Tool for managing Dynatrace configuration

[skrystosik]

Hello, in our company we have multiple Dynatrace enviornments, SaaS, Managed and Offline. For all of them we have to manage configuration. Some of clients has admin rights as well so they are able to change dashboards, and configs by they own. The problem is when something is broken after such changes, we have to check audit logs (not all information are there) to restore proper configuration. The idea is to build tool that will use configuration API for fetching config from enviornments.

But that's not all. Many times we have to recreate whole enviornment with dashboards, configurations etc when client is moving for example from FQA to NFT. This takes time because we have to start from scratch in many cases or deal with cloning dashboards and filter modification. The idea is to be able to export, modify configuration and import it again as well. For example batch changing of tags assigned to dashboard to allow it to work with different environment (most clients wants to have separate dashboards even if they are the same and can be filtered via management zone to proper env, but some of them cannot be used across environments if they are build based on key requests etc).

Last thing is versioning of the configuration, witch visible changes.

App would be accessible as desktop client made for all OS, with SaaS option I suppose. We want to know if there is need for such tool for larger group of Dynatrace Community users, because we are thinking about creating free version available for all of you. If you have your own idea please post it here. If this does not make sens for you tell us as well.

Thank you for your support 🙂

Sebastian

[Julius_Loman]

I have the same idea in mind for a very long time. However, due to the dynamic nature of the entities within Dynatrace, it's not easy nor straightforward to build such tool. Partially I use a simple shell script that is using curl and jq to transfer partial configuration between tenants such as dashboards, management zones, request attributes, tags, etc..

Some issues we have to face:

• object entities in different tenants have different unique IDs. If you want to update an entity such as dashboard, it can be impossible to find an appropriate entity. Thus you will need mapping file that must be maintained.
• even the configuration API is improving fast, still, there are many areas where API is not yet available or does not provide all configuration options for the entity. For example, the user action naming rules discussed a while ago.
  
  
  

[skrystosik]

I agree with you Julius but I have some ideas how to make it work. As I'm developer from many years I want to start building such tool and keep it work 🙂 I've started this post because I want to have community input about ideas and needs.

Sebastian

[sylvian_lam1]

It is a good idea to have such tool !

[ChadTurner]

This is a great idea and I know its been out here for a while. @Laima V. or @Karolina L. could you convert this to a RFE? Granted its more of a Dynatrace Partner tool, but still it would be very useful!

[skrystosik]

As Iremember @Julius L. and @Patrick H. are working on something similar to that. I have problems with time for this projects, we have many development on clients environments 🙂 but I'm still working on this.

Sebastian

[Josef]

Hi Sebastian,

we faced the same problem and developed the Dynatrace configuration management solution Composer. 

Our tool Composer supports the following use cases

- Backup of your Dynatrace configuration 

- Check-in to version control 

- Restore from a saved configuration

- Upload from a saved configuration

Composer is available in the Dynatrace Hub.

Please follow this url or contact me if you are interested in our product.

https://www.dynatrace.com/hub/?query=composer

Best regards

Josef

[r_weber · Accepted solution]

Hi @skrystosik  ,

I have developed a exhaustive configuration management solution while managing several thousand Dynatrace environments at SAP. It went a bit further than just managing the configuration, but also introduced a consolidated API and token management for this large amount of environments. This was necessary as a prerequisite to be able to seamlessly push and pull configurations between tenants without the need of maintaining API tokens by itself.

I've written a few blog articles on this on the Dynatrace blog (one part is here - see the other parts linked within)

The configuration management as code was one of my key aspects when I designed this, and I built a whole service architecture around it, ready to be included in a Git-ops approach for managing the configuration of one or many Dynatrace environments.

I now use this daily in my customer projects and it also opens up further interesting usecases, like consolidating problem views, data export, licensing and usage audits, etc....

If you are interested you can find the config management part on github

kr,

Reinhard