend troubleshooting on the Dynatrace platform, now captures ANRs on both iOS and Android, as well as crash reporting for Android NDK. Error Inspector reports errors as structured user events with precisely defined semantics. Previously, Dynatrace practitioners could add properties to automatically monitored telemetry data, turning previously opaque frontend degradations into immediately diagnosable issues. Similarly, in the new RUM experience, user events triggered by mobile apps are automatically enriched with view context, device details, and session information to identify exactly which users, contexts, and conditions triggered a crash, thereby dramatically accelerating root‑cause identification and troubleshooting.

Server-side processing applies efficient grouping logic to provide a clear, deduplicated view of what’s happening, enabling meaningful dashboarding and reliable future alerting. With Dynatrace Experience Vitals, SREs gain insights into app performance and stability. Insights are elevated to the same first-class status as performance, ensuring teams see both sides of the experience.

Crashes and ANRs flow naturally to Error Inspector, where they’re prioritized by severity—crashes have higher severity than errors, and all ANRs are highlighted. For developers, this means less noise and faster diagnosis. For business leaders, it means clarity on what matters most, making prioritization a breeze.

Introducing React Native symbolication

Cross-platform frameworks create powerful opportunities but introduce complexity when things go wrong. Stack traces often combine JavaScript and native code, leaving teams with unhelpful, obfuscated output like hashes. To solve this, Dynatrace now supports full React Native source map uploading and management, with automatic symbolication of React Native crashes directly in Error Inspector.

Teams can upload symbol files through standard methods and manage them via a new interface. Unlike competing tools, which only partially support hybrid stack symbolication/deobfuscation or require manual post-processing, symbolicated crashes appear automatically in Dynatrace, making debugging dramatically more efficient.

For developers working with React Native, this eliminates the friction of switching tools and patching together build artifacts.

A new mobile health overview

Mobile developers often collaborate with their SRE counterparts on observability teams, who frequently face a simple yet critical question from App Owners and PMs: “Is my mobile app healthy right now?”

The answer to this question is provided by Experience Vitals. The mobile health overview shows whether RUM is enabled on your monitored devices, highlights performance indicators such as app start thresholds, and surfaces stability concerns such as crash and ANR rates. Crashes and errors link directly to Error Inspector, creating a smooth transition from error awareness to analysis.

This focus on clarity allows decision makers to grasp app health at a glance while giving developers frictionless access to the underlying data.

Good insights require the correct setup

To help teams get started faster and avoid misconfiguration, Dynatrace introduces improved instrumentation guides for iOS and Android. These guides add necessary context to ensure new customers receive the exact data they expect. The mobile settings experience has been redesigned to make it clear how UI selections correspond to code snippet changes, aligning it more closely with what teams experience in agentless web flows. This consistency matters, especially for practitioners managing multiple platforms on the enterprise level.

To accelerate adoption and make insights immediately usable, Dynatrace is introducing two ready-made dashboards:

• App start health dashboard, which includes app start analysis and high-level performance trends.
• Mobile health dashboard, designed for investigating crashes and errors, providing stability insights without requiring configuration.

These dashboards incorporate the new metrics, dimensions, and logic introduced across the release, giving teams instant, actionable visibility into their mobile apps. Decision-makers get the reports they need, developers get the views that help them move faster. And everyone benefits from data that’s consistent, contextual, and unified.

Raising the bar for mobile troubleshooting

Most mobile monitoring solutions emphasize either performance or stability, but rarely both in a unified, contextual way. Many tools require heavy manual instrumentation, fragmented SDKs, or separate troubleshooting workflows for native and cross-platform apps. Crash grouping is inconsistent, ANR support varies widely, symbolication often requires external tools, and virtually no other mobile monitoring solution combines all this with a platform that also ties into backend traces and business impact.

Dynatrace delivers something fundamentally and wonderfully different: a single, Grail-powered, full stack view of mobile performance and stability that blends performance metrics, view insights, app-start intelligence, ANR/crash analytics, and hybrid framework support—all in one place, all contextualized by real user journeys and backend traces. This is not just crash reporting. It’s not just performance monitoring. It’s a complete solution for understanding the mobile experience, from the first view to the last tap.

With these enhancements, Dynatrace sets a new standard for mobile observability. Mobile developers gain a more intuitive debugging experience. Product Managers get clear KPIs. App owners receive actionable health insights. And organizations as a whole gain the ability to deliver reliable, performant, and engaging mobile experiences. In a digital world increasingly shaped by mobile interactions, Dynatrace provides the visibility teams need—and the intelligence mobile troubleshooting has been waiting for.

Get started

To instrument your mobile apps and start collecting the full breadth of performance and stability data, please visit our mobile instrumentation documentation. And, if you want to explore how Dynatrace helps you debug crashes, ANRs, and React Native issues with full context, open Error Inspector to see these new capabilities in action.

The post Deep troubleshooting and crash intelligence in the new Dynatrace RUM experience appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Why RUM matters more than ever

As the frontend becomes the primary point of customer engagement, real user monitoring is a critical link between IT performance and business outcomes. The ways users interact with web and mobile apps have evolved, driven by single-page applications (SPAs), asynchronous rendering, and nonlinear navigation. These changes have increased the demand for RUM solutions that can keep pace with modern architectures and deliver actionable insights.

Teams face growing challenges:

• Limited visibility into user journeys across SPAs and mobile applications
• Fragmented analysis between frontend telemetry and backend execution
• Slow troubleshooting when context is missing or spread across tools
• Increased pressure to capture meaningful data while maintaining strict privacy standards

Modern frameworks and libraries introduce new patterns and constraints, making it harder to understand user behavior and optimize experiences using legacy tools. Teams require solutions that not only keep pace with evolving architectures but also empower them to act quickly and confidently on user experience data.

Reinventing RUM for modern application experiences

The new Dynatrace RUM experience was purpose-built to address these challenges and futureproof RUM use cases. By leveraging unified, end-to-end observability with deep business context, Dynatrace introduces a streamlined, modern approach to understanding frontend performance and user behavior. Advanced analytics and intuitive, purpose-built workflows are layered on a foundation that aligns with how today’s teams operate.

With this new RUM experience, teams can:

• Understand modern application behavior with new frontend signals: Gain deeper visibility into how users interact with single-page and mobile applications, leveraging new data models and behavioral signals.
• Improve user experience with out-of-the-box insights and intuitive practitioner workflows: Access immediate, actionable insights through purpose-built apps and dashboards designed for common practitioner tasks.
• Extend insights with advanced analytics and built-in privacy controls: Perform deeper analysis, maintain responsible long-term data retention, and ensure privacy and compliance with flexible data access and built-in controls.

Together, these capabilities empower teams to optimize performance, resolve complaints, analyze user behavior, and accelerate DevOps workflows—collaborating more effectively and acting faster on real user impact.

Understand modern application behavior with new frontend signals

The ability to capture and analyze new frontend signals that reflect how modern applications behave in production gives teams a more accurate view of how users move through single-page and mobile applications—without additional instrumentation.

Industry standards such as Core Web Vitals, along with mobile-specific performance signals coupled with enhancements for troubleshooting: application not responding (ANR) and symbolication, provide a consistent way to assess application health and troubleshoot issues across platforms. The new RUM data model captures events that reflect how modern applications behave in production, including:

• Background requests: Network calls initiated by an application without direct user interaction, typically to fetch or update data in the background to maintain app functionality and user experience.
• User interactions: Events such as clicks, taps, scrolls, or keypresses that reflect how users engage with an application and provide behavioral insights without necessarily invoking a backend request.
• Soft navigation: As modern web applications often don’t perform a full-page load when navigating, soft navigation helps analyze the user’s path through the application from one view to the next.

Improve user experience faster with out-of-the-box insights and intuitive practitioner workflows

The new RUM experience delivers immediate value through redesigned, task-oriented experiences built around common practitioner workflows. Out-of-the-box apps and dashboards make RUM data easier to understand and act on from the start.

Pre-built dashboards surface industry-standard performance metrics such as Core Web Vitals and key mobile signals, giving teams a clear and consistent view of frontend health. Unified dashboards bring frontend and backend data into a single view, making it easier to trace request errors to their underlying exceptions, monitor customer experience over time, and understand how performance issues impact business outcomes.

Purpose-built apps include:

Experience Vitals: Quickly identify which requests or assets are contributing to slowdowns, using redesigned waterfall analysis and industry standards like Core Web Vitals. DevOps teams can define custom alerts and integrate them into existing workflows.

Error Inspector: Group and prioritize errors, presenting critical context in one place. Session details are shown alongside stack traces, making it easier to assess impact and resolve problems quickly. Integration with Jira accelerates issue tracking and accountability.

Users & Sessions: Ground investigations in real user session data. Support teams can quickly find and analyze individual sessions, reducing guesswork and time to resolution. Product owners can identify friction points, validate reported issues, and improve user journeys based on actual behavior.

These capabilities help teams:

• Optimize frontend availability and performance
• Troubleshoot issues faster with clear, end-to-end context
• Resolve customer complaints using real session data

“UWM is deeply committed to site reliability engineering to deliver the best possible client experience. With the new RUM experience, we gain unprecedented, actionable insights into user interactions, empowering our SRE teams to optimize performance.”

Gavin Wallis, Observability Architect, United Wholesale Mortgage

Extend insights with advanced analytics and built-in privacy controls

While out-of-the-box experiences address the most common workflows, some scenarios require a deeper dive. The new RUM experience provides flexible access to all frontend data through a unified data model, enabling teams to explore real user behavior with greater context and precision.

• Custom dashboards and collaborative Notebooks: Correlate frontend behavior with backend performance, analyze experience trends over time, and connect user experience directly to business outcomes such as conversion or revenue impact.
• Dynatrace Query Language (DQL): Explore and connect data, with Dynatrace Intelligence available to help with query generation and data interpretation.
• Privacy and compliance: Built-in privacy and permission controls support responsible data use. Extended data retention (public preview) allows deep investigations, compliance support, and historical trend analysis.

Getting started with the new RUM experience

The new RUM experience is now generally available, with all apps and features available by default on DPS SaaS tenants with version 330 or higher. You can allow data ingestion to the Dynatrace 3rd-generation platform for individual frontends or whole environments. (Classic data capture isn’t impacted.)

Dynatrace RUM setup guides

• For web application setup, follow these steps. If you use automatic injection, the new configuration will be applied within 5 minutes. If you insert the RUM JavaScript manually, you might need to update the snippet, depending on the snippet format you’re using.
• For mobile app setup, follow these steps to set up the new RUM experience.
• For web frontends at the environment level, follow these steps.

The post Unprecedented insights into frontend user experience with Dynatrace Real User Monitoring appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Mobile teams struggle to solve what they can’t see

For many businesses, mobile is now the most critical channel for engaging users. Mobile apps are where purchases happen, accounts are created, and first impressions are made. But it’s also where users are most likely to abandon their journeys if something feels broken, slow, or unintuitive.

All practitioners struggle to understand what actually happened during a user’s session when something goes wrong or when a user behaves in a way that deviates from the expected journey. This can get particularly puzzling when there are no apparent errors or performance blockers hindering a user’s experience. Traditional tools provide fragmentary details: logs, events, crash reports, or aggregated analytics. However, none of these capture the full context. Mobile engineers are unable to reliably reproduce bugs without seeing exact user actions. Support teams can’t respond effectively to vague or incomplete user reports.

Full visibility into mobile user behavior

This is where Session Replay comes in. This capability recreates real user behavior in a video-like playback, so you can visually step through a session just as the user experienced it: taps, swipes, scrolls, page transitions, and all. And now, for the first time, this powerful capability extends beyond the browser and crashes on mobile apps to include full sessions for native mobile apps.

With Dynatrace Session Replay for mobile apps, teams get a complete, contextual view of how users interact with mobile apps in the wild by collecting and visualizing key signals like gestures, views, UI states, and navigation paths. While Session Replay is often seen as a frontend-focused tool, it can significantly help identify, triage, and resolve backend issues by connecting user actions to system behavior. This helps contextualize backend failures, correlate user actions to backend events, and, in a nutshell, identify misalignment between front and backends.

How to make the most of Dynatrace Session Replay for Mobile Apps

Let’s dive into key use cases where Session Replay delivers tangible value across teams:

Faster debugging

Understanding the problem is often impossible with only data from Logs or Real User Monitoring. In some cases, observing the sessions where the error occurs can provide valuable context and lead to a more accurate solution.

Use case: Imagine your team can’t reproduce a performance issue affecting only a small segment of users still using iOS 17. Logs are inconclusive, and RUM data doesn’t tell the whole story.

With Session Replay, you can:

• Watch the exact gestures and actions related to the issue.
• See which page or interaction triggered the problem.
• Identify whether it’s a device-specific issue, a network hiccup, or a UI bug.

Result: Your dev team fixes the issue in hours, not days, without needing to reproduce it manually.

UX optimization and boosting conversion

The best way to understand users is to observe how they engage with your applications. Session Replay allows you to select a sample of mobile sessions based on various criteria. Watching these sessions helps you learn about annoyances and understand patterns in user behavior, which can then be streamlined into a better user experience.

Use case: Your analytics show a drop-off in the final step of your checkout funnel, and you don’t know why. Is it a confusing UI? A broken button? A slow-loading view?

With Session Replay, you can:

• Watch real user sessions to see where they pause, scroll, or back out.
• Identify if users struggle with form validation, payment options, or navigation.
• Spot rage taps or repeated attempts to interact with unresponsive elements.

Result: You optimize the checkout flow, reduce abandonment, and increase conversions—backed by real user behavior.

Improved customer support

Allowing help desk personnel to review the session that prompted a user’s complaint provides common ground for the conversation and helps ensure user satisfaction.

Use case: A user submits a support ticket: “The app didn’t work when I tried to book a ride.” No screenshots, no steps to reproduce, and the issue can’t be replicated.

With Session Replay, your support team can:

• Instantly view the user’s session to see what they saw.
• Understand the context: which screen they were on, what they tapped, and what went wrong.
• Provide a fast, accurate response, or escalate with full context to engineering.

Result: Faster resolution, happier users, and fewer back-and-forth emails.

Data privacy

Dynatrace adheres to world-class standards for data protection. Mobile session data is secured just like any other captured telemetry. However, privacy configurations must still be reviewed by each customer to ensure compliance with internal and legal requirements. Like web applications, Session Replay for mobile applications offers three levels of privacy controls:

• Safest – Masks all editable text fields, labels, images, switches, and web views
• Safe – Masks all editable text fields only
• Custom – By default, behaves like Safest, but allows you to define exactly which elements or views to mask.

See configure custom masking in the preferred documentation below.

Turn on Dynatrace Session Replay for Mobile Apps

Cluster-side activation

Session Replay is now supported for both iOS (including those built in SwiftUI) and Android apps (including those using Jetpack Compose). To get started, you’ll first need to turn it on for each mobile app, as it’s managed separately at the cluster level.

To activate the feature:

1. Navigate to: Frontends → Select a mobile application → Edit → Enablement and cost control
2. Set the Session Replay Mobile toggle to on.

Once turned on, you can define the percentage of sessions to capture. By default, Dynatrace captures 100% of sessions, but you can reduce this based on your data volume and storage needs.

Session Replay for Mobile integrates seamlessly with Session Replay for Crashes. This allows you to:

• Automatically capture 100% of crash sessions
• Sample a configurable percentage of all other sessions

If you’re hosting Dynatrace on-premises, make sure to prepare for increased storage requirements before enabling this feature.

Instrumentation and configuration of a mobile application

Scenarios differ depending on the operating system, so please follow our documentation:

• Configure Session Replay for iOS
• Configure Session Replay for Android

The instrumentation and configuration process is simplified for customers who have already used Session Replay for Crashes or mobile Real User Monitoring.

The post Dynatrace Session Replay for Mobile Apps: see what your users see appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Business Insights is a unique team within Dynatrace that partners with organizations to maximize their value from Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) and Business Analytics, through our deep product expertise and exclusive technology capabilities. The Business Insights team provides product configuration and best practices, exclusive analytics and analysis to drive improved customer experience, and expertise on demand. Dedicating the necessary time, resources, and focus to deliver excellent end-user experiences can be a challenge. This is why Dynatrace’s largest and most sophisticated customers rely on Business Insights to deliver the strategic value that helps drive improved customer experience and business outcomes, whether that’s:

• Deploying a synthetic monitoring strategy to help a large beverage company achieve 100% age-verification compliance for the first time across 3,000+ properties
• Using our deep expertise in real user analysis to help a global automaker drive a 90% reduction in frontend errors, a 50% reduction in search results load time, and a 58% year-over-year reduction in outages
• Identifying the root cause of a performance issue impacting customers on one of the UK’s largest retail sites, which, when fixed, reduced exit rate by 2%, driving $500k+ of additional monthly revenue
• Working with senior executives and cross-functional teams at one of the world’s largest airlines to implement a holistic Business Observability strategy combining DEM, Business Analytics, and the broader Dynatrace platform to provide an end-to-end view of how infrastructure, services, and front-end applications impact critical business flows and KPIs in real time

Business Insights has long worked closely with Dynatrace customers to help accelerate adoption and value from the Dynatrace Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) and Business Analytics capabilities; however, customer collaboration could be challenging at times with information scattered across emails and PowerPoint slides, multiple channels of engagement, and analysis disconnected from the Dynatrace platform. The Business Insights app simplifies and enhances the experience and engagement of Business Insights services, making it more seamless and accessible. It’s also the starting point for delivering more advanced AI-driven analysis, like those pioneered in the Opportunity Insights app.

Dynatrace delivers more value than its competitors

The Business Insights app directly addresses these pain points through unified, contextual delivery on the Dynatrace platform that transforms how insights are received, consumed, engaged with, and acted upon.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Bringing Business Insights into an app on the Dynatrace platform creates an enhanced experience of both the service and the platform through targeted, actionable analysis and recommendations directly in Dynatrace, in the context of the rest of the product, and with the ability to move seamlessly between them.

Timeline view: Your complete analysis history

As a Business Insights customer, keeping track of communications (enablement content, historical analysis, value over time, etc.), bringing new team members up to speed on the service, and summarizing value received over time for key stakeholders could be a challenge, with everything buried in emails. The Business Insights app centralizes all engagement and analysis in a single timeline view, making it easy to review everything the Business Insights team has provided for your organization, including:

• Analysis value moments
• Announcements
• Enablement material

Invites to live sessions such as Tech Talks and Customer Connects.

Each analysis value moment is tagged with helpful metadata, including type (performance, operational, business), product component (web, mobile, synthetic), application/synthetic monitor name, and specific page or event details. Enablement moments help you ramp up on the product more quickly, while announcements make sure you’re always up to date with what’s happening with the DEM and Business Analytics capabilities in the context of what matters to you. This comprehensive view helps new team members quickly understand your digital experience landscape and previous insights, accelerating onboarding for the service and Dynatrace DEM.

Value moment detail: Rich interactive content

Value moments are small and consumable DEM insights and analysis deliverables put together by our analysts for operational, performance, and business use cases to help you understand where to focus. Selecting a value moment from the timeline opens the main view with structured, easy-to-navigate content. Each value moment includes an optional video summary at the top for a quick overview, followed by indexed sections that allow you to jump directly to relevant information. Content links seamlessly to other Dynatrace Apps, Notebooks, and Dashboards for deeper context, eliminating the need to switch between tools. Each value moment also includes a shareable deep link, making bringing additional team members into the conversation simple. The structured, consumable content of value moments and easily navigable content help teams quickly identify focus areas and collaborate on operational decisions and actions.

Collaborative engagement and real-time feedback

The Business Insights app transforms analysis from a one-way delivery into a collaborative experience. Simply select any content within a value moment to leave comments or questions directed to the Business Insights team or your team members. Our team receives immediate notification and responds directly in the comment thread, keeping everyone aligned and in context. You’ll also receive email notifications with direct links when we reply. Threaded discussions and immediate notifications keep teams aligned and engaged with the Business Insights team.

Each value moment also includes a dedicated feedback section, allowing you to quickly indicate value and direct our future analysis and priorities.

Early feedback

The ability to easily provide feedback has been pivotal in quickly refining our interactions with the Insights team and the value we get from the service
– North American gaming company

By centralizing everything in one place, we’re inspiring people to use RUM and freeing them from digging through multiple tools and endless emails to find the context they need.
– UK insurance company

What’s next

The Dynatrace Business Insights app has been built to transform the way you engage with Business Insights and increase the value you receive from the Dynatrace platform, giving you:

• Centralized communication – All analysis, discussions, reports, and material in one searchable location
• Contextual engagement – See analysis in context of your real-time data within the product, with direct links to other apps/notebooks/dashboards
• Increased adoption and team exposure – Easy sharing of value moments with deep links, making insights more accessible across your organization
• Simplified collaboration – Comment directly on specific content to seamless interaction with Business Insights and your internal teams
• Historical access – Timeline view for easy tracking of past interactions, discussions, and analysis
• Self-service access – Anytime access to reports and insights without waiting for emails and calls
• Enhanced service through direct feedback – Simple, built-in mechanisms indicate value and guide future analysis

This first release is just the beginning, not merely a new interface but the foundation for next-generation Business Insights that will allow advanced machine learning and AI capabilities for enhanced analysis.

Get started

The new app is now generally available for Dynatrace Business Insights customers running a Dynatrace SaaS deployment. We’ll progressively roll the app out to existing customers over the coming weeks:

• If you’re interested in being part of the initial wave of adopters, please talk with your Dynatrace analyst or submit this form.
• If you’re not a Business Insights customer and are interested in learning more, please reach out to the Dynatrace Sales team.

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Dynatrace and the Dynatrace logo, are trademarks of the Dynatrace, Inc. group of companies. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

The post The Power of Business Insights expertise now directly on the Dynatrace platform appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Performance and error optimization is complicated, and the approach to driving improvement has long relied on static recommendations disconnected from a site’s end users and their experiences. While traditional methods can help you understand when your users face poor performance or errors, understanding if and how much these problems impact your business remains largely guesswork. The new Opportunity Insights app (available to subscribers of the Dynatrace Business Insights service) takes an industry-first approach to shift this paradigm: using predictive AI on top of your application’s historical real user data, we identify the primary performance/error metric impacting user experience on each page and quantify the predicted business impact of recommended optimizations. With this information, business and application owners are empowered to make decisions based on their impact on the bottom line.

Performance, errors, and user experience

Dynatrace has long understood the importance of performance as a foundational component of user experience and the impact that page speed and any friction introduced by errors have on user behavior. When a page is slow to load, users are quick to abandon the site; research by Google, Vodafone, and others has repeatedly shown that even small (~100 ms) degradations in page performance can increase abandonment, lost revenue, and lead to persistent changes in user behavior. Additionally, JavaScript or HTTP errors that impact a page’s functionality or overall experience can be even more immediate and lasting, leaving users with the impression that a site’s problems reflect the brand, leading to a longer-lasting negative impression.

Despite this broad, conceptual understanding of the importance and impact of poor performance and errors on end users, it’s difficult for site owners to fully understand and quantify the experience of their unique site on its users. Until now, the best approach was to take generic, static recommendations based on the experience of large internet brands and their user bases, apply them to a site, and hope to see improvement in the business. Sometimes, these recommendations are so far from current performance or cost so much to implement that they seem irrelevant or unattainable. The addition of more and more metrics over time has only made this increasingly complex. As a result, it’s challenging to get business and resources focused on performance and error optimization without supporting data that shows how those optimizations will impact your organization’s financial outcomes.

Site owners and businesses are left asking where they should invest and what exactly they should optimize to balance the best experience for their users with the least amount of effort that will lead to improvements in the business.

Performance and errors in context

What if you could answer the question, “What is the smallest change I can make to this page to maximally reduce user-exit rates and improve conversion rates?”

With Opportunity Insights, Dynatrace uses predictive AI and your site’s real user data to identify opportunities where improvements in performance and errors can make the most significant difference in retaining users and sessions while reducing exit rates and converting more customers.

To provide precise, contextual recommendations for performance and error improvement on a given page, Opportunity Insights does two key things:

• First, it looks at user behavior and performance/error metrics across millions of sessions and identifies which candidate metrics show the most significant impact on user experience and should be considered a metric to improve. Performance metrics to improve can be Visually Complete, Speed Index, or other timing metrics associated with the page load cycle.
• Opportunity Insights then predicts the business impact of improvement in those metrics and suggests a target for the most significant return on effort,” expressed as an increase in retained sessions, conversion percentage, or revenue per month.

From an underlying list of hundreds of opportunities, Opportunity Insights surfaces the Top 3 opportunities that will provide you with the most significant return on effort.

How we do it

Opportunity Insights’ predictive AI is powered by a patent-pending structural causal machine learning model (connecting the cause and effect of performance, errors, and behavior) that is trained on each application’s unique real user session data across millions of sessions to analyze errors, performance metrics, and behavior patterns. It looks at these metrics across key pages to pinpoint where your users are most impacted and which metric directly impacts each page.

With this deep understanding of the intersection of performance, errors, and real user behavior, Opportunity Insights simulates over 650 million possible scenarios of performance improvement per application to surface precise recommendations for optimization that will yield the most significant increase in retained sessions for the least amount of effort. Armed with this prediction, it’s easy to understand the potential payoff of improvements and better prioritize your development efforts.

In evaluating our model’s accuracy in understanding performance/errors and behavior, we use historical real user data and a standard 80-20 train-test split to train our model. It predicts user behavior based on performance/error experience. We’ve tested it across various applications and industries, and it accurately predicts user behavior about 90% of the time. When the suggested metric is optimized, the user-exit rate drops, and the number of additional retained sessions increases as predicted.

We also tested our business impact prediction in real-world scenarios. We used customer applications where our model identified improvement opportunities. After implementing the suggested optimizations, we found that ~20% more users and sessions were retained than predicted, showing that our model’s predictions are conservative.

Early user feedback

Preliminary user feedback validates the ability of the app to help application teams, and owners quickly and easily understand where to optimize and the business impact of optimizations. Here are a few customer highlights:

• The director of e-commerce at a leading budget airline stated, “This is exactly what we need [in our decision-making], connecting application performance and business outcomes.”
• The IT Manager of a leading US insurance company stated, “This aligns with the direction we are taking the company, which is to make decisions based on business impact.”
• A platform monitoring manager from a leading payment company stated, “Honestly, this should be driving where they (the teams) are doing bug fixes and performance improvements.”

Get started

Opportunity Insights is available with the Dynatrace Business Insights service. It was released to a subset of Business Insights customers as a preview in April 2024 and is now generally available with Dynatrace version 1.296.

Download the whitepaper to learn more about the technology underlying Opportunity Insights and how you can quickly understand where to strategically invest development resources so they have the greatest impact on your business.

If you’re already a Business Insights customer and want to learn more, please contact your Insights Team. If you’re not a Business Insights customer but are interested in Opportunity Insights and the value Dynatrace Business Insights can bring your customers and your business, please contact your Dynatrace Account Executive or Customer Success Manager.

The post Dynatrace Opportunity Insights uses AI prediction and real-user data to optimize business outcomes appeared first on Dynatrace news.

We’re proud to announce that Ally Financial has presented Dynatrace with its Ally Technology Velocity with Quality award. Ally Financial is the home of the nation’s largest all-digital bank and is an industry-leading auto financing business.

This is the second time Ally Financial has presented its Ally Technology Partner Awards. Specifically, the company recognized five third-party suppliers for delivering outstanding service excellence across various criteria that align with Ally’s core values and performance standards. These criteria include operational excellence, security and data privacy, speed to market, and disruptive innovation.

High monitoring costs and limited visibility drive the need for innovation

Ally Financial uses AI-powered observability for monitoring and automating its technology stack, from its cloud and on-premises infrastructure to its applications and customer digital experiences.

But as a company with a mission to “Do It Right” and be a relentless ally for customers and communities, the high-cost monitoring solutions it was using provided only limited insights into end-user experiences. Ally’s goal was to reduce the number of monitoring tools it was using and its annual spend while gaining better, more actionable—and more automatable—insights into systems that affect customer experiences.

Full-stack observability resolved problems, consolidated tools, and reduced costs

Ally became a Dynatrace customer in 2023. Within hours of starting Dynatrace, the team was solving long-standing problems. They quickly adopted full-stack monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM). With the insights they gained, the team expanded into developing workflow automations using log management and analytics powered by the Grail data lakehouse. As a result, Ally is driving a new level of operational efficiency and saving millions in annual licensing costs.

“We partnered with the Dynatrace team to consolidate our observability stack, allowing us to enrich metrics, logs, events, and traces with predictive analytics in a unified fashion across all channels,” said Jason McMunn, Director of System Engineering at Ally Financial. “This resulted in significant savings and much faster ROI. Moreover, we’re able to build automated workflows that help our teams resolve problems, operate more collaboratively and efficiently, deliver software faster, and delight our customers with world-class digital customer experiences.”

For Dynatrace, the Ally award is a cause for end-to-end celebration. “We’re excited Ally Financial has recognized Dynatrace as its Technology Partner of the Year,” said Matthias Dollentz-Scharer, Chief Customer Officer at Dynatrace. “Ally is an agile, modern financial services enterprise that has etched unified observability, AI, and analytics into the core of its cloud strategy. Indeed, by helping their team achieve an end-to-end view of their entire cloud environment—including front-end applications, mobile app experiences, and underlying infrastructure—we are proud to help Ally redefine digital banking.”

The innovation is mutual

The Ally Technology Partner Awards are a way for the company to acknowledge its exceptional partners. “We are proud to honor the vendor partners that play a significant role in our achievements at Ally through the Ally Technology Partner Awards,” said Sathish Muthukrishnan, chief information, data, and digital officer at Ally Financial. “Superior execution, quality, and partnership are showcased by each winner, which we value here at Ally as we aim to provide a best-in-class digital banking experience.”

Earlier this year, Dynatrace presented Ally Financial with its own award as our first Digital Breakout Performer. We present the award to customers who have begun their journey with Dynatrace in the last 12 months and immediately recognize a tremendous return on investment from unified observability, AI, and analytics.

Ally Technical Velocity with Quality award promises more innovation ahead

Receiving the Ally Technical Velocity with Quality award confirms the Dynatrace commitment to delivering customers the tools and technologies they need to make software work perfectly.

Dynatrace is especially proud to support innovators like Ally Financial. “The team at Ally is driving incredible efficiency as they continue to consolidate monitoring tools,” Dollentz-Scharer said. “Ally continues to push the envelope to further monitor their cloud infrastructure costs. I’m thrilled to see what’s in store for Ally Financial.”

The post Dynatrace proud to receive the Ally Technology Velocity with Quality award appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Synthetic testing simulates real-user behaviors within an application or service to pinpoint potential problems. Here’s a look at why this testing matters, how it works, and what companies need to get the most from this approach.

What is synthetic testing?

Synthetic testing is an IT process that uses software to discover and diagnose performance issues with user journeys by simulating real-user activity. Also called continuous monitoring or synthetic monitoring, synthetic testing mimics actual users’ behaviors to help companies identify and remediate potential availability and performance issues.

For example, teams can program synthetic test tools to send large volumes of simultaneous resource requests to a new application and evaluate how well it responds. Are all requests met in a reasonable amount of time? If not, what was the median increase over baseline response times? Did these requests impact users’ overall application experience? How?

By understanding how an app or service may respond in real-world conditions, teams can better pinpoint potential problems and fix these issues before live deployment or before users are affected. Along with real user monitoring (RUM), synthetic testing provides a comprehensive view into the user experience to ensure software meets user requirements.

Synthetic testing vs. real user monitoring

Both synthetic testing and real user monitoring (RUM) play a role in application development. The biggest difference between synthetic testing and RUM is synthetic simulates real-world scenarios, whereas RUM measures actual real-user behavior.

Another difference is where they happen in the development life cycle. Because synthetic tests don’t require a live environment, teams can conduct them in production or test environments to assess overall performance or the performance of a specific application component. In addition, these tests’ simulated nature requires minimal resource overhead, meaning teams can run them continuously.

RUM, meanwhile, requires actual users. As a result, it can only be conducted once applications or services are live. While this makes RUM more limited in scope, it doesn’t negate its value. Synthetic tests attempt to mimic both common and uncommon user behaviors, but even the best simulations are no substitute for the real thing. Users often interact with technologies in unpredictable ways that could reveal previously unknown issues.

Put another way, users may act out of frustration in response to a set of circumstances — such as “rage clicking” if an application doesn’t respond fast enough. Synthetic tools, meanwhile, can only simulate frustration. While teams can program them to rage click after a certain point or even randomly, they can never truly replicate the real-user experience.

As a result, organizations benefit from a mix of RUM and synthetic tests.

Types of synthetic testing

There are three broad types of synthetic testing: availability, web performance, and transaction. Each offers its own strengths and abilities for different needs.

Availability testing

Availability testing helps organizations confirm that a site or application is responding to user requests. It can also check for the availability of specific content, or if specific API calls are successful.

Web-performance testing

Web-performance testing evaluates metrics including page loading speed, the performance of specific page elements, and the occurrence rate of site errors.

Transaction testing

Transaction testing sees robot clients attempting to complete specific tasks, such as logging into accounts, filling in an on-site form, or completing the checkout process.

How synthetic testing works

Synthetic testing works by using a robotic client application installed on a browser, mobile device, or desktop computer. These applications send a series of automated test calls to a service or application, which simulate a user’s “clickstream,” or the actions they take while on the site.

Consider a synthetic test designed to evaluate an e-commerce shopping application. First is a test of the home screen. Does it open quickly and consistently with no visual artifacts? Next, the synthetic test links to product pages. It then moves on to shopping carts, shipping rates, and, finally, a simulated purchase. The robotic client application reports if any of these transactions fail or perform too slowly, allowing companies to make changes before services go live.

When designing synthetic tests, it’s worth using a combination of browser-based, mobile, and desktop tests to assess application performance. This is because each of these traffic vectors comes with unique challenges. For example, even if response times are consistent across all testing environments, mobile users could still experience issues with automatic screen size scaling or application design choices that favor desktop users.

Requirements for synthetic testing

To create a reliable testing environment, several components are critical.

Well-defined goals

Effective synthetic testing depends on well-defined goals. Organizations need to identify what they’re trying to measure before they write and deploy test scripts. Then, it’s ensured the data captured is relevant to these goals.

Customizable robot clients

Robot clients are the foundation of synthetic testing. But in the same way that testing needs to evolve over time, organizations need client components that can be configured to keep pace with change as their on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments evolve.

Comprehensive synthetic testing tools

To effectively evaluate and optimize digital experiences, organizations need synthetic testing tools that cover the major user touchpoints with their environments. At a minimum, a synthetic monitoring program should include the following tools:

• Single-URL browser monitors. Single-URL browser monitors simulate a user’s visit to a site using an up-to-date web browser. By consistently running single-URL browser testing from both public and private sources, organizations can ensure that sites maintain an established baseline performance.
• Browser clickpaths. Browser click-path testing monitors specific click sequences through critical application workflows. Running browser click paths regularly can ensure that specific function sequences remain available and high-performing.
• HTTP monitors. HTTP monitors use simple HTTP requests to ensure that specific application programming interface (API) endpoints and website resources are available.

In addition to running these tests regularly, organizations should ensure their synthetic testing tools follow basic security best practices. For example, a synthetic testing tool should not send requests to local hosts or default IP addresses.

Synthetic testing best practices

A few best practices can help organizations achieve reliable, actionable data from synthetic testing tools. The following are three strategies worth considering.

1. Reduce setup complexity

The level of application integration required for synthetic solutions to collect key data can lead to complexity. To help mitigate this risk, clearly define your goals before setting up tests to streamline configuration and leverage tools designed to simplify the process with visual or script-based setups.

2. Prioritize continual monitoring

Continual monitoring is critical for organizations to understand how applications and users interact over time. It also plays a key role in addressing the issue of test fragility. Even small changes to the user interface — such as removing or replacing a button — can cause tests to fail. Continual monitoring allows organizations to detect and fix these failures immediately.

3. Keep context front and center

Testing doesn’t drive action without context. While many synthetic tools provide data about what’s happening when users interact with applications, they don’t answer the question of why. Keeping context front and center with synthetic testing integrated into an end-to-end observability platform provides complete visibility without adding additional tools.

Synthetic testing as part of a unified observability strategy

To make synthetic testing easy to develop and maintain, it should be part of a wider observability strategy. By taking a unified platform approach to observability, organizations can integrate synthetic testing into their overall application performance efforts.

Dynatrace synthetic monitoring provides continuous and on-demand answers to questions about application performance, reliability, and the overall user experience. By combining this approach with Dynatrace RUM, it’s possible to capture the full range of customer behavior, from common clickstreams to unexpected actions that may suddenly tax resources or lead to strange application behavior.

Dynatrace helps organizations proactively evaluate the performance of applications no matter where they are in the development cycle. The result is enhanced application performance and improved user experience that keeps customers coming back.

The post What is synthetic testing? appeared first on Dynatrace news.

In today’s competitive business environment, customers demand seamless user experiences. As businesses compete for customer loyalty, it’s critical for organizations to harness tools that help them see how users interact with their services. By understanding the difference between two such tools, synthetic monitoring vs. real user monitoring, teams can use them to develop high-performing applications and services that deliver loyalty-building user experiences.

Although both of these development and testing practices examine user behavior, they have distinct—and complementary—goals. Here, we’ll explore synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring, and how both help to deliver user experiences that win—and keep—customers.

What is real user monitoring?

Real user monitoring (RUM) is a performance monitoring process that collects detailed data about users’ interactions with an application. RUM gathers information on a variety of performance metrics. If you collect data on page load events, for example, it can include navigation start (when performance measuring begins), request start (when the user initiates a server request), and speed index metrics (measure page load speed).

A user session, also known as a click path or user journey, is a user’s sequence of actions while working with an application. User sessions can vary significantly, even within a single application. RUM collects data on each user action within a session, including the time required to complete the action. As a result, IT pros can identify patterns and where to make improvements in the user experience.

Ideally, a RUM tool would record all user actions to capture the complete picture of a user’s experience. In reality, only highly scalable RUM solutions can collect data on all user actions, while less scalable tools must sample user actions and make inferences from partial data.

Benefits and challenges of RUM

Real user monitoring is great for providing real metrics from real users navigating a site or application. The benefits of RUM include the following:

• Access to data from real end users across various applications, services, and environments.
• The ability to collect a diverse set of data points for every user accessing the application or services.
• Customizable variables to track, collect, and evaluate application-specific data points using JavaScript.
• Real-time monitoring of user application and service interactions.
• Enhanced issue remediation with the option to watch visual session replays of users interacting with web services or applications.

RUM, however, has some limitations, including the following:

• RUM requires traffic to be useful. If teams use RUM in a pre-production environment, it’s challenging to get useful information. Because teams use pre-production environments for testing before releasing an application to end users, they have no access to real-user data.
• RUM works best only when people actively visit the application, website, or services.
• In some cases, you will lack benchmarking capabilities. Because RUM relies on user-generated traffic, it’s hard to indicate persistent issues across the board.
• RUM generates a lot of data. RUM’s attention to detail results in a more accurate diagnosis of end-user issues and experiences. However, the volume of data it generates can make responding to specific issues cumbersome and difficult to prioritize.

What is synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring, also known as synthetic testing, is a performance monitoring practice that emulates users’ paths when engaging with an application. It uses scripts to generate simulated user behavior for different scenarios, geographic locations, device types, and other variables.

After collecting and analyzing this valuable performance data, a synthetic monitoring solution keeps tabs on application updates and how an application responds to typical user behavior. For example, synthetic monitoring can zero in on specific business transactions, such as completing a purchase or filling in a web form. This gives teams crucial insight into how an application is performing.

Benefits and challenges of synthetic monitoring

Synthetic monitoring is good at catching regressions during development lifecycles, especially with network throttling. The benefits of synthetic monitoring include the following:

• Simulation of entire user journeys in a controlled application environment.
• The ability to identify application performance issues and potential issues by running interval tests.
• Customized tests based on specific business processes and transactions — for example, a user leveraging services when accessing an application.
• Complex transaction and process monitoring that might have deeper dependencies. For example, in e-commerce, you can validate and test checking out a shopping cart.
• Application or service lifecycle testing at every stage. This includes development, user acceptance testing, beta testing, and general availability.
• Geofencing and geographic reachability testing for areas that are more challenging to access. For example, the ability to test against a wireless provider in a remote area.
• Performance testing based on variable metrics (i.e., connectivity, access, user count, latency) of geographic regions.

Much like RUM, however, synthetic monitoring has its limitations. Here are some drawbacks:

• Synthetic monitoring can be too predictable. In synthetic monitoring, tests and results are generated in a controlled and predictable testing environment. Because synthetic monitoring doesn’t track real users, you’ll have challenges gauging what an end user might experience in the event of an unpredictable variable.
• Tools may be limited. Depending on the vendor or technology you work with, you may not be able to integrate existing tools with scripts for your tests.
• The range of costs and feature sets can vary widely for synthetic monitoring tools. It’s recommended to work with partners that can deliver RUM and synthetic user monitoring to deliver the most value.

Synthetic monitoring vs. real user monitoring: Which do you need?

The real answer may not be one or the other. Instead, when working with websites, applications, or services, you may need both. While synthetic monitoring allows you to create a consistent testing environment by eliminating the variables, both RUM and synthetic monitoring provide feedback about site, application, or service performance. The strength of both solutions comes when you combine them.

By using synthetic monitoring and RUM together, you can thoroughly investigate specific user issues, and discover and resolve shortcomings. Furthermore, both tools provide full visibility into user and service performance. Using both, you can gauge how fast a site or service needs to be to ensure user satisfaction and to deliver optimal performance.

Together, RUM and synthetic monitoring can accomplish the following:

• Help correlate business requirements with performance levels by providing the performance data you need to analyze the end-user experience.
• Pinpoint challenges before active users access your website or services by identifying problems, such as configuration issues, so you can fix them before users log on.
• Use data from one engine to facilitate testing for the other. For example, you can use RUM data to provide real use cases you can use for simulation in synthetic monitoring for detailed testing in a staging environment.

Finally, combining RUM and synthetic monitoring data can make troubleshooting faster and easier. For example, real-user monitoring metrics might reveal a user performance issue that you can then apply to synthetic testing to replicate the issue by exercising the same transaction across several different variables.

Synthetic monitoring and RUM—better together

The bottom line? Both RUM and synthetic monitoring tools provide insight into every step within the application delivery chain and life cycle.

Working with both RUM and synthetic monitoring creates a healthy long-term solution to support the best possible user experience. While using one or the other tool will undoubtedly help to analyze performance in different ways, the true power comes when you use them as a complementary toolset. The result is a more comprehensive and robust monitoring strategy that will have a longer-lasting impact on user performance and experience.

The post Synthetic monitoring vs. real user monitoring: Understanding best practices appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Third party APIs have become as essential to our software stack as your own code or the run-times your code runs on. If these 3^rd parties become problematic, it will impact your software and users, causing complaints about your services not working as expected. That is why you must treat monitoring of these 3^rd party APIs with the same priority as your own code or platforms your code runs on, using something like Dynatrace RUM to do so.

Depending on the type of 3^rd Party API (internal vs external) and where in your stack you are leveraging that API (whether it be from the backend or your client) you can apply different approaches to monitoring these API endpoints and get alerted on problems and impact, e.g. Real User & Transaction Monitoring or Setup Synthetic Endpoint Checks.

While I could and will (in the summary section of this blog) point you to tutorials and documentation on how Dynatrace can be leveraged for API Monitoring, let me first tell you a story that was shared with me by Roman who leverages Dynatrace with one of our customers in the financial sector.

Custom Salesforce 3^rd API impacting self-service portal

Roman and his team have recently rolled out Dynatrace to monitor some of their business-critical apps, including one of their self-service portals for insurance agents. It’s the same portal that can be used both within the internal network as well as for external agents.

While they have deployed the OneAgent only on parts of the backend systems that supports that portal, they have enabled Dynatrace Real User Monitoring (RUM) to monitor all external and internal users of that portal. The team wanted to do this to better understand problems their users have been reporting when working through the different self-service workflows.

The portal is accessible through different URLs depending on whether you come in as an external or internal users. Roman therefore configured two applications in Dynatrace mapping, each to the respective URL. This enabled him and his team to better understand who is accessing the application from inside or outside the corporate network and telling him whether there is any difference in user experience.

Two weeks ago, Dynatrace alerted on a dramatic increase in 3^rd party HTTP errors on both external and internal facing users. The problematic 3^rd part API endpoint in question in fact is managed by a different team within the same organization and is providing access to Salesforce lead data to different applications such as the self-service portal. Even though Dynatrace was not rolled out on the part of the infrastructure that is hosting this internal 3^rd party API, Dynatrace is monitoring the usage, performance and behavior of this API through Dynatrace RUM! The following screenshot shows the spike in errors including the exact endpoint that started to throw HTTP 500.

Besides alerting that this API endpoint had a significant jump in failed calls, Dynatrace also highlights the actual end-user impact for both internal and external users of that self-service portal. This information can be seen on the application specific infographics. The first showing that 566 individual internal users were impacted:

The data for the external facing portal shows that it only impacted 16 individual users.

Proactive alerting on otherwise blind spots

The great thing about this story is that without Dynatrace users would have started complaining about certain aspects of the self-service portal not working. This would have led to an increased number of support calls, slowed down the overall time it takes to execute these financial use cases, caused frustrations on many ends and would have eventually not solved the problem.

With the insights that Dynatrace gave them they could:

1. Immediately pinpoint the problem to that internal 3^rd party API and notify that team.
2. Proactively inform their support team about the potential problem, and that the team is working on fixing it, ahead of any potential complaining users.
3. Assess the overall impact of this problem based on the impacted user sessions.

The proactive alerting can also be automated by leveraging the Dynatrace Problem Notification Integrations, such as sending a message to Slack, Opening a Jira ticket or starting a ServiceNow or xMatters Workflow. For more of these integrations check out 3^rd party Problem Notification Integrations.

Learn more about Dynatrace

As promised, below are some additional links to my YouTube tutorials I recorded with our Product Team. They are the best ones to explain how to leverage Dynatrace to ensure your systems and all depending elements are running as expected:

• Ensuring Digital Business Availability through Dynatrace Real User Monitoring
• Synthetic Private Browser Monitoring
• Mastering Dynatrace Synthetics: Getting Started and Advanced Concepts

Thanks again to Roman for sharing this story with me. Great to see that the capabilities our teams have been building into our Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform really help our customers to Deliver Better Software Faster 😊

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With the rapid adoption of SaaS vendor-provided applications in the enterprise (for example, Salesforce, Workday, Sharepoint, and Office 365), companies are increasingly looking for ways to ensure the customer experience and performance of the SaaS applications that their employees and customers rely on. Unfortunately, it’s usually not possible to install Dynatrace OneAgent on the web servers that SaaS vendors use to serve their applications. This is why Dynatrace now offers a browser extension that enables you to gain user experience insights into the performance of SaaS applications without access to the underlying web servers. The new Dynatrace Real User Monitoring (RUM) browser extension allows you to capture all the application performance and user behavior data that you need. Once configured, the RUM browser extension delivers complete Dynatrace real user monitoring capabilities.

We’re happy to announce the availability of the public Beta of the Dynatrace RUM browser extension. During the Beta period, this feature is available for Google Chrome browsers only.

Monitoring the SaaS-vendor applications you rely on enables you to pin down the root causes of certain elusive user-experience issues. You can now easily determine when SaaS-application performance problems only affect individual users and when such problems affect all your users. The browser extension is also a great way to monitor how the adoption of new SaaS products affects the user experience of your existing customers.

How to set up monitoring via the RUM browser extension

Monitoring applications via the browser extension is easy. For all the technical details and setup instructions, see  Dynatrace help. Following are the high-level steps to get you started.

1. 1. Login to your Dynatrace environment and select Deploy Dynatrace from the navigation menu.
   2. Click the Monitor via browser extension button.
      
   3. Install the browser extension locally to test and refine your configuration.
   4. Configure the applications you want to monitor using the browser extension.
   5. Deploy the RUM browser extension company-wide.
      For full details, see How do I monitor the user experience of 3rd-party SaaS vendors?

Real user monitoring

Monitoring data captured via the browser extension is analyzed and presented on your dashboards alongside all other Real User Monitoring data captured by OneAgent and agentless RUM.

To analyze data gathered via the RUM browser extension

1. Select Applications from the navigation menu.
2. On the Applications page, select the Injection type > Browser extension injected filter to view all applications currently monitored via the RUM browser extension.
3. Proceed with user experience monitoring as explained in Dynatrace Help.
   

Deploy the RUM browser extension company-wide

Once you’ve configured your first applications, you’ll likely want to roll out the RUM browser extension to a larger group of users within your organization. The easiest way to roll out the extension—pre-configured and ready to go—is via two Google Chrome policies that are best deployed via windows group policies. Options for Linux & MacOS are also available. Head over to Dynatrace help for details on how to deploy the extension. 

All deployed extensions automatically receive all configuration changes you make (for example, updated URL injection patterns or even completely new applications to be monitored). Also, any application-specific settings changes you make via the Dynatrace UI will be automatically picked up by the RUM browser extension.

Missing user actions or XHR actions?

If you don’t see all the user actions or XHR actions you expect to see, make sure you’ve enabled the relevant JavaScript frameworks in your application settings (Application settings > Async requests and single page apps).

Feedback

If you’re interested in using the RUM browser extension for Firefox or Edge, let us know. Have other feedback for the team? We’d love to hear from you!

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Here is another example of an online email interface showing a list of contacts, or in this case NONE, due again to a simple JavaScript error. JavaScript errors today can ruin the user experience of a web applications.

But having found the page showing the problem is is a significant step toward solving a JavaScript error. What happened before would be a long investigation triggered by the occasional customer complaint actually received. Why a long investigation? Because the input obtained from support often looks like this:

“Customer XYZ is not able to click on the product in the search list. He is using his Android phone”

This information is not useful in finding the problem and fixing the JavaScript error. This will probably lead to another ticket that will close with “Cannot reproduce!” after the team tries the most common browsers, some click combinations, and maybe different search terms. It is frustrating and neither you nor the customer ever get a solution. So how can you get out of this frustrating “JavaScript error” cycle?

Step 1: Get visibility into JavaScript errors

Real User Monitoring solutions like Dynatrace today can capture all users and all their interactions on a page. They can also capture JavaScript errors, providing an overview of all errors occurring on a web application. With the impact today’s JavaScript errors have, this insight is mandatory for operating modern web applications. It allows you to see the impact of new app version deployments and if changes to third-party JavaScript libraries are causing issues. In screenshot below, we can see that the application is massively impacted with ~100 JavaScript errors/min after a new version of the app was deployed.

Step 2: Narrow down the JavaScript error play ground

Even better than simply having the JavaScript error count helping us to prioritize which issue to fix first, is automatically obtaining a narrowed down environment for the JavaScript errors. This allows us to immediately determine on exactly which page the error occurs, if there is a specific location, or a specific operating system impacted as seen in the example below.

This is already a great insight that would have made my day years ago, but now let’s get super fancy in the year 2017!

Step 3: Make the JavaScript Stack trace human readable (Source Maps)

Since we are minifying for better performance, our JavaScript files become unreadable once deployed. Source map files help developers figure out what the original code looked like. For more information about source map files review this blog. To help developers leverage those capabilities for Real User Monitoring (RUM) and fix errors faster, Dynatrace allows you to upload the source map files, automatically generating a human readable JavaScript file. The below example shows how this looks in the product where step by step we are getting more visibility depending on availability of Source Maps, minfied JavaScript files or the original source file.

Step 5: Reproducing the JavaScript error leveraging the user’s clickpath

The final step to get to the bottom of a JavaScript error is to reproduce the error. This can be tricky, and is where Dynatrace user session tracking supports excels. In addition to the specific JavaScript error instance, it allows you to obtain the user journey with the click steps leading up to the error. The screenshot below shows such a journey where, after the first five steps, the user had a JavaScript error.

Conclusion

Today JavaScript errors are impacting web applications more than ever. The good news is that being proactive and reducing the number of JavaScript errors is easier through improvements to real-user monitoring. By reducing the number of JavaScript errors, you can improve the user experience and make your day easier by not having to chase JavaScript errors without context. This will hopefully free up enough time for you to do fun things like develop cool new capabilities into your web applications. As always, if you want to get started check out Dynatrace Real User Monitoring today.

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