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Unified release management with Dynatrace: Empower DevOps and ITSM collaboration

Release management challenges with microservices

Modern architecture often involves hundreds of microservices, each managed by its own CI/CD pipeline and often by different DevOps teams. While adding a release validation step to each pipeline is a best practice recommended by Dynatrace, implementing this across numerous pipelines can be resource-intensive. For organizations with hundreds of pipelines, achieving consistency requires careful coordination and planning to smoothly incorporate release validation.

Using Dynatrace’s centralized validation workflow, triggered via ITSM or GitOps, organizations can maintain consistent validation standards without individually modifying each pipeline. This flexible approach allows DevOps teams to leverage centralized control while enabling a gradual, manageable rollout of validation steps across pipelines as needed.

Unified approach with ITSM and CI/CD (including GitOps)

Dynatrace workflows provide a solution by integrating release validation with ITSM, GitOps, and CI/CD tools. Here’s how it works:

  1. Centralized validation via ITSM tools
    ITSM tools like ServiceNow and Jira provide centralized control over releases, incidents, and changes. With Dynatrace workflows, release managers can trigger validations without modifying each CI/CD pipeline, ensuring consistent quality standards across environments.
  1. GitOps for Kubernetes deployments
    GitOps tools, like ArgoCD, enable Kubernetes-based deployments by syncing cluster states with Git. This GitOps approach allows ArgoCD to trigger Dynatrace workflows upon deployment, running the same release validations managed by ITSM. Combining GitOps with ITSM ensures that all deployments—whether initiated by developers or release managers—adhere to organizational standards.
  1. Developer-focused CI/CD integration
    For teams using CI/CD platforms like Jenkins or GitLab, adding release validation steps provides immediate feedback, helping developers catch issues early. This developer-centric approach aligns with GitOps principles while still allowing ITSM-driven validation for broader oversight.

Unified approach with ITSM and CI/CD (including GitOps)

Defining Dynatrace composite SRGs and tag-based workflow implementation

In Dynatrace, Site Reliability Guardians (SRGs) provide automated validation checkpoints for each release. SRGs assess key metrics and thresholds, ensuring each deployment meets reliability standards before it progresses further. With SRGs, you can define specific service level objectives (SLO) like latency, error rates, or resource usage, tailoring validations to the needs of each service.

Composite SRGs for Targeted Validation and Notification

SRG supports tagging, allowing teams to group services by criteria such as environment, project, or criticality level. Using tags, you can configure Dynatrace workflows to execute SRGs selectively based on specific attributes, making release validation adaptable to different services.

For example:

Single-Service Validation: If a tag is set to “critical-service”, Dynatrace can trigger SRGs only for high-priority deployments, allowing focused validation where it’s needed most.

Multi-Service Validation: Broader tags like “production” or “release-group” can initiate SRG workflows across multiple related services, ensuring consistent standards for larger releases.

Implementing Workflows with Tag-Based Triggers

Workflows can leverage tags to determine which SRGs to execute, whether triggered from ITSM, GitOps, or CI/CD tools. This flexible setup means each deployment triggers only the necessary validations based on its tag profile, optimizing resources and reducing manual oversight.

Implementing Dynatrace Validation in a Phased Approach

Start by establishing a centralized workflow in ITSM to give Release Managers high-level control and visibility. As DevOps teams become familiar with the setup, expand to GitOps and CI/CD tools to support on-demand validation directly within development pipelines.

This phased approach balances centralized oversight for Release Managers with flexible, real-time validation for both DevOps engineers and developers, creating a comprehensive validation strategy across roles.

Conclusion

Integrating Dynatrace with ITSM and GitOps provides a unified, scalable release management strategy. By centralizing validation processes and automating checks across tools, organizations can improve release quality and responsiveness. Embrace this approach to empower both developers and release managers, achieving a seamless, high-confidence deployment workflow.

To help your team implement these solutions seamlessly, consider organizing structured workshops to cover essential steps like identifying critical services, setting up Composite Site Reliability Guardians with tags, and aligning workflows with existing CI/CD and GitOps practices. This approach ensures a smooth integration process and empowers your team to maintain high standards across all releases.

Ready to unify your release management with Dynatrace, ITSM, and GitOps? You and your team can experiment with all the functionality explored in this blog post in the Dynatrace Playground.