VMWare Monitoring does not require ActiveGate anymore?!

[TorstenHellwig]

Hi all,

I just set up a Dynatrace Managed cluster (1.196) at a customer and while I was not watching they connected VMWare monitoring without setting up any ActiveGate first.

I guess that VMWare monitoring runs on the internal Cluster AG now.

While this is a nice improvement from the hardware requirement side it doesn't fit the documentation and might cause problems in more restricted networking szenarios. Can someone from Dynatrace please comment on this? Is this a glitch or a new feature?

kind regards,

Torsten

[Julius_Loman · Accepted solution]

With Dynatrace Managed this was never required, it always was connected via the embedded ActiveGate on the Cluster node. If you install Environment ActiveGate in Dynatrace Managed, it will be used for the connection.

ActiveGate was and still is is required for SaaS environments to connect to VMWare.

[msec_dt]

Hi Julious

On my environment (Dynatrace Saas), I have 2 AG, I want to use one just for extensions and the other one to connect agents. In this case, how can I choose wich AG Dynatrace will route the VMWARE monitoring?... Do I have to change custom.properties on Agents Active Gate to disable VMWARE monitoring?

Appreciate your comments.

[TorstenHellwig]

Surprising - I can see the sentence now but I know we couldn't get this to work a few month ago (in the POC).

But hey, then my question is answered and we need less boxes, all fine 🙂

Thanks!

Torsten

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

This works like this since quite a long time. Whereas this is possible and ease configuration, it's not recommended to monitor bigger VMWare environments with embedded AG.

[TorstenHellwig]

Hi Radoslav,

can't find anything on this in the docs: how big is too big?

How do I configure the embedded Cluster AG to not do VMWare monitoring?

cheers,

Torsten

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

Install an Environment ActiveGate in your data center before connecting Dynatrace to your VMware platform.
For Dynatrace Managed you can use the embedded ActiveGate running on the cluster node. However, the Cluster ActiveGate is typically used to forward RUM and/or Synthetic monitoring data to the Dynatrace Cluster. We recommend that you don't overutilize this ActiveGate with another type of monitoring data. Depending on the VMware size, you might consider using a dedicated ActiveGate per environment.

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/virtualization#h1-install-and-configure-activegate

Embedded = installed on cluster node.

Hard to tell what it is too big - all environments are different, more dynamic in creating/re-creating instances, disks, metrics etc. observe AG CPU and memory utilization.

[TorstenHellwig]

Well that doesn't really answer the question. Either it's automatically done - if I set up an environment active gate, the embedded won't be used anymore.

or - meanwhile I searched the installation folders of the managed cluster - the is a custom.properties inside <dynatrace install folder>/security-Gateway/config/. It's just not documented anywhere...

Torsten

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

It is: https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/setup-and-configuration/dynatrace-activegate/configuration/co...

[TorstenHellwig]

For the embedded one? Nope.

[Radoslaw_Szulgo]

True, but that's intentional. In that case, you shouldn't need to change that configuration at all as environment AG should take care monitoring, right?

[TorstenHellwig]

I hope so 😉

[Julius_Loman]

Well, I would not recommend touching embedded ActiveGate configuration, unless it's necessary. The files are there, just in different locations.

If you need for any reasons to adjust something, I'd recommend to install either a Cluster ActiveGate or an Environment ActiveGate and make those modifications.