Basic concepts of Dynatrace Business Analytics

Business events are an important concept and central to Dynatrace Business Analytics. Business events generate business-grade data to enable important use cases.

Business event

An event is an action or occurrence that takes place within a system or a service, such as when a customer completes a satisfaction survey or when a user selects a subscribe button. The system produces a signal when an event occurs. An event becomes a business event when it generates business-grade data. Dynatrace prioritizes business events separately from observability data to ensure business-grade data.

Business-grade data

Business-grade data is precise data that doesn't rely on samples to report baselines, identify trends, or alert on anomalies with statistical accuracy. It relies on complete and accurate data to inform businesses about system performance and anomalies in real time. Business events deliver complete and precise data to support demanding business use cases, and to support IT use cases where full accuracy is required.

Business-grade data is:

  • Complete
    All events are captured without sampling.
  • Fully accessible
    All events can be queried without extrapolation.
  • Real-time
    Events are available immediately after they occur.
  • Unconstrained
    There is no limit to the number of events generated.
  • Granular
    Events are not aggregated as they age.
  • Long-term
    The event retention period is up to ten years.
  • Topology-aware
    Events are stored with topology context.
  • Available from multiple sources
    Events captured include those generated by OneAgent, RUM, logs, and external sources.
  • Unified
    Events are stored in a single data store (Grail) and accessed through a single query language, DQL.

Business-grade data is often required for business decisions and reporting where precision is critical. Contrast this with typical IT reporting which achieves statistical accuracy through sampling and extrapolation.

Business event use cases

  • Business event data can be used to track financial information such as sales revenue and profit margins. Seasonal and longer-term trends can be used to anticipate demand. Seasonal trends can be easily transformed into long-term trends without extrapolation, thanks to a ten-year retention period.
  • Business events can be used to track complex business processes such as order management and fulfillment, to extract and segment financial details from a payment gateway, or to enrich Dynatrace data with external business data such as user feedback derived through voice of customer (VoC) solutions.
  • Business events can, for example, be used by a car manufacturer to better understand customer journeys within online car configurators, even when journeys span multiple weeks or months and involve multiple touchpoints. Business leaders can identify where users get stuck, experiment with approaches to improve goal completion, and better target specific audience demographics.

Business event dataflow

The business event dataflow in Dynatrace has three stages:

  1. Capture

    Business event data can be ingested from OneAgent, the RUM JavaScript API, and external sources.

  2. Process

    The data processing pipeline processes incoming business events to improve analysis and reporting. Data can be filtered, parsed, enriched, transformed, or assigned a retention period by creating rules. Rules are processed in sequence.

  3. Analyze

    Data stored in Grail™ can be explored using the Dynatrace Query Language, DQL to discover patterns, identify anomalies and outliers, report on trends, and more. DQL queries are also used to build dashboards, charts, metrics, and reports. You can use DQL to export selected data to external tools.

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