OpenTelemetry Exporter

[anderspedersen]

I see that New Relic have OpenTelemetry Exporters for multiple languages. Is there any plan for creating OpenTelemetry Exporters for Dynatrace.

We have an Web App running in a Managed hosted environment - with restrictions from installing OneAgents. Hence we have enabled AgentLess monitoring on the Web App.

The Web App is highly connected to our own internal APIs - all running in a OneAgent monitored environment. But since the Web App is not monitored by OneAgent - we are missing the purepath link from User actions to already captured purepath in the OneAgent environment.

Thinking that enabling OpenTelemetry on the Web App somehow could establish the link between User actions and purepath in the OneAgent environment.

Hoping that we could some how generate TraceIds and SpanIds based on the Dynatrace cookies from the Agentless monitoring.

Or alternativly having an Dynatrace OpenTelemetry Exporter - that are able to send the trace data and that way linking User actions with PurePaths.

Any thoughs?

/Anders

[Julius_Loman]

OpenTelemetry won't help you much here, since to stich user actions and purepaths there is a correlation based on Dynatrace cookies (dt* cookies). For this to work you would need OneAgent on the frontend application.

Did you consider other methods of Dynatrace OneAgent deployment? PaaS version of OneAgent might work for you if you don't have root/admin access to the hosts, but it highly depends on your particular hosted environment.

[anderspedersen]

When you say PaaS version of OneAgent are you referring to Paas Integration? Unfortunaly we do not have root access on the hosts nor access to setting up PaaS integration.

Are there really no alternatives to stich user actions and purepath togeather in an Agentless setup? Would expect this to be a quite common need for distribuated tracing in Managed environments?

The only alternative I can see right now is to use OpenKit - which would require ALOT of work and we would loose traceability of what goes on in the browser.

[Julius_Loman · Accepted solution]

I'm referring to the PaaS OneAgent versions that actually won't require root access. It's a version such as for Solaris (for Solaris only the PaaS version is available), but it is available for Linux or AIX as well. You then just need to unzip the OneAgent and either start the application using a wrapper or export environment variables. It won't give you deep monitoring of other processes.

From what you wrote about your setup:

Browser -> WebApp (uninstrumented, no OneAgent) -> Backend services

I see no way how to correlate user actions to backend services, unless the WebApp is just a simple reverse proxy passing the communication further to backend services. In such case the stitching of user actions to purepaths would work.

Afaik OpenTelemetry standard does not cover real user monitoring standardization, it's only for tracing/log/metrics. So I believe the only way for you is to get the OneAgent working on your hosted environment. The PaaS OneAgent version should work for you, but it only depends on your managed hosting provider.