Dynatrace and AWS Systems Manager – Automate OneAgent distribution securely, centrally and at scale

We’re pleased to announce that Dynatrace is among the first set of partners to offer support for AWS Distributor, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, that allows you to select from available popular third party agents to install and manage.

With this launch, Dynatrace customers can now use an AWS native way to distribute OneAgent over a dynamically scaling EC2 host fleet without code. With AWS Systems Manager customers gain visibility and control of their infrastructure through a unified user interface, enabling them to automate operational tasks across their AWS resources.

We would like to thank our partners at AWS who helped make this offering available with a special thank you to our AWS Sr. Partner Solutions Architect, Shashiraj Jeripotula, who helped with the proof of concept, integration and coordination across all the various teams.

What is AWS Systems Manager Distributor?

With AWS Systems Manager Distributor, customers can install third-party packages, such as Dynatrace OneAgent. These software packages are stored in a version controlled centralized repository and made available in all supported regions for distribution by the AWS Systems Manager distributor service.

You can choose to use either Run Commands or State Manager to control the roll out of packages and versions to managed instances. Managed instances are collections of EC2 instances that can be grouped by IDs, AWS account numbers, tags, or AWS regions. This allows organizations to keep up to date with software packages and manage package versions to both Windows and Linux instances one at a time or automated schedules across groups of managed instances.

By using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, you can control which members of your organization can create, update, deploy, and delete packages or package versions. In addition, you can audit and log Distributor user actions in their AWS accounts through integrations with other AWS services.

Leveraging Distributor, AWS and Dynatrace customers now have the confidence that their Dynatrace OneAgent packages are up to date and ready to collect all relevant monitoring data from their hosts, services and applications.

How to configure AWS distributor to install OneAgent

To install the Dynatrace OneAgent distributor package, log into the AWS console, browse to the AWS Systems Manager console and follow these steps:

1. In the navigation pane, select Distributor.

2. On the Distributor page, select Third Party and select the Dynatrace OneAgent package as shown below.

3. For this example, we’ll choose Install One Time from the options.

4. In the installation details section, pick the installation type, the package name DynatraceOneAgent, and provide the required Dynatrace specific parameters in JSON format as shown below.

5. In the targets section, there are several options as shown below. Each target options requires additional arguments such as instance tag values.

6. After selecting the option of where to save execution logs, click Run and review the Run Command distribution status. In the example below, the OneAgent was installed on 7 target hosts.

Below is an example of the distribution log detail.

If there are errors reported, the most common issue is an incorrect Dynatrace URL or TOKEN value, which will be reported in the logs.

Resources

Please visit Dynatrace’s AWS distributor documentation to get more information for installation options, parameters and troubleshooting. Also check out AWS’s Systems Manager Distributor documentation to learn more about this service.