The combination boosts users' direct control over software rollouts, but it's far from the only newly diversified tool available for shops looking to consolidate.
Dynatrace's observability customers now have a new option for controlling software rollouts with this week's acquisition of DevCycle, as lines continue to blur among observability, feature and data management providers.
DevCycle, founded in 2011 as Taplytics, offers feature management software that integrates with any OpenFeature-compliant feature flagging system. OpenFeature is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project that has created a standard API for integration with feature flagging tools, similar to what OpenTelemetry has done for distributed tracing data collection.
This means DevCycle doesn't necessarily replace feature management tools users might have in place but instead can standardize the management of multiple feature flagging tools within a software development or platform engineering organization, said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
"DevCycle doesn't really care about the feature flags themselves but about the real-time logic in the background," Volk said. "Once a feature is flagged and you have that signal, you need to go out without ruining the application or slowing the application down and see what that feature did in the millisecond it got released."
Dynatrace users eye consolidation benefits
Still, for one Dynatrace customer, the acquisition represents an opportunity to replace a separate feature flagging tool.
"We've spent quite a bit of attention on how to use it in our environment and observe the results," said Michael Cabrera, director of site reliability engineering at Vivint Smart Home. He did not name the other vendor. "Bringing feature flags into the platform will change how we think about config and rolling out features."
Mark Tomlinson
Another Dynatrace customer, FreedomPay, does not widely use feature flags in-house and is unlikely to adopt DevScale in the near future, said Mark Tomlinson, senior director of performance and observability at the digital payments provider in Philadelphia. But for many customers that do use feature flags, the previous alternative for AI-based feature management automation would be using something like Model Context Protocol to connect different observability, feature management and software deployment tools.
Now, with DevCycle integrated into Dynatrace, "you can manage these things within an enterprise environment, without having to jump through a lot of external noise or toil to get that stuff done," Tomlinson said.
As software experiments managed with feature flags hit production, having the tools integrated could speed up how quickly developers see the results of A/B tests and enable them to respond right away, he said.
"And maybe they could ask Dynatrace AI, 'Hey, which do you think is best?' And let the AI run the math," Tomlinson said.
'An active system of control'
It's clear that Dynatrace wants to do more than just report on anomalies.
Andrew CornwallAnalyst, Forrester Research
DevCycle will also give Dynatrace the ability not only to report the results of feature flag A/B testing and experiments but also to diagnose the root cause of problems and act in response to issues, according to analysts.
"It's clear that Dynatrace wants to do more than just report on anomalies," said Andrew Cornwall, an analyst at Forrester Research. "In buying DevCycle, they allow their customers to enable or disable parts of their application code based on feedback from Dynatrace … and can take actions rather than just exposing signals."
It is another deliberate step for the company into controlling DevOps workflows beyond simply observing them, according to a blog post this week by Alois Reitbauer, chief technology strategist at Dynatrace.
Alois Reitbauer
"This acquisition further advances observability into an active system of control," Reitbauer wrote. "By integrating the precise runtime controls and [the] 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."
This isn't the first foray beyond observability into direct automation for Dynatrace, which has offered software deployment hooks through its Keptn open source project since 2021. Last year, it added support to its Davis AI for AIOps tool to automatically generate software artifacts, such as Kubernetes deployment resources and Git pull requests, in response to issues.
"Dynatrace needs [DevCycle] as input for its vision for real-time responsiveness in what it calls Autonomous Intelligence," Volk said.
Observability lines blur everywhere
Dynatrace isn't alone in diversifying beyond observability. Rival vendor Datadog has also ventured into new IT automation territory over the last two years, including Kubernetes autoscaling, live debugging, security incident response and on-call incident management as well as a new internal developer portal introduced in 2025. Tightening bonds among feature management and observability vendors also saw LaunchDarkly's acquisition of observability startup Highlight.io and Datadog's acquisition of feature management vendor Eppo in 2025.
Observability, data management and AI infrastructure are also converging, as shown by Snowflake's acquisition of Observe, Inc. this month. For FreedomPay's Tomlinson, the Snowflake deal could also warrant broader consideration in business intelligence tool consolidation, because his company also uses Snowflake as a system of record.
"What's really compelling about Snowflake observability is that [it could eliminate] two [separate] paths of compliance, [where] I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get approval for real-time instrumentation [and] to get my data moved to a [system such as Snowflake]," Tomlinson said. "You're kind of paying twice for a bunch of data that should be married together at the end of the day."
By the same token, Dynatrace has been positioning itself as a business intelligence contender for years, especially since it introduced its Grail data lakehouse back end, which could also potentially replace Snowflake as a system of record for business data, he said.
"We're not [considering] it at the current moment, but it could happen," he said. "Since we have very strict regulations over how we manage our instrumentation in the runtime, it depends on the controls [available for] Observe … we've committed to Dynatrace because I really liked the security controls within the Dynatrace instrumentation."
Beth Pariseau, a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.
Mark Tomlinson
Alois Reitbauer
