May 2019 Summaries

The release notes for OneAgent and ActiveGate version 1.171, published on May 29, 2019, highlight various enhancements and support updates across multiple platforms and technologies. This version introduces General Availability support for tracing asynchronous code executions in Java Spring integrations, .NET Remoting, and IBM MQ Client, along with support for Node.js 12 and Go versions 1.11.10 and 1.12.5. PHP NG monitoring is available as an Early Adopter release, offering improved performance with reduced overhead. The release removes the need for a special license key to install OneAgent in Infrastructure monitoring mode, simplifying deployment options. Improvements include better Citrix process grouping, enhanced performance when retrieving containerD metadata, and support for Kubernetes Red Hat OpenShift 4.1. Several platform support updates are announced, with certain legacy support being phased out over the next six months. The update also addresses numerous resolved issues across different components, enhancing stability and performance.

The text discusses Dynatrace's involvement in advancing distributed tracing technology by supporting the W3C Trace Context specification, which aims to standardize context and event correlation across distributed systems. Distributed tracing, crucial for understanding service interconnections in microservices architectures, faces challenges when custom HTTP headers are not forwarded by middleware, leading to broken transactions. Dynatrace, along with other industry leaders, has been instrumental in developing the W3C Trace Context, which establishes a unified approach to tracing, enhancing end-to-end visibility and interoperability among monitoring tools. The support for this standard in Dynatrace's platform, now available in an Early Adopter Release, allows seamless tracing across services, even when unmonitored services are involved, by ensuring all services share the same trace ID. This advancement facilitates easier migration to Dynatrace without losing visibility, and the company plans to expand its support to encompass more distributed tracing use cases in the future, such as increased tracing in Kubernetes environments and integration with Open Telemetry.

Dynatrace dashboards have been enhanced with Markdown capabilities, enabling users to incorporate links, textual information, logos, and formatting to improve functionality and communication. A U.S.-based insurance company effectively used these capabilities to address specific needs: their Help Desk staff can quickly identify the appropriate contacts for issues thanks to a dashboard listing responsibilities, Dynatrace Administrators manage essential information like contacts and blogs directly on dashboards, and visual indicators such as Dynatrace UFOs are explained via Markdown to clarify their status. These examples demonstrate how Markdown usage can streamline operations and enhance the user experience, with a final user suggestion to keep dashboards engaging with elements like emojis.

The Dynatrace Managed version 1.170, released on May 6, 2019, introduces a range of new features, enhancements, and improvements aimed at bolstering compliance, security, and system efficiency. Key updates include new filtering capabilities for large service lists, the introduction of audit logs for cluster events to aid in compliance and security, and dynamic JVM memory settings allowing for automatic hardware updates upon service restarts. The release also increases minimum free disk space requirements for new installations and extends the Cluster Nodes Configuration REST API with additional functionalities. It resolves 27 issues across various components, enhancing the user experience and system performance. Furthermore, this version incorporates features from Dynatrace SaaS versions 1.169 and 1.170 and includes updates to the token management API, enabling more efficient secret rotation. The improvements in this release are designed to provide a more resilient and adaptable Dynatrace Managed deployment environment, as well as to offer new use cases for custom notifications using log monitoring tools.

The OneAgent and ActiveGate release notes for version 1.169, published on May 2, 2019, highlight several updates and improvements across various technologies and platforms. Key enhancements include added support for Java 12, Spring WebFlux WebClient, and Vert.x 3.6 and 3.7, as well as improved error handling for IBM Integration Bus and support for NGINX 1.11.5+ on Linux PPC-LE. The release also notes the impending discontinuation of support for Oracle Hotspot JVM v10 and OpenJDK v10, with version 1.169 being the last to support these platforms. Cloud Platform support has been extended with new metrics for Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, and custom Truststore files can now be used for integration. ActiveGate updates include the ability to configure with custom TrustStore files, and support will soon shift to 64-bit host IDs. The release addresses 104 resolved issues across components, improving installer resiliency, error handling, and various agent functionalities across technologies like Java, .NET, NodeJS, and PHP.