Q&A with Dynatrace: The Current State of Node.js in Europe and Its Growth Potential
Q) Tell us a little bit more about what your company does?
Dynatrace is the innovator behind the industry’s premier Digital Performance Monitoring Solution, making real-time information about digital performance visible and actionable for everyone across business and IT.
We help customers of all sizes see their applications and digital channels through the lens of their end users. Over 8,000 organizations use these insights to master complexity, gain operational agility and grow revenue by delivering amazing customer experiences.
Q) Where are most of your clients based? What regions have been the biggest growth area for you in the last few years?
Most of our customers are based in North America, although we have customers all around the world. While the US (revenue wise) has been our biggest growth area, we are seeing double digit growth in APAC and EMEA.
Q) You have a fairly big presence in Europe, are you seeing a large Node.js presence in Europe and what types of companies are using Node.js in Europe?
The European market is more conservative than the US. enterprises, which form our main customer group; they rarely use Node.js. Node.js Interactive Europe clearly showed that there are a lot start-ups coming that are solely Node.js based.
I am convinced that — within the next 2 years — Node.js will also take over the enterprise market in Europe and we are prepared for it.
Q) What general trends are you seeing with Node.js among your customer base?
In the US, Node.js is everywhere. We see it at high-tech companies as well as in traditional industries, like banking, insurance and healthcare. We see Node.js in new public facing offerings as well as in microservice initiatives and generally everywhere where APIs need to be consumed or provided, like as the gluing tier that connects mobile apps to enterprise stacks inside a company.
Q) Why did you join the Node.js Foundation? How does it align with your ultimate goal?
Never before has digital performance been so critical to the success of an organization.
Node.js is one of the key technologies we see at enterprises undergoing their digital transformation process. As a market leader in application performance monitoring, it was a logical step for Dynatrace to show our commitment by being part of the platform and actively contributing to it.
Q) Do you have employees that actively contribute to open source? If so, do they contribute to Node.js? What other projects are they contributing to?
Dynatrace provides support for and works with a lot of technologies.
For each of these technologies we try to actively participate in the community and also work with the governing bodies.
As an example, we are an OpenStack Foundation member as well as a member of the W3C.
For Node.js, Daniel Khan is a collaborator and member of several working groups dealing with diagnostics and monitoring for Node.js.
Q) You have special tooling for Node.js, can you tell us a little bit about that, what it does, how much it has grown?
Dynatrace traces every single transaction through all tiers of an application. This means that it can tell you exactly what happened down the stack when a user clicked a button on a website that triggered some Ajax call and hit Node.js.
In addition to showing calls to other tiers and databases from Node.js, we also provide process metrics like heap usage separated by heapspaces, CPU usage and overall responsiveness of the application. These metrics are all stored and analysed in real time.
Especially in microservice environments, it is not possible for a human to correlate all the telemetry data generated by microservices architectures to trace down problems fast.
That is why we are applying artificial intelligence for anomaly detection and baselining. It allows Dynatrace to tell you the exact root cause if this one click on the website suddenly performs poorly.
