Dynatrace has formally launched the company’s AI-powered digital virtual assistant: davis.
It has been developed to answer questions from anyone in IT, or the business, about the performance of any aspect of the digital ecosystem. A user simply talks to ‘davis’ through Amazon Alexa, or chats to it through Slack, and in an instant has answers to questions such as: What performance problems impacted my revenue today? Can you tell me about user activity levels? Are there any capacity issues? Were there any outages last night?
The new offering is the gateway to Dynatrace’s unified, AI-powered and completely automated digital performance management platform. As Dynatrace’s Chief Technology Strategist, Alois Reitbauer, explains, “IT teams are struggling with the hugely complex nature of application delivery. On top of this, internal resources are stretched. Problem resolution needs to be auto-detected with precision and presented back to IT in a very specific context.
“The remarkable thing about ‘davis’ is that it adds another layer of automation to the existing solution. IT operations can now have a simple voice or chat conversation with ‘davis’ and access the same deep insights, without having to go diving into dashboards. Additionally, it gives non-technical teams the ability to monitor and understand network health and performance issues via familiar communication tools. ‘davis’ has effectively ‘consumerized’ IT – this is an industry first.”
The next step in the roadmap for ‘davis’ will see Dynatrace working with more customers to develop questions that are very specific to their needs and environment. This will be done as part of a limited release and via a series of hackathons at Dynatrace’s global Perform 2017 event. The vision for ‘davis’ is to build a community where skills and updates are shared and downloadable via Github.
Alois Reitbauer is a key creator of davis and believes the virtual assistant is an important step towards alleviating some of the complexity and time constraint issues placed on IT today: “Microservices, cloud migration, IOT – the IT environment is getting harder to manage. Silo analytics are unsustainable now and so is a scenario where you have humans querying complex data sets trying to pinpoint problems accurately. Each application can have billions of dependencies so you need AI capabilities to automatically look for all possible solutions and select the right one. It then needs to start on the path to self-healing. Adding a human-like interface to such an intelligent, automated platform was the next logical step in the Dynatrace evolution, and our customers are completely blown away by its capabilities and where we see it going.”
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