His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service innovates faster with Dynatrace

HMCTS administers criminal, civil and family courts in England and Wales, as well as the reserved unified tribunals across the United Kingdom. To modernise its services, HMCTS launched a £1.3bn Reform Programme in 2016, which concluded at the end of March 2025. One of the main purposes of the programme was to replace paper-based processes, which previously required in-person completion, with digital services that are faster, simpler, and more accessible. HMCTS remains committed to continuously modernising its services to meet the evolving needs of its users.

HMCTS executed its transformation on a hybrid, cloud-native architecture running on Microsoft Azure and Kubernetes, alongside mission-critical on-premises systems. While this setup drove scale and innovation, it also brought complexity. Teams used multiple monitoring tools, each generating its own data, creating multiple versions of the truth. Without a single view, it was difficult for teams to identify improvements that would deliver the greatest value to users and taxpayers. To sustain high-quality digital justice services and make best use of public funds, HMCTS sought an automated observability platform to give every team clear, data-driven insights into the user experience.

HMCTS chose Dynatrace to deliver unified observability, automation, and business intelligence across its complex hybrid environment. The platform’s ability to provide full-stack visibility across infrastructure, applications, and user experience was key to taming complexity and empowering teams to make better decisions faster. Another major advantage was the opportunity to collaborate with Dynatrace on building custom dashboards that track progress against HMCTS’ transformation and performance goals.

“Dynatrace gives us the visibility and automation we need to deliver reliable digital services while making the best use of public funds,” said Jonathon Forster, Senior Product Manager, HMCTS. “The platform is flexible enough for any team to tailor it to their needs, whether that’s improving system performance, optimising resources, or tracking progress against our wider objectives. Dynatrace’s Cost and Carbon Optimization App adds further value by helping us identify and reduce cloud waste, supporting both efficiency and sustainability goals.”

• Leaner, greener cloud operations: Dynatrace’s Cost and Carbon Optimization App helps HMCTS identify over-resourced hosts and scale them down to reduce both cloud spend and carbon impact. Every new host is automatically instrumented by Dynatrace, giving teams full visibility across their cloud platform without manual effort. The FinOps team then uses insights from Dynatrace to give developers concrete evidence for optimising specific areas of cloud consumption. This supports HMCTS’s commitment to sustainability and fiscal accountability as a publicly funded organisation.
• Tailored insights for courtroom operations: HMCTS worked with Dynatrace to build a custom dashboard for monitoring video and audio recordings in courtrooms, ensuring each hearing is captured and stored successfully. By capturing logs in Grail, Dynatrace provides deep visibility into recording performance and automatically alerts teams to failed uploads. Using Dynatrace avoided the cost of acquiring another external tool, while creating a reusable model for other dashboards that track service quality and progress against modernisation goals.
• Faster issue resolution: With AI-powered root cause analysis from Dynatrace, HMCTS has significantly reduced time to identify and resolve incidents. Mean time to resolution is now 70% lower, and issues are detected 1.45× faster. The platform’s automation and anomaly detection enable support teams to spot problems early, often before court services are affected. By providing a single source of truth, Dynatrace also enables more collaborative approaches to issue resolution.
• Continuous optimisation: Beyond incident response, Dynatrace enables HMCTS to surface and address less urgent issues to proactively improve user experiences. Using custom Notebooks in Dynatrace, HMCTS built a workflow that identifies any recurring performance problems, to highlight trends that could degrade user experience or efficiency if left unchecked. For example, Dynatrace identified an issue that only impacted iOS users, allowing HMCTS to isolate and fix the root cause before it escalated to others.

“Dynatrace has become a platform for everyone at HMCTS, not just our technical teams,” continued Forster. “More than 150 users across product, service, and operations roles rely on it each month to understand our performance and make better decisions. In the long term, we see Dynatrace playing an even greater role in resource planning and organisational strategy, helping us use data to continually improve how we deliver digital justice services.”