Monitoring Dynatrace (private preview)

Dynatrace is an end-to-end observability solution, which includes infrastructure monitoring and incident management. The Dynatrace sensor for Instana displays the monitored hosts and processes, and their associated metrics and events, on the Instana UI. For more information about the Dynatrace product, see Dynatrace documentation.

After you install the Instana host agent, the Dynatrace sensor is automatically installed. You can view metrics for the hosts that are monitored by Dynatrace in the Instana UI after you configure as outlined in the Configuring section.

Supported information
- Supported operating systems
Configuring
- Dynatrace endpoint
- Dynatrace API token
Viewing metrics
- Configuration data
- Performance metrics
Viewing events
Troubleshooting
- Agent monitoring issues
- Agent OutOfMemoryError error

Supported information

Supported operating systems

The Dynatrace sensor supports operating systems that are consistent with the requirements of the host agent. To find the supported operating systems for every host agent, see the Supported operating systems section of each host agent, such as Supported operating systems for Unix.

Configuring

The Dynatrace sensor must be configured with the endpoint and API token for the instance that you want to connect to. You need to configure the following fields in the <agent_install_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yaml agent configuration file:

com.instana.plugin.dynatrace:
  enabled: true
  poll_rate: 30
  endpoint: 'https://<account>.live.dynatrace.com'
  key: 'redacted'

The following table contains the supported configuration options:

Name	Type	Required	Default	Description
`enabled`	boolean	Yes	False	Verifies whether the sensor is enabled
`endpoint`	string	Yes	NA	The endpoint of your Dynatrace API
`key`	string	Yes	NA	The API token that you are using to access the endpoint
`poll_rate`	integer	No	30	The number of seconds between metric queries. This time might need to be adjusted to account for any poll rate limit that is imposed by your endpoint.
`target_zone`	string	No	NA	The name of the generic zone where hosts that are monitored by Dynatrace are displayed on the Instana Infrastructure map. If not specified, the hosts are displayed in the `Undefined Zone`.
`zone`	string	No	NA	The name of one or more management zones that the sensor imports from. The management zone monitors a subset of the infrastructure that Dynatrace is monitoring. Multiple management zones must be separated by commas, with no spaces between the zones.

Dynatrace endpoint

The Instana Dynatrace sensor uses the Dynatrace API to collect information about the hosts and processes that Dynatrace is monitoring. The Dynatrace API endpoint is required to communicate. The endpoint is formatted as shown: https://<account>.live.dynatrace.com.

The entire endpoint must be included, with <account> that is replaced with the account that you are assigned by Dynatrace. This URL appears in the email that you receive from Dynatrace when your account is created, and is the same URL that you use to log in to the Dynatrace UI.

For more information on the Dynatrace API, see the Dynatrace documentation.

Dynatrace API token

An API token is required to authenticate with the Dynatrace. For more information about how to create an API token, see the Dynatrace documentation.

Your API token must include the following scopes:

entities.read
events.read
metrics.read

Viewing metrics

To view the metrics, complete the following steps:

From the navigation menu in the Instana UI, select Infrastructure.
Click a specific monitored host.

Then, you can see a remote host dashboard with all the collected metrics.

Configuration data

OS (name and architecture)
CPU count
Total Memory
Hostname
FQDN
Disk Capacity
Network interface name, MAC/IP address

Performance metrics

CPU Used %
CPU Load
Memory Used
Swap Used (Linux only)
Disk Used/reads/writes
Filesystem inodes used (Linux only)
Network RX/TX Bytes

Viewing events

Dynatrace manages events and associates them with entities that Dynatrace monitors. The Dynatrace sensor imports each of these events into Instana as issues and changes, depending on the event severity. To view the issues or changes, complete the following steps:

From the navigation menu in the Instana UI, select Events.
To filter events, click Issues or Changes.
To filter issues or changes that were imported from Dynatrace, enter the following query in the search box: entity.remote.host.source:Dynatrace.

Then, you can see a list of the events that are imported from Dynatrace. The Instana issues and changes remain open while the Dynatrace events remain open. When the Dynatrace event closes, the Instana issues or changes also close within a few minutes.

Troubleshooting

Agent monitoring issues

If the Dynatrace sensor cannot communicate with the Dynatrace endpoint, an agent monitoring issue is created. The issue describes which configuration parameter might be incorrect. For example, if the sensor receives an HTTP 401/403 error from Dynatrace, it's likely that the API token is incorrect or expired. The following configuration parameters can lead to agent monitoring issues:

endpoint
key (HTTP 401/403)
poll_rate (HTTP 429)

Agent OutOfMemoryError error

If you are connected to the Dynatrace instance that is monitoring many hosts, the JVM heap size of the Instana agent might need to be increased. If you find OutOfMemoryError error in the agent log, consider increasing the Instana agent's max heap size. For more information, see the JAVA_OPTS environment variable in the Environment variable reference.