Break down the barriers to end-to-end monitoring with Dynatrace

Dynatrace is excited to release cross-environment tracing, which enables enterprises to follow individual distributed traces from the boundary of one monitoring environment into other environments while maintaining a complete end-to-end view.

In recent years, more and more large enterprises have embraced microservices-based architectures that run across clouds and geographies to deliver increased agility, improved performance, scale, and reliability. This approach has accelerated innovation and created new opportunities for distributed development and support models.

As companies have modernized, they have embraced new IT business models and faced tightening regulatory requirements. Specifically, the heightened awareness of data residency and sovereignty in many regions of the world has resulted in the requirement to maintain separate data centers with local data footprints across the globe. Furthermore, global enterprises, which typically have multiple business units and divisions, often require separating applications and services.

Dynatrace is proudly committed to providing users with an integrated observability platform that provides true end-to-end monitoring and analysis. Simplifying complexity and delivering not just more data but answers has been our credo from the beginning.

Tracking a transaction from start to finish is critical for end-to-end visibility and is a relatively simple endeavor when applications are contained in a unified observability system. However, when applications span monitoring environments, end-to-end tracing becomes much more difficult because each environment only sees a piece of the complete transaction.

With millions of requests an hour processed, and some requests going into other environments, tracing a single transaction can be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Easy end-to-end distributed tracing through multiple environments

Seeing is believing, so let’s look at an example: a company that runs a travel platform is migrating its services to the cloud. They’re pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy where the front end runs on a hyperscaler cloud provider. The middleware and back end will continue to be managed internally to keep customer data in the local region. Multiple Dynatrace environments are deployed to ensure data residency.

Just before the start of the travel season, special attention is paid to the performance indicators, and an increased response time is noticed. The following distributed trace shows an end-to-end view through three Dynatrace environments from the front end (cloud hosted), to middleware, and the back end (hosted on-premises ). We can see an issue at the back end, but we can go further. A direct link to the Dynatrace back-end environment lets us jump right to the point where we can identify the problem.

Setup is fast and uncomplicated

Connecting multiple Dynatrace environments takes less than a minute. Just enter a unique environment name, the tenant URL of the Dynatrace environment, and a secure token. Be sure to enable the cross-environment feature in your OneAgent settings (Settings > Integration > Remote environments). That’s all there is to it.

How can I get this feature?

This new capability was released in Dynatrace SaaS version 1.248, Dynatrace Managed version 1.250, and OneAgent version 1.247. Please see Dynatrace Documentation to learn how to enable this capability and connect your environments.