Moving Dynatrace configuration between installations

[josedamianruizl]

Hello all!

I have a Dynatrace installation (PoC - Proof of Concept installation), and in next dates we will have a new Dynatrace Installation (we can say Production Installation)... So how we can move with less effort current monitoring configuration (dashboards, alarms, tags, etc.) from PoC installation to the new and final Production installation ?

Please we really appreciate guidelines, best practices and automation tools for moving from PoC Dynatrace cluster nodes to Final Production Dynatraace cluster nodes.

Target is recreate configuration with less effort and risks.

Many Thanks

Damián

[skrystosik]

I'm working on such tool right now, it will still take some time because of lacks of time for that project. But in general, the only you can use right now i Configuration API:

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/extend-dynatrace/dynatrace-api/configuration-api/

When we are doing POC's in most cases we are creating server that will handle production after presales. In such case we just change license into production one and we are ready to go.

Sebastian

[josedamianruizl]

Thank you very much Sebastian.

Is anfeasible option to add new cluster nodes to the current cluster PoC, and then properly switch off the PoC nodes ? Or is not a supported option ?

Many Thanks.

Damian

[skrystosik]

Ok I've frogotten about backup and restore option:

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/setup-and-configuration/dynatrace-managed/operation/back-up-a...

Use this and should be fine. But in general you can alway add new cluster to current one, they will replicate and then you can disable old one.

Sebastian

[josedamianruizl]

Hello Sebastian.

Could be possible to backup a specific environment a restore this specific environment to the new cluster ?

In our current PoC we have 2 environments: Preproduction and Production.

Many Thanks.

Damián.

[skrystosik]

I think you will have to backup whole thing and than delete one of environments from new cluster. This should be fine for you as well.

Sebastian

[dave_mauney]

If the latency is less than about 10 ms between the old nodes and new nodes you can add a node to migrate.

See the links below for more details:

Migrating a Cluster

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/managed-cluster-migration

Adding A Node

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/managed-add-node

Enable/Disable a cluster node

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/stop-restart-node

Removing A Node
https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/managed-remove-node

[ChadTurner]

We had the same scenario going for our POC to purchased instance. You can fiddle around with the API if you'd like and saving the json payload for each dashboard and the settings ETC. my Professional recommendation would be to create a cluster backup. You will need to get a hold of a support rep to assist you with restoring from the backup. But since you just completed the POC the sales rep should be able to get you in contact with the right person. It is important to note, that the back up is for settings and configuration only, your user data and such will not be carried over.

[pahofmann · Accepted solution]

Hello,

we (amasol) are currently working on a solution that will cover your use case.

Currently we plan to cover three main use cases with the solution:

• Config Backups

• Easy Configuration Management

• Continuous Configuration Management

Config Backups

The dynatrace managed backup mechanism is intended for disaster recovery. There is no way to do fine grained restoration of specific configuration.

We solve that issue by doing continuous backups of the dynatrace configuration to a git repository.

Easy Configuration Management

We want to make it easy to copy configuration between different tenants, environments or even inside them. This will make it possible for example, to copy config over from PoC environment or to copy configuration between the different stages of your applications.

Via a web UI it will be possible to copy configuration or restore it from a backup.

Continuous Configuration Management

For the last iteration we plan to enable customers to integrate dynatrace configuration updates into der CI/CD pipelines. With this you can deploy new dynatrace configuration directly with your application over different stages, simply with an API call.

Use case one (Backups) is already implemented and currently being tested by different customers. The Easy Configuration Management is the next step on our roadmap.

Once the second use case is finished, we plan to offer the solution on the dynatrace marketplace.

If you want more information or have feedback please let me know!

[pahofmann]

Currently the simplest way is to import the dynatrace configuration API spec.json into Postman as a collection, and then create different postman environments for the dynatrace environments.

It's still a lot of manual work, but it makes it a lot shorter then manual copy/paste 🙂

[pahofmann]

We plan to offer this as a SaaS Service for customer of our aMC Plattform, Dynatrace SaaS, and Dynatrace Managed customers where the cluster is available from the outside.

We will also offer a self hosted version that can be run on a VM or deployd as a container. This will then also work for closed off Managed or Offline installation.s

[dave_mauney]

Here are some already existing solutions that might work for you.

I have not personally tried them out, but have gathered the various links only.

Dashboard Mover (HTML5/JS)

https://github.com/JarettS92/dashboard-mover

Dynatrace Sync

https://github.com/AlonsoDeCosio/dynatrace-sync-environments

https://gitlab.com/eduardvdbent/dtconf

Hope this helps,

dave

[Josef]

Hi Damian,

we have such a Dynatrace configuration backup solution in place. Contact me or follow this link to get started https://www.dynatrace.com/hub/?query=composer 

Our solution is very easy to use. You can install it within a few minutes, backup the Dynatrace configuration and use it for the restore on the new environment.

Best regards

Josef