Marks & Spencer unifies observability with Dynatrace to improve customers’ in-store and digital journeys

Marks & Spencer (M&S) is one of the UK’s leading retailers, serving millions of customers across food, clothing, home, and beauty products via its digital channels and more than 1,000 stores. The business has launched a multi-year plan to increase its digital capability and drive operational efficiency by modernizing the technologies that support its stores, supply chain, and customer journeys. This includes expanding its use of cloud-native architecture across Azure and Google Cloud, as well as scaling Kubernetes and container technologies to support faster, more reliable innovation.

As its use of cloud services, containers, and modern backend architectures increased, M&S’s traditional monitoring solutions no longer provided the breadth of visibility, flexibility, and control required. Data was also siloed across application, infrastructure, and database teams, creating blind spots and making collaboration more difficult when incidents occurred. M&S wanted to simplify its toolset and establish a 360-degree view of its critical business flows, from warehouse operations and order processing to in-store applications and digital services. This would help more than 2,000 engineers build and release new services faster, while maintaining the reliability that customers and colleagues expect from M&S.

M&S selected Dynatrace for its ability to provide AI-powered enterprise-grade observability at the scale and complexity of its retail operations. The platform enables full-stack visibility into M&S’s core business applications and IT infrastructure, including approximately 12,000+ tills across stores. It also aligned closely with M&S’ cloud-native strategy, offering support for Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry as the company modernizes its technology foundations.

The initial rollout focused on international clothing and home retail, logistics, fulfilment, in-store applications, and tills, with Dynatrace Professional Services supporting deployment and training to drive adoption across teams. M&S now has around 2,000 registered users on Dynatrace, giving more engineers access to shared insights and helping teams embed observability into their ways of working. The retailer is using the full breadth of Dynatrace’s platform capabilities, including digital experience and full stack monitoring, alongside increasing its use of notebooks. Teams are also leveraging Grail and OpenPipeline to unify logs, metrics, traces, and business events data to achieve actionable business observability across fulfilment, order management, warehousing, customer channels, mobile, and web applications.

• Reduced cost and better collaboration: Dynatrace has helped M&S simplify its observability estate by consolidating eight monitoring tools into a single platform. Application, database, infrastructure, and service management teams now have access to the same AI-powered real-time data, reducing silos and enabling faster collaboration when issues occur. Meanwhile, Dynatrace Grail and OpenPipeline help teams turn log and span data into metrics for dashboards and alerts, supporting a more cost-effective approach to observability at scale.
• Faster issue resolution: The insights from Dynatrace have helped M&S to take a more proactive approach to issue resolution by anticipating problems before they emerge. Its previous monitoring tools had been unable to identify the cause of service incidents until after the fact. With AI-powered observability from Dynatrace, M&S’s engineers can pinpoint the root cause of problems much faster, eliminating guesswork and providing the precise answers they need to restore services quickly.
• Greater operational resilience: Dynatrace is helping M&S improve resilience across store, warehouse, and supply chain operations by enabling end-to-end visibility into the systems that keep goods moving. For example, M&S now has centralised dashboards with real-time alerts covering its assisted tills, self-checkouts, and payments infrastructure. This data helps teams quickly understand the cause of any decline in transaction rates, as well as analyse how customers use loyalty services and make gift card transactions. Longer term, Dynatrace’s business observability capabilities will also enable M&S to measure the success of pilot initiatives such as self-serve refunds and RFID tagging.
• Efficient engineering: All the M&S engineers get full observability platform access. M&S is embedding Dynatrace into its internal developer platform, so observability is built into new applications from the start. Capabilities such as Automation Engine, Site Reliability Guardian, and Davis Anomaly Detector are supporting more proactive service optimization, helping teams identify opportunities to improve customer experience and operational efficiency. Looking forward, M&S is exploring how Dynatrace can help teams better understand the behavior of its AI services as adoption grows.

Published 2026