Major operating system upgrade on ActiveGate hosts: any doc or official recommendations?

[gilles_tabary]

Hello.

I use a "Managed" cluster. I fail to find explicit documentation on how to, or what to (not) do in order to  major upgrade the OS version on my hosts running my ActiveGate's (in my case RHEL 7.x to RHEL 8.x). Am I wrong thinking this could be different from a minor OS patch (which BTW cause us no problem) ? 

I see For ActiveGate

• Doc "Update ActiveGate" (https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/update-activegate) : But this for AG software update, it says nothing specific about OS upgrade / update.

I see for Cluster nodes, but AFAIU not applicable for ActiveGate

• Doc "Apply operating system patches to a node" (https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/patch-node-operating-system) : fine
• Forum "Update operating system in cluster nodes with Dynatrace running during the upgrade" (https://community.dynatrace.com/t5/Open-Q-A/Update-operating-system-in-cluster-nodes-with-Dynatrace-...) : fine

Regards.

(For the record : https://one.dynatrace.com/hc/en-us/requests/178985)

[Babar_Qayyum]

Hello @gilles_tabary 

Yes. There are no specific Kernel or any other recommendations mentioned except the supported OS versions e.g. 7.9, 8.4, 8.6, 8.7, 9.0, 9.1, and with the passage of time we are getting operating systems support changes.

Regards,

Babar

[gilles_tabary · Accepted solution]

Thanks a million for the input. To complete it, this what support said :

There isn't any required steps for the ActiveGate when updating the OS, as we said it's good to backup: 
 
/var/lib/dynatrace/config
/var/lib/dynatrace/ssl 
 
but the ActiveGate is just a program, so as long as it's running on a supported OS, it'll just run. I would: 
 
stop ActiveGate -> upgrade OS -> start ActiveGate

---

Regards.

[Lukasz_Halman · Accepted solution]

Yes, stop AG services, then upgrade the operating system. Upgrade will definately involve reboot at the end and AG services should automatically start.

The directory quoted is incorrect. Depending on AG purpose it will be subset of:
- /var/lib/dynatrace/gateway
- /var/lib/dynatrace/synthetic
- /var/lib/dynatrace/zremote
- /var/lib/dynatrace/remotepluginmodule