What are the different installations available for monitoring?

Selvam_Sekar — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:12:04 GMT

I wanted to check and confirm what are the different way we can monitoring the application in Dynatrace? i am aware that the one is installaing OneAgent, other one is ActiveGate. another type?

Re: what are the different installation available for monitoring?

p_devulapalli — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:37:52 GMT

@Selvam_Sekar It comes down to the type of application and the monitoring use case you are trying to solve.

You can use Synthetic Monitoring , Log Monitoring, ingesting LMT using OpenTelemetry , Out of the box and custom extensions in Dynatrace, API's and many other ways...

Re: what are the different installation available for monitoring?

t_pawlak — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:43:20 GMT

Hi,
Your question is very broad, but I’ll try to keep it short.
As @p_devulapalli it's depends of application, data source and use case.
The main options are:

OneAgent (host / VM / bare metal / container). Primary way to get full-stack APM, service tracing, deep process visibility, etc.
Can run in different monitoring modes: Full-stack, Infrastructure, or Discovery (lightweight).

https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/observe/infrastructure-observability/hosts/monitoring-modes

2. ActiveGate - it's a gateway component used for routing/secure connectivity and for specific modules/integrations (cloud, remote monitoring, etc.). Dynatrace has Environment ActiveGate and (in Managed) Cluster ActiveGate
https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/ingest-from/dynatrace-activegate

3. Synthetic Monitoring

Public locations (Dynatrace-managed global network) for external checks.
https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/observe/digital-experience/synthetic-monitoring/general-information/public-synthetic-locations
Private locations (your network) require Synthetic-enabled ActiveGate and it must be a clean, dedicated install
https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/observe/digital-experience/synthetic-monitoring/private-synthetic-locations/create-a-private-synthetic-location

4. Real User Monitoring (RUM) for web it's monitoring by inserting the RUM JavaScript tag (manual insertion / tag)

https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/observe/digital-experience/web-applications/initial-setup/set-up-agentless-real-user-monitoring

5. Mobile app monitoring. Instrument iOS/Android apps with Dynatrace OneAgent for Mobile / OneAgent SDK

https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/observe/digital-experience/mobile-applications

6. OpenTelemetry ingestion (traces/metrics/logs) - https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/ingest-from/opentelemetry/otlp-api

7. Extensions (out-of-the-box + custom) - https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/ingest-from/extensions

8. APIs for custom ingest

Push custom metrics via Metrics v2 ingest https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/discover-dynatrace/references/dynatrace-api/environment-api/metric-v2/post-ingest-metrics
Push logs via Log Monitoring API v2 ingest (or OTLP logs) https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/analyze-explore-automate/logs/lma-log-ingestion/lma-log-ingestion-via-api

Last but not least: Kubernetes monitoring.
And this is another topic, because here u have other posibilities:

1) Kubernetes platform monitoring (cluster/platform only)

https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/ingest-from/setup-on-k8s/deployment/platform-observability

2) Kubernetes platform monitoring + Application observability

3) Kubernetes platform monitoring + Full-stack (cloud-native full-stack)
https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/ingest-from/setup-on-k8s/deployment/full-stack-observability

4) Classic full-stack (legacy mode)

https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/ingest-from/setup-on-k8s/deployment/other/classic-full-stack

Wow — that was quite exhaustive… this should totally be an official Dynatrace cheat sheet 😉

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What are the different installations available for monitoring?

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