Recently we have been engaging with other customers of Dynatrace. The vast majority of these customers build Management Zones looking at the individual application level. While this method allows you to be granular at the app level, it also provides hard breaks between applications.
Banking as an example - If MyBank was one of your applications, you would most likely have its own Management Zone, but what about the steps prior to the user getting into the 'MyBank' app? What about your login/authentication segment? Before a customer can access that Banking app, they need to authenticate with another segment of your tech stack. You might very well have built out a Management Zone called "Login/Authentication" Which is indeed the proper use of Management Zones, but this is where we saw a new view point in the use of Management Zones. In this scenario, we have two Management Zones that allows us to keep the infrastructure separate as they serve two different functions, but in the eyes of the customer, this is journey of the Customer - Step 1 - Login, Step 2 - Leverage the Applications. So why not build out a Management Zone that encompasses all the segments of the users Journey. Call it "MyBank Login Journey".
User Journey as a Management Zone - By building a Management Zone that brings in all of the tech from the customers perspective, you allow the ability to create dashboards/alerts on segments that would directly impact the customers journey as they tech is directly ties to the users RUM Session. All while removing traces and calls to irrelevant segments that would live outside of the customers journey.
Building it out - We took this idea and started to put it into action. Targeting the defined Application as the primary source, using Login and MyBank app designs. We did this via relationships, and placing a tag on the monitored entity. So (Think of Smartscape layers) services are related to Applications, we first tag our two applications being Login and MyBank, Then we tag the Services Related to the two targeted applications. Then we take one step back and tag Process Group Instances as they are related to Services, Then Process Groups related to Process Group Instances, Then Process Groups to Hosts. We just keep linking tags based off each layer of a relationship, much like how smartscape works natively. Then we leverage a Management Zone that is named "MyBank Login Journey" Which now gives a clear depiction of the users journey as the Login, and get deposited into the primary application.
It is important to note that this relationship design only works if you are using full stack and have an application defined out. For segments that are leveraged but are not linked to any of the defined application(s) you will need to add them into the Management Zone or add in the tag to allow them to be included in the Management Zone.
I hope this new way of looking at Management Zones (Converting to Segments) from the customers perspective, allows you to build effective groupings and help facilitate dashboard and data aggregation designs.
-Chad
