Take the Community feature challenge!

[laima_vainina]

Welcome to the first Dynatrace Community challenge of 2021!

We want to start this year with a creative and personal exercise. For many, the Community is a major place to look for answers to questions, submit product ideas, and do much more. All this results in a lot of time being spent here.

With that in mind, let's brainstorm some of the things you want to see improved or added in the Dynatrace Community which would make your time here more enjoyable.
Think about the following aspects: What would you like to see more? What would you like to remove? What features would you like to see in a perfect Community that you think could meet all your needs?

Be sure to vote for the suggestions of others. It's important for us to see what our Community members want most. Who knows, maybe your wishes will be fulfilled very soon?

Entries close on February 16th.

Everyone that lets us know their desired feature will get +150 reputation points!

[pahofmann]

I think stack exchange is a great model for communities like this.

I really like the community moderation features there, allowing trusted users to edit questions/answers to improve them, e.g. for better readability or to clarify meaning etc.

Also the "mark as duplicate" feature is pretty nifty, makes it easy to identify duplicate questions and automatically leaves a link to a place where it was already answered.

[laima_vainina]

@Patrick H. - thanks for your feedback.

We also like the stack exchange model. Thank you for mentioning it. Additional feature options for power users are a very good recommendation. I will add it to our list, maybe very soon our forum will have such an opportunity.

+150 points awarded 🙂

[Karolina_Linda]

hi Patrick, what would you say for merging duplicate product ideas into one?

[pahofmann]

Merging them is also not a bad idea, if it happens fast enough.

If there were already some comments on it before it was detected as a duplicate it might be better to just lock all further comments and link them together as a duplicate.

[Karolina_Linda]

That's the plan. Not to lose any content, just merge it into one forum thread instead.

[ChadTurner]

As we tested the new version of the community platform last year, there were a few features that were removed and a few were added.

Of them I'd love to see:

- How many views on a particular post

- Unique User Names as some times is hard to pick the right name because the name is very popular.

- Marking Community members as Experts

- Allowing these Expert users to move RFE's from questions to the Ideas page

- Put in some fail safes for large postings where an error is generated or if you accidentally click a link that redirects your page off of you community post that you were working on.

- Ability to add Videos/GIFs. (GIFs for me have never worked of videos so I post via youtube and link them)

- Allow to the ability to mark content. I've seen cases where users accidentally post sensitive data, but have no way to discretely letting the user know without pointing out the sensitive data. Lately I reach out to the fantastic community moderators via linkedin

- Allow users to adjust tags

- Allow users to mark RFE's or questions as duplicate and link them back to the original posting.

These are just a few and I'm sure there will be more overtime 🙂

[Karolina_Linda]

That's a very nice list! And... there's a chance close to 100% that most of them will be addressed very soon 😉

[ChadTurner]

Thats awesome! Very excited to see what the future has instore for the Community!

[laima_vainina]

Hey @ChadTurner going through your wish list, I wanted to let you know that most of it are realized on the new platform and what is not realized from your list, is related to a special expert user program, which we are working on and you will hear the news soon.

Just to sum up your wishes:

• You can see the number of views for each post
• Each user has a unique user name
• We are working on developing the Community expert program. You will hear updates soon 🙂 
• You can Videos/GIFs and emojis as well

[ChadTurner]

This is great! Thanks so much @laima_vainina and the Community Team! 👍😁

[AntonioSousa]

In my perspective, one of the most needed features is some way to arrange all the RFEs that exist. Searching them is difficult, and so a lot of duplicates exist. I'm not in a position to recommend the best solution, but it would be great if there is some visualization applied to all of them, even dreaming some type of Smartscape applied to this issue 😉

[laima_vainina]

Hi @Antonio S. Thank you for sharing your desired feature. I'm pleased to tell you the good news that soon your experience with searching for product ideas will be much more enjoyable and countless times easier 😉
+150 points awarded 🙂

[Karolina_Linda]

Hi @Antonio S., what would you say for merging duplicate product ideas? Would this be an option?

[AntonioSousa]

Yes, merging them is certainly a solution for the duplicates.

I believe tagging is a great solution, so it would also be great to search by tags in the sub-forums, and not only at a global level. And tag management could be a little bit improved, as some of them are useless, while others have a lot of associated functionality. BTW, one of things about tags is that when you classify a question/RFE, it only searches for the letters at the beggining of the tag, so searching for "api" doesn't render any suggestion, as it's "rest api". It should search globally.

Eager to see the new community platform you announced today!

[laima_vainina]

Hi @AntonioSousa - In the new platform, we have especially improved the search options with advanced filters, I hope that now it is much easier for you to find product ideas:

I also hope that you have noticed the status visualization in the Product Ideas and a widget on the right where you can see Recently completed ideas.

Has your experience with finding product ideas now improved? Let us know if you have anything else you would like to share 🙂 

[The_AM]

Hi Laima,

I think getting this call out there for ideas is very welcoming to allow members to be involved in shaping the future of Dynatrace Community!

I'd like to be bold in suggesting something a bit beyond what currently the Community platform currently offers directly, and that's to be more inclusive of all the great open-source projects out there. I know there is quite a bit of code out there already on platforms like GitHub, BitBucket, etc.

So, my suggestion is for a "Developer Community" portal for the platform where it can be easier to centrally track different Dynatrace platform extensions, OneAgent plugins, Monitoring-as-Code, etc. projects with links to those external repositories (where they already exist) or for our members to share new projects/code with the Community.

Maybe even a challenge, or two, for members to write a new Dynatrace extension and publish it along with a write-up to the Community?

Thanks,
Andrew M.

[laima_vainina]

Hey @Andrew M. thanks a lot for your support, as well as for your challenge idea suggestion! This is definitely something we could and would like to implement in the near future.

+150 points awarded 🙂

[The_AM]

Thanks Laima!

[Karolina_Linda]

I love it!

Andrew, what would you say for an "Extending Dynatrace" category with subforums for Extensions, Integrations, as well as all REST API questions in one place?

[The_AM]

Yes, Karolina! This looks like a great approach.

[skrystosik]

I would like to have option to easy find ideas posted by my from my profile page (when I'm authenticated). Sometimes I have problems to find the ones posted by me If I'm on rush 🙂

Sebastian

[pahofmann]

That would be really helpful, especially as they don't show up under questions on your profile so it's really hard to find old ones.

[Karolina_Linda]

That's a valid point that comes back to us as a boomerang. Thanks, Sebastian!

Let's see what we can do about it 😉

[pdeodato]

Hi @Laima V.,

As a newcomer, one of my greatest struggles while using the Community pages is the massive number of search results that regard AppMon, rather than Dynatrace. At times, I would find myself reading the answers to a question, analysing them for some time, only to notice after a few minutes that I lost time reading outdated content related to a different tool than the one I was after...

It would be a great feature to filter out all those results that relate to AppMon, globally! Maybe as a 'Site Preference' ??

Thanks a lot, keep up the good work and stay safe in these strange times 🙂

[laima_vainina]

Thanks, @Pedro D. for sharing your struggle. We understand that this is a very inconvenient issue, so I'm happy to let you know that we are working on it and very soon the search results will work much better.

+150 points awarded 🙂

[Karolina_Linda]

hi Pedro, just to add to Laima's comment, we'll be also archiving all AppMon product ideas, as that product will reach its end of support date on March 31, 2021.

[laima_vainina]

Hi @pdeodato we hope you already had a chance to explore the new forum. Just in case I wanted to follow up on you share that although it's currently not possible to completely remove the classic product from the search results, as a temporary option you can filter the content in the search by location and simply don't select the Classic product board.

I hope this helps! Please let us know if you have additional questions. 

[suresh230591]

I would like to see a filter on the main QA page where we can filter the questions by category like below. I wan to see only question related to RUM so I can filter them

• RUM
• Synthetic
• Plugin
• Activegate

Also, if search bar can also have similar filter so that only desired results get populated. This would reduce the time spent on search.

[Karolina_Linda]

Hi Suresh, I hope we can address your wish, at least to some extent.

We are thinking of having categories called "Using Dynatrace" and "Extending Dynatrace". Would they be good for the start?

We imagine USING DYNATRACE like this:

[suresh230591]

Hi, I think this is awesome. When we can expect this to be live ?

[Karolina_Linda]

In March, this calendar year 🙂 Check https://answers.dynatrace.com/spaces/391/forum-help-center/kbentry/249763/community-forums-are-movin...

[laima_vainina]

Hey @suresh230591 - wanted to follow up on you and just in case to update you that your wishes came true 🙂

Now we have a special board with only RUM-related topics. As well as for Alerting, Dashboarding, and Synthetic Monitoring. For plugins, we have a special category called - Extending Dynatrace

where you can find subcategories for REST API, Extensions, and Integrations.

Another big improvement is around search. Now we have many options to quickly find the specific content that you need. You can read more about advanced search options in the Search and Navigation article.

Feel free to share your experience about the new forum and any other feedback you may have 🙂