How to monitor Azure Container Apps with Dynatrace?

[shawnz88]

Azure Container Apps is a relatively new fully managed serverless container service in Azure. 

How can it be monitored with Dynatrace?

[radek_jasinski · Accepted solution]

Hi @shawnz88 

Azure Container Apps is part of Container Services.
To monitor basic metrics, you can use, for example, https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/azure-container-instances

It's worth verifying that you can install OA on the container as you can with AKS 🙂

Regards,

Radek

[benjamin_mullan · Accepted solution]

@shawnz88 I have been keeping my eye on this topic for a while.

You can bake the oneagent into your dockerBuild file to get service level insights and the rest of the OA feature set

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/setup-and-configuration/setup-on-container-platforms/docker/s...

As for monitoring the ACA infrastructure/runtime this has been asked of from both Microsoft and Dynatrace. Currently the Azure set of Dynatrace, last I checked, didn't have the option to pull in the MS telemetry for the underlying ACA-Env/containers. I am also not sure how it will deal with logging as the default is to ship them to a Log analytics workspace.

[dylan_taelemans · Accepted solution]

You can monitor it by installing the OA inside of the container (dockerfile), but there are some limitations / challenges.

• You can't Customize OneAgent installation (ex host groups, custom properties, custom hostnames, etc)
• agent tools (ex oneagentctl) are not included in the installation => you won't be able to use them.
• Making customisation in the Dynatrace UI after deployment is only a temporary solution => containers are immutable so everytime you make a change it will create a completely new container and this container will be detected as a new host in dynatrace.
• Only global dynatrace settings will apply to your container hosts => all other changes you will lose when the container is killed and a new one created, because it is a completely new host. 
• Because Dynatrace creates a new host for each individual container, it becomes more difficult to keep track of everything neatly. Containers are relatively short living especially if you have automatic up-downscaling.

Monaco could be a possible solution to keep your config, but I still need to test this.
An other possible solution is executing a custom script in you pipeline after container deployment to set settings (using dynatrace API) .