Is there a way to configure availability monitoring for an "unknown" process in Dynatrace SaaS?

[Alpa_Patel]

We have several processes that are not classed as an "important" process by Dynatrace and are hence classed as "other" technology. We need a way to easily change the availability monitoring of these processes for when Process is down. In addition, we cannot create custom monitors to detect when a process goes down (using proess count does not meet our requirements). We also cannot create automatic tags based on the Properties of these processes.

[wolfgang_beer]

Hi Alpa,

Can you give me a bit more information on your use-case, for example which processes you would like to alert on and how you would identify those in a large environment?

Currently you can opt-into process availability monitoring as you already mentioned on known process groups.

For unknown processes, or processes that never came up at all, I would recommend to use a very simple OneAgent extension that checks on the availability of the process and raise a Davis availability event in case the process is not running at all.

I once wrote such a simple availability extensions, you can find it on my Github page here:

https://github.com/wolfgangB33r/SimpleProcessAvailabilityPlugin

Please let me know if you can solve your use-case with that availability extension or what you are missing to fulfill your use case.

Best greetings,

Wolfgang

[Alpa_Patel]

Hi Wolfgang, there are 2 use cases. Firstly we want to be able to manage "admin tools" processes, such as splunk forwarder agents, bladelogic agents, etc. These are processes that need to be running at all times in order to enable management of our servers. The second use case is legacy applications, we have a specific application written in C++, which for the time being we only want to be able to ensure the process is running at all times. The solution offered would meet our requirements but is an additional cost option as it would consume custom metrics. This cost can grow quite rapidly due to the number of servers involved. Then there is the overhead of having this plugin deployed everywhere. I want an easy life 😉