June 2017 Summaries

Dynatrace offers comprehensive monitoring of transaction performance by tracking response times for each service and service method, categorizing these based on percentiles to illustrate the distribution over time. This method allows users to analyze huge amounts of data, highlighting outliers more effectively than averages. By using percentiles, such as the 50th and 90th, Dynatrace provides insights into service performance, offering users the ability to create custom charts and dashboards tailored to specific performance needs through its REST API. The system is built to manage large volumes of data in real time, and its unique capability to monitor all percentiles without setup distinguishes it from other solutions. Users can further customize their analysis by defining unique percentiles, such as the 70th, to meet their specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), demonstrating flexibility in monitoring and analysis.

Dynatrace OneAgent, with its PurePath technology, provides comprehensive end-to-end tracking and analysis of individual web requests, enabling users to efficiently pinpoint and investigate specific transactions among thousands. This capability is enhanced by Dynatrace's artificial intelligence, which aids in root cause identification and transaction analysis through features like service flow and service-level backtrace. Users can filter and narrow down requests based on various parameters, such as response time, to focus on those that require deeper analysis, allowing for detailed exploration of the entire call chain and performance metrics. PurePath offers visualizations of request sequences and response times, highlighting network latency and execution details at the code level. This approach facilitates error analysis by revealing the origins of detected issues and the specific sequence of events leading to exceptions. Additionally, Dynatrace allows for the analysis of requests from different perspectives, such as switching viewpoints from the Customer Frontend to the Authentication Service, providing flexibility for teams responsible for specific service components. Ultimately, PurePath empowers users to navigate complex systems efficiently, offering insights into the performance and behavior of web requests across distributed environments.

OpenStack, an open-source cloud operating system initially developed by Rackspace and NASA, has seen explosive growth in enterprise adoption due to its ability to provide a flexible, vendor-neutral alternative to major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It consists of multiple interdependent microservices that deliver a production-ready IaaS layer for applications and virtual machines, with core components handling compute, networking, storage, identity management, and orchestration. The appeal of OpenStack lies in its open API, which prevents vendor lock-in, and its strong data privacy capabilities, allowing companies to keep sensitive data on-premise. Despite its complexity, demonstrated by around 60 components, OpenStack's user base includes high-profile companies such as AT&T, IBM, and Red Hat, and its growth is evidenced by a significant increase in cloud deployments and larger cloud sizes, as reported in the latest OpenStack Foundation User Survey. The platform's rise in popularity has sparked discussions about the maturity of open-source monitoring tools, such as Monasca, Ceilometer, Zabbix, and the Elastic Stack, in effectively managing the complexities of OpenStack environments.

OneAgent has introduced several general improvements and fixes, including an Early Access Program (EAP) for Linux PowerPC (Little-endian) hosts on RedHat and CentOS, which offers deep monitoring capabilities for Java, Node.js, system, network, plugin metrics, and log analytics. The new garden-runc 1.2.0 release features garden injection, and CPU usage reporting has been enhanced for Windows protected processes. Changes to Erlang grouping mean that programs with undiscovered modules will now be grouped under 'Erlang,' and plugin technology names in plugin.json files are case-insensitive. Enhanced remote diagnostics have been implemented for Docker, and a Security Gateway is now required for monitoring large AWS accounts with 700+ service instances. Additionally, there is support for persisted custom configurations and trusted.jks for Windows, as well as VMware Cloud on AWS.

Dynatrace enhances its monitoring capabilities by allowing users to configure custom request attributes, which are key/value pairs associated with service requests, to improve the filtering and analysis of web requests. This feature enables users to create advanced, multi-faceted filters that facilitate detailed analysis of request sequences, helping to pinpoint issues more effectively. Request attributes can be sourced from various parameters and are applied across multiple requests within a PurePath, providing a versatile tool for service analysis. Users can define rules to determine how attribute values are fetched, allowing for specific filtering based on chosen criteria. The system also offers protection for confidential data, restricting access to sensitive attribute values based on user permissions. With plans to expand the functionality of request attributes further, Dynatrace offers a 15-day free trial to explore these features without requiring credit card information.