keptn Community videos, 15 Feb 2022

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Dynatrace’s Open-Source Initiative: Keptn and Monaco

Description

🔥 Like and Subscribe 🔥

Connect with me 👋
TWITTER ► https://bit.ly/3HmWF8d
LINKEDIN COMPANY ► https://bit.ly/3kICS9g
LINKEDIN PROFILE ► https://bit.ly/30Eshp7

🔗 Links:
- Scott Moore Consulting: https://scottmoore.consulting
- Perftour Website: http://theperformancetour.com
- SMC Journal: http://smcjournal.com

#performancetesting #performanceengineering

Guest: Henrik Rexed

https://twitter.com/hrexed?lang=en
https://rexed-henrik.medium.com/
https://twitter.com/IsitObservable
https://www.youtube.com/c/IsitObservable

Show Notes:

Why is Dynatrace investing so much into open source right now? They have turned the Innovation Lab into the Open-Source Program Office (OSPO).

https://engineering.dynatrace.com/blog/why-dynatrace-is-investing-in-open-source-software-development/

Keptn: https://keptn.sh/

Project Monaco: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/monitoring-as-code/ (monitoring as code)

Henrik explains these projects and why Dynatrace is involved heavily in the open-source community.

Sponsors:

This podcast is sponsored by Micro Focus and LoadRunner solutions. Performance matters. Did you know that LoadRunner solutions have the largest community of practitioners? Join the community at https://community.microfocus.com/adtd/b/sws-alm

This podcast is sponsored by Keysight Technologies and Eggplant Performance.
Keysight Eggplant Performance

A

Hi you're watching the smc journal, podcast, I'm scott moore. Your host. This show is all about performance in it today.

A

So commercial software open source can you have both well sure you can two open source projects that affect the performance community in a great way are prometheus for gathering metrics and open telemetry, so many companies getting together adding time resources and code to these projects have helped build a standard in the community, but it also helps expand their commercial software platforms as well. So recently, dynatrace made an announcement, they're, actually formalizing an open source project initiative and because I've got buddies there. I wanted to contact them directly and have them talk about that.

A

So I'm going to bring on my friend, henrik rexed, who works at dynatrace, to talk about this initiative within the company.

A

Henrik, how are you doing my friend.

B

I'm doing very great, in fact uh it's been it's been now more than 11 months or or no 10 months, or not never mind where I started my adventure at dinner trace and everything is going very well and smoothly the transition. I would say from the performance engineering world that we were all working on and to more on the observability sre space uh has been done now, so it's uh I feel I feel myself more comfortable.

A

Congratulations yeah well great and welcome to the smc journal. Our my new show I've been wanting to have you on the show ever since we started this year, but I'm glad we had a chance to get together and talk to today. I have some pretty specific questions for you and I'm hoping you can help me with this. I was doing some research on companies that are doing open source as well as commercial products and, of course, dynatrace kind of comes to mind.

A

First, and I was noting this article that came out in december and I'm gonna bring it up on the screen here. Dynatrace posted this.

A

Why dynatrace is investing in open source software development, so the the business capitalist in me is saying hold on a second: aren't we supposed to be making software to make money unless you're just a really nice person, you want to make uh open source software, but, as I began to talk to people in the open source community, especially in observability, I found out that there's a shared problem out there that everybody has and the value there's a there's, a value in having open source.

A

The real value in the commercial side is something else other than than necessarily what you're building in open source and I'll. Let you talk more to that, but I before I do, I just wanted to show show our audience here: there's an open source program and a charter around this, and there are multiple projects which we can talk about. um That dynatrace has, that is part of an open source initiative and it's an open source office. Can you speak to this and tell me kind of what this is all about of.

B

Course I mean I mean the more I mean, obviously, the markets and the way we provide software uh to our user. I've significantly changed over the years and open source a few years back, we were considering to say ah it's like east night is a sandbox.

B

Do I really want to take the risk and use it in my production environment? I don't know, I think now the mentality has changed a lot, and especially now since the usage and the merging of solution like prometheus, for example, when it's been launched, it was open source, it's still open source. And now, if you look around, I mean there's so many organizations here relying on collecting metrics just through this platform prometheus, which is, I think, just a wonderful story and similar to kubernetes.

B

Now I know how many companies are you using an open source solution to manage their workload in production or in non-production environments? It's just impressive and I think now. um I think that the advantage when you build a solution that are for the open source community is that everyone is involved and everyone can contribute in a way and share the feedback and make the the the solution uh even better uh over the years. So I think that that's that's the model uh which I think is every which everyone looks is expecting.

B

I mean if you go in a commercial way. I think it's it's great, but uh usually you you you.

B

We moved to waterfall to ariel's devops to be more aligned with what our customers are expecting from our products, and uh I think that is great, but I think with open source, you get that feedback as well and also you it's a way of giving a platform or a solution to everyone and so and and and extend the potential capacity of that that solution, uh for example, in my role now since I started this journey of uh building my youtube, the youtube channel is observable: I've been I've been focusing on most on open source solutions, and if you look on the cloud native space, I mean this there's so many uh so many open sources frameworks there.

B

So many way of collecting things, uh parsing things uh pushing things somewhere to store it in your in one of your back end of your choice, uh I mean another example is open telemetry I mean the just now um everyone, it's a it's a pretty uh buzz word to say open telemetry, but I would say that um now, with uh over the years, the framework itself has been more and more stable, especially for the traces. Now everything is more more or less finalized.

B

um Metrics is coming in very soon uh in a ga for ga version. Logs is promising as well and I'm so excited to see a standard that has been defined to the market.

B

So then, as end users, I would I can rely on those standards which is open source, but then the cons, the usage of the data that has been collected by those framework, then you are, you can do it with any solution of your choice and, and then this is where the the very solution that will store and present the data to the user will make some difference in a way providing a feature that will be smarter or whatever.

B

But I think I'm so excited to have at least that the standard that so everyone can building and transition to one tool together to the other, without I don't know, having a huge uh effort by moving all those propriety agents by by replacing with new agents. So I think that that's that's great, I'm so.

A

Excited I agree, and so let's talk about a couple of the different projects that dynatrace has brought to to the market. One of them is kept in, so this is considered to be an open source software package, that's available from dining trace. Can you talk about captain for a minute like what is it and why has it been offered out here as an open source project.

B

So the now downtrend has invested in this framework more than three three years plus I think, and the main concept of captain. um So, first of all, why did we build that framework?

B

We came to the uh we looked around us on how people were delivering their cicd process and at the time we were mostly relying on traditional, continuous integration servers where you have to have this complex pipeline, which usually was based on code, so groovy scripts, for example. In case of jenkins and and if you have that in your project, then you make a step back to look at the project close to you to your neighbor.

B

You realize that someone has copy paste one of your portion of your pipeline and he has put it there as well, so people were building the pipeline managing their integration within their pipeline and everything was based on code. So you were building code that will be deploying our code and, at the end, um it's very hard to maintain very hard complicated to get started.

B

So captain was been built initially to say: okay, let's simplify everything and to simplify that the design of captain were had to be relying on events. So I am building. I need something that trigger an event to say: hey my task is finished. Go ahead, do something else so after build. I may want to do, let's say some testing, so I do my tests, so I have so. The captain sends an event and then the test, the t, testing tool that has subscribed to that event will pick it up.

B

Do the work and then send an event back to say, hey, I have finished my test. You can go further on your process, so I think the event driven approach makes the things more smoother in terms of workflow and and simpler in general. But captain is not only designed for continued progress, continuous delivery.

B

They are in fact three distinct use cases that captain can covers so progressively. We mentioned so build to go to production. Then you have the which means everything which is before you ship to production to your production environment. Then you have the quality gate. So I said I already have invested so many years in gitlab or jenkins. I don't want to transition right now to captain, because it's the effort would be too big. Then I don't need to.

B

I can just utilize few features that captain provides, especially the quad gates, to calculate the score to automate the analysis, so there's so many use cases that makes captain so powerful and the last use case that captain provides is everything which is after the deployment production. So when you are in production, you are probably fishing for a remediation process alerting and so on.

B

So there is so many use cases, and the great thing is over the years captain has so many new uh integration, um so uh prometheus, of course, that race uh trucentis near load jmeter. So there is so many elite scales for chaos engineering. So there is so many tooling available and there are connected captain. So the the use, the the usage of captain makes things simpler and if I use, for example, a specific integration, let's say I'm today, I'm doing some load testing with jmeter and I want to transition to tracentis new load.

B

And then I don't have to rewrite everything: it's just unplugging one tool and recon uh connecting to the other, so the even transitioning your tools or your integration that you rely on to build your software will be very smooth and that's uh how captain has it been built, and I think the great thing is. There is also now a notion of um uh events and there are other uh so open source solution that relies on events so uh cdf.

B

So the cloud for the continuous delivery foundation, the they are starting to build, also standardizing those events and and captain wants to be compatible and and utilize that standard. So then, if you use any cd or continuous delivery solution that are sending those events, then captain will talk the same language, so you will be able to build any type of workflow that you have in your mind,.

A

Is is there a commercial version of captain, as well as the open source version.

B

So we we started with the open source solution, and now we started to slowly uh on board few customers to a sas version. So in fact the sas version is like a module in dynatrace. We call it the cloud automation, so cloud automation comes with several toolings that has been built over the years. So captain, of course, and then, when it comes to sre sre's practice, there is a a very important aspect of sres task is removing toil. I mean you, don't want to do manual test stuff man.

B

So if I have to deploy stuff and then go back to my observation, backend and configure my alerting converting configuring, the dashboarding, uh it doesn't make sense, you will spend so much time doing that those type of tasks. So why don't I use something that will allow me to configure everything, and that is another open source initiative that dentrous has built over the years called monaco, and that comes along with uh with the co-automation as well.

A

Okay, great segue, because that's the second thing I was going to ask you about was this other open source project called monaco, and let me just share that screen as well. This is monitoring as code through the same open source initiative. Can you speak to that and what this is all about?.

B

um So initially the the story behind monaco was a couple of years back. We have our service teams that helps customers to be onboarded, and you can imagine that on boarding an organization that has, I don't know, 10 000 plus servers plus clusters, plus, I don't know how many teams they have configuring manually, everything in the entries could be could be very time consuming, and so the monaco was a way of onboarding those customers in a very quick way. So over the couple of hours the the the service team was able to deploy.

B

I don't know uh thousands of servers that has been automating instrumented by dynatrace with everything configured, so that was impressive. So so initially we build that to and extend it depending on the need that we had on the field and and now the the usage could seems very difficult or or technical. But honestly, it's very simple.

B

So I I tested out myself when I arrived at dynatrace and there is so many things you can do it so especially um building dashboards, automating that approach managing all the user privileges between who can access to this data or not all those things which is very important for organizations. If you can automate that and save time, that's wonderful and that's all about monaco and monaco. I think now we are in. um We are at the moment where we want to bring even more features to uh automate even more things so um stay tuned.

B

I think a lot of great things will happen with with the monaco project.

A

Awesome so getting back to this first article, where they talk about they're, changing the name and dining trace from the innovation lab to the open source program office. So there's a full title to this: the ospo so they're. Now I guess in charge of this initiative. What other things might we expect in the near future from dynatrace or are there upcoming projects that are in addition to these two we've mentioned.

B

Yes, so we are, we want to open source, we want to be uh the first class citizens related to open source and we already started over the years. In fact, there is a lot of uh well-known framework that we mentioned, like open telemetry, for example, where dina trace is investing a lot. A lot of internal resources are actively working as we speak in various projects related to open telemetry, because I think uh we can help the the community to improve and add more and more features.

B

uh So I think for us, it's it's very uh part of our or the spirit of the company, so open telemetry is one one thing, but we also contribute in other type of aspect. um The the idea is that there are a lot of new solution framework that merged out of the market and I think from us from dan and trey's perspective, first being involved in by contributing to those uh framework.

B

First of all is so we are bringing value for the market, but it's also offer us a way of understanding the new technologies and be uh on the forefront of the new technology. So then we can manage, and uh in in in a very early stage how we can gonna bring it in our product later on, and so that that is a a way of making sure that we are always at the forefront of the innovation. Because, as we look at around us, the innovation goes now from open source.

B

So if you're not involved in open source, then you can miss the opportunity to know that something is out there and making sure that you're able to to to support it at the right moment.

A

Awesome well, this is really good information and it helps answer a lot of the questions that I've had, I'm sure other people have had as well. I want to thank you so much for being on the program today, and I know that, probably before the year out we'll be able to get together soon, and maybe it won't be virtually and.

B

A

Be able to do some more stuff together, so thanks again, henrik for being on the show, thanks.

B

Scott for inviting me and for those who is listening to the smc journal, if you want to have content to learn on how to observe things, stay tuned and pay attention to my channel the is it observable channel. There is a lot of tutorial that I'm building and helping uh our community around observation.

A

Absolutely I endorse it, I watch it and we will put links in our show notes to all of your channels and shows as well and share it with the audience. So, thank you thanks. uh You can reach me at scottmore.consulting. There's my linkedin profile url as well as my twitter handle. You can also reach me by email at help. Scottmore.Consulting.

A

Today's podcast is sponsored by microfocus makers of loadrunner solutions. Performance matters. Did you know that loadrunner solutions have the largest community of practitioners join this community at community.microfocus.com check our show notes on the youtube channel, as well as the smc journal. This particular entry and you'll see that link to the community. This podcast is also sponsored by keysight technologies and the makers of eggplant performance.

A

There's also a link to that on. Our show notes, as well as the youtube video showrooms as well. Eggplant performance is another load testing tool that you should be checking out, and we appreciate both of these sponsors for supporting the performance community. If you.

B

A

If you like this content, give me a like maybe uh share this content on your social network as well, but subscribe to the youtube channel, because this lets me know that I'm headed in the right direction and you want to see more of this type of content.

A

So again, let's keep the conversation going and what do you think open source works well with commercial commercials work well with open source as a good idea that dynatrace created this open source initiative project and has an entire lab and division dedicated to this I'd like to hear your feedback and until the next smc journal, where it's all about performance. I'm scott, moore and we'll see you next time.

A