Dynatrace partners with AWS to provide enterprise-grade, intelligent observability for custom OpenTelemetry metrics

OpenTelemetry metrics are useful for augmenting the fully automatic observability that can be achieved with Dynatrace OneAgent. OpenTelemetry metrics add domain specific data such as business KPIs and license relevant consumption details. We’re therefore excited to see that AWS has adopted the OpenTelemetry standards, which are actively driven by Dynatrace and the largest cloud providers.

Consequently, we’ve partnered with AWS to be part of future versions of the new AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, which provides a new way to analyze domain specific data from your AWS deployments and AWS services in Dynatrace.

What is AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry?

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry is an AWS-supported version of the upstream OpenTelemetry project:

• It’s fully compatible with AWS computing platforms including EC2, ECS, and EKS.
• It enables users to send telemetry data to AWS CloudWatch metrics, traces, and log backends, as well as to supported backends like Dynatrace.
• It has undergone security analysis and testing in accordance with AWS requirements.

Enterprise-grade observability for custom OpenTelemetry metrics from AWS

Observing large and highly dynamic microservice environments and making sense of the heterogeneous data emitted by them, is the biggest challenge that enterprises face today. Enterprises need a robust, consistent, and automated way to analyze this data.

The Dynatrace platform automatically integrates OpenTelemetry data, thereby providing the highest possible scalability, enterprise manageability, seamless processing of data, and, most importantly the best analytics through Davis® (our AI-driven analytics engine), and automation support available.

Dynatrace OneAgent collects all relevant performance metrics out-of-the-box. Custom metrics let you augment this data with application-specific information like revenue- or conversion statistics. With this information, questions like “how did the last performance degradation affect our revenue” can be answered.

Of course, all these metrics are available to the Davis AI and support auto-adaptive baselining or threshold-based alerting. So you don’t need to worry about data retention, security, or scale—Dynatrace has you covered.

What is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry is an open-source CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) project that was formed from the merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects. It provides a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs for capturing metrics, distributed traces, and logs from applications.

OpenTelemetry is expected to become the industry standard for use cases such as:

• Pre-instrumenting libraries and frameworks to add out-of-the-box and vendor-neutral observability
• Enriching local monitoring data with custom instrumentation
• Defining formats for telemetry data exchange to drive interoperability

Dynatrace drives and embraces open standards

Dynatrace has been building automated application instrumentation—without the need to modify source code—for over 15 years. Dynatrace provides the widest monitoring coverage of software frameworks that are used in modern enterprise applications. We invest heavily in ensuring that Dynatrace maintains the widest possible monitoring coverage of frameworks and platforms.

As we know how much work intelligent data analysis requires, we embrace the idea of OpenTelemetry to standardize how data is collected and sent to Dynatrace. As a founding member of the W3C Distributed Tracing Working group which works on standards for interoperability between tracing vendors, it was natural that Dynatrace joined the OpenTelemetry project from the start. Since then, a dedicated team at Dynatrace is actively contributing, making Dynatrace one of the top contributing companies to the project. Dynatrace also provides leadership with a seat on the governance committee as well as the technical committee.

Coming soon: OpenTelemetry trace ingest

Our mantra is to provide actionable answers and not just data. Traces have always been an integral part of the Dynatrace platform. Case in point, we just released PurePath 4, which lays the foundation for seamless integration of OpenTelemetry traces with the rich, multidimensional data that’s collected by Dynatrace to provide the single pane of glass you know and love.

Stay tuned for more news about the availability of trace ingest in the coming months.

Seeing is believing

You can start adding custom metrics to your applications running in AWS today.

Once the Dynatrace Collector Exporter is released with the AWS OpenTelemetry Distro, a simple config switch will let you send this data to Dynatrace.

New to Dynatrace? Try it out by starting your free trial today.