HL7 Monitoring with OneAgentSDK

[bridgettprevidi]

We're monitoring a Netty service communicating over a an on-prem TCP connection and want to retrieve the content of HL7 messages. Since OneAgent isn't able to monitor socket traffic natively, we want to implement OneAgentSDK to trace the messages sent over that socket. 

https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/shortlink/oneagent-sdk

I haven't been able to come across much regarding HL7 monitoring with Dynatrace, does anyone have experience in getting started with this or implementing OneAgentSDK to capture messages that are communicated in sockets? We aren't really sure where to start.

[Dant3]

Why not best use an OSS aproach with Opentelemetry? Creating custom Spans with the attributes that you want to capture. That information should be displayed in DT as a first citizen info when catched by the java agent.  If the Netty is the one executing the socket connection and passing the payload/processing the response, you could also leverage the use of request attributes to capture info of the methods that process such messages. With out the need of adding code to the base app.

Neither of this options would create the traces, unless you want to do the tracing with Otel in the process that handle the incomming socket connection. 

[bridgettprevidi]

Thank you for the response! We aren't seeing deep monitoring data including the transactions currently because this is a socket based connection, so Request Attributes wouldn't be capturable this way. 

However the approach to create traces with Otel you mentioned could be a viable solution. The application was created through a vendor so we may need to contact them for the implementation, but this could be a good approach if they're willing to make the integration. 

[Dant3]

Oh Sorry, I assume that the Netty would be the one creating the socket connection! Well if is a vendor and something that they offer to multiple customers, this would be something that your team could leverage to provide additional value to their solution. Hope they do, is a win-win in the long term!