How to monitor Services in Cloud Foundry (PCF) - MySql, Rabbit, Reddis

[ravinderonly]

Hi Experts,

We have provisioned Dynatrace as a service broker(not Bosch deployment) in PCF platform. It's very easy to bind the Application Instances with Dynatrace (which is available as a service) and monitoring starts immediately. How we can monitor the services in the PCF platform (Like mysql, reddis, rabbit etc). I dont see any service to service binding option in PCF platform. 

Here are some of metrics, that we are trying to fetch.

Total no of db connections available
Total no of connections initiated by the client

Unacked message count in the queue
Message Publish rate/sec to the queue
Consumer ack/sec on the queue

Thanks in advance

[The_AM · Accepted solution]

Hi ravinderonly,

Like you have found, it's very easy to get going with Dynatrace OneAgent on PCF/VMware Tanzu and other Cloud Foundry platforms.

However, the service broker approach you describe is what we call 'application-only' in Dynatrace. This means, where there is support for code module injection (process instrumentation), then it'll be supported.

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From: https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/cloud-foundry
Applications deployed on Cloud Foundry are usually run through technology-specific buildpacks that provide framework and runtime support for applications running on the Cloud Foundry platform. For complete details, see how buildpacks work.

Note: When deployed in application-only mode, OneAgent monitors the memory, disk, CPU, and networking of processes within the container only. Host metrics aren't monitored.

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The technologies you mentioned, Redis, MySQL, and RabbitMQ, all have metrics collected by OneAgent through the Extensions module. You'll see listed on the capability support matrix for OneAgent, that the Extensions module for Cloud Foundry is not applicable to the application-only deployment. Therefore, you need the OneAgent deployed in full-stack mode to the underlying VMs (diego cells) for Cloud Foundry.

The way to have the entire suite of OneAgent functionality enabled will be to have access to BOSH to deploy the OneAgent in true full-stack mode. See Cloud Foundry deployment strategies, for more information.

• RabbitMQ monitoring further details
• Redis monitoring further details
• Please note that the built-in MySQL monitoring with OneAgent is being deprecated and replaced by the ActiveGate extension (remote connection to the database instance)

As of April 2021, capabilities for Cloud Foundry BOSH deploy vs. application-only (supported buildpacks only)

[ravinderonly]

Thanks a lot, @andrew, It's really useful. We may have use case where we have other APM tool co-existing on the same PCF platform. We started with Bosh deployment of Dynatrace, but it was restricting other APM tools to functioning. Do you think, if there is an option available to have these SI metrics with Application-only monitoring.

[The_AM]

Hi @ravinderonly , for that scenario, it would require product changes. So, I'd suggest to open a request in Dynatrace Product Ideas (also known as "Requests for Enhancement") to ask for Extension module to be supported on Cloud Foundry in application-only.

The Dynatrace Product Managers regularly review the product idea suggestions and may choose to include it on the product roadmap.

Andrew