Managing Dynatrace SaaS agents on ephemeral servers

[aaron_wyatt]

In order to keep our development, QA, and production environments pristine, we rebuild our servers frequently-- at least daily in dev, but less frequently in QA and prod. The result is that there will be multiple entries in the Dynatrace SaaS interface for the same server name but that the data for the previous "version" of the server seems to be gone.

Is anyone else managing these types of "ephemeral" servers and if so, how do you handle this in the Dynatrace SaaS interface?

Is there a way to use API calls to Dynatrace SaaS to make this a "cleaner" break when we rebuild a server?

[hayden_miedema]

Hi Aaron,

By default, Dynatrace will keep those servers in the smartscape and other UI views for 72 hours. Once they do not see traffic or requests for that time period they will drop out of the UI and no longer show as unmonitored.

Does this help? Or are you looking for another option?

[hayden_miedema · Accepted solution]

Hi Aaron,

After thinking on this more and some better understanding around your question I'm not certain my first answer is what you were looking for. You're really asking to have the data for 'host1' to be the same as 'host1', even after 'host1' is rebuilt by the daily process.

Unfortunately, this isn't available within the product at the moment. There are rules for identifying Processes a unified way by using some process property, system property, or env. variable, but there is nothing for doing this at a host level.

I think this would make a great RFE (request for enhancement) as your use case here is strong and likely one that others have run into. You essentially are looking for a way to have a switch that allows the OneAgent to report the hostname as the key, that way the old host values would be overwritten using the same key value.

Please copy this request over to this forum: https://community.dynatrace.com/spaces/483/view.html . That is the space for Dynatrace Product Ideas. Once you do so feel free to link it back here and I will vote on it for you - I think this would make a great request.

Thanks,

Hayden

[aaron_wyatt]

Posted: https://community.dynatrace.com/spaces/483/dynatrace-product-ideas/idea/189555/oneagent-report-hostn...

Thanks for the feedback.

[helmut_spiegl]

If you like to preserve the host you would just need to preserve the ruxithost.id file as well. This file contains the (once generated) id of the host and if it is there during the startup of the agent it is used in case at least one mac address, also specified in the file, matches the currently available ones. In case the file is not present during startup, a new file (thus a new id) is generated. So if the mac-addresses do not change you can simply copy the whole file, in case they change you would also need to alter the mac address entries there. This sanity mechanism is there to prevent host id clashes in case a virtual system is cloned.
Location of the file in Windows: \ProgramData\dynatrace\oneagent\agent\config
Linux: /var/lib/dynatrace/oneagent/agent/config

[nakb]

Hi I am unable to find \ProgramData\dynatrace\oneagent\agent\config in windows host but there is a folder called conf is there and there is no ruxithost.id file inside it, could you please help me with that.