February 2020 Summaries

Dynatrace Managed has achieved certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.x distributions, marking a significant milestone in its partnership with Red Hat. This certification aligns Dynatrace Managed with OneAgent and OneAgent Operator under Red Hat's approved software, enhancing its resilience and security through features like live kernel patching and simplified migration from RHEL 7. With the release of RHEL 8.1, Dynatrace Managed version 1.186 has been tested for compatibility, ensuring a seamless transition for users upgrading their operating systems. The collaboration between Dynatrace and Red Hat underscores a mutual commitment to simplicity and innovation, promising continued integration and high-quality support with future Red Hat updates.

Digital Business Analytics enhances the Dynatrace Software Intelligence platform by linking business metrics to application performance and user experience, offering insights into how these factors influence business milestones and KPIs. Unlike traditional APM solutions that focus solely on IT-centric metadata, Digital Business Analytics integrates additional business data, enabling companies to better understand the impact of IT on business outcomes. By allowing the use of session and user action properties for audience segmentation, organizations can perform detailed analysis of business objectives, such as conversion rates and user engagement, based on user experience. This approach enables the seamless merging of BizDevOps perspectives, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of how technical performance affects business metrics. Through tools like the Dynatrace User Session Query Language (USQL), users can execute complex queries to analyze key performance indicators and generate customized dashboards, which can be easily shared to provide valuable insights to managers and executives.

Funnel charting is a powerful tool introduced by Dynatrace to help businesses understand and optimize user journeys through their applications by visualizing conversion funnels using user session queries. This functionality is crucial for identifying and resolving barriers that users encounter, such as a poorly laid-out homepage or confusing navigation, which can negatively impact conversion rates. By enabling application owners to pinpoint exactly where users drop off in their journey, funnel charts allow for the implementation of targeted strategies to enhance user experience and transaction completion rates. Dynatrace demonstrates the utility of funnel charting through internal use, identifying areas for improvement in their USQL feature, and through customer use cases, such as a hospitality company using digital experience monitoring and session replay to optimize their order-at-the-table app. Additionally, funnel charting supports A/B testing, allowing businesses to compare different user journeys and make informed improvements, while also providing insights over time by comparing funnels from different periods and filtering by user segments.

Dynatrace has enhanced its monitoring capabilities for hyper-complex environments by introducing comprehensive support for OneAgent life-cycle management through REST API, in addition to existing UI and CLI tools. This development allows users to efficiently manage OneAgent operations, monitor statuses, and ensure that the latest versions are installed across vast and varied infrastructures, including cloud platforms, virtual machines, and physical hosts. The REST API facilitates automated management tasks such as switching monitoring modes, tracking update progress, and configuring monitoring settings, thus enabling large-scale lifecycle patterns and centralized configuration management without the need for additional scripting tools like Ansible or Puppet. The new capabilities have been positively received by over 50 major Dynatrace customers from sectors like finance, retail, and government, who have participated in the Preview program, highlighting significant improvements in monitoring automation and integration. As Dynatrace continues to expand these features, further UI enhancements and extended write operations are anticipated, underscoring an ongoing commitment to simplifying and scaling application performance management for complex global enterprises.

The Dynatrace Managed release notes for version 1.188, published on February 12, 2020, detail new features, enhancements, and a total of 19 resolved issues across both Managed and SaaS platforms. The Managed version 1.188 addresses nine issues, including improvements in the installer and upgrade processes, handling of OpenID Connect response issues, and enhancements in Elasticsearch status reporting. Similarly, the SaaS version 1.187 resolves five issues related to RUM and cluster components, such as correcting display issues with mobile action names and improving Apdex granularity for mobile applications. The SaaS version 1.188 also resolves five issues, primarily focusing on the Core UI, such as fixing errors in the Global Timeframe Selector and unnecessary loading indicators on dashboards. These updates reflect Dynatrace's continued efforts to enhance functionality and address user-reported problems in its software.

The announcement highlights the new operations supported by the oneagentctl CLI tool, which simplifies the deployment and reconfiguration of Dynatrace's OneAgent software. The tool facilitates easy installation and runtime configuration by automatically connecting to the appropriate tenant and server, embodying Dynatrace's philosophy of automation. It offers both "getter" and "setter" operations for managing connections, tenant IDs, server addresses, and proxy settings, with specific commands for retrieving and modifying these configurations. While getter operations can be executed with OneAgent running, setter operations require OneAgent to be stopped and restarted to take effect. The 1.185 version also introduces features for managing log content access and port ranges, and users are encouraged to provide feedback through various Dynatrace community channels. Future updates promise additional capabilities for OneAgent configuration.

The Dynatrace Managed release version 1.186, announced in February 2020, introduced several key updates, including certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.x distributions, support for nftables as a firewall service on RHEL/CentOS 8.0+, and enhanced license notifications to prevent monitoring interruptions. The release also included the introduction of an Internet Proxy API for better cluster configuration management and resolved 17 issues across various components like ON-PREM, ON-PREM Console, Infrastructure, and Installer and Upgrade, addressing problems like widget display errors, profile access for non-admin users, and AWS CloudWatch metrics collection. Additionally, Dynatrace SaaS versions 185 and 186 resolved numerous issues, including improvements in mobile crash reporting, extensions management, and system load charts, alongside fixes for various UI and cluster-related bugs.

The OneAgent release notes for version 1.209, published on February 10, 2020, detail several updates and changes, including the deprecation of the no_create installation parameter, which now defaults to the LocalSystem parameter for new installations. The release also signals upcoming removals of deprecated installation parameters in version 1.213, urging users to replace them with the equivalent --set-param=<value> parameters. This version introduces support for the Confluent Kafka client library 1.4.0+ for .NET and .NET Core, and announces the last version for supporting certain OpenTelemetry versions for Go and Node.js. Future changes include a phased discontinuation of support for several operating systems starting in 2026. The 1.209 release resolves 33 issues across various components, including vulnerabilities and improvements in detection and configuration, such as Apache command line argument corrections and enhanced handling of the OneAgent .NET code module. Cumulative updates address additional issues, including those related to the mainframe, Go, .NET, and Java components, as well as enhancements for mobile agents on iOS and Android.

Dynatrace's OneAgent version 1.185 release, published on February 7, 2020, introduces multiple updates and enhancements, including the new OneAgent on a host REST API for managing hyper-complex environments, although the preview program for this feature has closed. The release also provides new operations for the oneagentctl CLI tool, and it outlines changes in operating systems support, with several OSs losing support between 2025 and 2026. The update resolves 37 issues across various components, including improvements for Java, .NET, NodeJS, PHP, and Go technologies, while addressing specific problems like agent crashes and performance issues. Additionally, early adopter releases for IIS Module Insights and TIBCO BusinessWorks version 5.x are introduced, requiring a restart for activation and offering enhanced monitoring capabilities for these technologies.

Keptn, an open-source control plane announced by Dynatrace, is designed to enhance autonomous software delivery and operations for cloud-native applications, addressing key challenges organizations face in adopting cloud-native environments. Part of the CNCF Landscape for Continuous Delivery, Keptn features capabilities such as automated SLI/SLO-based quality gates, continuous feedback through ChatOps, and automatic remediation of production issues. The recent version, Keptn 0.6, has seen significant enhancements with community contributions from partners like Avodaq, Citrix, and Neotys, making it more accessible for building autonomous cloud platforms. Google Cloud supports this initiative by offering $500 in GCP credits for running Keptn on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which aids developers in deploying advanced applications on a secured and managed Kubernetes service. Keptn's event-driven architecture allows for seamless integration with tools like Dynatrace, Prometheus, and Neoload, enabling efficient artifact promotion and problem remediation. Additionally, Keptn can be extended with custom services and integrated with other CI/CD tools like Jenkins and GitLab, offering a transparent view into the software delivery process through its interface, Keptn's Bridge.