Philosophy question: How to work with problems

[jan_palic]

Hi community. .-)

We started to use Dynatrace Managed in our world and I am happy, that our developers use our new monitoring more often.

But today one question came up: "We see problems in the entire view in red and in gray, but how do we mark a problem as solved?"

My first answer was:"Hej, you solve a problem by fixing the broken service, applicatio or what ever."

Hm, the following question and discussion came up about:
* "What are the problem numbers then? They are not unique and are recycled after 999 was reached?"
* "What about problems, which reappear, are they well identified and connected to each other?"

And at the end we are not really sure to work with the information of the problems. We cannot acknowledge a problem, if we know that this issue is persistent but not solvable at the moment. Further more do we have the problems still in the list anyway after fixing the issue, but in grey. This confuses and we think, that we may change our behavior in handling problems, but we do not know how.

So, long story short:
How are you working with problems and what processes did you specified dealing with them?

Best regards,
Jan

[wolfgang_beer · Accepted solution]

Hi Jan,

Problems have a lifespan that starts when Dynatrace detects an incident and ends when the reason for the problem is resolved. Each problem shows a short display number for quick reference that repeats itself but also has a global unique id that is shown within the URL path of the problem.

So far it is not possible to manually close a problem but that's on my roadmap.

Gray problems are just for history reference and can be filtered out by simply using a problem feed filter. Other convenient filters include severity level, impact level or user defined tags of affected components.

The typical process of working with Dynatrace detected problems is to alert on them through AlertingProfile filtered channels, such as Slack, PagerDuty, etc. Remediate the cause and comment onto them and let Dynatrace automatically close them.

I hope that helped a little,

best regards

Wolfgang

[jan_palic]

Hi @Wolfgang B.

thank you for the answer and well, you answered as I expected.
So, we need a change in our behavior with problems (Dynatrace is working in another way than CheckMK, but hey, it is not a surprise. ,-) ).

Closing a problem manually would be nice. Our way now is to set the level for alerting high enough, so that everything is ok from the Dynatrace perspective.

Anyway, thanks for you answer. ,-)

Best regards,
Jan