Intelligence in, intelligence out: How Dynatrace and ServiceNow are powering autonomous IT

Key insights:

• Why it matters. Traditional IT operations are caught in a reactive cycle of alerts, tickets, and manual fixes that slow innovation, drive up costs, and drain resources.
• What’s new. The Dynatrace and ServiceNow partnership introduces a new model for autonomous IT operations that connects observability and automation to predict and resolve issues before they impact users.
• How it works. Dynatrace provides real-time, causal intelligence through deterministic and agentic AI, while ServiceNow transforms those insights into automated, closed-loop workflows that detect, diagnose, and remediate incidents.
• Proof in action. Organizations such as BT Digital, CareSource, and Commerzbank have already reduced incident volume and mean time to resolution (MTTR), demonstrating measurable gains in reliability and efficiency.
• The bigger impact. Together, Dynatrace and ServiceNow are enabling self-healing IT ecosystems that elevate operations from reactive firefighting to proactive, continuous optimization across multicloud environments.

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It’s 3 a.m., and a critical service alert lights up your phone. You log in, sift through dashboards, trace dependencies, and chase symptoms while customers wait. By the time the root cause is found, you’ve lost hours, sleep, and user trust.

Traditional IT operations are stuck in a loop of alerts, tickets, and manual fixes—always responding, never advancing. That approach is no longer sustainable. As systems expand across clouds and teams, the cracks widen. When incidents strike, teams scramble to manually correlate data across disconnected systems to pinpoint root cause and impact, wasting precious time, as outages drag on.

A new model is taking shape, shifting IT from reacting to predicting.

The timeline for autonomous IT operations accelerates today with a new, multiyear partnership between Dynatrace and ServiceNow. Together, our goal is to move enterprises from managing incidents to managing intelligence: creating a foundation for systems that see, decide, and act on their own.

“We help customers anticipate issues, coordinate remediation, and continuously optimize services by combining deterministic and agentic AI — bringing them closer to autonomous prevention, remediation, and optimization at enterprise scale.”
— Steve Tack, chief product officer at Dynatrace

Why reactive operations can’t keep up

Most organizations still operate in reactive mode. The symptoms are familiar:

• Visibility gaps fragment understanding across applications, infrastructure, and cloud environments.
• Manual incident response requires human intervention at every step, from detection through resolution. Problems are often discovered only after users are affected.
• Alert fatigue overwhelms teams with noise instead of insight. Without business context, it’s nearly impossible to prioritize what truly matters.

The result: slow mean time to resolution (MTTR), recurring issues, and IT teams trapped in a costly cycle of firefighting instead of innovation.

Connecting observability and automation through AI

Breaking the cycle requires more than adding automation to existing processes. It requires aligning observability and automation so systems can see clearly, decide confidently, and act autonomously.

Dynatrace and ServiceNow are advancing toward agentic operations, where AI agents collaborate across platforms to detect, triage, and resolve issues end-to-end. These systems share context, coordinate decisions, and execute actions autonomously, creating a continuous flow between observability and automation.

This evolution unfolds in three phases:

• AI-assisted. Operators interact with Dynatrace directly from ServiceNow using natural language, accessing observability insights in context. This capability is available today through integrated workflows.
• AI-led. Agents begin coordinating workflows across platforms autonomously, while maintaining human oversight.
• AI-driven. Agents validate hypotheses, assess business impact, and execute full remediation workflows automatically — realizing the vision of autonomous IT.

This approach builds trust gradually, delivering immediate value today while preparing organizations for the agentic future of operations.

The convergence that makes autonomous operations possible

Dynatrace provides in-bound intelligence, combining deterministic and agentic AI for precise root-cause analysis, predictive detection, and proactive remediation across modern, multicloud environments.

“By bringing together real-time, AI-powered observability from Dynatrace with ServiceNow’s AI-powered IT Service & Operations Management, we’re empowering IT teams to move beyond traditional operations into a new era of proactive systems that continuously learn, adapt, and self-heal at scale.”
— Rahul Tripathi, group vice president and general manager, ITSM and ITOM at ServiceNow

ServiceNow provides out-bound intelligence, transforming observability insights into immediate, reliable action. Incidents are automatically created, enriched, routed, and remediated with full business context, reducing MTTR and operational overhead.

Here’s how the combined solution enables closed-loop operations:

1. Proactive detection and response. Dynatrace Davis® AI continuously detects performance, availability, and resource anomalies before they impact users. When a problem arises, ServiceNow automatically generates a context-rich ticket, complete with root cause, dependency mapping, and business impact, eliminating manual triage and ensuring the right teams act fast.
2. Continuous environment synchronization. Dynatrace Smartscape® automatically maps every service and dependency across your environment. Through the Service Graph Connector for Observability – Dynatrace, that real-time topology feeds directly into the ServiceNow CMDB, keeping it accurate and actionable without manual updates.
3. Closed-loop automation. When Dynatrace detects specific problems, such as memory saturation, capacity constraints, deployment anomalies, ServiceNow workflows automatically initiate remediation actions. Each workflow verifies the outcome via Dynatrace APIs, confirming the root cause is resolved, not just masked.

This is closed-loop remediation in practice: detect, diagnose, act, validate, and learn – continuously.

When self-healing IT meets real-world scale

Organizations worldwide are already realizing measurable gains from this unified approach:

• CareSource reduced MTTR by >98% and cut downtime from 12 hours to 2 through automated self-healing workflows powered by Dynatrace and ServiceNow, while increasing observability adoption by 450%.
• BT Digital achieved a 93% reduction in mean time to detection and resolution. When a critical Apache process failed, Dynatrace detected it in 2 minutes, and ServiceNow remediated it automatically in under 6.
• Commerzbank realized a 70% reduction in major incidents and 96% faster MTTR – from 30 hours to 1 – as part of its journey toward ticket-free IT operations. (October 2024)

These are strong indicators of a deeper transformation, from reactive operations to proactive, self-healing systems that elevate the role of IT from maintenance to innovation.

A trusted foundation for Zero Outage outcomes

The Dynatrace and ServiceNow partnership creates a reliable, AI-powered foundation for Zero Outage outcomes. It combines:

• Davis® AI, the Dynatrace hypermodal AI engine for deterministic root-cause analysis and predictive insights.
• Smartscape®, dynamic topology mapping that continuously updates ServiceNow’s CMDB.
• OneAgent®, unified instrumentation for complete, code-level observability across any environment.

Together, these capabilities give ServiceNow workflows the trustworthy, real-time context needed to act autonomously. As organizations mature, they evolve through stages of operational intelligence, from visibility to automation to prediction, ultimately achieving self-healing IT ecosystems.

For executives, this means lower operational costs and higher reliability. For ITOps, SRE, and platform teams, it means faster resolution, fewer alerts, and more time for strategic innovation.

Getting started: from insight to autonomy

The path to autonomous operations begins with a solid observability foundation:

1. Deploy Dynatrace OneAgent® for full-stack visibility.
2. Integrate ServiceNow using certified apps available in the ServiceNow Store:
   • Service Graph Connector for Observability – Dynatrace
   • Dynatrace Incident Integration
   • Dynatrace Workflows for ServiceNow
3. Automate remediation for common, high-frequency scenarios.
4. Expand continuously toward predictive and self-healing automation.

Put autonomous operations into practice

Experience how Dynatrace and ServiceNow combine intelligent observability and automation to turn reactive operations into proactive innovation.