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Dynatrace Tutorials: OneAgent

April 14, 2023 Leave a Comment

What is Dynatrace Oneagent?

Dynatrace OneAgent is an intelligent, all-in-one monitoring solution designed for modern, complex IT environments. It is a software agent that can be installed on a wide range of platforms and is capable of monitoring a variety of technologies, including cloud-native applications, microservices, containers, and infrastructure.

The main purpose of Dynatrace OneAgent is to provide comprehensive visibility into your entire technology stack, from front-end user experience to back-end infrastructure. It captures real-time user experience data and correlates it with application performance, helping you identify and troubleshoot issues before they impact users. It uses AI-powered analytics to automatically identify the root cause of performance problems, reducing the time it takes to resolve issues.

Dynatrace OneAgent provides code-level visibility into application performance and identifying issues in your code. It can trace every transaction across your application stack, providing insights into performance and availability issues. It can monitor your infrastructure, including servers, networks, and storage, providing insights into performance and availability issues.

Capabilities of Dynatrace OneAgent

Dynatrace OneAgent is an intelligent, all-in-one monitoring solution designed for modern, complex IT environments. It can be installed on a wide range of platforms and is capable of monitoring a variety of technologies, including cloud-native applications, microservices, containers, and infrastructure.

Here are some of the capabilities of Dynatrace OneAgent in more detail:

  1. Full-Stack Monitoring: Dynatrace OneAgent provides comprehensive visibility into your entire technology stack, from front-end user experience to back-end infrastructure. It can monitor applications, services, containers, databases, servers, and more.
  2. Real-time User Monitoring: Dynatrace OneAgent captures real-time user experience data and correlates it with application performance, helping you identify and troubleshoot issues before they impact users.
  3. Automatic Root Cause Analysis: Dynatrace OneAgent uses AI-powered analytics to automatically identify the root cause of performance problems, reducing the time it takes to resolve issues.
  4. Cloud-Native Monitoring: Dynatrace OneAgent is designed to monitor cloud-native environments, including Kubernetes, OpenShift, and AWS Lambda, providing deep insights into containerized applications and microservices.
  5. Code-Level Visibility: Dynatrace OneAgent can trace every transaction across your application stack, providing code-level visibility into application performance and identifying issues in your code.
  6. Infrastructure Monitoring: Dynatrace OneAgent can monitor your infrastructure, including servers, networks, and storage, providing insights into performance and availability issues.
  7. Scalability: Dynatrace OneAgent is designed to scale with your environment, supporting hundreds of thousands of hosts, containers, and applications.
  8. Integration: Dynatrace OneAgent integrates with a wide range of technologies and tools, including cloud providers, DevOps tools, and ITSM solutions.
  9. Security: Dynatrace OneAgent provides advanced security features, including data encryption, role-based access control, and secure communication.

Overall, Dynatrace OneAgent provides a comprehensive, all-in-one monitoring solution that can help you quickly identify and resolve issues across your entire technology stack.

How dynatrace oneagent works?

Dynatrace OneAgent is an agent software that is designed to provide full-stack monitoring of applications and infrastructure in real-time. It is based on a lightweight, modular architecture that can be easily installed and configured on various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

Once installed, the OneAgent works by collecting telemetry data from the monitored environment, such as application code, logs, network traffic, system metrics, and user behavior. This data is then sent to the Dynatrace platform, where it is analyzed and processed using advanced algorithms and machine learning models.

The OneAgent is capable of monitoring a wide range of applications, including Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, and others. It can also provide visibility into cloud services such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as containerized environments like Docker and Kubernetes.

One of the key features of the OneAgent is its ability to automatically detect and map the relationships between different components of the monitored environment, such as application components, processes, services, and hosts. This enables it to provide end-to-end visibility into complex distributed architectures, including microservices and serverless environments.

Dynatrace OneAgent gathers information automatically through a combination of different techniques, including instrumentation, process injection, log file parsing, and network traffic analysis.

Instrumentation is the process of adding code to an application at runtime to collect data about its behavior. OneAgent uses this technique to automatically instrument applications at the code level, allowing it to collect information about application performance, user behavior, and errors.

Process injection is a technique used to inject code into a running process. OneAgent uses this technique to collect information about the behavior of third-party libraries and frameworks that an application may be using.

Log file parsing involves analyzing log files generated by an application to extract useful information. OneAgent uses this technique to parse log files and extract important data, such as error messages and performance metrics.

Network traffic analysis involves monitoring the network traffic between different components of an application or infrastructure. OneAgent uses this technique to analyze network traffic and collect information about network latency, errors, and other metrics.

Overall, the combination of these techniques allows OneAgent to automatically gather information about the behavior of applications and infrastructure without requiring any manual configuration or intervention. This makes it easy to set up and use, and provides deep visibility and insights into the performance and health of modern applications and infrastructure.

OneAgent comprises a set of specialized processes that run on each monitored host. It collects metrics from the operating system on which it runs, and compares the metrics to expected performance values. The most important metrics are then reported to Dynatrace.

In addition, OneAgent detects which processes run on each host and collects performance metrics for the most important processes. OneAgent can also perform more detailed monitoring of specific technologies (such as Java, Node.js, .NET, and others) by injecting itself into those processes and monitoring their performance from within. This provides you with code-level insights into the services that your applications rely on.

To deliver Real User Monitoring, OneAgent injects a JavaScript tag into the HTML of each application page that is rendered by your web servers. With these JavaScript tags in place—along with a corresponding module that is automatically installed on your web server and requires no configuration—OneAgent is able to monitor the response times and performance experienced by your customers in their mobile and desktop browsers.

OneAgent is also capable of monitoring the log files of a specific host or a specific process group. It can discover and analyze system or process-created logs. Depending on your configuration, you can store these log files, which makes the log data available independently of the log files themselves. This can be beneficial in the following situations:

  • Short log-retention periods
  • Volatile log storage
  • Legal requirements to keep logs archived centrally

OneAgent can dig deeper and get network metrics at the process level. Thanks to process-to-process monitoring of network communications Dynatrace can:

  • Ensure high quality process communications over networks.
  • Understand your network topology in dynamic environments.
  • Monitor process-level network capacity.
  • Perform integrated network health monitoring.

OneAgent offers a rich set of monitoring capabilities.

Real User Monitoring

Real User Monitoring analyzes the performance of all user interaction with your applications, whether the interactions take place in a browser or on a mobile device. Real user monitoring also enables application availability monitoring, verification of correct display of UI elements, third-party content provider performance analysis, backend service performance analysis (down to the code level), and performance analysis of all underlying infrastructure. 

Mobile app monitoring

OneAgent supports real user monitoring for mobile applications as well. The process of monitoring the user experience of your native mobile applications is fundamentally different from monitoring browser-based web applications. This is because mobile-app monitoring involves the compilation, packaging, and shipment of a monitoring library along with your own mobile application package. The process of instrumenting your mobile application largely depends on the platform of your mobile application. Dynatrace supports both Android and iOS platforms.

Server-side service monitoring

Web applications consist of web pages that are served by web servers (for example, Apache Tomcat) and web containers (for example, Docker). The web requests that are sent to a specific Tomcat server are an example of a server-side service. Server-side services may be of various types like web services, web containers, database requests, and custom services. OneAgent can provide information such as which applications or services use which other services and whether or not a service makes calls to other services or databases. 

Network, process, and host monitoring

OneAgent enables monitoring throughout your entire infrastructure including your hosts, processes, and network. You can perform log monitoring and view information such as the total traffic of your network, the CPU usage of your hosts, the response time of your processes, and more. OneAgent also provides detailed topological information so that you know, for example, which processes run on which hosts and how your processes are interconnected. 

Cloud and virtual machine monitoring

OneAgent monitors your entire stack, including private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Whether you run on AWS, Azure, Cloud Foundry, or OpenStack, OneAgent auto-detects all virtualized components and keeps up with all changes. OneAgent can be integrated with your virtualized infrastructure, allowing you to connect the dots between the dependencies of the vCenters in your data center, the processes that run on them, and your applications. 

Docker container monitoring

OneAgent seamlessly integrates with existing Docker environments and automatically monitors your containerized applications and services. There’s no need to modify your Docker images, modify run commands, or create additional containers to enable Docker monitoring. Simply install OneAgent on your hosts that serve containerized applications and services. OneAgent automatically detects the creation and termination of containers and monitors the applications and services contained within those containers. 

Root-cause analysis

A key feature of OneAgent is the ability to continuously monitor every aspect of your applications, services, and infrastructure and to automatically learn the baseline performance metrics related to these components. Dynatrace also automatically learns the baseline response times and failure rates of all requests that are vital to the success of your business. Based on these baseline values, Dynatrace determines when a detected slowdown or error-rate increase justifies the generation of a new problem event. 

Rajesh Kumar
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