Dynatrace Application Security Module Will Block Attacks Such as Log4Shell

The Dynatrace Application Security Module will soon automatically detect and block attacks such as Log4Shell. Dynatrace’s upgrade, which it revealed Thursday, is among four announcements the company made at its Dynatrace Perform partner and customer event.

During the online conference, Dynatrace also launched a DevSecOps Automation Alliance Partner Program. In addition, the company announced multicloud monitoring of serverless architectures with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud functions. Furthermore, Dynatrace said it plans to provide its AIOps capabilities to software developers as code.

Dynatrace, a provider of cloud-based AIOps services, competes with Cisco’s App Dynamics, Datadog and New Relic, among others. Since its IPO in 2019, Dynatrace has expanded its application performance and observability platform.

The company expanded its focus on DevSecOps in late 2020 when it launched the Application Security Module. It is designed to discover vulnerabilities in cloud-native and container-based software that could enable injection attacks. The planned update will automatically block those attacks in real time.

Log4Shell

When Log4Shell surfaced late last year, Dynatrace officials emphasized that its Application Security Module was able to quickly detect attempts to exploit the Log4Shell vulnerability. Rick McConnell, making his first appearance as Dynatrace’s new CEO, said during the opening keynote session at the Perform that the Dynatrace Application Security Module detected the Log4Shell vulnerabilities within minutes.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace’s Rick McConnell

“Not only did we detect all instances of the vulnerability across highly distributed, multicloud environments, but through our AI engine, as well as our associated understanding of the topology and transaction patterns in our customers environments,” McConnell said. “We help our customers prioritize application updates and mitigation strategies. Customers using alternative tools had to go through the painful and largely manual process of upgrading their agents and restarting their applications to mitigate Log4Shell.”

Dynatrace partner Rick Sullivan, general manager of DXC Technology, said he welcomes the company’s expanded focus on application security.

“Speeds and feeds and new technology introduction increases the potential on the risks, vulnerabilities and threat vectors,” Sullivan said.

DXC’s Rick Sullivan

“It cannot just be that we do gates of security checks, but inherently and organically software must be developed securely, and then released and managed securely, where we’ve got controls and observability tied in like we would handle any other defect or risk of vulnerability,” Sullivan added.

DevSecOps Automation Alliance Partner Program

Building on its application security focus, Dynatrace launched its DevSecOps Automation Alliance Partner Program. The program aims to make it easier for alliance partners to integrate the DevSecOps capabilities of their offerings with the Dynatrace platform.

More than a dozen solutions are now integrated with its platform, according to Dynatrace. Those include …

… Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, GitLab, Gremlin, Jira Software LaunchDarkly, OpsGenie, PagerDuty, Slack, Snyk, Tricentis NeoLoad, and Everbridge’s xMatters. Once integrated, the solutions can utilize Dynatrace’s observability, AIOps capabilities and application security monitoring capabilities.

“When you look at DevSecOps platforms, they involve dozens of tools,” Dynatrace CMO Mike Maciag told Channel Futures. “The question is, how do you get them the data that they need and orchestrate and automate these tools? That’s what we’re doing with our DevSecOps platform. And our partner program is making it easy for people to do that.”

Multicloud Serverless Support

The Dynatrace observability capability in its platform for some time has supported AWS Lambda, Amazon’s serverless offering. In the coming months, Dynatrace will be able to monitor Microsoft Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. It will also support managed Kubernetes environments, messaging queues and cloud databases offered by all major cloud providers.

The broadened serverless support, which runs modern software code without having to provision or manage specific servers, will let DevOps and site reliability engineering teams optimize serverless applications.

“We actually have the broadest kind of coverage in that area, similar kind of things that we were talking about,” Dynatrace CMO Maciag said.

Support for serverless functions across clouds is a critical requirement, said Mark Lewis, VP of sales at Dynatrace partner Orasi Software.

“Barring few exceptions, all of our customers are multicloud,” Lewis said. “This is something that the market has been asking for a while. And I’m happy that this is coming to market through Dynatrace.”

DXC’s Sullivan agreed, noting that new application development is increasingly shifting to cloud-native environments.

“More and more, we’re developing natively in the cloud as a part of the solutions for our customers,” he said. “The advancements that they’re going to have there, especially as it relates to full stack observability, is a key one.”

Multicloud serverless support will also reduce the need to manage each environment separately, Sullivan added.

“We’re looking, in essence, at digital command centers, not necessarily separate and independent layers of the enterprise technology stack,” he said. “The expertise required in each of those areas has not relaxed, but the whole next level is requiring a full-stack focus to getting observability in serverless environments.”

Software Intelligence as Code

Dynatrace said it is making available its APIs and code that provide the intelligence of its platform. The move aims to allow developers who have created “everything-as-code” software development models the ability to incorporate Dynatrace’s observability features into their applications.

“When they write code, they can determine what are the performance, security and quality gates that need to go through,” Maciag explained. “That would include, what are the thresholds and those gates? And then if something goes wrong with those thresholds, how do they remediate that immediately?”