Pros and cons of dedicated vs centralized ActiveGates

[Pooja_3]

I am looking for the information for our new setup of having multiple active gates. What are the pros and cons of dedicated vs. centralized ActiveGate services? Centralized would be used by all applications, and dedicated would be an individual app. 

[abhi · Accepted solution]

Hi @Pooja_3,

It mainly comes back to the number of connections made by each application's servers and which modules you are planning to monitor through an ActiveGate. 

With a centralized connection, the main con is that you know how the connections are being established and if there is any network issue you would able to know precisely which ActiveGate you would need to work on to resolve the issue. 
Similarly, with a dedicated connection, it would be a much more structured approach if you have a very large number of connection schemes (say a huge number of application servers along with cloud/container-based cluster monitoring)

Apart from all these, you can also control each application's connection to the Dynatrace server through a dedicated ActiveGate as an endpoint routing. What I mean is, you can route the application traffic through a specific ActiveGate server for a much more secure network setup.

Here is a document that will help you share some more details on when you would need to use an ActiveGate:

ActiveGate Purpose and Functionality

Hope this helps!

[Pooja_3]

Hi @abhi 

Thanks for your reply. Agree with structured approach on having dedicated servers however, it will be complexed to have multiple active gates for 20-30 different applications servers as per BU. Furthermore, Active gate works on 9999 and 443 port so in case of any network issue, I assume all active gates would be impacted within network. (Please advise if I am wrong).
Also, What do you advise on using "Multi-environment deployment of ActiveGate". If we add more environments by adding new sections to the authorization.properties file, will that work as expected. Do you have insights on implementing this approach?

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/sgw-multiple-environments 

[abhi]

I understand. So say for example you have multiple ActiveGates for an application and if one of the ActiveGates is affected due to network, then OneAgent would automatically hope to another ActiveGate to continue routing the data. If all the ActiveGates are not reachable, then the data is directly sent to the server (if the connections are open)

Similarly with the Multi-environment deployment of ActiveGates. The functionality and the working would remain the same, and both environments would detect this ActiveGate and route the data. However, if you say you have more environments existing and each environment has a couple of applications being monitored. I would recommend using a dedicated ActiveGate for each environment. 20-30 different application servers per BU would not be a high load on a single ActiveGate.

Kind regards,
Abhi

[Pooja_3]

@abhi So, centralized active gate would help us with reducing firewall port opening and having multiple VM to maintain and install. Apart from this centralized set up is not advantageous in terms of application monitoring. is that correct?