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July 31, 2025 20 mins

Dynatrace just changed the game. 🚀

I wasn’t even planning this episode—I’m in the middle of my series on the Dynatrace Platform—but last week, Dynatrace dropped a huge nugget: Gen 3 is here, and AI is at the forefront. I couldn’t wait to break down what this means for IT teams and share real-world examples of how AI is transforming what’s possible.

In this episode of Thriving in Ambiguity, we cover:

  • Why Dynatrace Gen 3 is a major leap forward for AI-driven operations

  • How Minnesota, TD Bank, and SAP used Dynatrace to reclaim time, cut costs, and innovate faster

  • The new capabilities behind Grail, Smartscape, and Davis AI that make autonomous IT a reality

  • A roadmap you can follow to safely scale AI in your organization

📩 Got your own story or question? Email me at steve@thrivinginambiguity.com

🎙️ Subscribe for more unfiltered insights into tech’s biggest changes and how they impact you.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
IT leaders.
I get it.
Change is hard and your teams takeimmense pride in what they've built.
I've managed IT teams, I've been there.
I know how personal this work feels.
But here's the deal.
AI isn't a checkbox.
It's not the next buzzword to fade away.

(00:25):
We're at an inflection point that willredefine every aspect of it, and let me
be bold, likely every aspect of our world.
So over the next 20 minutes, I'llshow you how to tackle AI head on.
How to deliver immediate impactand share real world examples of

(00:45):
peers who have done exactly that.
There is a better way.
And why change?
Look, I've listened to CIOs at Nascioasking what do we even use AI for?
They're exploring use casesfor ai, knowing they don't have
the resources to pull it off.
Think.

(01:06):
Do you have the people?
Do you have the infrastructure?
Do you have the experience?
Oh, and by the way, all ofthat costs money, right?
Then they have CISOs in theirear warning that attackers are
weaponizing AI against them.
That's a lot of noise.
And how do, how do you not fall behind?

(01:27):
I mean, I know no one wants to be playingcatch up, but you're on the cusp, right?
But look, change isn't optional.
It's essential.
Today, I'll give you a roadmap tobring clarity to this daunting shift.
How to inject new life into yourIT teams enable safe AI deployments

(01:49):
with visibility, automation, andremediation, and put guardrails in
place to satisfy those AI policies,and you'll hear directly from others
and how this can all pay for itself.
Now you might be thinking, Steve,we've heard that type of hype before.

(02:09):
What's really different now?
Stick with me here, and by the end ofthis episode you'll know exactly where
to start and what's different this time.
So folks, welcome to Thriving andAmbiguity, where we'll make sense
of tech's biggest complexities.
I'm Steve Mancini, your host andpartner in tackling today's toughest.

(02:31):
IT leadership challenges.
Let's begin with one public sectorteam and how they turned firefighting
into forward thinking innovation.
Let's start with the state ofMinnesota during COVID, their
unemployment insurance portal, laed.
From an average of 638,000visitors a month to 6.6 million.

(02:55):
I mean, if I could do thatto this channel, think about
the monetization there.
I could do this full time, and you'reprobably like, please, no, we don't
want to hear that much of you anyway.
Their backend systems weren'tbuilt for this type of load.
And I can only imagine the scramble teamschasing one bottleneck after another.

(03:19):
Stitching together those logs, lookingat metrics, following the traces
across a dozen different tools.
I mean, what a mess.
They knew they needed a better pathforward, so they turned to Gardner
and they looked and said, Hey,who's the leader in observability?
And Dynatrace was at the top.

(03:41):
So they called them for help and rightaway Dynatrace's observability traced and
mapped their entire environment, revealedevery dependency and delivered not
just answers but remediation, guidance.
And in weeks Minnesota's It team reclaimedroughly 40 full-time work days a month,

(04:05):
moving engineers out of the war rooms.
And got them back toinnovating where they belong.
Now remember back towhat I just said earlier.
You know, you don't have the peopleor the time to get this all done.
Maybe you do, maybe you just haveto do things a little bit different,

(04:27):
and I know what you're thinking.
You're saying, Steve, this all soundsgreat, but it's a nightmare deploy.
How are we gonna deploy all this?
And actually, it's farsimpler than you'd expect.
You don't, and you don'thave to take my word for it.
Do a proof of concept, okay?
And you'll see actionableinsights within hours.

(04:49):
And by the end of the day, yourteam will have the clarity just
like they did in Minnesota.
Now let's fast forward to today.
And Dynatrace's Gen threetakes that impact even further.
See, Dynatrace learn from customers likeMinnesota and they evolve their ai so it
can do more than just point out problems.

(05:13):
And it started on the back end.
Um, GRAIL's Data Lake House is nowa custom built SaaS environment.
Ingesting petabytes instantaneously.
No more log pipeline delaysthat speed and scale.
Let Davis AI run in real time.
See Davis's causal and predictive AI findsthe root cause, understanding complete

(05:39):
context, and then it uses generative AI totranslate that into plain English fixes.
And because it understandsyour code, your topology.
Gen three can write and deployremediation code on the fly with
no human intervention in the loop.
Imagine if Minnesota was armed withgen three, reclaiming weeks of effort,

(06:06):
not only by diagnosing issues, but byactually fixing them automatically.
I mean, it's crazy, right?
But yet it's exactlywhere AI is taking us.
And it frees your teams tofocus on what really matters and
take a moment to process that.

(06:26):
This is real and it's a game changer.
Now I wanna share somethingpersonal, because this next
example really hits home.
As an IT manager, one of the mostfrustrating and honestly embarrassing
experiences is when an end useror a customer calls to tell you

(06:47):
that your application is down.
I know you know exactly what I mean.
There's that sinking feeling of howdo I not already know about this?
Then your team scramblesaround to identify the issue.
Digging through those logs,those metrics, those traces.
From a dozen different tools thatdon't even talk to each other.

(07:10):
It's painful, it's inefficient, and quitefrankly, it's exhausting for everyone.
Now, TD Bank knows a thing or two aboutthis, and Chris Conklin, their technology
executive, he shared his experiences.
He wrote this.

(07:31):
Previously we lacked visibilityinto how our customers were
interacting with our solutions.
We often receive calls into ourcontact center when issues arose, and
rather than being able to identifythem proactively, if you think about
the time it takes to make a call, hassomebody listen, then escalate a response

(07:53):
30 minutes to an hour have gone by.
We could have easily avoided that ifwe had the right solution in place.
There's many options out there,and believe me, we've tried them,
but if you look at the track recordof Dynatrace, there's constant
innovation that really drives progress.

(08:14):
Dynatrace gives us the ability to lookat all of our critical functions and
services and dig into what's drivingthe experience for our customers.
And what happened when TD Bank leveragedthe advanced capabilities of Dynatrace's,
latest generation, gen three, I mean.

(08:35):
Let's be honest, no one's ever gotpromoted because your app crashed
again and again and again, andand you fixed it quickly, right?
But hey, you might have a shotwith these type of metrics.
They saw a 45% reduction in monitoringtools and infrastructure cost.
45%, 75% of incident resolutiontasks were automated through ai.

(09:03):
And customer irritants droppedby 60% and transaction failures
were reduced by 10 basis points.
Think about that impact.
I did mention that cost was a concern.
What if there is significantmoney to be saved?
Could that fund this whole transformation?

(09:25):
Now that's promotion material.
Now, TD Bank's, IT teams weren'tbogged down in firefighting anymore.
They weren't constantly apologizing inwar rooms or scrambling for answers.
Instead, they could rely ondynatrace's ai, which operated at

(09:45):
a speed and scale that no human,no matter how talented could match.
But let me be clear, this isn'tabout replacing your best people.
No.
It's about empowering them byoffloading routine, troubleshooting,
and incident response to ai.
Your top talent can focus on what'struly strategic, implementing

(10:10):
transformational technologies likeAI into other areas of your business,
creating new customer experiences anddriving real innovation With all of that.
Saved cash.
And your new promotion that youjust got and, and, and that was
all in the first 10 minutes.

(10:32):
So now that I've gotten yourworkforce back, I found you some
money to pay for things and yourteams are thinking about what's next
rather than what just went wrong.
That's exactly what TD Bankachieved with Dynatrace.
And, and your team can do that too.

(10:53):
And on that note, do me a favor.
Think about your own teams for a minute.
How much time are they spending onfirefighting versus actually innovating?
Now let's shift gears and talk about SAP.
This is a great one.
And the stories, they honestly justkeep getting better, don't they?

(11:17):
Their story highlights.
What it really means to leverageAI for true operational excellence.
SAP is a global software leader servingmore than 437,000 customers worldwide,
and they recognize early on the need toget as close to zero downtime as possible.

(11:41):
Martin Lorado Aurora, the VicePresident of CX Observability.
And Automation Foundationsat SAP explain this.
Dynatrace is critical to understandingour customer's environments and driving
our mission to reduce downtime to zero.
We can now ensure that every team andour customers have a single source of

(12:05):
data so that they can quickly understandwhy a service is going down and how
to resolve it with minimal impact.
Dynatrace has had a significant impacton peak season, such as Black Friday.
Previously, our senior leaderswould've sleepless nights afraid
of customer calls about outages.

(12:27):
And with Dynatrace, we can rest easy.
The impact for SAP has been extraordinary.
Meantime to discovery dropped fromthree hours to less than one minute.
Customer notification time reducedto under two minutes, and service
level agreement violations decreaseddramatically from 16% down to just 0.1%.

(12:54):
Are you kidding me?
The cost savings alone fromthose violations likely paid
for the whole project, and,and they have so much more now.
I mean, look, SAP could havethrown more people at the problem.
That's probably people's initial reaction.
Hey, things aren't where we need it to be.
Hire more people that costs so much money.

(13:16):
Instead, they consolidatedmultiple tools into one platform.
Think about it.
A single platform delivering measurablevalue and true peace of mind.
It's incredible knowing Dynatrace is thesecret sauce behind SAP's reliability.
And yes, that couldabsolutely be your story too.

(13:40):
That's it for the stories, and I knowyou're like, I get it, Steve, but let's
just take a minute to address a few otherconcerns I've heard out in the wild.
Things like traditional securityand AI security compliance.
Dynatrace Gen three enhancesyour existing security posture.

(14:02):
It provides detailed visibility into dataflows and real time correlation of events.
Now let me be clear, it doesn'treplace your current security tools.
Instead, it complimentsand strengthens them.
See, with Dynatrace, you cansee precisely what's in memory.

(14:22):
You can understand log data in real time,and you can rapidly respond to incidents.
Think of Dynatrace as your co-pilot,helping your security team swiftly
track threats across your entireenvironment, ensuring comprehensive
visibility and faster remediation,keeping your data secure.

(14:46):
At the same time.
Gen three specifically tackles AIcompliance concerns with its AI driven
anomaly detection and immediate automatedremediation, you're safeguarded against
threats that exploit AI vulnerabilitiesbecause remember, the platform
understands all of your systems andthe context that they operate under.

(15:11):
Now, let's explore some emergingAI workloads, starting with.
Retrieval, augmented generation or rag.
See, with Dynatrace's Gen three, yougain visibility into critical metrics
such as vector database latency, largelanguage model accuracy, and real time

(15:31):
guardrails against hallucinations.
Moreover, Dynatrace helps you recordand audit prompts and AI responses.
Which are essential forcompliance and accountability.
If some user claims that you know, theyacted inappropriately based on your AI's
guidance, and then there's token usage.

(15:54):
Token usage tracking isanother vital aspect.
Each prompt, successfulor failed, incurs a cost.
Dynatrace provides deep visibility,allowing quick resolution for any token
related issues, ensuring cost effectivemanagement of your AI initiatives.

(16:15):
And if you're unsure of what totokens are, be sure I'm not talking
about the ones that you used touse on a bus or in an arcade.
Tokens are like currencyfor large language models.
And wasting tokens on failedproblems is like throwing money away.
Dynatrace helps you control that, spendensuring that every token counts, and it

(16:38):
supplies precise guardrails to ensure thatyour AI implementations align with policy
requirements enhancing your securityand compliance posture simultaneously.
And the last hot topic isedge and internet of Things.
As AI represents another fast growingfrontier, Dynatrace extends observability

(17:04):
seamlessly into the distributed edgeenvironment, which is essential for
organizations rapidly adopting IOTreal-time insights and short performance
security and optimal operational status,enabling confident management and
scaling of complex edge deployments.

(17:26):
So what specifically does DynatraceGen three bring to your table?
Let's just do a quick review.
It's built around three core technologies.
First, the Grail Data Lake House.
This provides real time schemalessingestion of massive telemetry data.
Think about all of your logs,your metrics, your traces,

(17:49):
all instantly queryable.
This eliminates data, bottlenecks anddelays providing immediate visibility
into your entire environment.
Second.
Smartscape technology mappingcontinuously visualizes your entire
IT ecosystem, uncovering everydependency across multi-cloud, hybrid,

(18:12):
and containerized environments.
Your teams see issues in context,allowing faster, more accurate decisions.
And finally, there's Davis ai,which has evolved to include
generative capabilities.
It doesn't just predictand diagnose problems.
It proactively writes for mediationcode resolving issues before

(18:36):
they impact your end users.
See these technologies together ensureyour teams aren't buried under data.
They're empowered by its insight.
Now I have promised youan actionable roadmap.
First, start small, deploy Dynatracein a controlled environment.

(18:56):
Measure the hours reclaimed by automating,monitoring and incident resolution.
Next, communicate thesequick wins internally.
Show your teams the immediate value andease their concerns about leveraging
AI for observability and remediation.
And finally, strategically redirect thetime you've saved to high impact projects,

(19:21):
exploring and implementing AI in new areasof your business, and drive innovation
and enhance your competitive advantage.
Now I hope you've enjoyed this episodeand I'd love to hear your stories.
Obviously, I love stories.
Email me directly atsteve@thrivinginambiguity.com or

(19:43):
can or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Let's keep the conversation going.
Oh, and on an upcoming episode,we'll dive deeper into Gen three
and we'll have two special guests.
Greg Hedstrom, seniorVP and General Manager.
Of North America and Steve Harris,general manager of Dynatrace's

(20:03):
public sector business, and they'llshare their perspective of what
Gen three brings to customers.
But until then, keep embracing change,leading boldly and thriving in ambiguity.
That's it folks.
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