Self-service observability: Empower engineers to get the most value out of your observability data

What good is your observability data if the engineers who need it have to spend a lot of time looking for it? Why is it important to deliver data right into the engineering workflows? Events, logs, traces, and metrics are only valuable if the right people can use them effectively.

The Dynatrace unified platform experience delivers actionable insights to engineers without the hassle. With customizable launchpads, seamless Backstage integration, the RedHat DevHub plugin, and automated deployment validation with Site Reliability Guardian, engineers get the most important information front and center, allowing them to prioritize work and make informed decisions.

In this blog post, you'll learn how platform teams can bring observability to developers, right where they need it.

Focus on what matters with launchpads

Dynatrace launchpads let you create customizable home pages that offer an easily digestible view of your environment, tailored to the needs of engineering teams. Launchpads can address various use cases, from onboarding and learning, serving as an entry point for occasional users, or providing an opinionated view for daily operations across different users, teams, and departments.

You can pin quick access to relevant Dynatrace® Apps, link to external tools or specific entries in Dashboards, Notebooks, Workflows, Problems, and more.

For example, the launchpad below was built for a developer team. It covers their daily routines, relevant content, and documents. Using Launchpads this way ensures that even occasional users know where to find key apps, how to resolve common issues, and how to debug problems-using Dynatrace and external resources.

Read our Launchpads blog and explore different Launchpads on our Dynatrace Playground tenant!

Figure 1. This home page is the entry point for a team of developers who work with Dynatrace on a daily basis. It includes links to daily routines, relevant content, and documents.

Bring observability to developers with developer portal integrations

Developer portals like Backstage have become increasingly popular in recent years, based on their ability to centralize access to tools, services, and documentation. By offering a consistent interface, they help developers navigate complex ecosystems more effectively and reduce time spent on context switching.

The seamless integration between Dynatrace and Backstage allows developers to pull observability and security data from Dynatrace and display it in software components you manage through the Backstage Software Catalog. This plugin allows you to provide smart links to Dynatrace apps, context-rich overview tables, and Site Reliability Guardian results and logs, all directly in Backstage!

Read our documentation on Backstage integration, and to get started, check out the Backstage Dynatrace plugins monitoring & observability page on the Dynatrace Hub.

Figure 2. This is a team's Backstage developer portal, directly accessed from Dynatrace through deep links. Data from Dynatrace is displayed directly in the portal.

Teams using the RedHat Developer Hub can also benefit from the Dynatrace integration. This plugin seamlessly integrates observability and security data from Dynatrace into the portal, enabling teams to monitor and operate their software components more effectively.

You can display real-time insights alongside managed components and add links to Dynatrace Apps for deeper analysis and root cause investigation.

Figure 3. This page comes from the Red Hat Developer Hub, showing data from Dynatrace displayed directly in the portal.

Validate deployments automatically with Site Reliability Guardian

Dynatrace's Site Reliability Guardian (SRG) embeds observability directly into the engineering workflow, allowing for fast, automated validation of service health during every change.

Automated change impact analysis

SRG automatically analyses the impact of deployments on performance, availability, and capacity. Powered by Davis® AI, it detects regressions and anomalies early-before they hit production.

SLO validation

Engineers can define service-level objectives for their software components to ensure they meet expected quality standards. See how your software components rate against company benchmarks and get insights on where and how to improve to deliver the best quality. SRG validates these objectives regularly or on demand, ensuring services stay performant and resilient.

Unified overview

SRG validation results are stored in Dynatrace Grail® data lakehouse and visualized in a single-page summary, showing the pass/fail status of the last validations and a detailed evaluation of individual objectives. This allows you to easily spot trends and degressions over time. Visualization can be enriched with custom metadata, such as release versions, build IDs, and environment identifiers.

Automated release validation, CI/CD integrated

Trigger SRG validations directly from your CI/CD pipeline, to get instant feedback and observability insights into the current health and performance state of your component.

For more information, check out our documentation and then go to the Hub and set up your first Site Reliability Guardian! If you're looking for inspiration, check out our Site Reliability Guardian config-as-code samples.

Conclusion

Observability as a self-service is a reality with Dynatrace. Our unified platform experience allows platform teams to connect observability with developer portals, workflows, and automated deployment validation, giving engineers direct access to the data they need-without bottlenecks.

By empowering engineers to curate and automate their data according to their needs, teams can work more effectively and bring reliability checks earlier into the development lifecycle.

Next steps

Ready to try out these self-service observability enhancements yourself? Explore Dynatrace integrations and start customizing your observability and developer experience!

• Try out launchpads on the Dynatrace Playground
• Install Dynatrace plugins (Backstage integration)
• Set up RedHat dev portal Dynatrace integration
• Explore Site Reliability Guardian (SRG)