Getting started with Dynatrace dashboards

Dynatrace has a reputation for being one of the most powerful and cutting-edge observability platforms and is consistently listed as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability. It boasts a rich technology stack that goes beyond application performance monitoring to include functionality such as business analytics and even an app development platform.

Many organisations, though, need a high level overview which can pull insights not only from Dynatrace but also from systems offering specialist analytics in areas such as FinOps, CI/CD and DevSecOps. This is where SquaredUp comes into play. With a wide range of engineering data sources, we make it easy to achieve a unified view across all of your tooling.

A New Look

If you have previously used the SquaredUp Dynatrace data source, you may find that it now has a new feel. Over the past few months, we have been working to make the user experience more streamlined. Dynatrace has a huge feature set, covering a very broad functional spectrum. The aim of our integration is to help you to easily pull in relevant analytics.

In this article we will walk through connecting to your Dynatrace environment, querying your Dynatrace telemetry and creating smart dashboards.

Getting Connected

Getting set up is easy. The main prerequisite is that you will need to generate a Dynatrace API token which has permissions to access the relevant scopes – you can find out the details in our Dynatrace documentation.

To configure the data source in SquaredUp, you just need to enter the URL for your Dynatrace environment and your API key. The format for the URL will be:

https://<your-environment-id>.live.dynatrace.com

Once you have created the connection successfully, SquaredUp will generate three Out-of-the Box dashboards relating to three key perspectives for your monitoring – front end performance, host health and external availability.

Out of the Box

The first dashboard we will look at is Hosts. This is an overview of resources such as virtual machines in your environment. The dashboard loads with a summary view encompassing all objects, but you can also select specific instances. There are obviously a large number of metrics that Dynatrace gathers about your resources, but this dashboard homes in on a number of key measures such as CPU. Disk, Memory and DDU (Davis Data Unit) billing.

Next up is Real User Monitoring (RUM). Observability is not just about the performance of your backend servers. You also need to be aware of latencies or errors that users are encountering in your web application. Dynatrace captures a wide range of browser metrics, and SquaredUp automatically summarises a number of these in our Real User Monitoring dashboard.

You can use a drop down list to select any application for which you have implemented RUM, and see critical metrics such as User Experience Rating and Time to First Byte.

What if your system is up and running without any problems but, for some reason, users can’t connect to you? This is not something that your internal monitoring tools can tell you. You need external tools which can check whether your system is visible to the outside world. This is the function of the Synthetic Monitoring dashboard. It brings together the results of a number of Dynatrace availability metrics in a consolidated view.

Our New Data Streams Experience

The Out-of-the-Box dashboards are designed to cover some of the most common use cases. Naturally, every user has unique needs and our Dynatrace data source ships with three Data Streams. A Data Stream is how we group functions of a backend API into packages so that they can easily be queried. The Dynatrace data source has Streams for:

• Health
• Problems
• Metrics

Again, the philosophy here is not to attempt to recreate all of the analytics that you could generate in Dynatrace. The aim is to provide a streamlined way of pulling the measures and insights that really matter.

The Health stream provides an extremely simple way of monitoring the status of your most important services. Let’s create a new dashboard and then add a new tile, selecting Dynatrace as the data source:

Then select the Health data stream:

This will now present you with a list of objects. This will consist of resources such as applications, services and hosts whose health we might want to monitor:

Once you have selected the relevant services you can just select a Block visualisation to generate a tile with a high level view of resource health. We can see, at a glance, that these services are healthy as they are colour-coded green.

Bring Us Your Problems

Problems is an incredibly powerful and valuable feature of the Dynatrace system. A set of AI-driven processes continually scan for anomalies and error conditions on your system. SquaredUp users in enterprises that use multiple tools will often surface these alongside alerts from other systems to create a single view of potential issues across all systems. Using our Problems data stream you can select exactly the Dynatrace resources you wish to monitor:

We might only be interested in surfacing specific issues such as Availability, so we can easily apply a filter:

Our Dynatrace dashboard might exist in a Workspace with dashboards capturing alerts from other sources. By adding a Monitor to this tile, we can automatically roll up any Availability Problems reported by Dynatrace to our Workspace overview:

Configuring the monitor is really simple. Often you can just accept the defaults that SquaredUp suggests. The logic for this monitor is that an error state will be triggered if the number of Problems is greater than zero.

As you can see below, the Availability Problems have now been rolled up to our Workspace overview:

Exploring Dynatrace Metrics

The Metrics data stream gives you the flexibility to select specific metrics and assemble them into your own customised view. Using the Metrics stream, we can select one or more objects of a particular type and then select from a list of metrics available for that particular type. In our case we want to look at our Sales Service:

The metric we are interested in is Session count, which will provide us with the number of active users over time:

Once the data is returned, we can visualise it as a Line graph displaying the user count in 30 minute intervals:

SquaredUp offers almost unlimited flexibility in building your dashboards. You can combine Dynatrace insights with data from any of our 70+ data sources. You can even overlay data from different sources in the same tile.

Conclusion

Dynatrace is a highly sophisticated platform that delivers deep observability across your IT estate. With SquaredUp you can leverage this power to zero in on just the insights you need and make them available in a single pane of glass alongside insights from other platforms.

If you don’t have a SquaredUp account, you can get started with our Free Forever plan and start building smart dashboards in minutes.