Dynatrace helps global enterprises build robust and scalable Private Synthetic locations

Dynatrace provides precise and flexible insights into the health and capacity usage of private Synthetic locations. This helps you scale your locations easily and automatically and ensures an even higher level of robustness and reliability.

Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring provides you with 24/7 insights into the health of your applications and API endpoints and helps you discover issues long before your users notice them. Synthetic Monitoring also provides insights into your application health as perceived from various points around the globe.

Private Synthetic locations are critical elements in the synthetic monitoring of systems that are used internally within corporate networks, for example, corporate ticket-handling systems, bookkeeping software, planning systems, and many more. For enterprises with a large number of offices located in multiple countries across various time zones, synthetic monitors executed from private locations are needed in order to constantly monitor access to company resources by employees working out of different locations. Private Synthetic locations also ensure visibility into the performance and availability of publicly available applications as seen from the vantage point corporate offices.

Managing private Synthetic locations can be challenging

Maintaining private locations, whether installing, updating, or scaling them, must be performed by administrators, who require a quick and precise view into the health of the locations. This becomes challenging when you need to maintain an increasing number of private locations with an increasing number of synthetic monitors executed from them.

To solve this problem, you need more than precise self-monitoring metrics to describe location usage and/or availability. You need proactive notifications about potential issues that could impact your insights into customer experience and digital business results.

Smart insights into location health and capacity usage

For this reason, we created smart insights into the health and capacity usage of your locations delivered directly on the location settings page or as quick and adjustable notifications about, for example, an ActiveGate being down or a location’s capacity being close to its limits.

You can even go a step further and use such information in combination with the Synthetic locations API to build automated procedures. For example, you can add a new ActiveGate before a location becomes overloaded. After all, the risk of losing synthetic monitoring insights into your business-critical application might be just as dangerous as the risk of application failure. In both cases, you want to react immediately.

Check location health in the easiest possible way

What you’re interested in is the answer to one simple question: Is my location doing well with synthetic monitors assigned to it or does it require my attention? That’s why we enhanced the Private Synthetic locations settings page with the simplest possible location status indicators in three colors: green, yellow, and red.

Check our documentation for further technical information, including the thresholds for status indicators, the ability to drill down into location details, or the types of monitors that might be affected.

The same status information can be delivered over different channels, such as alerts, proactive notifications, or even via API, which is the Dynatrace standard. You may also increase the reliability of your private locations by using such data to automate procedures for location management and handle unexpected situations.

Automation and more by using metrics for your custom purposes

Capacity usage values per monitor type are also available as standardized, out-of-the-box metrics in Dynatrace. You can use these metrics to create your own customized dashboards or generate alerts when their values exceed customized thresholds. This presents a huge variety of options for proactive notification in case of a significant increase in capacity usage.

The same information is always available via the Dynatrace Metrics API v2 and the Events API v2.

Location availability is also important

Private Synthetic locations overloaded with too many monitors aren’t the only potential issues you need to protect yourself against. Proactive notification when an entire location or one of its elements fails is also crucial. That’s why we introduced the ability to trigger notifications for location availability, which are displayed as a banner above Dynatrace web UI and/or generate a problem in case of such failures.

The settings are disabled by default so that you’re not flooded with unnecessary notifications, especially during location setup. However, we recommend that you enable at least one kind of notification once your private Synthetic location is fully operational.

What’s next

While these improvements significantly simplify the management of your private Synthetic locations, there’s more to come. We’re working on an additional way of delivering private locations—soon it’ll be possible to deploy the components as containers and orchestrate them with Kubernetes.