topic Best Practices for Dynatrace instrumentation with Tagging/Detection/Naming in Open Q&A

Best Practices for Dynatrace instrumentation with Tagging/Detection/Naming

alok_gupta1 — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 15:24:06 GMT

What are the some of the best practices to instrument a new environment with Dynatrace.

I am looking for the sequence for the generally suggested configurations.

In my environment i have multiple process groups, Services running on the Same host for multiple environments (dev/qa/Stage)

So in this situation, what are the best practices for instrumentation.

which one should be done first ?

Host Tagging
process group Detection
process group naming
Create mgmt zones
service Detection
service naming

Please suggest

Re: Best Practices for Dynatrace instrumentation with Tagging/Detection/Naming

yasmeen_hazy1 — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 16:16:29 GMT

There's no set guideline, this is generally what I do when I make a new deployment:

First of all, host groups should be put on the OneAgents, either during or after deployment. This will make the tagging of hosts, processes and services much easier.

Once RUM data is coming through, configure your application detection rules, and enable additional technologies such as JQuery, Icefaces, etc. This needs to be done early to start the 7 day baseline timeframe started asap.

Service and process group detection and then renaming of entities such as services, processes, user actions, should be done as early as possible to avoid re-configuration when these change, and to avoid changing the baseline. You might want to begin thinking about maintenance zones around this point.

Next I would look for any additional monitoring of technologies that could be enabled, e.g. IBM MQ plugins or Redis deep monitoring, etc.

Then I would decide how you're going to split the data with tagging, and then create management zones off of these tags.

Then look at additional data to be captured through request attributes, user action/session properties, conversion goals, key user actions, key requests, user tags, masking, etc.

Then you can look at enabling additional features, such as synthetics, log monitoring, etc.

Re: Best Practices for Dynatrace instrumentation with Tagging/Detection/Naming

michael_bonner — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 16:44:52 GMT

Hi Alok!

Yasmeen is correct with the above statement. There is no set guideline, and is up to each tenant owner around the steps they would like to take. I just wanted to post some basic documentation around this process as well.

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/how-to-use-dynatrace/tags-and-metadata/basic-concepts/best-practices-and-recommendations-for-tagging/

For basic documentation around these application detection rule stated, and other utilities; here is our documentation basehub

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/welcome-page

-Michael

Re: Best Practices for Dynatrace instrumentation with Tagging/Detection/Naming

ctturner — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 14:06:24 GMT

@Alok G. I would suggest taking a look at the following articles. There are great use cases and will give you an insite as it relates to how other organizations have tagged and renamed hosts/processes/services.

Host Tags;

https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/monitoring-windows-workstations-with-dynatrace-an-it-helpdesk-case-study/

Process Rename: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/more-effective-ai-to-human-interactions-with-dynatrace-davis-at-nycm/

Markdown Tiles:

https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/unleash-the-power-of-the-dynatrace-markdown-dashboard-tile/

Auto Tags:

https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/supporting-disaster-recovery-with-dynatrace-at-nycm/

Re: Best Practices for Dynatrace instrumentation with Tagging/Detection/Naming

alok_gupta1 — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 17:54:53 GMT

Thanks much for the valuable suggestions