Looking for reference material for developing integrations

[Dhruv]

Hi Community,
Use Case:
I want to do a POC and build an integration in Dynatrace that fetches data from a third-party platform. The ingested data should then be correlated within Dynatrace, and dashboards should be created to visualize the insights.

Questions:

• Can this use case be implemented using a Dynatrace Extension?
• If so, how can we make the extension publicly available to all users and publish it in the Hub
• What is the process for publishing an extension to the Dynatrace Hub?

I would appreciate any guidance or documentation references.

[SjoerdB]

Hi Dhruv,

- This can definitively be done with extensions, that's their main goal. You can define the topology to define relationships and setup screen definitions on how data should be visualised. The visualisation is shifting from GEN2 to GEN3, so if you set it up correctly in your extensions yaml, you will get your entities nicely integrated in the "infrastructure & Operations" app.

Next step would be to setup the new smartscape entities, but for now you will have your entities as CUSTOM_DEVICE in Dynatrace.

- You can make it publicly available if you wish, but probably you best publish on github

- process for publishing on Dynatrace Hub can probably better be explained by Dynatrace personnel (if possible)

Out of curiosity: what third-party platform do you want to interface with?

[imsingh]

Hi Dhruv

You can also create actually a Dynatrace App. Dynatrace Apps can fetch any third-party data(as long as the URL is in the allowlist). Then this data can be correlated with existing data in Grail and can be shown as DataTable, Chart etc.

We have a lot of guides on how to do that at https://developer.dynatrace.com. 

Some of the exact documentation pages that might help you:

1. Allow-listing external APIs https://developer.dynatrace.com/develop/guides/app-functions/allow-outbound-connections/ 
2. You can then fetch external data via app function https://developer.dynatrace.com/develop/guides/app-functions/create-consume/ 
3. You can query and visualize this and Grail data https://developer.dynatrace.com/develop/guides/visualize-data-in-apps/query-and-visualize-grail-data... 

If you're new to Web App Development, I'd suggest you take a look at the our Dynatrace App Tutorial that has your exact use case https://developer.dynatrace.com/quickstart/tutorial/create-new-dynatrace-app/ 

I hope this helps 🙂