Dynatrace’s Carbon Impact App with Klaus Enzenhofer

This is Techstrong tv. Welcome to Techstrong tv. I'm Bonnie Schneider, and today I'm pleased to have us joining us now Klaus Enzenhofer, product Lead Business Analytics at Dynatrace.

And Klaus has immense experience driving sustainability into innovative solutions at Dynatrace. He is here to share insights into dynatrace's Carbon Impact app. Klaus, it's great to have you here.

Thanks for having me, Bonnie. Well, I'd love to hear more about your background and your work in sustainability and how it led to the work that you're doing now. So I'm with Dynatrace for 13 years, and we used to work in optimizing IT systems for different reasons, but, uh, that's the core of Dynatrace.

I started, uh, there and, uh, three years ago I had a very interesting customer meeting. Mm-Hmm. A customer actually said to me is like, Hey, Klaus, what you are doing?

What you are optimizing? Couldn't you, couldn't you help us with optimizing the carbon footprint? Your system?

You are aware of everything, every component that we have, uh, couldn't we use similar mechanics to optimize the carbon footprint? And it wasn't just anyone, but it was a large European, uh, car manufacturer who asked. So I started looking into it and dove into it.

And the result of, uh, a little research was, uh, the carbon impact up great way of, of, of, of getting overview across everything and having a core KPIA core KPI that you can just start optimizing for. And that's, that's great. Yeah.

No, many, many organizations are looking for solutions just like this. Can you explain more about dynatrace's Carbon Impact app, how it works and, and how, um, it might be implemented into an organization? It's, uh, for customers of Dynatrace, very simple because, uh, we are reusing what we are already, uh, capturing.

But, uh, what we really allow our customers to do is with a simple enablement of, of, of the, of the app to not only get insights into performance of, of, of a system and availability of a system, but also seeing like what does this IT system actually consume energy wise and how much carbon it actually produces. And, uh, the key benefit really is people try to optimize, but they don't know where to start. And with the ability, with the visibility that we give our customers, we not only give them the baseline, but we also give them the ability to execute and to start optimizing.

That's great. And one of, one of the, um, important features of the app is that it does provide analytics and information. Can you explain how that is implemented and why those insights are so important?

The implementation happened together with the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance. So we worked with them to, uh, come up with a scalable solution of, uh, of monitoring the carbon footprint of on-premise systems and cloud systems because, uh, when you look at the largest corporations, you have thousands of servers on-premise and equivalent also, uh, in the cloud. But nowhere you are given fine-grained information.

The Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance really is an NGO that really wants to help people, uh, and standardize within the European Union, uh, the, the way how, uh, carbon is being measured for IT systems. And what we are actually working and collaborating with them is we're, we're delivering the base metrics, and, uh, together we have produced a formula that allows you to take simple monitoring metrics and turn it into, yeah, carbon and energy equivalent. And it makes it really simple for, uh, corporations to start, uh, getting this baseline.

You have their just traditional monitoring metrics that you are looking at with a little bit of, um, meta information. Like where is your data center located? Uh, depends on what the energy mix, uh, you are consuming.

All these kind of information needs to go into the, into, into this algorithm. And then we, you have this, uh, calculated baseline across your premises and cloud premises. That's, uh, that's the beauty and the challenge really for every customer is how to get from the visibility to an actual sustainability program that actually drives reduction.

And this is where everybody has an initiative. The largest corporations in the world have really great initiatives, but, uh, when they look then at the data that they are getting from all over the place, it's, they're missing the insights needed because it's simple to reduce the carbon footprint of IT systems. You just shut it down.

So if we shut down all of it in the world, what happens? The world would stop. Yeah.

Collapses absolutely can't do that. So you actually have to balance, you have to balance between customer experience, availability of IT systems, business needs, SLAs and all of that. And with that, you are adding carbon to the, to the mix as a, as a part of, of, of, of the game.

And you have to balance out between these dimensions. And the beauty is you have to have everything in context of IT systems into and give every stakeholder different perspective. Because when you think about it, you have green engineering, green coding, which is aiming for optimization done by developers, by engineers, and you have initiative.

These initiatives do go into IT operations as well, where you try to optimize, uh, the data centers that you're running, the machinery that you have there, all that needs to work together in order to really, uh, produce a reduction. But everybody needs to have the same KPI and focus. Everybody needs to have the same few on the state of the corporation and, uh, that way really step by step optimizing, uh, the carbon footprint.

What would you say, um, you mentioned, um, a couple of the challenges that these IT organizations face and the Carbon Impact app can help greatly, uh, by providing insights. Can you give us some examples of some of those insights and, and how they might, uh, really provide action, um, when they're given to organizations? Sure.

Very simple one is, uh, the, the app, for example, highlights like many others do. Uh, the an idling host, so a machine that sits there that isn't being used, utilized to what it could perform, and the question becomes, can I shut this machine off? Can I turn it off?

Save costs, save carbon, both at the same time. I give you an example of what happened to us. I have, we, we installed the Carbon E picked up and I went to our, uh, ops team.

They're like, Hey, wouldn't it be great? We have here a list of 50, 60 hosts that we could shut down. We haven't seen any, uh, utilization of this machine.

I looked at it and then I, uh, I asked, uh, our head of operations and I said like, Hey, let's dive into it. And they took their operations view on it, and I, they're like, no, we can't. We cannot because this is the data center for our synthetic product that is this note down in, uh, south France.

We have to run three machines there. We know that there are, there is one idling, but for SLA reasons we have to keep that running. And this is, this is the challenge.

And the, the, the, the beauty of the app itself and, and that that we solve here with the, with the app is you have at the same time the recommendation, but you have the surrounding information to actually drive a decision and say like, yes, we can save here. No, we cannot save here. Well, that's important, you know, and many of these corporations have broad sustainability goals, um, for their entire organization.

It definitely gets, that gets the brunt of a lot of, uh, attention. But how would you say this carbon impact app really can affect their, their corporate sustainability goals for an organization overall, I would say depending on the industry, it can be significant parts of it that are, uh, or that the, it is contributing significant parts to your overall, uh, carbon emissions. And the core really is when you look at insurance or banks, it can be all the way up to 20% of the overall corporation's emissions.

And what we really wanna, what we really wanna help here is keep the emissions of it not growing as fast as they are at the moment. Because when you look at ai, AI is going to contribute massively to the energy consumption. Today we are, depending on which study you take, we're a little bit above the airline industry with around about 2% of global energy being consumed by data centers.

The expectation is though, and again, depending on the study that you're taking, we're going to four to 6% of the en entire world's energy going into data centers, running ai, running our regular things. And that is, is, is, is going to hit every corporation that now starts to invest into AI as well. So you have to have a countermeasure, you have to be able to measure and optimize carbon footprint because otherwise you will not get to a sustainability goal that says 20 30, 20 35, and carbon neutral as a corporation.

Well, as these corporations, um, use these insights to make decisions going forward, one of the, uh, crucial features is the accuracy and reliability of the data. Can you talk about what Dynatrace does to ensure this, uh, data integrity? We are working together with, uh, some large corporations.

So because we don't have, uh, every piece of hardware, uh, that, uh, potentially could be running out in, uh, in the world, but together with our customers, we are getting a decent footprint, uh, and a decent perspective. And what we are doing is we're collaborating with these, uh, customers very, very closely to measure the carbon emissions and the energy intake of the machines side by side with what we, uh, actually calculate. We are also certifying, uh, the calculations so that, uh, it can be used for reporting purposes.

Um, that's the way how we go about it. And, um, keeping this, uh, as accurate as possible is, uh, is is one, one of our, uh, biggest challenges. It comes with, um, the balance that you need to find between accuracy and, um, yeah, spreads that you can, uh, reach, that you can, can have because, uh, it doesn't help you to have the a hundred percent accurate, uh, uh, accurate measure on a hundred machines when you're running 25,000 machines in your data centers.

Uh, so coverage is, is key, uh, uh, for, for our customers. And that is, that is what what we really focus on is giving the coverage with the highest possible accuracy. And I spoke about the sustainable digital infrastructure lines, uh, with the, with this NGO, we are, uh, actually collaborating here in this, uh, area as well to, uh, optimize the calculations to get, uh, better results and, and, and, uh, become more accurate.

Can you talk about some of the benefits that organizations really will get to experience when they focus on optimizing the carbon footprint of their IT department? The first experience is always, uh, I buy green energy for my data center. I move to the cloud because the cloud providers are taking care of my carbon footprint.

These are the big needle movers. But, uh, then the next steps for those that really want to do something, uh, become critical. And, uh, it's a lot of the young engineers that are pushing here, corporations quite hard.

So this is where it comes to the green coating, the green architecture, uh, topic. And people are not satisfied anymore by, hey, by moving to the cloud, uh, it's carbon neutral. Yes, it is carbon neutral because the large cloud co uh, providers are taking care of, offsetting are taking care that green energy is being bought, that kind of stuff.

But people know, still know it's consuming energy and there is simply not enough green energy in the world. And these young engineers are pushing really hard and they're like, Hey, I wanna optimize to reduce the carbon. And the beauty for our corporations though is it's, it's a benefit for them as well, because when you optimize an IT system for carbon, you optimize it also for cost.

You also optimize it for better, better digital experiences that you deliver with your IT systems. So it's a win-win win situation on all fronts. Yeah, that's, that's true.

It really is. I think that, and that's the, the beginning. And I kind of wanna go back to the carbon impact app because, uh, let's say IT leaders are watching this now and they're, they wanna understand some of the metrics and KPIs that this, this app will provide.

Um, can you give us some more examples of some specifics maybe that you've seen come up that have really impressed people that have used it? Uh, we had, uh, a large, uh, European bank, for example, that just optimized by green, uh, doing green coating, optimized 75 grams of carbon in a pre-production environment on a single service. Now, when you think about it, this is in pre-production, the engineer on his, uh, on his own, not in production, not with millions of users against it, not 24 7 active service.

So they did the math and it's like, it saves them, this 75 grams that they measured will save them round about two tons of carbon over a year. And that will, they will save that constantly. You know, that is a, a, a massive, massive saving that they are, um, going to have just out of this, That, that impressive.

I'm sure that they were very, um, pleased to hear that, that they were able to get the results like that. And, you know, going forward with the, the Carbon Impact app and the work that you're doing at Dynatrace, I wanted to get your perspective on what what you see moving forward will be the trends, um, into 2024 and, and the years ahead, um, towards sustainability and tech and, and IT departments optimizing their carbon footprint. It is, uh, a must have, it is going to be mandatory for everyone.

Uh, we see, uh, in Australia, in Europe, since I'm out of Europe, uh, we are seeing here a massive, massive trend already. And we're seeing now this, uh, trend moving also into the United States, Canada because, uh, yeah, legislation is requiring across the board that you have to do something. Uh, what I'm also seeing is that, uh, the leading companies are picking it up because it's so many benefits on every front.

As I said, it's not only on the sustainability front with, uh, um, yeah, with shareholders, uh, requesting more sustainable corporations, but it is also for employee, uh, and, uh, employee satisfaction, I want to say. Plus also, uh, the bottom line is benefiting from moving here, uh, the needle. And what I'm seeing is, uh, a convergence actually of the different metrics.

So it is, has the, the way how people are looking at it has changed massively during covid from a, yeah, we need to have it kind of a cost center situation towards now a revenue driver. And that's why people want to invest. Uh, the, as I said before, AI is going to increase cost and carbon footprint, both at the same time, massively and significant.

And this is going to be the biggest challenge for us in the upcoming years. How do we balance out, again, the revenue, uh, that we can drive with all our IT versus the cost versus, uh, the sustainability, uh, focus of, of, of today's, uh, uh, yeah, today's, uh, people, And that's a really great point, um, especially about AI and all the energy consumption ahead, that the dynatrace's Carbon impact app will really help, um, give great measurements and great data that I think will provide those actionable insights. KS en Hopper, product lead, business analytics, DY of Dynatrace.

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure having you on text Strong tv. Thank you, Bonnie.

All right, well stay with us. We're going to have a lot more great interviews like this one coming up.