Ability to manually close problems when justified

Within Dynatrace, all problem detection is done automatically. The lifespan of each detected problem is automatically managed by Dynatrace. This means that Dynatrace detects when an unhealthy component recovers and automatically closes the corresponding problem once it receives a resolved status. This is a helpful feature, but sometimes you may want to manually close a problem for a good reason. With the latest Dynatrace release, you can now manually close problems and add a closing reason within a textual comment.

Every problem that’s detected within Dynatrace automatically closes when either the infrastructure recovers or a specific timeout period expires. In most cases, the responsible Ops team ensures that remediation is triggered in a timely manner and that the system is brought back to a healthy state so as to minimize the business impact on customers.

There are some corner cases where Dynatrace problems are raised and, for good reason, no remediation action is required.

One such example is the unexpected shutdown of a VM or host that is no longer used. Dynatrace detects the situation and alerts by raising a ‘Host unavailable’ problem. As the host is no longer used, it’s not expected that the host will become available again. In such cases, the problem remains open until the timeout automatically closes it.

This is a perfect situation where the responsible operator can push the Close problem button to manually close and resolve the issue. Additionally, the operator must add a textual comment explaining why the problem was closed, for future reference.

The screenshot below shows the close problem action as well as a text comment that contains the closing remarks.

A problem’s comment feed shows who closed the problem, when, and why. The problem comment feed can be used as a reference for understanding what’s going on within the remediation workflow and to review relevant findings.

The comment feed can also be used to show if a Jira ticket was automatically created or if a remediation action was triggered, as Andi Grabner explains in his blog post, Atlassian Connect(-ing) DevOps Tools JIRA, xMatters and Dynatrace.

By introducing a way to manually close problems, Ops teams can now disregard problems that they’ve already acknowledged and that are awaiting the recovery of a component.

The closing reason is preserved within the problem’s comment feed for further reference and can be used by third-party integrations through the Problem Comments API.