Dynatrace monitore SaaS web Applications like Office 365

[alberto-jesus_1]

Hi,

We are getting different aproaches to SaaS monitoring. In case of SaaS WebServices or APIS it's easy to monitore from the backend perspective using Custom Resources. From Applicatios perspective, they are handled as 3rd parties to get some insights.

The problem is to monitore SaaS Web Applications like Office 365, SaleForce, etc. In that case there are only two ways to monitore using Dynatrace:

- Manually update of pages inyecting javaScript tag (not possible in most of SaaS web applications).

- Using browser extension which could be an alternative for Development team, not for final users (just Chrome and Edge are BE complience and requieres a extension installation).

Is there any other approach to monitore SaaS web applications like Office 365? I am thinking about instrument the proxy if it is a supported technology, do you have previous experiences doing so?

Thanks in advance.

Alberto.

[Julius_Loman · Accepted solution]

Hello Alberto,

two approaches you have mentioned are the standard ones and work quite well.
Besides that, if you just need to monitor SaaS services from your corporate network, one possible approach would be to use a reverse proxy such as NGINX (with OneAgent installed) to proxy the communication to SaaS services. I use this approach from time to time and typically it works very well.

So basically it will work for a corporate network, even if HTTP proxies are not used. It will require several things:

• a host with NGINX, Apache HTTP or other webserver with reverse proxy that will proxy the communication
• your local DNS resolution service in your corporate network must point the SaaS hostname to your reverse proxy (e.g. saaservice.com will point to your reverse proxy)
• valid https certificate at the reverse proxy. As you will need to get certificate for a public service, you won't get that from a public certificate authority and you will need to use your internal one (corporate CA), so the https connections will be trusted.
  
  

Traditional HTTPS proxy will not work for at least two reasons - typically SaaS services are HTTPS, so it must be a man-in-the-middle proxy which is not a typical case. Secondly, HTTP proxies are not supported by Dynatrace and it would require nontrivial effort to support them.