Understanding Today's Digital Business With Dynatrace | Kulvir Gahunia & Dana Harrison, TELUS | Inside the Digital Business With Dynatrace

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Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host

theCUBE Research

Kulvir Gahunia

Site Reliability Office - Director

TELUS

Dana Harrison

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

TELUS

Info
Transcript

Kulvir Gahunia & Dana Harrison, TELUS | Inside the Digital Business With Dynatrace

In this episode of Inside the Digital Business With Dynatrace, Rob Strechay sits down with Kulvir Gahunia and Dana Harrison to discuss how TELUS is navigating digital transformation. The conversation dives into site reliability engineering, platform modernization and how TELUS stays ahead of rising digital complexity to deliver seamless customer experiences.

Gahunia shares how TELUS strategically integrates Dynatrace to boost observability, strengthen operational resilience and support enterprise-wide initiatives. Harrison underscores the evolving role... Read more

Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host theCUBE Research

HOST

Kulvir Gahunia

Site Reliability Office - Director TELUS

Dana Harrison

Principal Site Reliability Engineer TELUS

Kulvir Gahunia & Dana Harrison, TELUS | Inside the Digital Business With Dynatrace

>> Welcome back to this episode of Inside the Digital Business with Dynatrace, where we're going to continue to examine the current challenges and opportunities for organizations as they optimize themselves as digital businesses. I couldn't think of a better way to really dig into this than to actually have a customer on. Today, we're joined by some folks from Telus who are going to help us understand how they're using Dynatrace and applying it to their digital business. First off, I have Kulvir Gahunia, who's the director of site reliability office for Telus, and Dana Harrison, the principal site reliability engineer for Telus. Welcome both of you to the show.

>> Thank you so much for having us.

>> Yeah, I think, again, I'm not joking, having been on your side of the fence and been an end user of products in the past in IT, you guys really are on the front lines of using this stuff. So let's start off with Kulvir. Let's start by talking about your modernization journey and your strategic initiatives for transformation, because I think understanding where Telus is at will really help us baseline this.

>> Thank you. Yeah, I can start off there. Our journey began probably let's say 10 years ago at Telus on really picking up steam on the DevOps and agile principles, and trying to get Telus to a place where we can deploy often, quickly and reliably, and all with a customer focus. So when you're focusing with the customer internally, you're also focusing on OpEx reduction, so how do we do that strategically? And so when we went on the DevOps experience, we did moving to cloud or a monolithic infrastructure. Moving to cloud helps with being agile, providing resiliency, and also bringing focus on our customer journeys and experience. With monolithic applications, it was very complex, and we've moved it all together and put on a great observability platform to see what's going on, to provide insights and make data-driven decisions for the business. And we're well on that journey moving forward, and with security as DevSecOps as a primary focus on where we want to continue to build towards.

>> Yeah, I think that makes total sense, because I think, again, having also been at a hyperscaler and built out and had SREs on my team and things of that nature, you guys are literally on the front lines with this. So Dana and Kulvir, bring Dana in here a little bit, help us understand the importance of technology in achieving those transformation initiatives, and business resilience in general.

>> Absolutely. It's so key to everything we do, because we're in a world where you have a customer who can walk into a Telus store, let's say in a mall, and they're expecting a smooth, reliable, quick experience. In that same world, if that experience isn't meeting all of their expectations, it is trivially easy for them to walk into the mall aisle where they've got the kiosk across the hall, maybe to a competitor's store, and go get served in a way they expect to be served and deserve to be served by one of our competitors. So technology is what gives us that advantage to make a more resilient, reliable, available experience to really get that sale. In particular, with things like Black Friday, which is our biggest sales event period and has grown into that over the past few years, it's bled over from the states because we're a Canadian telecom, we especially have to be on our A game with experiences like that.

>> Yeah, I think that totally makes sense. I think, again, I was a Telus customer by the way when I worked for a Canadian financial services company when I was in IT, back in the day with a Blackberry. But I think again, the experience was is so key, like you said. So Kulvir and Dana, as customers of Dynatrace, could you speak to the continual innovation from Dynatrace and how it factors into the role they serve as one of your strategic partners?

>> Yeah. We've been customers of Dynatrace for many years now. It's been probably 13 years, so we've seen the evolution of Dynatrace, and we partner with them in developing new features, and any asks that we have, they're great partners. And it's been a strategic platform for us as we go through our journey and we're still going through. It helps us with the analytics piece of making decisions. It helps us with understanding the complexity of our platforms and where to focus on. We used to go, from a customer perspective, it was iPhone launch was the big thing and now it's Black Friday, and now we want to work towards forget the events. Let's just try to be ready every day with the data that's provided to us. And we continuously work with Dynatrace, and always excited for the new features that come out yearly that we are able to preview a lot of, because we're good partners with Dynatrace, and understand what's going to work and take that forward to the business as well and show them the value.

>> And Dana, where do you see... You're using it on a day-to-day basis and you've seen some of the new features that are out. Why don't you give us a little perspective on that as well?

>> Absolutely. So I can attest from the fact I haven't been around Telus as long as Kulvir has and I haven't been a Dynatrace user as long as Kulvir has, and that's no dig on you, Kulvir. I'm just saying, you've been around here longer than I have, but one of my first roles at Telus was to help migrate off of our then observability solution into DynaTrace SaaS. I was with a different arm of Telus at the time, and I have nothing but praise for the really symbiotic relationship we've had with DynaTrace since that cut over. Truly, they're getting us involved in every preview that they think might be valuable to us. We were on Live Debugger many months before it came out and got a really good feel for it, had a really great back and forth with the product team on that. We've been on Rum on Grail for a while back when it was in preview as well, and anytime we seem to have a really weird, maybe unique problem, I've got a whole ton of DynaTrace engineers who are more than happy and excited to help us solve that. So the innovation on their side in helping us solve really Telus specific problems but then that might have wider potential for use has been nothing short of Fantastic.

>> Yeah, that's so great, because I think, again, when you start to look at it, it's about how do you partner and serve your customers better? And Kulvir, why don't we jump into the big trend in digitally transformed organizations is using observability to understand how technology and business impact one another. Can you help us understand how you use or how Telus uses observability to better understand your business?

>> Yes. So traditionally, DynaTrace has what used to be a monitoring tool, became an observability tool, but it's much more now. It's a platform of information and can be used for various aspects of an organization now, and our goal at Telus is to partner with the business to provide insights now with the information coming live out of transactions happening in our systems, and what better place to have that visuality and decision-making? You are now capable of doing sales or marketing events to see real time, is there an impact at this? Hey, we're going to release at this hour. Is there an impact? Yes. Should we pull back and whatnot? And demonstrating this to the business. The tool itself, it's not a, let's say, traditional IT tool for developers. I truly believe it's an informational tool for every aspect of the business, and working and partnering, and they're an engaging partner with us to leverage capabilities like biz events to understand what's happening with certain products or systems or sales events and whatnot. So very excited to go down this path and have more users of the platform than your traditional devs.

>> Yeah, I think that's super interesting, and I think again, Dana, how have you seen it play on the business side as well?

>> So I think Kulvir nailed it. The fact that we're now able to pull in and understand and interpret meaningful business metrics in the same tool where all of our, what you would call traditional monitoring and observability signals are, so your golden signals, your traces, your logs, but now we can track product sales and we can track everything live. We're tracking cart totals, and the fact that we're able to do all of this in real time as opposed to some of the every hour, every 24 hours reporting we had before has really given us an edge. And now we have marketing people. As Kulvir said, it's not just for developers anymore. We've got people from all across Telus who are hearing about the incredible things we're able to do, especially with a lot of the Gen 3 platform stuff in Dynatrace that has really changed the game. With these additional signals, we're also or have been able to move from a really reactive to a proactive mindset. So before, it was you're just reacting to alarms. Okay, everything's gone to heck in a hand basket, so you're trying to see exactly what's going on, what signals are firing, what alarms are going off. But now, with the fact that we have business metrics, we have business signals coming in with that same platform, we've been able to shift to a really proactive mindset. So we're no longer just getting together on war rooms and saying, "Hey, this P1 happened. What's going on?" We can now shift to things like game days and game nights where we are load testing in production several times a month, many times a year. We're getting those signals out. We're saying, "How does this impact live transactions from our business? How is this impacting sales? How is this impacting our marketing and customers, and how can we react to that in a meaningful way prior to the big lead up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday?"

>> Yeah. No, I think that is the key, is how do you bring the business along and be, like you said, not just a tool for your team, but how do you be a tool for the business? I think you brought something up and let's dive in a little bit. Logs have been around for a long time, but in the modern era of AI-powered observability, are they still necessary in your mind? And what are some of the specific examples of how you're getting value from logs in your observability team now?

>> Absolutely. So I know logs have been around for a long time. I don't see them going anywhere anytime soon. They're still going to play an incredible part in... There's a reason they're a pillar of observability when you have traces, logs and metrics. Especially with platforms like the Dynatrace third gen platform, we have the ability from our team to deliver to our developers and our users observability right out of the box. So on initial deployment, you get a whole bunch of templates that we've set up for you, some dashboarding, some alarming, some queries. We also with logs on Grail and trace injection into logs on Grail have the ability to power really developer focused and AI enabled experiences. So with a really unified observability platform, logs are just as important in the context with traces with your metrics to reduce MPTR, therefore also reducing your manual effort and your overall operational .

>> Which I'm sure developers love, so let's go there right now. Kulvir And Dana, let's talk about what the developer experience has transformed into and how you're helping, and how Dynatrace has helped your developers at Telus.

>> Yeah. I'll just quickly start off. That is our team, what you just described. Our team is to enhance the developer experience related to reliability, and we try to make it easy for them to onboard, to use the tools, and to absorb and consume information to make better decisions. And through that, we truly brought the ops part to the DevOps. That's our role. When you go through that journey, tying it back to the original question at the beginning, was when you go through that journey, there's a dev. We had dev and we had ops. We are making it easy for devs to do ops, and that's all part of the dev experience. How do we simplify that dev experience so they can get all this information? And Dana can go into more details.

>> I sure can. This is my bread and butter here. I talked about this at Perform, and it's funny, before our chat at Perform this year, a few months ago, I had a quick chat with Andy Grabner, who's an incredible partner with us at Dynatrace. Just an overall fantastic guy who had not at that time as of yet heard of the concept of MCPs or model context protocol servers in AI. It was a pretty new concept, only a couple of months old by them, but we at Telus had already been able to build out a Dynatrace MCP, and I know it's great, Dynatrace has their own now, which is really, really fantastic. But using things like some of the gen 3 techniques with live debugger, like with trace injection, like with the ability to query traces on Grail in particular has been very powerful for us. We've been able to take things like combining live debugger in a developer's visual studio code environment with our Dynatrace MCP that we built out that has some investigative techniques and some prebuilt DQL to be able to query Grail quickly and effectively with natural language. What used to take us 45 minutes to debug now takes two. We also did a really, really quick demo the other day where we showed a pager-duty or a pager-duty customer problem come in in a production problem, and moved from that through our many AI workflows into a full-blown pull request inside of 15 minutes. So it has really completely changed the game for our developers, from both a development perspective and an ops and day-to-support perspective too.

>> What about some of the security aspects of it? Because it would seem like this has just been key from DevSecOps, easy for me to say, but what have been some of the results that you've seen out of that side of things?

>> So with our enablement of Dynatrace vulnerability management across the stack, we've been able to realize a 30% reduction in open vulnerability count across all Telus processes and a 40% reduction in distinct open vulnerabilities. It's been very, very powerful and useful for us.

>> Yeah, I love that, because again, everybody talks about shift left and all of this stuff. I talk about meet in the middle, and I know Dynatrace has their perspective on that as well, around manage left and things. But I think one of the things that's really interesting is you bring the developers along, give them better insight. They build better code. It's not like they want to build insecure code, but getting them and helping get those reductions is amazing. That's great. So wrapping things up, Kulvir, AI is reshaping many businesses. I would say almost pretty much every business. I assume Telus is no different in how AI is reshaping what your company is going to market with. Can you share some examples of AI initiatives that are in production or areas where there may be experimenting with AI that is helping your business?

>> Yeah. From leadership, from the top down, AI is at the forefront of everything we're doing right now, and it's reshaping... Dana just gave some examples of the MCPs, the Dynatrace MCP for example, and how it's helping reduce time for troubleshooting. That's a primary example, and that started from an experiment. We're able to experiment. It's enabling the entire organization to fail fast and move forward, and it's truly happening. We've always said it. "Oh, you can fail, but it takes six months to iterate again." But now it's half an hour maybe at tops, right? And so the entire company's doing that, so experimentation is happen every day, and especially around the observability and how do we help reduce the mean time to resolve consistently? But yet we're also developing production apps across the business. The entire business are developing their own Copilots and chatbots. Our chatbots are being used outside of Telus as well, as commercialized and for call centers, and it's helping... We have the model that AI is another tool to help the individual. It's not here to replace you. How do you leverage it to remove, let's say, toil or get you focused on more stuff? And so you're delivering value instead of worrying about the day-to-day mundane tasks that you may have. So with that, it gives you information, so it's all over. It's all over, and as Dana just said in the last question, it's every day for us now.

>> Yeah, I can imagine. Again, and by the way, shout-out for the MCP stuff. I know what that is, and it was at KubeCon in London this year. People were just like... Everybody had their MCP coming out. It was crazy, so good work there. I think that's that forward-looking that you guys are driving out of your organization there. Kulvir and Dana, that's fantastic. So thank you for coming on. This has been great. I really appreciate you sharing your experiences and being on today.

>> Thank you so much for having us. Again, it was great to chat.

>> Thank you for having us.

>> And thank you for watching this episode, Inside the Digital Business with Dynatrace. Stay tuned for more to come as we peel back the covers on theCUBE, the leader in technology analysis and news.