Mike Maciag, Chief Marketing Officer at Dynatrace joins Tech Transforms to talk about the power of observability. Careful monitoring is of paramount importance for any successful operation, and observability can take your agency to the next level. Listen in as Carolyn and Mark get some tips and tricks for improving cybersecurity posture with the most accurate technology.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:31] The Vital Role That Observability Plays in IT
• [10:40] Observability: When You’re Asking the Systems to Share
• [22:48] The President’s Memo on User Experience
• [34:01] Let Machines Do the Stuff That Doesn’t Matter

Episode Links and Resources

• Mike Maciag
• Dynatrace
• American Moon Shot

The Vital Role That Observability Plays in IT

Carolyn: Today, we get to welcome Mike Maciag, who is Chief Marketing Officer of Dynatrace. One of our own, one of the clan is here with us today. And as CMO, Mike is responsible for Dynatrace's global marketing organization. We're really excited to hear his expert opinion on observability and the vital role that it plays in IT, and especially the cloud.

Mike: Thank you, Carolyn. Mark, nice to be with you both today. And I know this is a long time in coming, but I'm excited to be sitting down and talking to you today.

Carolyn: We've been able to talk to a few of our guests a little bit about APM. And just recently we talked to a former CIO at VA. He is very bullish on APM, and he talked a lot about the advances that they were able to make in the VA with APM. Just that at least within the VA, APM moved from a nice to have to a must-have. And what I'd really like to hear you talk about, just to dive right in, Mike, is so there's the APM part. But then in my mind and I might be positioning this wrong. In my mind, I think that observability is like APM 2.0. But can you speak to that APM versus observability? What's the difference?

Mike: As long as we're talking about terms, we might want to mix monitoring in there as well. All terms that are thrown around, is it monitoring, is it APM, is it observability? And it's changed, it's changed a lot. Let me start with the simplest definition, then maybe we can unpack it from there. Think of observability as the umbrella term, as the broadest umbrella term that goes above all of this.

Monitoring, APM, Observability

Mike: Observability fully includes APM, and observability also subsumes monitoring, both of the things that we've been doing. There are kind of two megatrends in the industry that have been driving this move towards observability. One is the move to the cloud.

More and more systems are moving to cloud architectures, probably more important digitally native architectures. We're going from monolithic systems that we could understand, that we could see, that we could touch. We could understand what's happening with them into cloud increasingly complex, even multi-cloud architectures that are driven by microservices and the like.

The reason for that movement is it has made digital transformation, application development faster and easier in that regard. Which is this digital transformation fundamentally looking at everything that I've been doing in every aspects of my business. Whether it be on the front end or in the services I provide. Whether it be on the front end or in the backend machine to machine conversations is happening in cloud architectures. And we're trying to figure out how we can automate more of it and things are happening that...