OneStream drives continued growth of leading financial planning software with Dynatrace and Microsoft Azure

Simplifying financial planning for modern businesses

OneStream, a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software with 1,400-plus customers across 35 countries, is focused on fulfilling its vision to be the go-to operating system for modern businesses. Bringing together and simplifying the financial systems organizations rely on, particularly as they prepare for initial public offerings (IPOs), OneStream delivers on this vision by offering a single, clear window into corporate performance.

OneStream started as an on-premises solution but migrated its platform to a more flexible and dynamic Kubernetes architecture on Microsoft Azure as customers grew more accustomed to hosting financial data in the cloud. OneStream continued to grow at scale because of this. It also optimized its platform to run more efficiently and enabled its teams to drive faster innovation. However, it also introduced complexity that was added to by OneStream’s extensibility, enabling partners to build solutions on its platform so customers can deploy customized versions of its software. With such a complex and distributed architecture, it could often be difficult to trace and identify a root cause when problems occur.

A unified platform for a complex architecture 

Part of OneStream’s challenge was it didn’t have a full-stack observability solution, so its teams relied on manually pulling logs to triage problems. This approach wasn’t scalable in the cloud, and support teams at times spent tens of hours with each customer troubleshooting an issue, which increased frustration. After evaluating the market, OneStream selected Dynatrace’s unified observability and security platform, impressed by its breadth and depth of capabilities as well as its native support for Microsoft Azure and the ability to deploy it through Azure Marketplace. 

“When a customer would phone in with an issue, we’d have to go through various security controls to obtain access to their environment to triage that problem. That’s a very lengthy and time-consuming process,” said Ryan Berry, Senior VP of Architecture, OneStream. “When support can't identify what the problem is, we’d have to bring in the big guns—consultants or engineers—which has a financial impact. We evaluated a number of platforms and were intrigued with Dynatrace’s innovation and unified portfolio of capabilities that allow us to really paint a picture of what's going on in our environment.”

Dynatrace uses several Azure services for hosting. Along with compute, storage, and networking services, Dynatrace uses Azure Kubernetes Service to ensure the platform is scalable, reliable, and consistent across deployment models. Dynatrace also uses Azure Active Directory to enable single sign-on for its team of approximately 1,000 engineers, providing security and reliability to an increasingly remote work environment.

"Leveraging the deep integration the native service integration offers for Dynatrace, setting up observability for customers’ Azure resources and more is done within minutes," said Pawel Siwek, Principal Product Architect—Azure Native Dynatrace Service, Dynatrace. "The initial Dynatrace deployment initiated from the Azure Marketplace is completed with a few clicks by the customer and allows the configuration of Dynatrace directly from the Azure console where the customer manages its Azure infrastructure." 

Siwek added: "The full automation of setting up observability in the background needs no interaction and configuration for the customer. With one click, customers can enable the Azure monitor integration, which instantly results in logs and metrics of resources in the customers’ subscription flowing into Dynatrace. Deploying the Dynatrace OneAgent directly from the Azure console is the easiest way to get VMs and App Services monitored with Dynatrace in seconds."

Life with Dynatrace includes:

Proactive resolutions: With insights from Dynatrace, OneStream’s engineering team can proactively improve the performance of its platform and identify issues before new versions are shipped. This has helped deliver better customer service while reducing the volume of incidents the support and operations teams need to tackle. As a result, OneStream expects to see savings in the seven figures over the next 12 months.

Improved cost-efficiency: Previously, OneStream relied on multiple customized solutions and a DIY approach for triaging problems. These solutions were built and operated in the cloud, with additional running costs that amounted to several hundred thousand dollars per month. By switching to Dynatrace, OneStream can drive significant cost savings by decommissioning previous tools.

More collaborative efforts: Dynatrace offers a single pane of glass that OneStream’s business, engineering, and consultancy teams can use to understand the behavior of their software and identify the impact the underlying cloud platform has on customer experiences. As a result, team members can collaborate more effectively and work more efficiently in their efforts to foster better customer experiences and drive greater value for the business.

Privacy and security by design: Because of the nature of the market in which OneStream operates, it was crucial that its new observability solution was compliant with stringent financial services regulations across global markets. Dynatrace’s privacy and security-by-design approach, which gives customers the ability to isolate and protect sensitive data in line with regulatory requirements, gave OneStream peace of mind it was the best solution to meet its needs. 

“Dynatrace allows us to do more and proactively respond to customer issues, which is a game-changer,” Berry said. “Our engineers have gotten immense value out of it immediately. We’re able to better engage with our customers and be more responsive to any critical issues that they may be experiencing. When we saw what Dynatrace could do, our entire engineering organization realized that this thing is really powerful.”