Is it possible to activate/deactivate Oneagents licenses for certain hosts?

[martin_adler]

An application department uses 2 sets of preproduction hosts, each containing 4 servers.
In their development cycle, the developers want to monitor just one set of hosts at a time.

Is there an elegant way to "switch" Dynatrace host units?
E.g. deactivate the Oneagent licenses on one set of hosts and activate it on the other set?

[pshinde]

Are they part of same tenant

[vladislav_samoy]

This is a relally good question when in come to active\passive datacenters. I was thinking about disabling agents using API, but it's in roadmap and now I have no clue what the best way to achieve it

[martin_adler]

Yes, the mentioned hosts are all connected by Oneagents to the same Dynatrace environment.

[kalle_lahtinen]

Hi,

I'm also interested in this, since we have a disaster recovery environment that's identical to the production env., and in case of a failure, we'd like to disable the prod monitoring and enable the DR monitoring. As far as an elegant way goes, at least for me it's enough to categorize the servers under specific host groups, and then disable/enable the monitoring via the Deployment Status window since it allows filtering per host group.

So I'd first disable monitoring for the production host group, and the enable it for the DR host group. My question is though, will that be ok from a licensing perspective? So far I know that it can take several hours for the licensing data/status to be updated. The production and DR environments are identical server and memory wise, but in case the activation of licenses for DR is "noticed" earlier than the deactivation for production, the license utilization would temporarily go over the quota.

Any comments on this from Dynatrace?

[Julius_Loman]

Depending on the license type, Dynatrace may allow overages for host licenses (same for DEM units / Synthetic and custom metrics). It is host hour licensing vs host unit licensing.
The license calculation is also performed almost real-time (definitely within minutes, not hours), so basically if you disable a host, the freed it is available immediately.

[kalle_lahtinen]

Thanks for the response! In our case we're using host units for licensing, and the license quota says "No overage allowed". I do not agree that the license calculation is done in real time, though. For the "Licensing" menu screen to update, it does indeed take hours. I have seen this personally several times. However, the "Environments" view which displays the number of host units per environment does update pretty much right away, so you can see the correct status from there. Unfortunately I think it's the Licensing view that really matters in this case, and for some reason it doesn't update the same way the Environments view does.

I am not the only one who has observed this delay, e.g. check this thread:

https://community.dynatrace.com/spaces/482/dynatrace-open-qa/questions/193059/disable-monitoring.htm...

"when disabling monitoring it took 3 hours before the 'used licenses quota' got changed."

[Julius_Loman]

Well the Licensing page really does not update in real time. I was referring to the situation that if you are close to the limit, you can just disable some hosts and immediately enable them. I used this several times and it always went well.

I would not bother what is in the Licensing screen unless it does not match your consumption.

[kalle_lahtinen]

Alright thanks for the clarification, that sounds good. I was worried that because the licensing screen takes long to update, that might interfere with the plan of disabling some hosts and right away enabling other ones. But based on what you're saying, that doesn't appear to be the case.

[ctturner · Accepted solution]

anonymous user From a managed admin set up you can definitely created another environment called "DR" however, you will be double dipping on licenses since you have duplicate servers for DR when both are active.. In our set up, we preform a hot DR, where we can jump to reserved hosts and replicate to Location B in the event Location A becomes compromised. Typically we preform a MOCK DR every year to test and perfect our methods. With this hot DR we do not incur any extra license usage as the host names do not change, but only the IP's. For your set up you can do it VIA host groups and flick your DR hosts ona and off as you need them, but personally, I think it would be most beneficial to create an entirely new environment that you can enable right away at the time of a DR, and disable when you are done. This can be done from the Cluster Management console.

[ctturner]

In my Screen Caps I have 2 environments, Production and non Production , If preforming DR as you stated I would create a 3rd Environment and name it "Disaster Recovery", get the dashboards the way you want them, then via the CMC, Disable the "Disaster Recovery" Environment and only enable it when you are ready for it. That way its a one button click enableing vs flicking on hosts

[kalle_lahtinen]

That is of course one way to do it. I'm not sure if it's worth all the customization and management though, that's required for the DR tenant. To me it's simpler to have all the configuration related to a single app / environment done within one tenant. I'd probably prefer just clicking a few times extra to disable those certain hosts and the enable the DR ones, instead of having to worry about maintaining configs in two places.