ADT strengthens resilience of security systems by unifying logs and telemetry with Dynatrace

ADT is a home and business security systems company that provides 24/7 monitoring to protect its customers around the clock. In recent years, ADT has undergone a major business transformation, launching its own hardware line and introducing a streamlined, user-friendly platform for customers to manage their smart home systems under the name ADT+. This platform allows ADT to meet the growing demand for connected devices, real-time monitoring, and personalized alerts that enable customers to manage their home security from anywhere.

The ADT+ platform is primarily built on Kubernetes, distributed across multiple domestic regions on Google Cloud, which ensures reliability and scalability. It seamlessly integrates with connected devices so customers can fully customize their smart home security systems. This creates a complex technology environment, with interdependencies on first- and third-party services. ADT wanted to ensure its engineering teams could manage this complexity and identify problems before they become customer impacting events. It therefore decided to deploy a modern observability platform that provides visibility across distributed systems.

After evaluating the market, ADT identified Dynatrace as the best solution for its needs due to its ability to unify logs, traces, metrics, and events into one observability platform. With Dynatrace Grail technology, ADT can analyze logs and telemetry data—like traces—in full context of its application behavior, so engineers can identify the precise root cause of any service disruption or anomaly in near real time.

“Like Dynatrace is unifying observability, ADT is unifying professionally installed and do it yourself systems into one product – ADT+,” said Ryan Gow, VP, Product Engineering, ADT. “First impressions have a direct impact on customer sentiment. With the insights from Dynatrace, we can proactively identify and resolve issues our technicians are experiencing to improve the installation process for our customers. Arming our product managers and customer experience teams with high quality data from Dynatrace gives them the ability to improve customer experience in ways they couldn't before.”

• Optimized costs: By unifying logs and telemetry data in Dynatrace Grail, ADT has reduced its reliance on multiple monitoring tools to manage the user experience. As a result, developers can work faster and more efficiently, and ADT has driven a reduction of 30-40% in log monitoring costs alone.

• Proactive improvements: With Dynatrace OpenPipeline technology, teams can easily parse logs, traces, and business events data to unearth insights that reveal how services can be improved for customers, development teams, and business users alike. Dynatrace Business Events enable ADT to see the customer journey end-to-end, which ensures that engineers can identify problems proactively, rather than waiting for customers to report them to its care team.

• Faster resolutions: ADT has realized significant value from Davis AI, which enables site reliability engineering (SRE) teams to identify the precise root cause of service issues faster, often before customers are impacted. This has driven a reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR) of at least 200% in some cases.

• Greater reliability: By using AutomationEngine to automate workflows in its synthetic monitoring processes, ADT is able to resolve common issues in a matter of seconds, rather than trigger manual incident response efforts that could take hours. With Dynatrace, ADT also maintains visibility into the user experience for every customer cohort at every stage of their journey, so it can identify where they become stuck. This visibility enables its engineers to improve service reliability by automating short-term fixes while they develop a long-term solution.

“A unified observability platform gives our developers an easier way to debug applications without needing to switch between tools,” continued Gow. “Nothing comes close to the value that Dynatrace has created with OpenPipeline. OpenPipeline allows us to enrich data from logs and business events, which makes it easier for our engineers to query and gives other teams additional business context that they wouldn't otherwise have. We see Dynatrace business events and OpenPipeline as a key enabler for our innovation and future growth.”