How Dynatrace and Atlassian help transform your operations team to work smarter not harder

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Co-authored by Ian Buchanan, Atlassian Developer Partisan and Rob Jahn, Dynatrace Technical Partner Manager.

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how you can improve incident and problem resolution for enterprise software? The team at Atlassian & Dynatrace have been wondering, and decided to collaborate to identify the right solution.

We started with some observations about why enterprise operations teams struggle to improve mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).

1. Too much time manually searching for the root-cause

• Virtualized and dynamic infrastructure increases complexity
• Multiple tools, dashboards and logs viewed by multiple teams

2. Lack of critical information, to be able prioritize effectively

• With hybrid, multi-cloud environments it’s challenging to see where systems are connected and dependent
• Lack of insight into user experience and unable to prioritize before business impact

3. Confusion on how to ensure Service Levels

• No unified view across on-premise, cloud apps and infrastructure

What follows are the integration scenarios we explored, and what we learned about how every team can simplify the complexity, reduce MTTR, and drive proactive and measurable experience improvements before business impact.

What does this look like?

If your goal is to transform from manual operations to autonomous, leveraging NoOps operations and the strengths of Dynatrace and Atlassian can help you achieve this.

Dynatrace’s Software Intelligence Platform, built with AI at the core, delivers the best in class application and infrastructure monitoring, digital experience management, and digital business analytics with AIOps built in. Atlassian products connect, accelerate, and scale your entire enterprise through extensible workflows, out of the box integrations, with built-in security at every level. Together

Referring to the picture below:

1. Dynatrace maintains full stack observability in highly dynamic hybrid cloud environments
2. When Davis detects a problem, it informs Opsgenie with automated service and business impact detection and precise root-cause analysis
3. Opsgenie automation rules, notify the correct people at the right time with the right channel
4. Jira Incident management and agile ticketing workflows contain actionable root-cause information to dramatically reduce MTTR.
5. Opsgenie actions can utilize the Dynatrace prioritized problem details and remediation hints and integrate them smoothly with automation platforms

What makes Davis so special?

Davis is Dynatrace’s purpose-built AI engine that uses high-fidelity metrics, traces, logs and real user data ingested by Dynatrace and third-party applications, that map to a unified entity model that identifies the precise root cause and business impact. Davis sits at the core of

Instead of raising multiple alerts for individual events – such as a slowdown of a microservice – Davis simply opens a single problem ticket, with all relevant events of all related entities based on your live dependency graph, and forwards that information to either Opsgenie or Jira to streamline the incident management workflow. 

Below is an example of a Dynatrace problem card that shows the business impact and root-cause of an issue in a simple, straight-forward way.

Solution #1 - Automated dispatch with Opsgenie

In a critical performance-related incident, we need to get the right information to the right person at the right time. So we applied Opsgenie's Dynatrace integration to send alerts to Opsgenie API with detailed information.

Opsgenie acts as a dispatcher for these alerts, determines the right people to notify based on on-call schedules, notifies via email, SMS, phone calls, and push notifications, and escalates alerts until it’s acknowledged or closed. The diagram below shows this workflow.

Furthermore, we looked at how the tags and metadata from Dynatrace help the flow so users spend less time figuring out what went wrong, and more time fixing the performance. We learned that these tags could feed the prioritization and routing logic within Opgenie right of the box.

Solution #2 - Synchronize Dynatrace problem status within Jira

By leveraging Dynatrace for Jira for Cloud you can create a complete integration loop with live updates between Jira and Dynatrace as shown below:

This additional integration provides the following features and benefits:

• Live Dynatrace problem status in Jira ticket
• Automatically link Jira tickets to Dynatrace problems
• Synchronize Jira ticket comments with Dynatrace problems
• Direct links to root cause dashboards from your Jira ticket
• Enable JQL queries based on Dynatrace Problem data

The Jira problem screenshot below shows how answers are now at your fingertips in a tool you know and trust today.

Automate service delivery with Atlassian and Dynatrace

These are just a few of the way you can get started today, to deliver the foundation to modern operations that delivers you:

• Single view across IT services and operations
• Automatic tracing of services, applications, topology and dependencies, with code level insights for an end-to-end picture of IT health
• Proactively identified service issues
• Informed incident response with root cause service and business impact

The Atlassian and Dynatrace platforms, when combined through their unique capabilities, are critical deliverable for IT organizations to cope with the relentless rate of change now and ahead.

Tip: Check list for modern operations foundation

• Make sure you can get a complete, single view across IT services and operations
• Automate where you can
• Include a process to identify service issues proactively
• Be sure to get incident response that includes root cause service and business impact

Check out the Atlassian and Dynatrace platforms to see how we can help you get there using data-driven, AI-powered, automated approaches.