Dynatrace acquires DevCycle to strengthen feature delivery for modern cloud and AI-native workloads

Safer feature releases with real-time insight.

Modern software teams are shipping faster than ever. With cloud-native architectures, AI-powered development, fast releases, and continuous delivery pipelines, new features flow continuously from commit through development and testing into production in minutes.

While release velocity has accelerated, release risk has not disappeared. As modern software environments grow more complex, releases have become harder to understand and riskier to manage, placing increasing strain on developer experience while forcing organizations to balance rapid innovation with the reliability that customers expect.

That’s why Dynatrace has acquired DevCycle, a feature management platform built on the OpenFeature standard, to help developers, SREs, and platform teams bring progressive delivery for AI-native applications directly into the Dynatrace platform.

Why feature management matters in modern delivery

Feature flags are a core control plane for progressive delivery including:

• Canary deployments
• Blue-green releases
• Experimentation
• Rapid mitigation when something breaks

Feature flags are frequently used as standalone control mechanisms, allowing teams to change application behavior without clear visibility into the consequences of those changes. While teams can toggle features instantly, they lack direct insight into how each decision affects performance, reliability, and user experience in real time.

What DevCycle adds to Dynatrace

DevCycle brings enterprise-grade feature management built on OpenFeature, the open standard that Dynatrace helped establish. Together, Dynatrace and DevCycle will enable teams to:

• Reduce risk: Release features to small cohorts, validating behavior, and scaling gradually based upon real-time performance and error monitoring.
• Experimentation: Compare feature variants, models, or prompts using real traffic and real telemetry instead of offline assumptions.
• Improve MTTR: Use Dynatrace causal analysis to quickly pinpoint when a specific feature is driving an incident, and act immediately.
• Improve developer experience and flow: Give developers a fast, intuitive way to ship, test, and control features with immediate feedback from production telemetry.

Built on OpenFeature

Dynatrace recognized the importance of progressive delivery early by initiating and leading the OpenFeature standard in 2022. It is now a CNCF project and the industry’s open vendor-neutral standard for feature flagging.

Because DevCycle is OpenFeature-native, customers can use Dynatrace with DevCycle or with any OpenFeature-compliant feature flag system. This preserves openness, avoids lock-in, and gives teams flexibility as their platforms evolve.

Feature flags and observability in practice

Dynatrace brings together development, operations, and business teams to deliver software more efficiently, securely, and reliably. By integrating feature flagging, teams gain a single, contextual view of intent, execution, and outcome across the software development lifecycle.

Practical examples include:

• Roll out a new checkout flow only to premium users and immediately observe performance, errors, and conversion impact.
• Automatically disable a feature for a specific region if Dynatrace detects degradation.
• Test new AI prompts to compare latency, quality, and user behavior in real time.

This integration enables advanced use cases such as real-time, health-driven feature control, experimentation, and faster remediation workflows. Over time, we plan to extend these capabilities into AI-assisted workflows that help teams understand blast radius and act more quickly when issues occur.

What’s next

This acquisition further advances observability into an active system of control. By integrating the precise runtime controls and centralized feature concept from DevCycle with comprehensive insights from Dynatrace, we will move closer to realizing our vision of an intelligent resilience platform capable of self-remediation, prevention, and continual optimization.

We are already working to integrate DevCycle capabilities into Dynatrace. Stay tuned for updates, and thank you for being part of the Dynatrace community!